Something I am very interested in getting into is organising creative events in Belfast in Northern Ireland, as I feel that there are no events that cater to that field. Web designers have managed to capivate their audience with web design conferneces bringing over huge names, along with monthly nights for local web enthuisasts to get togehter and inspire one another. Nothing like this is on offer for the greater creative field; illustrators, motion designers, typographers, textile artists etc. I want to bridge this gap and create inspirational events in which no one is forgotten, I want to create inspirational environments in which the idea of collaboration is open. I want to aid in putting Belfast on the map as a major hub for the creative industry globally as we have so much talent in this tiny island.

I have put my first step on the latter when alongside Belfast Design agency Atto, and fellow Graphic Design Student Winnie Shek, we undertook our first Pecha Kucha in Belfast. Pecha Kucha is an event that happens globally, one company, person or group per city around the world is allowed to hold a Pecha Kucha License. It took months to pull of, but on the 23rd of June 2010, we managed to pack the Black Box with an estimated 250 people, which is a HUGE outcome for such an event and it was a phenomenal success, which proved how much the industry is calling out for such an event.

Our speakers where:

• Andy McMillan, Good on Paper
• Barry Falls, Illustrator
• Chris and Nik, Web Standardistas
• Claire Mullan, Tee and Toast
• Joel Simon, Flickerpix
• Lyndsey McDougall, Artist
• Paul May, Front
• Robert Durston, Photographer
• Rose Kane, Doodle Bread
• Sarah Landstreet, Marshmallow Grove

We asked 10 speakers from all facets of the creative industry, and each took to the stage to produce a presentation of 20 slides, a 20 second limit was put to each slide. It is the infamous 20×20 concept that Pecha Kucha is reknowned for globally. Myself and Winnie Shek created the overall branding for the night along with all the promotional posters. The two of us adore illustration and doodling and so we took this inpiration and created  a poster that capitvated visually, every facet of the industry.

We are now planning our next PKN, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our speakers who helped to make this such a successful night.

Check out the Pecha Kucha Belfast site for updates and info on the next night. If you are interested in taking part do not hesitate on dropping an email to me.  We would love to take it global with the creatives attending and speaking!

Our Official Website.

Unfortunately on my trip to Dublin I failed to find The Museum of Modern Art, I ended up on the wrong side of Dublin on the Luis. I really wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art as they are currently holding an exhibition called ‘Picturing New York’, which has been organised by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. It is running until the 7th of February and it has photographs by 40 world famous photographers including Berenice Abbott, Garry Winogrand, Lisette Model, Alfred Stieglitz, Cindy Sherman and a photographer I dearly respect Diane Arbus. The exhibition contains 145 photographs all depicting and celebrating New York life, from the 1800′s to the present day. It sounds like an exciting exhibition and I plan to return to Dublin and successfully find the museum before the exhibition wraps up. If anyone is interested in attending this amazing exhibition here are the details:

I was stunned by the immense catalogue of World Famous artists, each museum I shrieked at the art I had stared at for years in books, was now right in front of me. I saw a little bit of Monet, Manet, Renior, Goya, Degas (paintings and sculptures), Gris, Piccasso, and to my immense shock and excitement I even saw Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking of Christ’ which is absolutely breath taking. I have been to the Louvre, the D’Orsay, the Metropolitan NYC, but Dublin is definitely on power with the greats.

Although all this art was exciting the best part of the weekend was going to the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. It is currently holding the ‘Francis Bacon- A Terrible Beauty’ exhibition. Out of all the exhibitions I have ever attended this is definitely the best. It is room after room, floor after floor of information, quotes and works of the extremely talented Dublin born Painter Francis Bacon. Even the Graphic Design and wayfinding of the exhibition were breath taking. Unfortunately, you were not allowed to take photographs in any of the galleries, even phones were prohibited, so I could not photograph any of the exhibitions.

The exhibition started with a video presentation of Francis Bacon back in the 90′s in his studio in London, in which he talks about his work ethos and background. He explained how he had never went to art school as he did not want to be told how to draw or paint, he did not want to be forced to mimic the work of any other painter. He chose to teach himself and learn through trail and error, so that he found and carved his own style influenced only by himself, and I think this attitude is what made him a great. The video is facinating, it shows how he liked to work in chaos, his studio was incredibly messy and that is how he liked it, he used the doors and walls of his studio as palettes to mix colours. He also exclaimed how he never sketched before paintings as he felt that once he started the painting he would then only be ‘illustrating a drawing’, which is a beautiful way of thinking.

The video also let you delve deeper into Bacon’s thinking and also showed how unique he was. He exclaimed he always used the wrong side of the canvas, he would turn his canvas around and paint on the unprimed side as it took the paint better and if he made a mistake he would be unable to fix it, he would just go with his brush strokes. He exclaimed how he wanted each brush stroke on the canvas to be like the first, to stand out, and he likened this to painting a wall, how important the first stroke is to the finished product. He exclaimed too that if his brush strokes took him in the wrong direction instead of carrying on and trying to fix the error he would destroy the painting. In one room of the exhibition the walls are lined with paintings that Bacon destroyed, which is probably the most fascinating part of the exhibition. Large canvas line the wall, with large chunks cut out of them, and slits down them created my frantic knife slashes. You really feel like you get into his way of thinking. It is also nice to see the vulnerable side of the artist, in galleries you never see the artists faults or failures just their great pieces of work, you take it for granted you don’t see the numerous pieces that had to fail to get to that point and I think that is why this exhibition is so successful it shows the human side to Bacon, it grounds him, makes him more approachable and easier to embrace, you can relate to him.

The exhibition, is bursting with photographs Bacon used, pages he ripped from books to use as reference (later in his career he preferred to paint from photos than live models), his sketchbooks, notes, paintings, doodles. Everything the gallery could salvage from his studio that showed a personal insight into the life of this artist. The most breath taking part of this exhibition is in the second room. They took his studio from London and recreated it in a huge glass box; walls, ceiling, floors and contents, all arranged to how it was when Bacon worked in it, I could have stared at it all day, it was amazing. Along with his actual studio are photographs of the ajoining two rooms, which housed his kitchen and bathroom which were in one room, and his bedroom and living room which were one room. It was a bizarre living arrangement, but what was odd, was the polar opposite of these two rooms compared to his studio. The studio was a chaotic mess, but his living quarters were absolutely spotless, not a thing out of place, every item had its space, straight and tidy, this was a huge insight into his private life. I don’t want to ruin the exhibition so I will stop there. At the exhibition I bought the book cataloguing it and its contents, it is gorgeous book, beautifully designed from front to back and it is a must to buy in the gift shop and is a steal at only 18 euros! It is a huge book and it is bursting with facts, quotes, paintings (even those he destroyed), his notes, doodles and pages from his sketchbooks!

This is an exhibition not to be missed I could talk about it all day. It runs until the 7th of March, here are the directions and opening times from the flyer:

Last friday I attended the Drawing Unlimited Workshop in University, it was a workshop that started at 10am and continued until 1pm. It was organised by the Vis Com Illustration tutor Christine Blaney. It was open to 1st, 2nd and 3rd year Vis Com students along with some foundation students. Only two of us 2nd years showed up, but it was a great experience to get to interact with fellow students and get some advice and inspiration from other students. The workshop consisted of many illustrative exercises ranging from image to typography. Many of the exercises consisted of using black ink, a thick paint brush and using the opposite hand to which you write with to give a more quirky image, there were also time constraints of a couple of minutes for each too. Each of the class created one of the letters above using these methods. Below is the first exercise we were given.

We were each given a post-it note and with a thick paint brush and black ink, using our opposite hand to writing we had to draw a self portrait, the outcome was actually quite beautiful and very free, this exercise loosened us up for the following exercises.

Again we had to use a thick paint brush and black ink, using our opposite hand to writing and draw a self portrait. This time we also had to add text that explained our likes. I decided to go more abstract and drew half of my face and focused on the typography coming out of my head in the form of a speech bubble to give a connection between the type and image. It was incredibly difficult to do with a large paint brush and my left hand, but never the less interesting.

We then were given a bit longer and were asked to create a self portrait using any hand, using any materials and I came up with this collage of news print, ink, and crayon, again I stuck with a thick paintbrush as I loved the freedom of it, the 20 mins flew in I thought it was too long at the start, but I really needed more time. It was however a really nice outcome.

and finally we had to create a typographic piece that would present advice to students whom wish to apply for the Vis Com course. This was my typographic poster I created. My advice were the 3 R’s: Remember (all you see and are told), Risk (take risks with your work sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t), Read (with this course you can never read too many design books, you constantly have to feed yourself inspiration).

This was a collection of all the advice from the class! It was an extremely fun workshop and a welcomed break from the chaotic few weeks at university trying to get the publication project finalised.

The artist of the cupcake was a local guy called Alan Thompson.

I am so excited about this event. If you are out an about this friday the 25th September in Belfast, there is an event been held by Paperjam design studio, and it’s part of Belfasts Culture Night ’09. It is happening in the Cathedral Quarter, Belfast at 8.30pm.

Paperjam are going to project from their office in Waring Street a huge live draw and they will be using nearby buildings on Waring Street and Hill Street as their enormous canvas! It is summed up well on the Paperjam website: “The creative folks in Paperjam will be joined by friends from the creative community to present an ever-changing piece of ephemeral, site-specific fun/art.” It’s going to be a great night!

The wine was flowing and the air was buzzing with creativity and the fumes of permanent marker!  Yellow, black, grey and white were the chosen shades and colours for the nights events, and this meant that although everyones styles were different they all flowed as one.  Each illustrator took there own wooden slab of wall went to work creating amazing ideas.  We realised two at the end that were bare and decided to just go with our instinct and just draw what we felt.  Mine lacked the composition and preparation the others had, as I just drew a simple cupcake I did not have the time to draw a scene, I broke away from the colours used by the others and decided to experiment with the colours, but by the time i gathered my confidence most of the markers had began to run out so it was a hard task.

I loved the outcome, my type needed a lot more work, but I see it as a work in progress, I hope there will be more events like this in the future.  My friend Winnie Shek drew a beautiful scene of a mouse outside its mouse hole, it was beautiful and married well with the other designs.

Anyone is welcome to come down and watch the illustration creation.  I will post pictures after.

For more info visit: http://www.ulsterfestival.com/

end of year show map

I attended the End of Year Show at the University of Ulster on monday night.  I have never seen the university so busy there was barely elbowroom throughout which was such a nice sight.  It is great to see how much young talent is appreciated in Northern Ireland and that so many people will turn out to encourage, support and admire final year students in all art forms.  My first thrill of excitement was for the design of the map and information booklet, which were absolutely beautiful this year, it was contained a lot of white space with a beautiful colourful logo, a warm and inviting paper welcome to the show.  I collected so many business cards from the show some of which were absolutely beautiful and finished to such a high standard. 

I went straight to Vis Com to see the final year show, and the work was absolutely amazing, it made me so nervous, the standard was so high on everyone’s work, and it all looked extremely professional.  I could not fault it, the ideas the students had created were so original, so clean and fresh.  I was so impressed with the illustration students, the work they created was so unique, I will not be surprised to see them following in the footsteps of Oliver Jeffers and other past students working for agency’s around the world, its definitely not the last that we have heard from them.  The second year students this year not only had some of their work chosen to appear in a Steven Heller book but also received the opportunity to create there own book based on Modular fonts they each created.  Within the book each second year student had a double page spread to create. Their font adorned one page with a bit of info and on the facing page their font at work in some sort of poster or design.  It is an extremely interesting book called Les Enfonts.  The university really do give their students the best exposure possible, not only was the book on show but it and a CD with the fonts on it were sent out to local design offices, to show of the talent in the students and also to give them the opportunity to use any the fonts that took there fancy in any future projects.  The opportunities given to student on my course are not only exciting but also endless; everything is done to make us as successful as possible.

After Vis Com I went on a tour through out the other floors and I took some photographs of some of the pieces that really stood out for me.  The textile art was some of the most exciting art I saw all night.  The freedom the students have is endless and that is shown in the work that they created, not a single piece was in anyway similar and I found that extremely exciting.  Here are some of my favourite pieces, unfortunately I didn’t get names for all the piece, but some of these pieces I thought would work so well as book, or CD covers they are so beautiful, so I found it extremely inspirational.  I love to experiment with textile and photography to make raw design that just could not possibly be created on the computer.

beautiful dolls

I then went to painting and I actually got extremely excited about some of the work.  There was a great mixture of contemporary and traditional but out of all of the pieces one artist stood out for me. 

Dereck Ogilby was creating the type of art that our illustration tutor had been pushing us all semester to create, it was so free and unlike any of the other work.  I loved his colour use and his use of black instead of block colour.  The work was on sale for over a thousand pound each and so unfortunately my student loan only stretches so far, but he is definitely and artist to look out for in the near future.

Dereck Painting

 I then went to see Sculpture and some of the pieces were absolutely beautiful, some very traditional and beautiful others more playful and informal.  My favourite were a wall full of clay ginger bread men, they were so eye catching I absolutely loved them.  Then there were stranger installations like bales of hay and a heap of shreaded paper all of which made quite a beautiful visual impact, from geometric shapes to soft edges.

 I was very impressed with the photography too, I was unable to get photographs but all of the final year pieces were so different none of them following the same theme none of them in the same style and I thought that made them even more inviting.  I was also very impressed by some of the second year pieces that were on show, one of which stood out from all the rest, a black and white industrial piece by a photographer called Shaleen Temple.  She is definitely a photographer to look out for, her piece would not have looked out of place next to the final year students she is definitely in a league of her own.

All in all is was a very exciting night, it just confirmed the amount of talent that is present in Northern Ireland, hundreds of pieces were on show but not a single piece could be likened to another, every piece was completely different.

On thursday, I attended a talk by world-renowned typographer Bruno Maag at the University of Ulster.  It lasted a mere hour, but it was probably one of the most informative and interesting hours of my life.  Maag is a very talented speaker; he was extremely talented at captivating the audience and presenting his ideas and thoughts in the most interesting and humorous way possible.

His presentation dealt with the issue of noise in the visual word: type and design shouting to be noticed. Examples of this were billboards with large font trying to stand out from other large font billboards and the same with posters pasted onto walls all overlapping each other with large type vying for the most attention, but all these fail miserably and just create noise for the senses.  We are just overwhelmed with fonts, all large and bold, all at the same size screaming out at us, nothing jumps out.  He questioned why designers fear using white space and smaller font to stand out within lots of large font advertisements.  I thought that this was an obvious choice once I thought about it, go against the grain and the norm and that design will surely stand out.   I found this to be an extremely inspiring piece of wisdom.  He continued to show us some woeful hiccups in typography out there, from street signs, to restaurant signs and even to a underground sign that was erected with the wrong font and wrong symbol, these were all ‘sackable’ offences Bruno kept referring to.  He showed great annoyance towards the incorrect and absent use of punctuation, which I was very happy to listen to, as it is one of my pet hates too, that and the use of slang on advertising.  If we allow slang and miss out apostrophes, then grammar will slip.  It is a designer’s job to educate the world and not dumb it down, so I was extremely please to hear that Bruno had the same beliefs.

Bruno took us through some of his own work from his beautiful work for Urban Splash, which was quite playful and informal to his Toyota work.  His Toyota work was probably one of his most interesting he talked about.   He had created a sans and a serif font.  He hoped for the company to chose the serif font as through his research he realised that all but one car manufacture use sans serif fonts, the only one that didn’t is Mercedes a luxury car manufacture and so he thought that the use of a serif by Toyota would raise its overall package to the astir level of Mercedes.  Unfortunately Toyota did not listen and left the choice up to market research, in which the feedback was all for the sans serif font.  I thought that this was an extremely interesting story and just shows how unaware companies are to the power of type.  Bruno then brought us through his design process showing us initial sketches to the tidying up of the lines on computer.  He also showed us some failed attempts, which was when he was creating an Arabic font and owned up to lack of research as the reason for failure.  I thought his honesty was very admirable.

Before I new it an hour had past and Bruno finished his presentation, some of the audience though were not letting him go that easily and quite a few questions were thrown to him.  In this time we quickly learned how much he detested the font Helvetica, which he claimed to just be a very ugly font.  He also shared his detest for the Helvetica film, saying it was 45 minutes too long, and couldn’t understand why a film would be made about a single font.  He also shared his dislike for David Carson, which I totally agreed with.  I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation I was captured from start to end and I would go back to another of his talks in a heartbeat.  I had my eyes opened to so much inspiration in one hour.  I cannot wait to get stuck back into my projects.

check out the university website for more info: http://www.ulsterfestival.com/