Designing a promotional leaflet for BridgeCare

BridgeCare is a local organisation that looks after the well-being of older people and their carers in Bath. It was founded and is still partially run by people from the church I used to go to.

Recently they have asked me to design some promotional material for them - which I'm really pleased and privileged to do.

This is right in core business, since I have been involved in the not-for-profit and charity sector for most of my working life, and have several other similar organisations that i help.

This first project is about about day care services, but I have also got to write a style manual for all the outgoing communications. Later there's some more brochures, photography and a website. You can see the current website here by clicking the screenshot.

First job is to find some suitable pictures for illustrations. I got them to list the activities they do and hopefully I'll be able to illustrate most if not all. As they have a small budget, in most cases I'll be looking to Creative Commons for royalty-free imagery where possible. Although I fancy getting some good pix myself for the beetle drive.

Guides are delivered!!

Impressively large lorry delivered 35000 Bath Fringe Festival guides yesterday. Little boy moment - I'm kind of responsible for that and clogging up Walcot street for the time taken to unload...

Designing(?) puppets/automata

This is a rough drawing for a puppet. It's not very imaginative, but I quite liked it. I used the metaphor of a puppet for mental health issues some time ago - the idea of someone else - or another, less controlled part of your head pulling the strings.
This pictures was based on an artist's lay figure. I have the notion that I could use that at least as a prototype and maybe as a way of getting the rough shape and articulation. They can be brought now for around £3-4 in the shops, and almost you couldn't buy the wood for that. Certainly it saves a few hours of cutting and shaping.
Right now I'm not quite sure how to do the joints. Just stringing would mean that they would turn in unnatural poses, so either a cloth or leather hinge comes to mind.
I did get a couple of smaller figures to play with, but I think that they will be too small to work with and possibly too light. But I'm going to give them a go once I've figured the articulation though I shall replace the heads.
Really I need to be turning paper into tangibles. Perhaps that should be next week's task.

Designing the Ghost House

In the posting I did about the doll's house that we are building I mused about whether or not it could be automated to give the appearance of people or things living inside it.

Since then I thought a bit more and I think it's entirely practical that such a thing could be done and the diagram here gives an idea or two.

First up is using puppets - or automata - to give some motion to it. The mechanism can be hidden in the roof or floor - depending if they work by string or wire. Here you can see a ghost coming down through the floor and another skull making the same trip. Although these are shown using cranks, intact I'd probably use small servos or stepper motors to allow them two be moved individually. While the romance of brass cams and steampunk mechanisms appeals, using electronics gives more control and would allow interaction between the ghosts and the viewer in a less predictable way.

The last ghost, sitting bottom right in a chair is a variation on pepper's ghost a victorian illusion that I keep find now days being referred to as a 'hologram'  - it's not. It's a simple partial reflection that unless done live isn't even stereoscopic. In the use of the effect above, the originating image is a LCD screen built into the floor. You can see the reflective glass at 45 degrees and the ghost will apparently sit on the chair or move around.

I don't suppose I will ever build this, at least not in this form; but it was a good think through and design.I also quite liked the drawing that I did - at the moment I'm still into grunge and imperfection in a big way.

SS April 2015

Burning the midnight oil and sending it all off.

So some few days without a posting. Back to normal I suppose. Overall it went fairly smoothly this year. No last moment panics - although did get one advertiser wanting to make a change just after we had 35000 printed.

Got some time off to do things like sleep and eat but only just:

• Friday 12: worked all day and most of night. Bed about 6.00am
• Saturday 11: Worked all day from about 9.00am until about 16.30; then from about 20.00 through to 4.00am
• Sunday 12: Worked on guide 12.00pm through to 4.00am.
• Monday 13: Worked on guide from 6-8am, then 16.45-2.30.am

By this time I have artwork about 60 pages or so. The 40 in the guide plus half that I did twice.

Tuesday 14: Had lessons at college for most of the day, checked proofs as I went along. Uploaded the files around 4.00pm, which I did as a demonstration to a few students.

Went like this:

Days of handing over hard copy in one form or another are long gone. Now it's all print-ready pdf, which as a designer you better make sure that you understand. (Incidentally, I do a course on this - shameless plug). Even so there's a few things that ca trip you up or particular issues that one system has that you don't expect.

In this case after half an hour trying to upload a file that I thought was perfectly good, only to have it get dropped without a meaningful error message (see next screen) I finally remembered that this system doesn't like anything other than simple ASCII filemanes, no spaces no "unusual" characters in the filename. Renamed the file using underscores thus"fringe_guide" as opposed to "fringe guide" and the Kodak system was perfectly happy. You would have thought that they might have warned you or given a sensible error message.

Once you pages are uploaded the system's preflight kicks into action. This goes through each page and the system makes a technical evaluation of each page. I expected this to fail and had made a note of it when I submitted the file - we had one or two pages where there was a low-resolution file. Dutifully they were failed. The rest of the pages I have to click on approve, download a proof or set up for replacement.

In this case rather than go all through the process of calling up the printer and going through I opted to cheat. I opened up each of the problem files in Photoshop and simply doubled the pixel count. This doesn't do anything (You can't upscale picture to get more detail - usually if anything it looks worse) other than make the preflighting software happy.

Out of interest I did a tiny test. I upscaled using two different algorithms to see if there was any difference in the final quality. My hunch is that they will look the same.

There was one last call from the Printers before it went on Press, they had noticed a small issue with the front page. Whilst no-one would of noticed I suspect, out of professional pride I fixed it and the job then went to the press.

We wait with interest.

Pictures from the Artists' book fair - Arnolfini April 2015

Took an afternoon off from doing the Fringe Guide last weekend to visit the Artists' book fair at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol. Looked like it could have been good, so I had suggested to my students that it might be a good idea for them to come along and see what was there - especially as some of them were talking about doing something similar.

To be honest, if I hadn't said that I would have probably given it a miss - I was up to my eyeballs in the Fringe guide at the time and could have done without the distraction. However, I went - saw some exceedingly good work - didn't see any students. (A little of me was glad since I had offered a minor bribe - if they had all turned up could have been expensive.) (Yes, you're all worth it..).

In no particular order here's some shots of things that caught my eye. My wallet was caught by two books - would have been more - but I've got to eat as well.

Sone nice, fairly standard production book, particularly taken by the Eggar-tist one bottom left.

Selection of letterpress/block printed books. Want to do some vaguely similar for the Bedlam leaflet for Bath Fringe Festival. That is print from block. Did have this idea of doing the whole thing as a Linocut, but lino doesn't have an undo button which that kind of product needs!

What is it about bugs that I find interesting? These were engravings made up as books - exquisite drawings with fine, high quality printing. Tempted to buy one, but not quite sure what I would do with it.

Lots of little books, some full of poems or drawings. Others prose.

Strange books and objects, some fun, many fairly obscure. Like the "Affordable housing" piece at top left.

More hand-printed tiny books. Some are linocut others are screen prints.

Delicate model making from old books. One of a couple of things where old books are cut up or into to make objects. Bath Library have run a competition in the summer holiday break using discontinued library books. Must say that I still find this kind of destruction of a book a bit disturbing. And I speak as someone who made four life-sized papier mache apostles from old bibles.

For me the star of the show - difficult to photograph effectively. This is a paper cut-out that forms a graphic narrative. It's a strip of A0 (?) paper that has been laser cut incredibly finely; I would guess that parts of it are no more that 0.5mm wide and it folds down to a large fan-like structure.

I was in awe...

Same idea, but a bit smaller from the same people.

Collection of books that told a story, exhibited in the doll's house that they are writing about.

Selection of comic books and graphic narratives. Brought one similar that had been produced using silk-screen print.

Day six, another few pages bit the dust.

Here's one: