I love making ThreadForms, they're my therapy. When I've made them available they seem to sell OK too. The pandemic has closed down opportunities to show them in real life so I'm putting them up here, as reference for myself and to show what's available. Email me if you're interested in any.
They sell (unframed) for £70 (30 x 40cm), £80 (40 x 50cm) or £90 (50 x 70cm) and I'm happy to include UK and Ireland postage in that. I can quote shipping for anywhere else. This one measures 50 x 70cm.
We haven't spent enough time in the Mourne Mountains, despite skimming and camping in their shadow them many times. Noah knows them quite well from walks and camps with mates, so he was our guide this summer.
I spent a day in Derry last week. I've been a few times before but with children, in bad weather, and with no real motivation to do anything in particular. We walked the city walls, got soaking wet…went to the pub and watched the racing, as I remember.
Last week I was flying solo, on a professional assignment and the sun it was a'shining.
I avoided the walls for a while, explored the city's inner workings then hovered at its west side exit, Butcher's Gate. The road beyond leads, in a south-westerly direct, down to the Bogside.
I can't deny that I was a bit nervous about heading down that way.
The Bogside is a sprawling, largely Catholic/Republican enclave, sitting outside the city walls and, you might say, in its shadow – remember I said 'down to the Bogside'. As the name suggests, a long time ago this was not a place you would want to live. And that's why, when us English muscled our way across the island of Ireland around the 1600s, those that we didn't like were pushed down this way, into the quagmire. Even today it's not particularly pretty.
It has a complex history but once you know some of it, you can imagine why resentment was sparked, grew, manifested itself in violence and, in some areas, remains.
So, I was a bit nervous about heading down that way.
We like to think we live in enlightened times and certainly, since I began working in interpretation design, I have found myself more and more considering all sides of a story. It could be said that that is one of the missions of interpretation design – to provoke and to reveal – to give an impartial view of (always) multi-facetted stories; to tell us the things we didn't know and to change our view to a fully informed one.
Living in Northern Ireland, that seems particularly important.
An English man in the Bogside, you can easily imagine, is not a welcome one and my trepidation remained even though I barely skimmed the periphery of the area.
Two things I noticed…
One was that the longer I spent down there, the greater the feeling of excitement grew in me. Excitement tinged with fear. It was thrilling and for the first time I felt I was consciously tasting 'Dark Tourism'. I began to see why some people seek out a place with a grim history. In the case of the Bogside, I'm not sure 'history' is quite right, its past is still part of its present.
The other thing I noticed was that once you've walked down from the city walls to see the murals up-close and rising above you, they take on a greater power.
I live in East Belfast. It's largest Loyalist and not so far from us is an area of intense muralisation (that's not really a word but it'll do for now). The murals of East Belfast of very paramilitary. Lots of badges, crests and gun-toting, balaclava-wearing 'soldiers'.
The murals on the Bogside are more creative and conceptual. At least the ones you see on its edges. They tell stories and have social meaning. There's protest and cause in them. They feel like expressions of the subjugated, oppressed and victimised.
I don't know anyone who suffered or lost people during the troubles, it's very distant from me. But I've learned a fair amount about Irish history and now have some insight into the bigger Irish picture, un-influenced by more direct and contemporary things.
Walking along the Bogside's edge, I felt that there was still reason for dark thoughts to be present in the shadows.
September witnessed the second public outing for my ThreadForms. Accompanied by a large and surprising slice of success! You just never know do you? I love making these things. If I had space, would hang every last one of them on my own enclosed walls and spend my days gazing adoringly at me own creations. Poor, starving, filthy…but happy.
But I don't expect anyone else to like them.
Thankfully, for my family, they are liked by more than I could ever have expected and some people are even prepared to part with their hard earned money to own a little piece of me.
To those encouraging and generous people I say thank you.
I'd made three space exploration pieces, which were the first to go and here are the next three in that series: Kepler-22b above and Mars then Jupiter below.
Next outing is on Saturday 14 December at the Black Santa Bazaar in St Anne's Cathedral Belfast (same place as last time). It's a spectacular venue so worth coming along just to check out the space and avoid the usual entrance fee. But you might just pick up a piece of something surprising to fill someone's stocking.
In 2020, I'm going to put ThreadForms on some kind of online market place. Haven't decided which yet. So there's another unknown ahead.
I'm just going to leave this here. Picked it up a few weeks ago from the Seaside Revival Festival. We were lamenting the demise of the printed guide when we were in New York. I remember the first time I was there and how I was very self-conscious about pulling out my guide book, particularly in some of the dodgier corners I found myself.
I guess Googling your current and intended whereabouts is more discrete but a tourist is a tourist and isn't not going to stand out, particularly in some of the dodgier places we found ourselves.
Our lamentation was somewhat fuelled by roaming avoidance and battery level anxiety of course.
Didn't get to Lulu's. Less interested in the vintage clothing, but was a little intrigued by the 'n shit'.
My tidy haul of ephemerality.
Part way between our Styversant Heights hideout and the big city was the Dumbo Sunday Brooklyn Flea, a small, well formed market of vintage goods. A perfect way to spend a morning before heading to Central Park for a family picnic (if a Saturday works better for you, then Williamsburg is the place to wander sinfully amongst the stalls of retro nonsense).
US FDC's and old school bingo cards were a dollar a pop.
Bowne & Co. Stationers is billed as New York City's oldest continuously running business, founded as it was in 1775. Luckily for us, it happens to be a print shop.
If you're at the bottom of Manhattan, maybe to catch the free ferry to Staten Island or the not free ferry to Liberty Island, then you might as well take a walk up Water Street either before or after your voyage to buy letterpress prints from the shop and/or visit the South Street Seaport Museum which Bowne & Co partners. You can explore the museum's collections of photography, printing, ephemera, ship models and scrimshaws (carvings on marine mammal ivory) and the shops (there are two actually) sell a selection of irresistible and reasonably priced print porn.
It's a great location too, as you might expect right on the water's edge so there's plenty to see.
Just back from NYC.
It was around 25 years ago that I first went to New York. It was a solo trip at a pivotal time in my personal life and the city energised and changed me. I returned a number of times both on my own and later with Karen, coming close to moving there in 2000. Our decision to not move in the end, given what happened the next year, was later to seam fortuitous, although of course at the time we had no idea why.
Catastrophe aside, we never regretted our decision, choosing to get married and have a family instead. And although New York became a distant place, it didn't take much to fuel an urge to return: Seth wanted to holiday in a city, ideally Tokyo…New York would do. OK, we said, New York it is.
So, just over 19 years after our last visit, we were back, curious to see how the City had changed and expecting quite a different experience with two boys in tow this time, albeit 13 and 16 year olds fully engaged with our destination. Seth's sights were set on Koryo Books in Koreatown, bubble tea and the Line Friends store in Times Square. Noah (true to form) wanted an authentic New York bagel (Bagels & Schmear), pizza (2 Bros.), Xi'an noodles (Xi-an Famous Foods) and a pastrami on rye (David's Brisket House, Brooklyn).
As it turned out, we all managed to find what we wanted from the City and we had an awesome time; seeing some great sights, experiencing the unexpected, witnessing some sad things and coming home exhausted, with sore legs and plenty to show for our trip.
Yes, we saw changes: the High Line wasn't there before and, of course, the 9/11 memorial, which had a powerful effect on me. It was sad to see the demise of certain things and the unwelcome development of other things but it was also great to see improvements and positive developments that we weren't expecting.
It's a very personal response to the City but my stand-out experiences were:
Worth noting, we did New York on a bit of a budget; with, effectively, four 'adults' travelling during the main summer holiday, it was never going to be a low cost thing, so we looked for things to do that wouldn't cost $100 for us all to get into (I'm looking at you The Met), missing out on free MOMA on a Friday afternoon (it's currently closed) but winning with that fab outdoor film showing in Bryant Park, picnics in other parks, $1 a slice pizza from 2 Bros. and the High Line, amongst other things.
All my money went on vintage stationery. Man alive! The stationery!
On Saturday 6 July, 2—10pm, I'll be selling my weird wares at the Seaside Revival Festival in nearby Bangor (Northern Ireland, for readers from other lands). I'm in the throes of creating a special coastal series of ThreadForms, using photos taken from around the coastline over the past 15 or so years (I knew I'd find a use for them!). Threaded lines, typed titles, found materials and original photos meet in 30 x 40cm frames.
A few weeks ago I posted a set of map key extracts along with a suggestion that they were the beginnings of something. Here is that something else. Sewn weirdness that keeps my itchy fingers busy during idle moments. I've put them on the Ace Jet spin off ThreadForms.
The North Bull Wall sticks out above the Port of Dublin in a kind of north easterly direction. Building began around 1820 and took 5 years. It was constructed as a breakwater and to hold back the North Bull sand bar which hindered the progress of ships bound for Dublin Bay.
A not entirely planned outcome was the forming of a 5km long island running parallel to the north Dublin coastline, now the multi-designated Bull Island; Bird Sanctuary, Biospehere Reserve, Nature Reserve, Special Protection Area, Special Area of Conservation and finally, a Special Amenity Area.
The North Wall, the southern edge of the island, is accessed across a wooden bridge and hoofing along it reveals evidence of that last designation. Dubliners love a swim. It’s integral to coastal life. I guess that can’t be unique but as someone who was raised in the land-locked midlands (of England) the sea, and the culture it stimulates, is still new to me despite by mature age.
Even on the freezing cold, wind-blown morning that I was there, there were old dudes in the water – accessed by concrete steps down into the sea from bathing booths. Remnants of a boom-time for the local community’s aquatic recreationals; their aquatreationals.
Apparently, water quality hit a low during the seventies which, perhaps explains why the dull grey bunkers were left unloved. But a concerted effort, begun in the eighties, has seen that addressed significantly. I can’t say if the swimmers I saw were stalwarts that have persevered through the murky-water days but considering it was a random chilly Wednesday morning in early April, their presence suggests the pastime is still a normal part of life in these parts.
I've put most of the thread art pieces I've made so far here on threadforms.com…and I've given them all names. Some make sense, some…well…make your own mind up.
Over the last two weeks I have, periodically, been walking the streets of Dublin's coastal villages as research for a Tandem project. Nice work if you can get it. The 130 bus carried me out of the city to Bull Island and Dollymount (more on the island later) from which I walked inland through St Anne's Park to the nearest DART station, at Raheny.
Once you're through the park, the scenery takes a distinct dip in quality as you scurry on, in appropriate haste, through an unfamiliar council estate, but after a little while you come into Raheny village. A bit better. Then, turn a corner, and behold!…Our Lady Mother of Divine Grace.
Rising like a great brutal pointy gateway to another world the Roman Catholic Church was designed by architects Peppard & Duffy and completed in 1962. The main entrance is distinctly modernist; an interpretation of romanesque churches and abbeys of Ireland with that arrangement of triangles that simultaneously points to both heaven and earth.
I think I accidentally approached from the perfect angle; my first site of the building was sudden and was preceded by mundanity at best so the effect is striking.
As ever, I have to add what is becoming a standard disclaimer: I can't find much about the church online. It's built on the site of an ancient holy well of St Assam, which was the name of the previous over burdened church.
A very short entry on Archiseek notes that the overall design is, 'Not completely successful, the remainder of the church is quite boxy', and I must admit that, after looking for more interesting views of the building I found none. All the effort must have gone into the entrance but maybe that's enough. It was for me.
Raheny station is almost literally at the back of the church so my progress was hardly hindered by this diversion.
I don't really post anything specific about the day job here but I keep thinking about the work we did for the Titanic Hotel Belfast and, in particular, how it relates to things I enjoy most about what we do at Tandem.
The truth is, I stumbled into Tandem. I was only supposed to be there for ten months, covering someone's maternity leave. That was just over five years ago and, unless something drastic happens beyond my control, I have no intention of leaving.
I've completely fallen for interpretation design. Maybe I've explained this before – it's hard to keep track on what I put out on this blog – but, in summary: the work is worthwhile and we get to do great things with surprising means. It's hard, challenging work that takes us all over the island of Ireland mostly (although not exclusively). At its heart, interpretation design is loaded with values that bring cultural and societal enrichment. It's 'hearts and minds' stuff on the whole, rarely with a commercial objective.
Even with this particular project – where there is a commercial backdrop to the work we did – our focus was on preserving the stories and heritage of an important building now that it has been re-purposed as a fancy hotel.
You can read about this Titanic Hotel project on the Tandem website but here's a potted overview:
Titanic Hotel Belfast can be found right across the plaza from the 'World's Best Visitor Attraction' Titanic Belfast. The building was the Harland & Wolff Drawing Offices and Headquarters – originally designed, very cleverly, to give the designers of H&W's ocean-going vessels the very best conditions to work in. The two main drawing offices are vast, vaulted and many-windowed rooms positioned to make use of the northern (i.e. best diffused) light which swamps the spaces.
Putting that in context: other shipbuilders kept their draughtsmen in temporary sheds that they moved around their ship yards. By comparison, H&W's working conditions were literally second to none.
As part of the purchasing deal, the hotel operators were charged with being responsible for preserving the heritage of the building. And that's where we stepped in. We developed a bunch of 'light touch' interventions that highlight what working life within the building was like during H&W's glory days.
We referred to the plaques pictured above as 'Room Labels' – just one of the aforementioned interventions. They appear all over the original part of the building and tell visitors about each specific room, or original feature in some cases. They are my favourite part of the project.
A mahogany frame matches the timber work around the offices and an engraved brass surround (inspired by plaques found on H&W engines) frames a vitreous enamel text panel. The brass surround is based on the foolscap paper format which would have been used in the offices for admin docs. The H&W motif is the company's original motif.
Other interventions included routered Corian® wall panels that feature a floor tile pattern found in the building along with ships names or (as pictured) the job roles found within the walls of the Drawing Offices.
Here and there, super-discrete pieces give visitors little moments of delight – like the engraved lamp base below which features an amusing quote from the one of H&W's big cheeses, Mr Wolff himself.
Len Deighton is 90 today.
International man of mystery, no other author has had such a constant presence in my life, and not just for his works of fiction. The film adaptation of The IPCRESS File is high (sometimes at the top) of my top ten favourite films, with the book remaining in my top ten favourite books since the first time I read it a long, long time ago (I've re-read it numerous times).
His love of fine food has been a contributing factor to this presence – the books this spawned have not been uninfluential too. I have a number of his cookbooks, including his iconic Action Cookbook, which I blogged about here way back in 2006.
His famous cook strips (below) expose both his interest in good food and his skill as an illustrator. The latter is another factor that makes the man so interesting.
After spending his National Service in the RAF, Len studied at Saint Martin's School of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) alongside the brilliant Raymond Hawkey, who would go on to design covers for Deighton. After graduating later from the Royal College of Art (for which he won a scholarship in 1952) Deighton worked (surprisingly) as an airline steward for BOAC and then (less surprisingly) as an Art Director in New York, before his writing career took off.
Clearly, a man of facetted talents and passions; Deighton's life story is littered with revealing anecdotes…
It is rumoured, for example, that his interest in spy stories began in 1940 when the 11-yr-old Len witnessed the arrest of his next-door neighbour Anna Wolkoff, a British subject of Russian descent who turned out to be a German spy.
The image above was taken during the filming of The IPCRESS File. The story goes that when Michael Caine came to do the omelette making scene he couldn't get the hang of cracking an egg with one hand (I've mastered the art now) so it's Deighton's hand doing it in the movie.
Extracted from Ordnance Survey map keys, actually from a 1975 metric edition of B. Lockey's The interpretation of Ordnance Survey maps and geographical pictures. I've got plans for them. Isolated like this, 'Saville vs. Wainwright' sprang to mind.
1911, and little did the photo-etchers at Southampton's Ordnance Survey Office know, as they beavered away at their photo-etchings, that a soon to be formed Serbo-Croat nationalist group's resentment for the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Turkey would manifest itself in the brutal assassination of the Archduke of Austria and his wife by Serbian student Gavrilo Princip.
The etchers were as surprised as the printer when it all kicked off after that, with the Austrian government blaming the Serbian government; Germany offering to back-up the Austrians who promptly declared war on Serb-kind; Russia mobilised, calling on France to get stuck in; The Germans declared war on France and Britain declared war on Germany because they wouldn't get their troops out of neutral Belgium.
Them etchings ain't gonna etch themselves.
Prints of Instagrammed images of Northern Ireland's north coast with intersecting thread lines of black and red. I've been working on thread compositions for a few years now. It's an on-going project that's seen long periods of inactivity and short, frenzied bursts of needlework.
I feel that it could be my most original pastime. I'm not sure what the precedent is…Maybe the string pictures of the seventies; precisely spaced tacks on felt-wrapped boards, intertwined with cotton or string to create analogue moiré patterns, as in Barbara Hepworth's Orpheus (Maquette 2) (Version II), from 1956, edition 1959…
Perhaps it's the influence of my wife's craft activities – the presence of cotton thread was a constant in our house before she had her own studio space. Then again, I can see the influence of El Lissitsky's Suprematist work that I used to be obsessed with. Add to that the slightest hint – a mere pinch – of collage (another obsession) and I can begin to see how my brain brought these into existence.
Last week I found half a bark face during the morning dog walk, and I could not have been happier. What luck!
A Demi-Groot, was my rather obvious first thought, holding the dead wood to my face, the correct way round. Then I thought to check the underside for anything my own face didn't want to rub up against and I was struck by its moist woody beauty. Still damp from the night's precipitation my eyes beheld a proliferation of rich reddy-brown tones and I chuckled to myself, imagining the delight I had in store for Team Ace Jet, on my return.
Alas, what greeted me was apathy3.
And a new thought sprang to mind: What's to become of my shit when I'm gone?
Have I mentioned I love my job? Actually, have I mentioned what my job is? Yes, obvs, I'm a graphic designer but it would be more accurate to, now, describe me as an interpretation designer. I used to 'do brochures and stuff', now I do 'exhibitions and that'.
We (that is, Tandem) use the term 'Interpretation Design' (a specific discipline that I wasn't familiar with until I stumbled into my current position nearly five years ago) because what we do is much more than exhibition design. It encompasses exhibition design and lots of other disciplines too. As our Lord High Prophet of Interpretation, Freeman Tilden, described it, it is a discipline that encompasses many disciplines.
So now I design exhibitions…and visitor experiences and museums and interior spaces and interior interventions and architectural interventions and environmental interventions and wayfinding and public art and interpretive graphics…all underpinned by principles set out by the main man just over sixty flipping years ago.
Lots of what we do is connected to heritage or cultural stuff. So I often find myself rummaging through the kind of things I would love to rummage through whether I had this job or not. And often I'm lead down tracks I'm not meant to take.
Last week, I was looking for historical illustrated maps and found dealer in antique maps and atlases Barry Lawrence Rudermann. What an amazing image database Bazza has! Ever since I bought my first atlas I've considered the poles to be the finest of cartographic delights. While BLR may have a different preference there is much Pole action to be had.
A small portion of Japan, from 1959. I tried finding out something about the 20th Congress of the International Air Transport Association but, alas, I could find nothing to enlighten us. I did find a film about PanAm and the Boeing 707 from the same year…
Then these two films about the 377 Stratocruiser…
Classics. A set of Moore & Wright dividers, wrestling external calipers, naked; an instrumental coupling of precision tools.
A few years ago we were in the Riverside Museum in Glasgow. My enduring memory isn't of the tall ship parked out the back or the very clever display of bicycles suspended from the ceiling or even the stunning Zaha Hadid architecture but of a wonderful display of vintage callipers/dividers and drawing instruments.
For the last six months I’ve been using one of these instead of a mouse. Wrist pain had set in; a burning feeling at the joint with occasional sharp needle pain in my forearm. Hardly surprising, I’ve been wielding a mouse since the designing world was first infested by them.
I looked into getting a Wacom tablet but, to be honest, even the entry level tablet makes for a pricey mouse substitute when all you actually need is a mouse. So I thought it was worth giving the Swedish designed Penclic a whirl. Within a couple of weeks I was feeling the benefit and it only dawned on me last week that I have not even a hint of pain anymore.
I miss the swipiness of the Apple Magic Mouse but I still use that function, with my left hand. Took a bit of getting used to and I’m thinking about getting a third-party trackpad instead but it’s been working just fine – I actually find the Penclic more precise than the mouse. Maybe a Wacom would be even better but I’m not an illustrator and have no use for full-on tablet functionality.
There’s no denying, the Penclic is really a mouse on a stick but the stick is quite nice to hold. Again, it takes a bit of getting used to, especially the right click, which is on the left but while initially the buttons seem to be the wrong way around, in practise, they’re not. The track wheel is probably the one thing I’d change – it’s slow.
I use the R3 Wireless version which wins over the Magic Mouse by being able to charge and use it at the same time using a rather neat retractable (separate) charging cable.
The overall ergonomics and cost of the Penclic make it, on balance, a good choice for me although I can't say it's a perfect solution. The ‘mouse on a stick’ concept is especially good and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it more often – it feels much more natural in the hand.
Report ends.
West Germany, 1973:
Four lovely stamps highlighting environmental waste issues are released.
Chester, 1963: The custodians of the cathedral faced a dilemma. The bells needed maintenance work but it was feared that putting them back might have a detrimental effect on the buildings structural/architectural integrity. An alternative plan was hatched by architect George Pace, who specialised in ecclesiastic structures.
It took a while but by 1968 Pace had been commissioned to design a solution by Dean G W O Addleshaw, backed by his crack team of clerics. Work on the Addleshaw Tower began.
I’m sure Pace was the best man to sort the bells out and perhaps Addleshaw’s support of the scheme meant the Dean absolutely deserved to have the new building named after him. I am definitely not suggesting for a second that anything fishy occurred and, quite frankly, I’m shocked that you might even think such a thing! Shame on you.
In June 1973 the foundation stone was laid on what was once an old burial ground, in the south east corner of the cathedral’s grounds. Building work continued in ernest and by October of the following year a new set of twelve bells, recast from all but two of the originals, were installed.
Chester heard the first proper ringing of the new bells in February 1975, for a posh wedding. Something to do with the Duke of Westminster.
The Addleshaw Tower was George Pace’s last major work and while it caused a bit of a stir initially, largely because of its modernist sensibility, the ‘Chester Rocket’ also received much praise and a Grade II listing, for its respect to its historic setting.
I first saw it from the roof of the cathedral while on the tower tour. It’s stunning and I was lucky enough to be able to admire it from almost all angles.
I'm sure Expo 70 was a marvellous thing. I've never been to a World Fair – to me they seem like a thing of the Victorian era, full of fantastical inventions, sights and sounds. But of course they are as much a part of the present and the future…and the past…everywhen, really.
Expo 70 was held in Osaka, Japan and was where the USA displayed a lump of moon rock they'd picked up the year before. It's Landmark Tower inspired the designers of the Valley Forge from Silent Running and the site was used to film the final battle between Gamera and Jiger in the Japanese monster movie…Gamera vs. Jiger, obviously.
And then, there were these stamps.
A history of eugenics told through buildings
Last week I was lucky enough to go to the Association of Heritage Interpretation annual conference, this year in Chester.
Three days. Lots of talks. Some not so good. Some amazing.
By far the best one I saw was by Subhadra Das from University College London. Das is a museum curator of UCL’s science collection and her talk, 'Bricks + Mortals', centred of the, now, little known Victorian scientist Francis Galton.
Galton was the first person to recognise that we all have unique fingerprints – in itself, not an insignificant contribution to the world – but he did loads more. He also invented and gave name to eugenics, the science of improving the genetic quality of a human population. Some, including Das, have described this as ‘the science of racism’ and for good reason. Back in the 1800s University College effectively legitimised this science which was, you will not be surprised to hear, adopted by the Nazis and has over the years fallen (or been pushed) into obscurity – although Galton had his disciples and UCL have a building named after him. If you listen to the podcast below you'll here about more well known names connected to eugenics.
Das has made it her mission to tell the story of Galton and his science, dragging it out of its hiding place (in plain site). So in that spirit, I thought I’d share a couple of links with you. Not exactly her talk from last week but a TEDx talk she did that includes quite a lot of her talk (and is also a bit different)…and below that…
…the UCL web page that is all about her exhibition ‘Bricks + Mortals’, and includes a podcast you should listen to (that is actually her talk and more). That's here.
It was Culture Night. My eldest teenager was heading into Belfast with some 'friends' to wallow in the free culture dripping from every corner and crevice of the city centre.
I'd never been to Culture Night in Belfast, even though I'd heard it's a great night to be out in; I'm too miserable for such free and easy public expressions of culture. No, The Night of Culture is a night for me to stay home and close the curtains. Batten down the hatches in case some culture breaks free and catches the bus out to the suburbs where we live – I keep a large stick by the front door just in case some culture comes a'knocking.
Of course, my son was really out talking to girls, his interest in an evening of extreme free-roaming culture thinly masking his real motivation.
At least my other son was safe at home.
Not for long. His mate Patrick rang and asked if he'd like to go to Culture Night. Wrenched from the comfort of our comfortable sofa (with matching very large food stool – it's soooo comfy) we head city-centre-wards; the two children too young to roam free on Crazy Night without an adult within rescue distance.
Once in town I was soon abandoned and wandered the cultural streets in search of a familiar face. Instead I discovered a familiar place – Keats & Chapman open late to cash in on the culture punters, so in I went, with cash (K&C is the city's finest book cave and it flipped my evening better side up).
Top find: This Penguin Education edition of 'Academic Freedom', circa 1974, with a top notch cover by Omnific/Peter Thompson.
6 years and 8,282 moments later…
The death of Path – the beautiful, sometimes flakey, alway marvellous, social media network – is scheduled for 18.10.18. It's sad. There's a lovely bunch of people with whom I've shared much via Path. The group fluctuated between around 12 and 18 but there was always a hard core that stood the test of time. It's quite something, having your friends in your pocket.
We shared lots; benefitting from each other's skills at time and enjoying each other's sparkling wit at other times. There were many bright moments – weddings, births, heroic deeds. But there were dark times too – deaths, illnesses, stresses, anxieties. To the uninitiated, it's probably hard to appreciate just how much (I think) we all got out of Path; out of some software – separated as we have always been by significant distances. Significant, but not insurmountable – we even got to meet up in real life from time to time.
Now, we find ourselves in a peculiarly modern predicament…
We've been given notice to quit our app.
Visual delights from the East, in the form of first days covers, from the late 60s through to the beginning of the 80s. Like all countries Japan has produced some absolutely stunning stampage (as illustrated here) and many cubic tonnes of self-adhesive shite.
My summer read.
Japan is stalking me. From the corner of my eye I see it, spying on me; following me. From the shelves of a shop; from a painting; whispering, it calls to me through my phone's podcast app…(the flipping weirdo); I bump into it, disguised as a postage stamp that just 'happened' to be passing my way; it sends my son models (better call the police).
It tricks me into letting it in by wearing a rather attractive jacket.
I was talking about Japan with a friend of mine recently, around a camp fire, as it happens – so I was reminded of Jun'Ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows which Rob and Jon recommended via the North v South podcast.
I was telling Mike about Seth's Gundam habit and Mike was telling me about his mate that worked out there for a few years. Specifically, Mike remarked about quite how different his mate found the culture – for example, when travelling on the tube, unless you know the language it's incredible hard to recognise your destination by the station signs.
Reading these short stories gives you an inkling of the differences too; in the lifestyle and also in the format and style of stories.
The collection is compiled to demonstrate a broad Japanese brush so stories range wildly from matters of culture and honour to family, sex and nature with some translated from nineteenth century texts and others from modern work. So far, all are beautiful and 'other landly' – even the gruesome description of a Samurai's ritualistic suicide in 'Patriotism' almost moved me to tears, wrapped as it was in his motivation for such an extreme act and his wife's devotion and support…best you read it yourself, I can't possibly do it justice here.
The cover design is by Matthew Young and uses an illustration – Local Training the Country from Don't Give up Japan, 2012 by Hiroyuki Izutsu.
What was I doing last August? The one in 2017. Whatever it was it must have been all-consuming because I completely missed the publication of Moleskine's Giovanni Pintori monograph. Actually, that Moleskine published anything was news to me!
Pintori and Olivetti are, as you may know, bound together as tightly as the pages of this monograph. In the days when the typewriter was king, Olivetti was the Commander in Chief and Pintori was its…erm…Field Marshal. Armed with an ammunition box full of colours and shapes (and typewriters) the Lance Corporal Designer General would charge into battle, decimating lesser typewriter regiments with a frenzied volley of sub-machine artwork.
It would be fair to say that Pintori is the man that set the standard for the company's marketing activity, raising it head and shoulders above its competitors and visualising Adriano Olivetti's product vision. Pintori left the company in 1967, a few years after the death of the man, although continued to work for Olivetti on a freelance basis while growing his own independent practice.
The monograph brings together many of Olivetti's iconic ads along with original artwork and sketches then other commissions the designer carried out after leaving Olivetti.
If you're not so familiar with Pintori's work then a quick PinterSearch will yield much delicious fruit.
Somewhere between The Amazing World of Gumball and Overwatch my youngest son (he's not so young any more) builds Gundam models. Back in my day it was the Spitfire and Chieftain Tank that we assembled from Airfix kits bought from that model shop up on New Street. For Seth, it’s Mecha – equally complex, but shipped over from Japan.
If you lived in Japan, these amazing model kits wouldn’t cost you too much – a few week’s pocket money maybe, depending on which side of the Bullet Train tracks you were born on. We have to stump up for shipping but they are undeniably cool, so money (and time) well spent I say.
Seth's building quite a collection now and is really into the TV show they derive from.
The models take time to construct and (forgive me for sounding predictably parentist) in our age of fast gratification, that's a very pleasing thing to witness.
They're also awesome to photograph.
I, for one, am a natural pebblist. Unshackled by geological concerns, I am drawn to the pebble like a moth to a flame by an unconscious notion. For me, it is an instinct…and not one shaped by nature or nurture.
I grew up in Birmingham. Further from the sea, can you not get on the island of Great Britain, and although we holidayed by the sea occasionally, it wasn’t common enough to stir, within the young Ace Jet, a great interest in ocean-smoothed rock fragments.
Coming ashore 14 years ago in the north eastern corner of Ireland, I found myself dwelling in quite a different environment. The sea was, and has remained, mere minutes away. More than that, it seems that the Northern Irish find it hard to pull themselves away from the sea so when occasion takes us to explore beyond our immediate area, I am encouraged by both people and the call of other places to hug the coastline.
It seems the best places here are by the sea.
It wasn’t long before my gaze turned towards the shingle, the beauty of pebbles took hold, my hand reaching down to pick up a flattened ovoid of schist, a piece of chalcedony or a quartz veined slate.
‘Hang on a minute! You said you were “unshackled by geological concerns”, now you’re all “schist” this, “quartz veined” that. What (as the kids say) the flip?!’
Ah, well kids, you see now I'm reading Clarence Ellis's The Pebble on the Beach – A Spotter's Guide, recently re-designed and re-published by Faber & Faber. I'm getting the gist of the schist.
It's a really nice read and has a lovely 'fold-off' cover that reveals the illustrated spotter's guide. You can find out more about it on the Guardian's website here. It's unapologetically über-nerdy so you'll get the longshore drift of the 'swash', the 'backwash' and the 'fetch' and so much more that I don't think you'll look at a beach the same way again.
I'll be testing that out next weekend as we head northcoastwards once more.
This is, probably, my favourite building on the Belfast skyline; ever since we moved here I've admired it. I may be in the minority but I know I'm not alone. In fact, I'm very grateful to James Greive, who wrote about his fascination for the Belfast City Hospital building a few years ago on Architecture Ireland — not least because his piece fills in some gaps (and, provided the architect's impression below. Hope that's OK James).
The hospital building was the brain-child of 'avant-garde' architect Louis Adair Roche while he worked at Munce and Kennedy who don't seem to be around anymore. Cork-born, Roche's family moved up to the northern territories of the British Empire during the 1940s with LA packing his suitcase and heading over the water to study making buildings and that at University College London…in London. It seems that the hospital was his finest work, although it is also considered by many to be a monstrous carbuncle. I flipping love it.
Surprisingly, to me at least, it was opened in 1986. I've always assumed it was from the seventies. But, speculating wildly, that date might be a clue to explaining how the flip LAR got away with dropping that spaceship into the south western corner of the city.
I've heard stories about other Belfast buildings built during 'The Troubles' (late 1960s to late 1990s): against the backdrop of paramilitary shenanigans, seriously dubious city planning decisions were made. Maybe there were a few backhanders here and there; maybe there was a little 'pressure' applied — a little 'persuasion', you might call it. Who knows; between you and me I get the distinct impression that the laws of the land, during those difficult times, were somewhat more flexible than in other regions of the United Kingdom.
Whatevz. I for one (and I think Mr Greives would agree) am glad that the Rochemeister was granted approval for his design.
This gives you an idea of the building in context although you get a much better sense of its prominence from the ground.
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By the way, I didn't take the photos! They're great and I stumbled across them online, on the MDE Installations website. Finding them (the best photos of the building I've seen) is what prompted this post but they weren't credited so I can't say who took them. I use them with gratitude to the photographer and in the hope that whoever it was doesn't mind and won't be round to punch my lights out :-)
Roche died in 2014.
I'm just putting these here. I've sold a couple, without trying but one day I'd like to get them out there and see if anyone's interested. Personally, I love them, which is the best place to start. Watercolour with cotton threads.
W. A. Dwiggins (1880—1956) was one of the pioneers of American graphic design. A skilled calligrapher, type designer, printer and illustrator, he was a major force in print design in the early half of the twentieth century. He's one of those enigmatic figures that influenced so much — an ever-present name even if you don't know much about him.
Written and designed by Bruce Kennett, W. A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design is the first comprehensive biography on the great man. Currently a live Kickstarter project, from the Letterform Archive, it's already well exceeded its pledge goal but if you want a piece of the action go here now.
My interest in cartography intensifies inline with the concentration of cartography. Sheets are lovely but an atlas! With an atlas comes a frenzy of map-joy. And a pocket guide! A small, maption-packed book…with cloth-bound, foil-blocked cover…and a plethora of tipped-in fold-out maps. Man alive!
On a recent drive to Galway (a four hour slog from Belfast) I listened to an episode of the BBC's Seriously podcasts. It was a spliced together collection of recordings of Roald Dhal, talking about his past. It's great. Amongst all the things he touches on is what an adventure travel used to be. It still is, of course, but not like it was back in the day.
Obviously, you might still purchase a pocket guide for your holiday – and that guide might still be a thing of beauty, albeit super-efficiently mass-produced – but may I suggest that the reduction in adventurial magic that Mr Dahl refers to is directly proportional to the reduction in production investment in pocket guide production. Needless to say, I'm sure the cover price also reflects this difference.
Around the middle of 2017 I made one of these, just for the pleasure of sewing those lines and pinning those pins: The Marber Grid, rendered in cotton thread and map pins on a canvas board. A tribute to Romek's very clever system that brought unity to so many Penguin and Pelican covers through the 60s and 70s.
It was pretty well received on the social medias back then and again more recently when I made one for friend-from-the-internet Daniel Benneworth-Gray. So I'm now making them them to order — there are a few of them out there now, hanging on various walls.
The grid is re-created, by hand, at actual size, as the great designer intended it, i.e. Penguin and Pelican paperback size.
I've mounted mine in a 30 x 40cm Gunnabo from IKEA but they don't seem to be available now so I've switched to the Hovsta (available in dark brown, medium brown and birch). These have the necessary extra depth for the map pins and I'd be happy to supply the 'Homage' framed the same way, or you can take care of framing yourself.
There's a bit of work involved but I'm keeping my pricing as tight as a taut thread, hence:
Framed: £75 / Unframed: £65
Happy to include UK postage and packaging in that cost but will have to charge a little extra if you're further afield – I'll let you know how much before you commit. If you'd like one email me by clicking here. We can arrange payment through PayPal (if you don't have an account it's really easy to sign up). Allow around two to three weeks for me to make your 'Homage to Romek'.
Map pins mark the critical grid points:
One grey thread represents the broken line on RM's original drawing.
Click each image for a closer look.
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Post updated 31.12.17
I can’t tell you very much about Hans Thoni except that he died in 1980 aged 74 and was a Swiss graphic designer. There are a few of his posters online and some stamps he designed. There’s much more online about Finsteraarhorn, the highest and less popular mountain in the Bernese Alps.
It’s nothing personal, Finsteraarhorn is, I believe, a perfectly respectable Alp, It’s just that it’s hard to get to. And I don’t mean ‘no public transport’ hard to get to, I mean it’s in the middle of flipping nowhere. It’s, what we explorers call, “a very very long way away”.
Of course, I’m an armchair explorer really and would much rather scrutinise the results of a tectonic uplift from the comfort and relative warmth of my living room, with or without Kendal Mint Cake…
Thoni’s economic illustration of Finsteraarhorn is as sparse as a mountaineer’s emergency rations after three days of blizzard-bound isolation. I count three colours and really, not much drawing. But everything is just right. Just as it should be.
I’m a little obsessed by this tiny depiction of a very big thing.
Between the years of 1876 and 1890 Justus Oehler's great-grandmother Agnes Leibbrand made 42 flower pressings which she kept in a decorative envelope box and which, after her death, remained hidden away, as if forgotten in a drawer, waiting to be unearthed by Oehler decades later. In the latest Pentagram Paper (No. 46) all surviving compositions are reproduced at actual size and Oehler tells of discovering the treasure in his grandparent's house.
Agnes carefully labelled each piece with a number, a date and a description of the fauna's origin. Oehler reflects on his great-grandmother's meticulous work and on the 19th century pastime, "…an art whose delicate beauty and emblematic floriography reflected the social and aesthetic sensibilities of the time".
It's a touching collection, made all the more interesting by how Agnes seems to have stopped pressing when she got married…as if, perhaps, the activity represented a time that had come to an end. I don't know, the Paper's text is very brief but Oehler wrote enough to trigger thoughts on the collection's significance.
Episode 1: A Potter
I'm not a fan of The Potter. Too derivative for me. But I know, I concede, I’m in the minority; I certainly am in our household. I’m not sure what the dog thinks but everyone else (the goldfish doesn’t count) flipping loves a bit of Potter.
During the summer we went to The Making of Harry Potter, down there at Leavesden Studios near Watford. Even I was a little excited – I imagined there would be at least one or two things I’d find interesting. I was wrong. There was loads of stuff. You’d have to be a very cold-hearted troll to not enjoy it; if you're a Potterette, I expect you’d need some kind of charm spell to keep your brain from exploding. There is much to get excited about.
The sheer volume of stuff is enough to make you pledge your allegiance to He Who Shall Not Be Named in order to obtain just a tiny fragment of it. Thankfully your soul is saved (although not your bank balance) by the gift shop, crammed as it is to the mythical sea creature’s gills with fabulous stuff. The perfect takeaway being, obviously, a wand and we were delighted to be fleeced two-fold…for two.
Magic: a delightful visitor experience and a perfect memento of the day.
Episode 2: The Poet
At the end of September Tandem’s latest project went live: Seamus Heaney | Man & Boy is a permanent visitor experience, housed within HomePlace, a new arts centre dedicated to, arguably, Ireland’s greatest modern poet. I had very little to do with the project so when we all went along just prior to launch day, I could enjoy it without too much baggage. I wasn’t that involved but I was in close enough proximity to the project team for a little Heaney magic to have rubbed off on me and I had by this time come to enjoy his words immensely.
Man & Boy has been received very well so far with some great press coverage in the Irish Times, the Guardian and the New York Times. It is a special experience and I think you'd have to be a very cold-hearted troll to not enjoy it; if you're a Heaneyite, I expect you’d need some kind of charm spell to keep your brain from exploding. There is much to enjoy. At the centre of the inspiration gallery upstairs there is a fountain pen, suspended as if in thin air. It's the kind of pen Heaney used.
The perfect takeaway? His wand…his gold nibbed, inky wand.
Episode Three: Two Jokers
You can’t buy a Conway Stewart from HomePlace. The company that made them went out of business, first in 1975 and then later in 2014 after an attempt to rejuvenate the brand just didn’t come off; despite the company's reputation for excellent pens demand was just not high enough.
The company was started originally in 1905 when Frank Jarvis and Thomas Garner left De La Rue, a leading fountain pen manufacturer, to set up on their own. Legend has it that they named the business after two music hall comedians of the day. It didn’t do them any harm, things went pretty well and Conway Stewart enjoyed great success with their top notch and affordable fountain pens.
It must have been some time in the 50s that Seamus Heaney was presented with his pen by his parents. He was 14 and went on to use that pen for the rest of his life. He wrote about it more than once: in ‘Digging’, the first poem in Death of a Naturalist, Heaney famously wrote:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun
In the more explicit 'The Conway Stewart’, from Human Chain, he beats less around the bush and goes into so much detail that pen nerds have speculated confidently over precisely which model he describes – probably a 58 although some have suggested a 388.
Mine is a 15.
I got it on ebay. It’s a nice example although not exactly like the Poet’s. His had three gold bands around the lid, mine only has one. But still, when it arrived my hands trembled as I removed it from its modest packaging. It feels nice in the hand and is, I have to say, an elegant pen. Yes, it’s “squat”, as Heaney described his and yes, it does feel “as snug as a gun”.
It also feels magic.
Can we stop referring to the Co-op “re-brand” as nostalgic please?
It’s a shallow response to a well considered solution. If we hadn’t seen that mark before, would we think it retro? Just look at it! I would suggest that if we hadn’t seen it before we’d think it a bold, maybe even ground breaking design for a business built on strong ethics.
OK, perhaps nostalgia comes as a bi-product but it clearly wasn’t the intention of the designers. It’s actually a great example of really smart, grown up graphic design; recognising that the solution was already there and there are better things to spend the client’s money on. In that respect, it’s a beautifully appropriate and ethical solution. It reminds me of this.
Let’s talk about that instead.
I just got an email from Russell from Designers & Books. In October they launch a Kickstarter to re-publish Depero's Bolted Book. So, nothing really important then. (Oh my god! They want to re-publish the Bolted Book!).
Here's real treasure for the map fiend: A topographical study of the region known as Europe. I remember Europe – some of it is just below us and there's a much bigger bit over on the other side of the British mainland. We used to holiday there when it was easy to do that, before the walls went up. I liked being in Europe…then one day…one dark day in the 2016, just over half the voting population of Great Britain decided they wanted to leave. Mostly for stupid reasons. But that is, as they say, history. We won't dwell on that.
Still, nice maps: a geographical study based on extracts from large scale maps of European countries featuring the natural environment, agricultural regions, areas of industry that it'll be harder to do business with now and both urban and rural settlements that we are no longer free to visit because an ill-informed population were invited to decide on something they were wholly unqualified to decide on. But as I've already said, let's not dwell on that particular clusterfuck.
Instead let's marvel at the myriad of lines, tones, colours and typography deployed to describe these now more distant regions.
Thankfully, the beauty of cartography is not influenced by poor socio-political referendums and we can still enjoy the skills and artistry of drafts-people from countries with whom we are no longer unified economically.
To summarise Marty Neumeier’s 2013 book Metaskills: when the robots rise up to conquer, our only hope, our last line of defence, will be to hit them good and hard with a hefty dose of creativity. It’s our last chance, a full-on, hardcore assault of creative power, right where is hurts. Boom!…Or, at least, I think that was his point…don’t quote me though.
As we automate and roboticise more and more tasks that we really just can’t be bothered to do ourselves, in the end, all we’ll have left to claim we are still superior – that we still have mastery over the machines – is our ability to think outside of the lidded vessel – to think and act unorthodoxically…irregularly…nonconformistically…offbeatedly……as they say.
Not for the first time I’m joining the many voices that have expressed, more elegantly and in much greater detail, that original thought is our most valuable gross international product. And, literally, thank God (or Darwin, if you’re less spiritually inclined) because without that, without ‘new ideas’, let’s face it, we’re robot fodder.
Now I for one, have what neuro-types might call a “growth mindset”. None of us have to rely on what talent or skill we already have and infact we’d all do well, better actually, to expand our abilities through conscious, mindful, concerted and continual training.
Dorte Nielson and Sarah Thurber's book The secret of the highly creative thinker is an aid to just that. Sub-titled "How to make connections others don't", the book guides you through the theory then the practice – the conscious, mindful practice – of connection making. Building on what people like James Webb Young began fifty plus years ago Nielson and Thurber continue the de-mystification of the creative process with the science and provide numerous exercises to help anyone expand their abilities.
It's a handsome volume, easy on the eyes and pretty quick to work through up to the exercises which you can spread out for as long as you like. It's one of those "I wish this was around when I was starting out" kind of books.
In our modern era of near-androidian supremacy, as singularity inevitably approaches and those in the know – those beyond the "creative industries" – elevate creative thinking to a prized status, teaching like this is welcome and valuable.
If nothing else, it means we’ll be ready for the robots.
