Know Design

Last week I was at the University of Warwick to talk to a group of MA students at the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies. Focussing on fields including Arts Management, Cultural Policy and the Creative Industries, I was invited in to give some industry perspective on things and talk about my background, Supercool and issues surrounding running a small creative agency.

Having been slightly dreading the prospect of having to talk about myself for 45 minutes it actually went really well. Nobody dropped off to sleep and most people responded well by asking some tough questions. In fact having rushed over to Warwick straight from a pitch, I found the students’ questions were far more testing than any potential client. Issues ranged from creative sign-off, budget approval, business planning and cash flow. Hopefully everybody learned as much out of it as I did.

Thanks to Dr Jonathan Vickery [Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies] for inviting me in, and everybody who listened to the talk and managed to remain looking interested, I really enjoyed it.

I’ve spent my winter in Birmingham.

It was an exciting opportunity for me to go abroad as an intern. Why not? Besides from experiencing being a graphic designer in the real world, I get to discover a whole new country! I just couldn’t let that chance pass me by.

James and Katie really made an effort to make me feel welcome. For instance getting my own orange office chair! Sadly I couldn’t fit in in my suitcase!

My main project while staying at Supercool was branding the Library of Birmingham.*

I was also lucky enough to be invited along for the lovely Chitterlings event with other interesting local creative people and John Berry, who works for Microsoft. That was a really great evening. I also joined in on a couple of the Likemind events, where I met new people from Brum.

I have learnt a lot both as a person and as a graphic designer and gained new confidence in myself. Thanks – it’s been supercool.

Sophie

(Sophie’s internship at Supercool ran from November 2009 until February 2010. She is a final year student at Skolen for Visuel Kommunikation)

* A project based on a recently circulated tender brief – KP

The logo for the XXII Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Krasnodar Krai, Russia in 2014 has the first ever Olympic logo to include a web address.

The ampersand font, Coming Together, that we contributed to a few weeks ago is now on sale.

Around 400 designers (some listed above!) from around the world took part in producing this cross-platform OpenType glyph font, and all the money raised from the sale of the font is going to help the relief efforts in Haiti.

You can buy Coming Together from the following places now – Veer, Ascender Fonts, FontShop – and from MyFonts later this week.

(Ours is the zero, by the way!)

Did you know there’s more than one Chinese character for ‘love’? The characters for ‘lovey-dovey’ love and ‘friendship’ love have a fairly similar design – but the former includes the representation of a heart within the centre of the character. Lovely!

Have a happy Valentine’s and Chinese New Year this Sunday.

I follow Ellen Lupton on Twitter (@ellenLupton) so saw a recent tweet of hers about Font Aid IV: Coming Together.

The US-based Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) are putting together a font made entirely of ampersands, designed by loads of different designers from around the world. (Hence it’s name, Coming Together.)

They’ll then sell the resulting font via MyFonts, with all proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders who are one of the many organisations helping out in Haiti at the moment.

SOTA are on the hunt for submissions at the moment, so I had a go …

My contribution is based fairly closely on the ‘et’ from which the ampersand shape derives and is (loosely) made up of a heart shape and a kiss. Ahhhh! I tried to make it simple but with a bit of thought behind it – though only time will tell if it’s good enough to be part of the font or not.

If you’ve got the mad Illustrator skillz, why not spare half an hour or so to create an ampersand?

Here’s what you need to do to take part:

> Submit a black and white “ampersand” icon.
> It should be a vector image file, not a bitmap.
> Keep it simple, not too crazy.
> Send it in EPS format to by 01/29/10.

(Remember to check back on MyFonts and buy the font once it’s ready!)