Gingenie - CDs

Today I received a rather special package in the post - The physical copies of Gingenie's EP which I designed the cover for a few weeks ago.

Really happy with the final outcome - you can grab a copy by emailing the address that can be found on

http://gingenie.bandcamp.com/album/p-a-e-p (where you can also download)

or if you live in Brighton go to Resident or Rarekind Recrods where you can pick up a copy!

Muybridge and Nelson

These past few weeks I've been to see various exhibitions around London with help from the fact our university is right next to the Tate Britain.

In relation to our animation project at the start of term I went to see the Muybridge exhibition which was really interesting in terms of looking at the first photogrpahy animation.

This then led me to find Mike Nelson's exhibition called Coral Reef which was a maze of interconnecting rooms with strange, fascinating and unsettling objects inside. It felt rather like a dream going through it, recognising certain aspects of things but still now knowing where you are. The most unsettling part about it for me was two rooms which were almost identical apart from a few subtle details which in a maze atmosphere can be every disconcerting.

It also felt uncomfortable when you come through to a much larger room with painting and decorating materials; it feels like you have stumbled across the backstage of the Tate but you know that can't be possible. Even the exit to the Exhibition is strange - a plain white door that makes you wonder if you've even just been there. Overall it's definitely worth a see.

Green Package returned!

So last week we were asked to design an A1 black and white poster that summed up everything we had been doing in the mail art project so far.

Two days before the hand in my mystery object package turned back up so I went and got the photos developed. It was exciting wondering what was going to come back even if we have found ourselves with far better projects within the mail art brief.

It was also really nice to see the layers of stamps on the one envelope and all the different franking stamps.

Some of the photos turned out far better than others. Some were dark and blurry, so I've just included a few of the better ones... it seems a lot of people have the similar ideas about what the object might be!

The last picture is our poster design. I feel our design was ok however after the crit I realised just how cluttered the poster was. We really didn't need all the information that we included and allocated far too much space to the mystery object project when we have been far happier and excited about the fan mail and the stop watch project. When I get some spare time I'd really like to redesign the poster and really simplify it down.

It was also difficult to design a poster as a group of four since only one person could work on the computer at a time and yet we wanted to include so much so it took a long time to complete.

How to turn your house into a five star hotel.

So this is the final outcome for the instructional graphics brief for living in an age of austerity.

It still needs a couple of tweaks layout and text wise but overall im really pleased with the overall theme and how my illustrator skills have improved after starting off having never used illustrator before. It has definitely opened up this programme to me, I will definitely consider using it again for other projects.

Click on the image to see a larger version of it.

Dear Jamie Oliver and James Bond

As another part of our mail art project we thought it would be really interesting write to people who have the same names celebrities. When writing to them we would send a photograph of the famous individual and ask them to sign it and return it; ultimately creating a colelction of almost famous people.

To start off, I wrote to a J.Oliver and a J.Bond - we found out their adressess using an online phonebook.

It's quite funny as well that we don't actually know what their first name is...I could be writing to a woman.

The letter to Jamie Oliver is from the point of view of a super fan someone who spends all their time trying to meet Jamie Oliver. I wrote this one on a computer but for the second one i thought it might be interesting to write it form the point of view of a child.

When i wrote the letter to J. Bond i pretended to be Jack an 8 year old who had just seen all of the James Bond films.

I really hope we start getting replies from these letters and I will be sending out more soon as I really like the concept. Other people have written to dead and fictitious people and I think it might be interesting to perhaps leave out the photograph in some to see whether the individual is more inclined to sign an autograph.

How Fast is the Postal Service?

In our group, Donald came up with the grand idea of sending a stop watch in the post. We thought about the equation Speed = Distance / Time. So if we know the distance we are sending the watch and how long it took to get there, we can work out just how fast or slow the postal service actually is.

Yesterday I made a box for the stopwatch but after finding out it was too high to fit through a letterbox I remade it today and sent it off with some quick instructions - making sure i started the stopwatch before I sent it!

How to...

Do this Brief: a new brief where we have to design a how to guide for living in an age of austerity using illustrator.

Inspiration given in the briefing presentation included: a series of protect and survive videos made incase of a nuclear attack, the graphic outlines outlines of michael craig martin and even the messages sent into space on the pioneer spaceship.



We were grouped into our mail art groups and given sub topics. Ours was social. We then created mindmaps around this theme.







After thinking some more I think I will try and create a how to guide either about complaining effectively or how to rent out your bedroom or run it as a hotel.

Guess The Mystery Object - Through the Post

On Wednesday our mail art group sent off some packages so that we could play a game in the post.

The aim is to guess a mystery object using a disposable camera.

We got a close friend to decide on the mystery object and got them to describe the object in 5 words.

We then sent round 4 disposable cameras in small groups so they wouldn't take long to get back.

Each group had a different amount of words to use to guess what the object is. We included ourselves in the game.

We realised after our crit just how controlled and confusing this game is so for the next couple of week we are gonna focus on a couple of small funner ideas.

Including: sendin a stopwatch in the post. We figure if we know the old equation speed = distance / time then we can find out the speed of the royal mail service by sending a stop watch to a specific distance.

We will also be writing to people who have the same names as celebrities asking for their autograph and picture. I'm looking forward to these and any more we come up with.

Here are some pictures of the packages we sent and a diagram showing how the game will work... confusing stuff.

Around the world in as few days as possible.

Today we sent off postcards that we were given in our welcome postcard pack at the start of the year. In our mail art groups we had to get 4 addresses from around the world, put them all onto one postcard and hope that it would get passed on and eventually returned to us! We are hoping ours will go to South Africa, China, Canada and Columbia... oh and the first postcard back wins.





Photos thanks to miriam-abrahams.blogspot.com/