Ace Jet 170

belfastified

Objectified is showing in Belfast, at the QFT, this Sunday at 3pm, with Gary on-hand to answer questions...which is ace! 

Tickets available here.

Read about the film here.

Feltrometer

Very happy to have been asked to do the promo material for the Nicholas Felton talk next week. And very excited about his visit; it's the first time Nicholas has talked in the UK. Special thanks have to go to Nicholas, of course, for taking the time out and to Rita and Chris for funding. Also, big thanks go to Andy for persuading Mr F to come over.

This is a rare chance to hear a super-talented designer. Here's the blurb from the poster: 

Award winning, New York-based graphic designer Nicholas Felton has gained an enviable reputation for creating sophisticated and innovative information graphics. In particular, for his series of introspective annual reports in which he displays data compiled from his everyday activities throughout the year using ingenius charts, diagrams and maps. These are self-published under his personal project alias Feltron. 

From his professional studio, Megafone, Nicholas has designed information graphics for Esquire, New York Times, Metropolis, Wired and Print. 

He is also co-founder of Daytum; an online information depository that converts the data surrounding subscribers habits and routines into elegant graphs and charts.

Time/Date: 

18.00 for 18.30/02.04.09 

Venue: 

The Conor Lecture Theatre, University of Ulster, York Street, Belfast 

Admission: 

£5

To secure your place, visit the booking site.

If anyone's interested: Download Feltrometer_Poster 

  

Twursday Night

It's Belfast Twestival this Thursday night, "a glorified meetup with fun times, drinks, games and prizes...and it's for charity, currently estimated at £1m". It doesn't cost much to get in, it's for a great cause and it'll probably be a bit of a laugh.

Six

"Instead of of 6 students going to do work placements at 6 different agencies, the design agency will do the placement at the college."

Bid

Watch out for St Bride's Design Auction.

Pissing on flies and kicking-in nonses

Last night's Digital Futures talk was superb. Really inspiring stuff and if by some fluke Jane Fielder from Red Bee or Nicolas Roope from Poke are reading this, many thanks for making the effort and coming to Belfast!

Red Bee used to be the BBC's graphics department, now an independant company working internationally for loads of different broadcasters. When it was part of the Beeb, Jane was involved in title sequences and ident's for things like Top of the Pops, Blackadder and lots of other stuff including those brilliant BBC2 ident's (not sure if they did them all). She showed us her old show reel, modestly playing it down but I thought it stood up well - it was very "analogue" while more recent work has become digital-orientated, although by no means exclusively so.

Jane explained how the nature of her work has changed from domestically-focused, intuitively-driven work for one broadcaster to research-based, brand-experience work for an international clientele and how the nature of programming and channel identity has shifted. She descibed how it used to be all about craft, now programmes and channels are recognised as valuable commercial assets.

Two examples stood out: the totally brilliant work that surrounded Life on Mars, like this...

...and Dave.

A channel, "for blokes that like to go down the pub but can't because they've got a family", the idea behind Dave was to make a channel that felt like your mate, so the actors involved in the fillers and idents are from a small select and so eventually, familiar cast. Interesting and importantly, the channel was going to be called TVGT before the idea was formulated and "Dave" was proposed.

The simple and important conclusion from Jane's talk, for me at least, was that "the big idea" was still the most important thing and that, like John Grant's "think genre not application" idea, the best concepts are platform independent.

Looking like some kind great design viking (revealing his Norwegian roots) Poke's Nicolas Roope was up next and talked about the tension between making something look good and making it work. As well as Poke, Nicolas is one of the guys behind Hulger, the people responsible for that beautiful and energy efficient Plumen bulb...

...he explained his interest in surprising solutions that have effective results like the fly-in-the-urinal (not by them) that you'll find in Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam which reduced unfortunate spillages by around 80%, cutting cleaning costs significantly.

Poke are the people that did all that Orange Balloonacy stuff and created the first never ending website for Orange Unlimited...

Nicolas talked about how crucial the scroll bar was for that, how it had to be part of the Flash but that it needed to recognize your browser and appear in its style to be totally convincing. Apparently, people would test its neverendingness by leaving a book on their scroll key and go home for the night only to get in the next morning to find it still scrolling. It's an amazing piece of work and created a real buzz around the brand, which tied in nicely with what Jane was talking about earlier.

A really great night. You should have been there.

Something important

Apparently something important happened last night in the US, the word is it was something quite good. Well all I know is that it's Design Week Ireland and tonight it's Digital Futures with yer'man from Poke and her from Red Bee Media.

Tomorrow night it's Place-making with a less colourful poster but an equally top notch speaker, Peter Higgins.

If I were you, I'd be at Ulster University for these historic events. The fun starts at 6. 

Pay on the door, it's a fiver.

Design Week Ireland

  

Been a bit busy lately with a couple of side projects including making a small contribution to Design Week Ireland. The week begins November 3rd with stuff going on all over the place. Up here in Belfast there's Place-making with Peter Higgins from Land Design talking about, "...the importance of editorial control in creating unique experiences for users of buildings, exhibitions and public spaces"; and Digital Futures, with Jane Fielder from Red Bee Media and Nicolas Roope from Poke who'll be talking about all manner of digital and broadcast cleverness. If you're local and thinking of going, you can buy your ticket here (for Digital Futures) and here (for Place-making). Or you can register your interest with Rita here and pay on the door. They should both be great evenings.

  

Spookyism

What are the chances of that? On the very day I throw together that last post this opens. I really had no idea until John at Eye told me. Spooky. Sadly, I'm not in a position to go (we were thinking we'd go somewhere other than London this year) but if any one else is going, has a camera (and the gallery allow it of course) please Flickr it for us less fortunates.

Fame? Definitely no fortune.

Aegir (Ministry of Type) was at the Seeking Inspiration conferences last week (at the St Bride Foundation) and shot this. Text taken from the short lived, might be revived one day, Uncommon Knowledge mini series. Isn't that great?

But what's on Speikermann's mind I wonder.