The Dulwich Picture Gallery have an exhibition of Rembrandt that focuses on how he illustrated light. It's good you should go. Russell, not you.
The most interesting thing about the exhibition is that it's specifically lit by Peter Suschitzky who's an actual cinematographer and photographer who worked on The Empire Strikes Back, Crash and many others. That fact made me notice the lighting and I thought it was good. Obviously all exhibitions are lit, but I've never noticed it before.
Anyway.
Really enjoyed this. On until April. Go if you happen to be in Melbourne, Australia.
Beautiful and important book by my friend and incredible designer Richard.
He says, "Not since the early twentieth century and the post war building programmes of WWI & II have we needed such a wholesale reappraisal of all the systems by which we live, and by which society functions. Including not just the methods by which we design, make and build, but also the values through which we ‘see’.
So how do movements like this happen? Where do they come from and what exactly are they made of? How far back do the origins of the Sustainable Movement really stretch?
This book looks at the journey taken to get us here, to the beginnings of a new movement, which despite remaining an unproven theory, has for some time now, shown great potential. Then shows how only as a brightly lit community in action, might we collectively set ourselves on a healthier long-term trajectory."
If nothing else buy it for the beautiful typography.
Back it here.
Just over a year and 177 sketches so more like One Sketch Every Other Day but still this has been the most fun I've had in ages. I have a few simple rules;
Sketching for relaxation.
I'm always amazed how relaxing this is. I'm able to completely switch off and be immersed in the sketch. Whatever I'm doing, wherever I am, I find this a huge relief from the days activities. I find this strange but maybe I shouldn't.
None take longer than 10 minutes.
It’s just sketching for relaxation so I don’t worry about it too much. Just draw. This, of course, is always the best way to draw.
No deeper meanings.
Most of them are just what's in front of me when I remember to sketch or when I have ten spare minutes. No ironic points made. No in-jokes. No shade. Just drawing.
Looking back here are some of my favourites.
We stayed in a cabin in a forest and walking back one evening I spotted the light and stopped to draw it. I had some pens in the cabin so I went and got them. I love the black and white with one colour effect. I like how it's clearly night even though the sky is white paper.
One of the best pencil sketches I've done. There was a nice flowing nature to this. Everything just seemed to work. I'd like to do more pencil sketches but pencils are harder to carry around.
I like drawing with marker pens and no hard lines. And I'm a bit obsessed with this tree.
I sit on a lot of planes and it's the perfect place to observe people sat still for a long time. I could easily have called this project One Bad Posture A Day.
I sit in a lot of meetings, again a good place to observe people sat still for a long time. Sometimes I sketch on an iPad. It's very easy to get a good result but I miss my little notebook. Maybe I should just put one of the stickers on the iPad. That's probably what Russell would do.
Bananas. I love bananas.
Airport lounge. I should do more where there are lots of little quick sketches.
Like these ones of the great Roger Law.
This iPad sketch was very popular and was drawn from a photo I took. I'm not that fussed myself.
Incredibly satisfying this one. Incredibly quick.
Early for coffee with a friend. Stop and get out the pens. Photographed in situ which is nice.
Let's end on a nice story. I know Tara the co-author of this and was drawing this when she unexpectedly (to me) turned up at our house. This picture is now framed and hangs in her kitchen.
Anyway, follow here if you're interested Ben One Sketch A Day.
Our office building in Old Street has this shield outside.
It's even better inside. The words say 'More Light, More Power' which is a good phrase for many things. I'd always assumed it was a strapline for an old power station.
Here's another one on a gate near a church.
Here's another on the top of Shoreditch Town Hall. Turns out it was the motto for the borough of Shoreditch to celebrate the provision of electric power around 1900.
You can read more here and here and lots more by googling.
Made me wonder what the motto is now. It's 'Justice is our tower'. I dunno maybe that's something about luxury apartments.
Every London borough has a motto obvs. Redbridge's is 'In Unity Progress' while Ealing's is 'Progress With Unity'.
Islington's is 'We serve' which maybe they nicked from Wandsworth whose motto is 'We serve'. Or vice versa. IDK.
More London borough mottos here.
Anyway.
But here we are. I saw this at the Wellcome Collection and thought it was nice. Clear and simple with a little added depth when you look closer. No clever ideas getting in the way.
I have no idea who did it. I don't think it was a design agency but some creative soul at the Wellcome Collection.
10 years ago as-near-as-is-good-enough-for-blogging I visited the Unpackaged store in Islington.
I wrote a glowing review. I was very taken with the concept and the store.
It looked like this. More pictures here on Flickr which everyone used then because it was two months before Butterfield quit with an epic resignation letter.
2008 was that golden age when we all blogged about Brands going Green. Jones invented the term Unproduct, Russell blogged diligently and I created a media storm in Design Week which now 404s. You get the idea here. Good times.
The other day I went into a Planet Organic and I saw this.
I wondered if it was the same Unpackaged. It is. Hurrah! Their story has taken all kinds of twists and turns since 2008. They opened a cafe, another cafe, a bar, a different shop and a restaurant. Closed all that. And now have concessions in three Planet Organics.
Which got me thinking, in many ways this is better than opening a shop themselves. Is it similar to supermarkets stocking Fairtrade? Which always seems to be the best example of Doing Good at the High Street Scale of things. Which feels important. Good is good, but it's better when it's at a mass market scale even if it's a little bit less good.
Are there any other examples of this?
High Street brands are always trying lots of innovation when it always seems like a better idea to find something good and help make that bigger. Which sort of reminds me of this bit of the GDS Design Principles,
"Government should only do what only government can do. If we’ve found a way of doing something that works, we should make it reusable and shareable instead of reinventing the wheel every time. This means building platforms and registers others can build upon, providing resources (like APIs) that others can use, and linking to the work of others. We should concentrate on the irreducible core."
Anyway. Less plastic, more dried bananas.
RELATED (am I doing this right)
Don't forget to visit Sophie's brilliant website Trash Plastic.
I stayed in a hotel the other day and it had a music theme. Every floor had these big pictures of dead singers.
Hotels often have pictures of dead people. I wonder if it's to help you sleep.
Anyway.
I wrote about this shirt in 2007. I'm writing about it again. Yes blogging is so bad I am now writing the same blog post about the same thing just twelve years later. Think of this as the reboot. Same narrative new, higher res, images.
For the new listeners here's a recap. I bought this shirt with some money my Granny gave me for my 18th birthday. That makes it 13 26 years old. I bought it in a shop in Bath called John Anthony for £75.
The same comments I made in the original post still apply.
1. 26 years on I still have absolutely no idea what I was doing spending £75 on a shirt. Although over 26 years that works out at £2.88 a year so if they'd had subscription models back then I reckon this would have been a great deal.
2. 26 years. More than half my life. And yes, maybe well made, well designed things last longer and that's better. Slow fashion ftw.
Anyway. Next update 2031.
First the designers, now it looks like Account Management have got involved.
These water fountains have caused a stir on the design forums.
They've been called "hideous" and "naff". I'm not a fan of them visually, but I think "naff" is an extremely patronising way to critique public design. But anyway, there's plenty of discussion about the design of them here and here.
They are undoubtably a good idea. Presumably you can't just revive the old stone fountains and presumably someone else other than the government has to pay for them, so that might as well be Thames Water.
What I find most fascinating is that they look like an ad campaign made into a 3d object. More persuasion than usability. There's one near me, I'll report back in a few months.
UPDATE: It has been covered up. Maybe it was the designers.
UPDATE: Account Management are involved
I love Cindy Sherman.
Actually I don't. I don't like the photos that much. They're good, but I don't find them amazing. I absolutely love the fact that all her pictures are self-portraits. 40 years of that, that's brilliant.
What I mean is that I like Cindy Sherman like I like Radiohead. Because it's well known that it is possible to like the idea of Radiohead without actually liking the music.
Cindy Sherman at the National Portrait Gallery.
More info here WARNING opens on a page that auto plays a loud video.
Very good. I enjoyed it way more than I expected. You should go. Dulwich Picture Gallery continues to have surprisingly good, though small, exhibitions. Russell, worth a look if you happen to be in Dulwich.
I'm sure Modernist is the correct technical art term, but it didn't feel how I think of modernist. If that makes sense. It felt much more industrial. There was more movement than I was expecting. The prints felt like stills from a film.
The London stuff was great and I'd not seen any of it before despite always thinking I've seen all of those London Underground posters.
Closes 8 September. More info here.
Having some fun with this project. Still not as good as Alan. @eyesonamazon over on Insta.
James has a point in this tweet the other day.
NASA image AS08-14-2383, taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. Image commonly known as Earthrise.
The other day I was looking at the recycling pile and I wondered what Alan Fletcher would have done with all that cardboard. Remember that he made these incredible animals out of rubbish he found with his grandson Tobia. Mike Dempsey has the full story here. Alan set the bar high for side projects and these ended up in the RA Summer Exhibition.
He made also lots of collages from found bits of cardboard. More of those here.
I thought Alan would definitely have done something good with all the Amazon boxes that you find in every recycling bin. The smile is crying out to to be played with.
Inspired by Alan I started drawing on the Amazon boxes we had at home. I started adding eyes to the smile. Here are the first few. Like all good side projects I started an Insta @eyesonamazon.
Worth noting that although Alan was my inspiration; whatever Alan would have done would have been far better than anything I am about to do.
Anyway.
Giles and I were talking about cows because he wrote about how he had a nice chat with some the other day.
I've always been a fan of cows partly because they are easy to talk to and partly because the black and white ones have a nice graphic quality against the fresh green grass. That's always appealed to my visual sensibilities.
Here's a good picture of that phenomenon by Guy. Lovely stuff.
All this reminded me of the magazine Pentagram's DJ Stout used to design. It was called Dairy and it featured a big portrait of a cow on the front cover of each issue. Not messing around, big, glossy portraits of cows.
I went to visit DJ Stout in 2010 when I was in Austin for SXSW. He had some of the portraits on the studio walls.
And let's not forget Matthew and his cows.
Picture by Russell
Cows, pretty much their own design system.
UPDATE:
Mayo has reminded me of Gateway 2000 and their excellent cow packaging boxes.
UPDATE:
I spotted this on the way to work and it reminded me of the Innocent cow vans back in the day when everything was nice.
UPDATE:
These bins by Hackney Council which I wrote about on this blog thirteen years ago.
I'm sure there are others. Send 'em my way.
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