Food For Thought

My latest research project based around the social and experiential side of food.

Tales To Change The World

The latest addition to my portfolio...a perspex book. My idea began primarily as a response to the great influx of digitised books. Being a great believer in the good old fashioned three dimensional book, i felt that this project should wave the flag for the physical book. 

With a brief that limited us to producing something predominantly typographic, i looked for ways to break those rules. I created images using perspex letters, and printed them on acetate and trapped them between my perspex pages. 

I wanted to re-excite the reader with an even more 3D book than ever. I hope it celebrates the text 'The Waitress' by Jack Zipes, and most importantly lets the reader use their own imagination, and create their own ideas from the imagery that Zipes describes. 

Excellent fun.

Holden Gallery Project: One

I am lucky enough to be one of three people chosen to help produce posters for exhibitions held at the gallery at Manchester Art School. This is our first one for illustrator Johnny Hannah. His work's pretty nice so pop down to the Holden Gallery next week for a gander.

Co-designed with Charlotte Wakefield & Chantelle King

And They're Off!

The first project of the year is just about done (minus a few tweaks). The brief set was 'BANG!', and we were pretty much given free reign on where we wanted to take it. I went down the route of investigating the home life of horse racing commentators (obviously..?) and produced this little spectators kit. It accompanies some audio i scripted which i may one day upload, should i work out how.

[a transcript of the audio]

The box that houses the items needs re-making, as everything's a bit of a snug fit at the mo (can't add up). But overall the general concept's there, i'm pretty happy with it.

Alter Is Born (Almost)

An exciting endeavor a friend and i have been working on for some time. The final touches are being made, and then it's ready to go to print.

Summer Salt

A Personal Preservation Project
We are constantly evolving, every second, minute, hour, day, week, and month of every year. Observing, consuming, working, doing, wanting, waiting, interacting, desiring, developing and changing – and all of these complex interrelationships and many more affect our views, habits and behaviour, every decision that we make influences what happens next in our lives and has impact on others and the wider world around us.
As societies have evolved they have always made attempts to preserve and store their daily experiences by using various visual languages, methods and techniques, from chalk on walls, paint on canvas, words in books, musical scores, recording static and moving images.
How can we classify, quantify and measure the changes of these complex evolutions?
This is going to be a personal investigation in which you will be observing yourself in macro detail over the next few months and then making sense of the information by visualising the data collected.
Part 1 OUTLINE CRITERIA 
What are you going to collect and how are you going to do it?
Design a way to record your daily activities over the summer months; this could be in the form of a questionnaire, visual dashboard, diary, visual journal, series of charts, apps etc.
How can you reduce your daily activities into quantifiable information?
Is it through a series of tick boxes, segments, shorthand, scientific models, tallies, graphs, pictograms, charts, tables, a series of photographs, film or some other method?
What criteria should you include?
The information gathered could be physical, mental, emotional, subconscious activity, economic, relationship interactions, changes in geography, environment, the weather, what you consume, distance travelled, time elapsed, sensory factors, multitasking, sleep patterns, brands which you come into contact with, websites visited, tweets made, the music you listen to, even concurrent activities happening outside of your immediate environment which have impact on your day.
Part 2 OBSERVE / COLLECT 
Go about your daily business, work, eat, sleep, go on holiday, let your hair down and have a well-deserved rest. But at the end of every day record your daily activities onto your beautifully designed measuring apparatus.
Part 3 ANALYSE / ORGANISE / EVALUATE
Now you have to do something with all of this information which you have gathered about yourself and analyse, arrange, order and visualize it all into some kind of holistic narrative, find patterns, make sense of yourself and the activities you have encountered. What insights have you discovered? Create graphs and charts, map your movements, and design pictograms/icons that can represent you and your experiences. Think metaphorically; even relate what you have done to a wider cultural context. Based on these findings try to predict what will happen next. Its what you do with the data at this point, which will be the really interesting part of this project and will show how ambitious you really are.
Part 4 INTERPRET / PRESENT / PUBLISH 
What would be the best way to present this information? The format is up to you, it could be in the form of a wall chart, an annual report, fold out map, info graphic poster, newspaper, editorial, documentary, interactive media etc. Whatever way you decide to interpret this data, we would like you also to produce an A3 poster, which will present your findings as a signpost/teaser campaign to your body of output.




Time to get recording...

Futureshock

Photos of 3 of the 4 book covers i produced for the 'Futureshock' series. The cover to 'A Clockwork Orange' was still printing when i took these photos (i was in a bit of a rush). I was looking into the way we have been conditioned to read books, and i wanted them to have a slightly clinical feel to echo the conditioning that goes on in the novels. 

Loved this project a bit much, sad to see it go. 

Project 2.4: Careless Design Campaign

Just a few images from our current project. They're part of a viral campaign to encourage designers to check their work before going to print, and raising awareness about how much paper is wasted through careless design. 

Doesn't the ink look lovely on this paper? If you look really closely you can see the really small bleed lines from the letters.

Project 2.2

Just a first rough draft of how my project might end up looking. Would love to take this into letterpress.

Consider this a sneak preview