I live on your visits

In between wondering if I like or don’t like the 2012 London Olympic logo, and looking at pictures of walruses with silly captions, I’ve been designing a book or two. Well, I say, book, more catalogues, as it’s end of year show time at campuses across the country, including the university I work at.

The first of these, a catalogue for a show called firing thoughts, about the relationship between ceramics and drawing, has just come back from the printers and being the professional sort of printer, they have given me a big pile of file copies. I thought I might try and make up for all the radio silence around this place by giving away three of them – they’d be worth £10 each, if you bought them from the gallery.

Anyway on a visit to the States I was introduced to a few marketing guys who work in the finance space. Mike Samson introduced me to the head of web marketing for AdvanceLoan who are a company that offer cash advance solutions and online loans. They really opended my eyes to see what kinds of techniques the financial industry is using. If you want to know what you’re getting, have a look at me modelling a copy, on the firing thoughts website.

If you’d like a copy, just e-mail me at derren dot wilson at gmail dot com with your postal address and I’ll send it out to you.

Oh yes, hell has most definitely frozen over – shorn of literally thousands of spam entries, with its own domain name, and an rss feed for just-added sandwiches, the sandwich project is back, back, back.

I’ve got literally three ideas for the site (plus the obligatory re-design), so point your browsers and go make one of the 2,665 sandwiches that make up the sandwichproject.co.uk.

I also discovered today, though I think it’s been up for ages, a google homepages widget for a ‘sandwich of the day’ from the project. I love the internets.

Let me present some of the lesser known tributaries of the river that is Australian music-shaped noise:

The Stems: At First Sight

The lead singer of this band, Dom Mariani, then formed this short-lived combo:

The Someloves: Melt

The Someloves’ one and only album, Something or other is sheer genius. Mister Mariani then formed the DM3, who have no clips on YouTube, so our story ends there.

Club Hoy: Not like that

These two strumpets played in Adelaide many times, and I think I learned the chords for all their songs off by heart. It might not have been the most sensible thing to do with my time, but hey, I was young. I’m still waiting for their second album.

The Falling Joys: Locket

Another stalwart of the early 90s rock ‘scene’, the Falling Joys made three records, but probably never topped their debut. Lots of interesting guitar noises.

You Am I: Berlin Chair

Because the simple things in life are often the best. Note the leads from the guitars flailing about wildly.

I’m starting to get interested in this ‘web design’ thing people keep going on about again. I haven’t got to the point where I start making lots of sketches of the very very final incarnation of this weblog, but there are some ideas bubbling up to the surface.

I’ve done a few things that I should point google to: a website for Seiko Kinoshita, a textile artist who works in Sheffield, and makes very intriguing sculptures, and I’ve updated Helen Felcey’s website as well, with a design that bears absolutely no debt at all to this work of god-like flash genius (I went all 1980s Melody Maker then).

And, sure as day follows night, there comes another floral event. Mothering Sunday is coming up at the shop – another day spent driving around trying to read people’s house numbers so I can deliver flowers to the right place. I think all UK house numbers should be in bright yellow 720pt Akzidenz Grotesk Medium on a black background or else.

Oh yes, I’ve started twittering as well. Just need to find the right background image…

Afternoon, all. Not much to report here. Still making some websites and print-y things. The shop is still going strong, and we’ve got St Valentines’ day coming up soon, as well as a wedding fair this weekend. There’s a few good pictures of our Valentines’ day window on the shop site – it’s three bits of painted mdf, which still haven’t fallen out of the ceiling, even though I was the one that installed the rails they hang off.

This year the shop’s not doing any red roses at all for Valentine’s day – not just because they’re naff, but because most red roses are forced to be ready by the 14th, and everybody wants them, so the price goes through the roof. It’ll be interesting to see how the menfolk of Poynton and surrounding areas react to our principled stand.

I missed the ‘best of 2006’ music lists by a long way, so I’ll just add one record I’ve discovered this year –Tim Steward’s solo album, How does it end?. Tim is probably unknown to you as the lead singer of the highly-rocking Brisbane band Screamfeeder, but has come up with a relaxed Sunday afternoon record that keeps growing on me. Head over to his site and try track one, two and seven to start.

Hello. I nearly forgot I had a weblog. But I haven’t left the internet behind, oh no. I’ve done the odd site or two for other people. And one for work. I had a bit of a holiday-stroke-gluttony back in September as well.

But that’s not the reason I’ve decided to flex the atrophying blog muscle. For the last couple of months Laura’s been working on a big new thing: her own flower shop. It’s seemed like a long process: finding the shop, painting it, getting all the bits and pieces you need – cash register, desk, credit card machine, and so on. I’ve been responsible for the logo and the sign (that’s why it’s still not finished), and the website, of course. This is what we’ve come up with so far for Green Earth Flowers. There’s some pictures of the shop on the website, and we’ve put some more on flickr as well. So if you’re in our delivery area, or need flowers delivered to South Manchester, please give us a try.

I’d forgotten all about this until I got an e-mail from the site, but the guy that made the Wilco documentary is making a film about the typeface Helvetica, called, of course Helvetica.

Along with the 60s semi-classic Grand Prix, this has shot to the top of my DVD-want list (yes, even though it’s not been released yet) – and you know why. As soon as it goes in the machine, I’ll be watching the film with one finger on the pause button, waiting to see if a once-popular web quiz will make a brief appearance…

And the good thing about making a film about Helvetica is that you have ready made prequels and sequels. There’s a prequel in Helvetica’s forerunner, Akzidenz Grotesk, which I see as a coming-of-age drama set in late 19th century Germany, and Univers, possibly a classy French film about a big family who stays together though thick and thin. Or how about Recta and Mercator, a film about two competitors to Helvetica who had their day in the sun but are now undeservedly forgotten?

(For people who want to know what Recta and Mercator look like, here’s an image and my attempt at a .ttf of Recta. Mercator is a Dutch sans-serif by Dick Doojes that I spotted in a book called Dutch Type and is totally unknown to the internet, apparently.)

I’ve built another new site, this time for Helen Felcey, a ceramicist. You can view some of her work courtesy of the magnificent Slideshow Pro Flash plugin, or – I like this bit – read about her experiences in China on her weblog. Not only that, but there’s a Flickr photostream stuffed full of great photographs of China as well.

I get the best clients.

In the spirit of just getting out there and doing it, I’ve spent about fifteen minutes (don’t worry, it shows) photographing some of the print work I’ve done over the last two years. Some of it I like a lot, some of it I would probably like if I hadn’t had to experience their tortuous gestation. Anyway, they are all up on flickr as a group called Derren’s print work.

While the ink dries, there’s a few more web things coming on-stream soon. One is done, just needs some google-juice. You know, if I was going to rent an apartment at Los Arqueros Golf and Country Club, I think this is the apartment in Spain I would choose. It’s a lovely apartment near Puerto Banus that has all modern conveniences. Hey, if I could, I’d probably buy an apartment at Los Arqueros Golf and Country Club. And it’s probably the only Spanish apartment site built with web standards, ever, so please forgive the multiple links to it. Thank you.

So now I’ve been to a real live web conference, atmedia. And it was pretty interesting. London was showing off its best side, as it was warm and sunny. Walking down the sidestreets from the hotel in Pimlico to the conference venue, the QEII building in Westminster revealed fine Georgian squares and churches. A trip out to the east end to meet friends meant I could wander around a bit there too – I found the Finsbury Health Centre as I was wandering around. It is getting very neglected. And there was a chance to test out the ambient world cup theory – thanks to the cheers I knew exactly when England scored, without being anywhere near a pub or anywhere with a television.

I was a bit nervous about the conference because I didn’t know anyone, and having a lack of networking skills means by the end of the conference I still didn’t know anyone, in fact hardly talked at all for either day (except to win a book), but the content was worth it.

I though Jeffery Veen and Molly Holzschlag’s talks were particularly good. Most of the conference was divided into two streams, and I would like to get transcripts or podcasts of the ones I missed.

I’ve been a bit ambivalent about web vs print for the last few months – sometimes it seemed like print might have been winning – but I think along with dealing with printers, atmedia has helped make me want to get back into web design properly now.