The Universe

Here are the digital files for the piece me and Zac did for The Edge of Print exhibition on Thursday. It's a double sided picture with the universe on one side and then the code that makes up the image on the other. The idea was to try and expose the part of print in our modern age that you never really see (the .jpg code) and put it into print) We're heading into hackney to hang tomorrow so will hopefully have some photos of the prints, which are HUGE tomorrow, so you can see it in all it's glory.

The Edge of Print

In our digitally driven age, is print with its varying forms relevant to the progression of contemporary design? Kingston design students respond to what print means to them and the evolving industry, which has traditionally seen print as an integral part of its output.

The little blurb above explains the exhibition I'll be taking part in on Thursday better than I ever could. All I have to say really is you should come down and see all the amazing work! It's destined to be a great evening. I'll post some photos of the piece I have in the show when it's all done, which hopefully should be very soon.

A little update to the ole' website

I've been kind of sick of my website for a while and I thought it was about time I got that shit updated. At the moment all I've done is added a new opening page and a couple of new projects. Hopefully new stuff will be added over the next couple as I'll be finishing off some projects that can get added too, so watch this space!

It Snowed

I've had this app called Gawker, which instantly creates time lapse videos for you using the mac's webcam sitting on my computer begging to be used for the last couple of months. So what better way to use it than make a cliche video of the snow falling? I started it off at about 8pm and let it run till 11am the next morning. Nothing else to it really.

Nothing Happening Here

This is a very quick little experiment I did today that is a very first step in me trying to visualize and understand the scale of nothingness that is present on the internet. It is a wall of videos which I found on youtube, all of which had under 500 views and don't really serve any purpose. They're videos of things like flowers blowing in the wind, a train passing in the snow, a family having dinner, a kid playing baseball lots of tiny little moments that would go unnoticed on the hubub of the internet. I wanted to see what would happen if all of these moments happened at once and it's kind of overwhelming. They kind of become something. I'm still not really 100% sure what I'm trying to say with it, or how i really want people to interact with it. But yeah as a starting point it's kind of exciting.

Click here to view. (it will probably take quite a while to load up all the videos, so maybe leave it a couple of minutes)

Some Apps

With dissertation out of the way I can finally update this bloody blog and I've been wanting to do a quick post about some lovely iPad apps I've come across over the past month of having an iPad. I knew going into owning an iPad that the main thing I would be using it was mainly for reading and it is amazing how many publications and reading platforms get it so wrong. So yeah here's a few of the apps I've found myself really enjoying and using a lot.

Readmill is essentially just another ebook reader, like apple's iBooks and amazons kindle app except it's kind of completely different. It works in the same way last.fm does in that it tracks your reading time and where you are in the book and creates a profile for you with all this data. Being a sucker for data I love that, but the thing that really won me over is the ability to highlight sections of the book and share them on your Readmill account. Now I know no one is going to give a shit about what sections of Slaughterhouse 5 I really loved, but as a tool to help me remember great quotes and such, it's proved really useful. It also helps that the app is beautiful with a gorgeous UI which unlike most of the ebook readers out there doesn't make a tacky looking fake bookshelf for you with fake books on. Instead it scraps that for a really minimal Saul Bass-esque approach with some beautiful typography.

Letter to Jane is in my mind the perfect example of how a publication can work so elegantly on an iPad. Each issue is it's own self contained app with it's own editorial style and issue three, titled Moral Tates pictured above is just perfect. It works so seamlessly and looks absolutely beautiful.

The McSweeney's app was always one of my favourite apps back in the day when I still had an iPhone and on the iPad it's even better. Having Internet Tendency in my hands again to access at any time is something I definitely missed and the Small Chair subscription is really enhanced with the bigger screen, with each separately designed little supplement really popping. 

Within the McSweeney's app was one of the things I was most excited about on first getting my hands on an iPad. Chris Ware's first ever exclusively digital comic, Touch Sensitive. It's a very short piece that I'm still not 100% sure about, yes the story is beautiful and affecting as expected and it looks absolutely stunning. but the way it works just doesn't seem to match up with the page, It's been simplified to much and there's no opportunity to get lost, which is one of the things I love most about Ware's work.

Well enough nerding out. I seem to still be in  "I must analyze everything and write a shit load" mode from doing dissertation.

Done at last!

This picture in no way conveys the joy I am feeling right now having just this second finished binding my dissertation. Time to collapse now.