The Daily Ampersand Project: Days 11 - 15

Day 11's ampersand is American Typewriter - a font that came with my mac and confuses me slightly. Does that look like a letterform produced by an american typewriter to you? No. I thought it looked like a cats tail. So I made it into one with clever pencil use! Ta da.
Day 12's ampersand is another font I got off trusty dafont.com, called JF Ringmaster. There's loads of variations of victorian/circus style fonts out there but this one caught me a bit. Reproduced in neon fineliner, it makes me happy.


Day 13's ampersand (lucky for some) is called 'Maximilian Antiqua' from dafont again. Nice typeface, this. Standard. So I created this one from a cutout of a magazine, Grazia actually. I felt bad for cutting her face up, so I gave some of it back to her.


Day 14 is Didot of course, good classic typeface. Thought it looked a bit like a well-to-do gentleman, and they always wear pinstripe suits and have moustaches. One for Movember, I think!

Disclaimer: Moustaches are cool, but not on an actual person. Because it's for charity, I'll let you off, but seriously, facial hair, never good. Unless it's stubble, even then, I'm not loving it.Day 15 was actually Halloween! But as I was out getting gazeeboed (I do hope you understand that reference) then... no drawing for me. This, I do believe, is Eccentric Std, and it's covered in goo. In felt tip! Yeah that's right, felt bloody tip. Rock on.

Only got a few more to do now and I'm caught up. Still haven't installed my scanner. Lazy.

La Roux & Dan Black @ Camden Roundhouse - iTunes Festival

Last night I went to see La Roux play at Camden Roundhouse, with Dan Black supporting, as part of iTunes free London festival going on all July. What an awesome night! Getting free tickets to a gig is nice enough, even better that I love La Roux, and once I'd found someone to come along with me, (cheers Kylie, saved the day!) we had ourselves a great little night out in London town :)

Fern Cotton and Dave Berry were there presenting for itv2, how special:

Me and Kylie getting a bit sweaty in the crowd, ah fun times:
So as I said, Dan Black was supporting, I hadn't really heard much of his stuff before, checked him out and like what little I heard, but he was immense! Really enjoyed his set, we were dancing and bobbing along, first time I've enjoyed a largely unknown support act for a long time. His music is what I'd describe as Electropop mainly, little bit of an indie feel (actually, I detect a slight early Radiohead feel, in a good way) and a slight leaning towards the melancholy in his lyrics, as well as entirely danceable, which means he gets a thumbs up from me! Loved it, I'm definitely going to get his album when I have some cash.



Nice set, very neon/brightly lit/crazy. Also, if Jesus was a rocking post-indie keyboard player who likes to go a bit mental, he would look like this:

So then La Roux came on, and I have to say I think I enjoyed Dan Black a bit more. He seemed to have much more energy... although I really like La Roux's style and songs, and she hit pretty much every note perfectly, I just didn't feel as invigorated as I thought I would. Having said that, when Going in For the Kill and Bulletproof came on, everyone rocked out a bit more and it felt really good to do some crazy dancing. She had an amazing jacket on though, not entirely sure if you can see it properly, but it was white and had no lapel, with massive plastic gems on. Sooo cool. She's a bit stylish, that girl.






A really great saturday night! Ace to be back in London (again woohoo), I'm making a pleasant habit of this.

Lastly, the road opposite the roundhouse is called Crogsland Road. Which I found hilarious and I don't know why. Crogsland. Heeheee.

Retro is the way forward!

I've decided not to post my work in progress for the Penguin Design Award competition. Obvious reasons really. I'll post the finished version when it's sent off and entered :)

In other news, I have been working on my sustainability posters, in particular the mobile phone one - persuading people not to upgrade their phone when it works perfectly well, for the sake of the environmental damage that new phones cause during manufacture.

I'm going for a retro feel here, the idea that vintage/retro is cool and so old phones are cool too. Just been doing some drawing and some initial ideas and....

Cassettes! Space invaders! Old Nokias! All the best things ever. I have discovered that I love drawing cassette tapes ^.^

So this is the starting point. Imagine pixellated text, retro colours... good times. I'll update as I progress, I have a good feeling about this project :)

Music, Neon, and Small Objects.

Hello blog-type people. This week, I 'ave mostly been fer'ilising. I mean, er. I have mostly been working. It's been really great actually, startling how much I've learned about how design companies work, relationship with clients, how to actually layout a well designed page (sweeeet), and other stuff. Been bloody knackering though. Monday is my last day; I hand back over to the normal designer, then I get paid yeeeeha :D Hehe.

Today I went shopping with my dad, for his birthday present. It's scary how much I enjoy shopping, even if it is for my (oldish) dad - picking stuff out is cool ^.^ However, being the buying-stuff-aholic that I am, I couldn't resist these shoes in the Schuh sale:















How amazing are they?? (Yes those are my feet, they are pudgy, sshh.) They were half price, from £40 to £20. Duh. And they're uber high and actually pretty comfortable! I just love the neon style reflection on my floor :P I already have lots of neon accessories, although not much yellow, so may have to get a bag, or bright yellow top and then wear black jeans. Mwahahahaha. I want to wear them all the time! This nu-rave thing that's going on is the best trend EVER.

Moving on from that, I wanted to bring to people's attention some nice things I found, first of all is:
The Small Object
It's pretty explanatory once you visit it; a site selling lots of lovely little handmade artwork, and other things. These being my favourites:
The thumb war battle of 1596

Stickers. But cool ones.

And basically it's just a lovely little site. I like finding nice things like that.

Another thing I wanted to share was:
Creature Magazine
I found this via Allmightys.

"Creature-mag is an artist run online publication released quarterly. We receive work from artists, photographers, designers, illustrators, writers, poets and musicians from all over the world. The creature encourages free thought/speech and enjoys receiving pieces that both inspire and display an inventive application of the artists creativity.

We are a magazine of folk sensibilities, we aim to develop and sustain a talented community of creative people, to showcase the work of local and international artists and to facilitate both our own and others artistic development."

It's very pretty and now I aspire to having something accepted into it. But in the mean time, it's just a nice read :) Bookmark it, issues come every so often I believe.

The last thing, again found via Allmightys.com, is:
Music video for Grandaddy - Jed's other Poem.
It's entirely made on one of those old school 70's computers, and it's utterly beautiful. The song ain't half bad either!

I think the reason I like it so much is the visualisation of the lyrics, not just written out but, interacting with the song. I'm really into this myself - I may be alone but when I listen to songs I visualise the words and how they would be on paper, and the tones and melodies of the song affecting the way they're laid out - italicised, laid over, bla bla. Anyway, so quite often I'll just write out/design lyrics to how I think they'd look if music was visual. It's fun and so therapeutic. For example, I did these a few months ago now, it's the lyrics to Another Word for Desperate by Straylight Run:
























On the left is the original, typed up lyrics, overlapping etc. Click on it, have a look. The one on the right is the same, but messed up - I'm not going to say how 'cos I've never seen anyone else do this before, and it's miiiiiine ahahahahahaha. I'm sure you can figure it out anyway. It does strange things - stretches bits, flips lines over, all kinds of stuff. It's great. Hint, no photoshop involved, this entire thing is just done in word, well and a scanner/printer of course. Now I know how to use InDesign it can be done a lot easier now :) All the lyics belong to Straylight Run, of course.

So that's all for today. Have a nice weekend all :)