Type Coasters - buy custom personalized products from Ponoko

Coasters for the typophiliac. These coasters come in 4 mm Eurolite plywood treated with mineral oil. Each coaster is approximately 3.5 inches in diameter, and is done in Baskerville SemiBold. Just ...

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Publish your own book with "Blurb"

I have just uploaded a book on my holiday in Ireland. It is primarily a gift for my friends Dermot and Anne, who I stayed with. It is just a little thankyou for putting me up, and is a series of photographs of their kids – Grace, Seamus and Kate.

My former colleague and friend at Ravensbourne, Finola Gaynor, put me onto the software from Blurb. Free to download, it is so easy to use you just drag and drop your photos. Select your layouts and bang in the text. Upload it to the server and then order as many copies as you like. The book is available in softback and hardback. Cool!
Check out the website. www.blurb.com

Ireland 2008

By by Andy Ellison

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Unisign bag

It's not quite a Freitag messenger bag but pretty damn close and at least half the price. I saw this little beauty on Amazon of all places and decided it had to be mine. It smells a bit, as it is made from recycled truck tarpaulin, but it is a typographic statement I am proud to wear. It also only cost me £29.04. Bargain






This shot is taken in my lovely studio!

Emma Williams' Font

I got an email today from one of my former Ravensbourne students, Emma Williams. She recieved a First Class degree in 2007 and has just completed her Masters' Degree in Typographic Design at Reading University. Her typeface "Milvus" has been used to advertise the Course and it's subsequent website on the "ilovetypography" site and blog. They have selected the italic version of the font, which is lovely and quirky. A real coup! Visit ilovetypography for a look at her font and those of others on the MA. You can also download the type specimens in PDF format.

D&AD Xchange Conference

I recently went to the D&AD Xchange Conference held in London on Sept 1st and 2nd. I have to say that the speaker were a mixed bunch, some very good, some rather naff.

There was an emerging theme about digital advertising that came through many of the presentations. It seems to be the 'new buzz word' although it has been around for quite some time now.

It was great to see that the debate around craft was kept alive by the like of Alan Kitching and his letterpress work. Seeing these pieces in the flesh gave me great inspiration, rather than seeing them as thumbnails in books. The vibrancy of the colour made them hypnotic and I found myself wanting to go home immediately and 'do some work.'

The sense of playfulness of the work left me wanting more. It is obvious there is a love of what he is doing and the contacts he and his wife Celia gave to the audience regarding letterpress workshops will no doubt be useful.

In stark contrast to this came the work of 'onedotzero' was decidedly high-tech. It may not be completely described as graphic design, although it has links with it. Shane Walter used a few case studies but it was the work of United Visual Artist or UVA that impressed me. They have done many pieces of visual work for bands, including back drop screens for the likes of Massive Attack. The project in particular Shane showed was a light installation for a show in Paris. The installation reacted to movement and music, so the audience had participation with these huge monolithic structures. See images below.

The other speaker that was extremley good was Joel Veitch, with his rathergood.com website. He spoke about how some of the short 'films' he had done for fun and put on his website had attracted a lot of attention from ad agencies and eventually reworked to use for campaigns. The thread of his talk was that just by putting a project on youtube, even something fairly rough could have a massive effect, to the extent you never know how far it could go. The examples were some sketchy collage work to a low-fi song that became a cult hit called 'we like the moon', this became a commercial for Quiznos. Entertaining and very fun, worth checking out.