Like these.

5:23 pm  •  25 April 2012

It seems that the most useful online tools are the ones you use seamlessly and effortlessly, and that integrate into your daily flow. And then actually seem useful in reflection. Over the years, in my case, this has been the case for Last.fm, Twitter and now Instagram.

In light of it’s growing popularity, I thought it would be worth mentioning my usage of it, that has started again since I invested in an iPhone 4S a few weeks back. I’m going to post all the photos I’ve taken in the past week, starting from today. The interesting ones at least.

Are lots of photos of what you’re doing interesting? I dunno. To be honest these photos are quite boring, in a particularly interesting week too as it happens! I’ll try harder this time. You can follow me on Instagram on your phone, but not on the web! My username is matt.

5:05 am  •  24 April 2012

In our first class of the new term, we made a list of 100 (but 33 here. This is hard and I’m still adding) things we personally want to do, on creative terms, in the next 60 days.

1. Learn
2. Teach
3. Document
4. Reflect
5. Improve
6. Work
7. Play
8. Experience
9. Write
10. Draw
11. Capture
12. Create
13. Paint
14. Be inspired
15. Inspire
16. Listen
17. Make
18. Stretch myself
19. Try new things
20. Meet people
21. Make something useful
22. Make something pointless
23. Get organised
24. Internship/placement
25. Learn to screenprint
26. Relax
27. Imagine
28. Love
29. Share
30. Read
31. Explore
32. Make music
33. Attend exhibitions
34. Start a zine

5:00 pm  •  20 April 2012

After an excessive Easter break, we’re back in the studios (and lots of other places) for the 3rd term of my first year.

The GDA project has just been all submitted (well, unfortunately most of it in my case - but more on that later) and we’re getting underway on the new brief, our major project for the first year.

Term 3 starts off in the form of workshops, with the intention of producing outcomes from these. But again, more on that later!

It’s nice to be back. After a month off, I really started to miss the daily commute (not joking), the college and most of all, the people!

12:00 am  •  17 April 2012

For the past few weeks we’ve been working on the 3rd phase of our Graphic Design Applications project, in the form of a Work Based Learning project with an industry partner of our choice, LBi London.

Inside and outside of weekly sessions at LBi’s offices on Brick Lane, near to where I live in East London, we already have and will be further developing and proposing ideas for a mobile app centered on the London 2012 Olympics, happening later this year.

On the 16th March we will present our final concept… watch this space. Read more on LBi’s blog (where I even managed to sneak into a photo!)

7:19 am  •  11 March 2012

These London cycling maps by Simon Parker are both simple and suitable. There’s one for both central and greater London and also a petition to have something like this used as London’s one and only cycling map, “the cycling equivalent of the London Underground Map”.

8:46 pm  •  28 January 2012

For the first week back at LCC, and as part of our new Graphic Design Applications (or GDA) project, we got into groups and were set a (actually a lot less than) 1 week project to research and answer a set question about an area graphic design practice. Our question was “Who is doing really interesting/useful graphic design at the moment?”.

The brief was set on Tuesday morning our findings presented Friday morning. I found this to be a great exercise to get to know more people on the course (as the first term was spend very much around the same people) and get back into thinking-and-doing-mode after the xmas holiday.

Our response to this question was to research into various areas of graphic design practice, including art direction, branding, interactive design and service design. We chose to each talk about 2 pieces of work which we saw as either interesting or useful, including quotes from the artists involved and other useful information.

As well as a presentation (and a Q&A), mini-exhibitions of each group’s work were also held on the same morning. Some of the pieces of work talked about were presented physically on a the surface of a table in the studio, along with useful information about the work and describing each particular area of practice. Everything was formatively assessed by our tutor Jo and feedback given.

I think that given more time than a week, it would have been good to actually go and speak to industry professionals, to find out more about why they’re actually doing what they do and to get more direct information, quotes and hands on experience. All in all, this week was a good introduction to the new term’s work and will help a lot with the next part of the project, ‘mapping’.

7:55 pm  •  16 January 2012

The timeline set for this term’s project entitled Graphic Design Fundamentals including a 1 week intensive project, the ‘mapping’ project and finally an industry brief, the process of all of which will be documented.

8:42 pm  •  15 January 2012

Top artists 2011:

Top albums 2011:

Top tracks 2011:

11:17 pm  •  1 January 2012

I recently visited the London Transport Museum’s ‘Sense and the City’ exhibition in Covent Garden. This was a good opportunity to get an insight into themes both directly connected with transport, but also covered a broad range of matters to do with both work and leisure, focusing on our love/hate relationship with the objects we use every day, now and in the past as well as advancements in these things, including buildings and, of course, transport. Although, instead to the exhibition itself, I’m actually going to talk about the curation of the exhibition.

I’d visited the London Transport Museum on one occasion previously, but didn’t quite know what to expect. Partially to my surprise, the event took place in the same area I last visited for their ‘The Art of the Poster’ exhibition whilst studying for my BTEC National Diploma in 2008. This was quite nice as I was immediately familiar with the space and could navigate between the different floors and rooms and barely had to think about what I was doing and could simply focus on the work, whilst taking notes and photos.

The exhibition fell into 2 categories for me. The quite mundane (but of interest) objects, that whilst relevant to the theme, some of which we’re so used to seeing in every day life already (such as an iPhone) that I couldn’t help but question the placement of such things. The other, extremely interesting images and moving images of prototypes of buildings, objects and data visulisations that could have been, or could be in the near future. This was the part had me glad to visit upon leaving, and I have to say I would definitely consider returning soon (with my £10 1 year pass in hand) to study these in more detail. Some of it was pretty enlightening.

This for me is what a good exhibition is all about, getting to see something that you otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to - or at least taking something quite ordinary (like data) and turning it into something useful and interesting.

On the basic level of the presentation of this exhibition, everything came together fairly well. This was made possible with consistent lighting in each room, typography and colour on the various walls, signs and displays. I’m intrigued as to why quite a cold turquoise colour was chosen as the primary feature of their presentation here. It felt like a lot of the items and achievements on show deserved a warmer, more celebratory and optimistic tone. Maybe some sort of multi-coloured display of various areas would have been welcome, which sounds picky but it felt a bit like the whole exhibition was drowning in the chosen colour-scheme.

As you may have expected from the London Transport Museum, all of the signage and display headings were set in New Johnston, which has of course been a familiar face (excuse the pun) in all London Transport related graphic design since before most of the network as we know it today was even conceived. This certainly helps to give the exhibition a feeling of authenticity, just in case any visitors were in doubt. Although perhaps this would automatically come with a ‘propaganda’ (using that term very lightly) like feeling for some - TfL is a government body, after all - and one that is often under a lot of criticism at the moment - running an exhibition which could have very well had a large input from the Mayor of London himself. It’s very possible that a lot of decisions on what to actually show would have been made somewhere higher up, and perhaps concepts and prototypes left out of the exhibition entirely for this reason. I just thing that’s a relevant point to bring up, whilst discussing out of all things: the curatorial aspect of such an event.

The exhibition is housed in 3 rooms. You’re first directed upstairs to a small area which can only be described as ‘the introduction’, where you find the title of the exhibition as a large illuminated sign. Explained also here is the sub-title - “Smart, connected and on the move” - as well as a short piece of text describing the inspiration for this exhibition, summing up all that is to be found in a few moment’s time. Beyond this are 3 rooms which make up the exhbition; 2 on the same level where it starts and a further room at the bottom of a spiral staircase.

The first room houses display cabinets which split into categories visually and textually demonstrating the different ways in which we have experienced communication, shopping, news, entertainment, socalising and computing in the past - to name just a few. The dates of which these objects originate varied greatly, from newspapers that were 300 years old (The Illustrated London News, from 1878) up to far more contemporary items such as a Game Boy from a mere 15 years ago. You really get a decent snapshot of how all of these different areas have evolved over the years, and how valuable and interesting it can be to collect such things together and present in this way.

Whilst curating objects to show, I think they were trying their best to appeal to everyone, even showing a Harvard t-shirt in one cabinet, with the principal of showing Facebook - as one phase of our technological evolution - at just 7 years old, right next to radios and telephones dating back 75 years and more. Taking pride of place in the center of this room were a RYNO scooter and next to it, a Sinclair C5 - “please do not sit on the exhibit”. Among the ordinary were some surprises, for example, I never knew that London has a pneumatic tube based document carrying system until I saw a small part of it here.

One thing that did catch my attention was the lack of relationship between each object and it’s relevant caption card which described it. If I didn’t have a pre-conceived idea of the appearance of a particular object, I found myself having to use a process of elimination to work out which item was which. Something that is harder than it sounds, with objects such as the pneumatic tube, where I had no idea in which form, or scale this would be shown.

In the second room was an interactive table that LTM describes as the “centre piece” of the exhibition. Oddly enough, this was the one part that didn’t particularly catch my eye and maybe even felt like a bit of an after-thought. It’s not so much that the content here wasn’t interesting, in fact it was the very placement of the table, or more so what was on it that caused me to pay very little attention to this particular feature. Perhaps it suffered amongst the more eye catching displays which surrounded it, or perhaps there is something about interactive touch screens that no longer catches my imagination and always feels quite gimmicky. There’s no doubt I’ll be heading back soon for a more detailed look at the whole exhibition, and this table in particular.

Also in this room were a wall of ideas and image/video prototypes courtesy of students from the Royal College of Art. I thought directly collaborating with an postgraduate course in this way was a great idea. Presumably students would have been set a brief by the museum itself. The ideas here ranged from the expected (buses with large scale moving adverts on the side, although still wonderfully executed) to the more creatively gripping, such as Alice Moloney’s “Discover your borough” an arty and more thought provoking, public involving wayfinding system for pedestrians. I thought this exhibition was effective in that it combined a lot of ‘to the point’ concepts alongside more radical ideas and prototypes - a lot of which really get any creative person thinking, I’m sure. That is certainly how I came away from this.

Staying in the second room, on the opposite wall could be found a wall of words and definitions, each one depicting a certain term that has emerged in this internet and mobile boom of recent years. I found this quite interesting from a curatorial perspective as this display would have a very split effect on different visitors. Many of which will at least be familiar with the majority of these terms. Some I guess would (at no fault of their own) have no idea whatsoever. How many would really know what the role of an API is? How many even care? Nonetheless, the wall certainly does a fine job in giving you a rundown of such terms.

Talking about the use of APIs, if you head downstairs you will find what I personally found to be the most interesting part of the entire event. A multitude of displays showing visualisations of various data collected across London, the UK and the rest of the world. One of these shows the activity of buses, over a 24 hour period on a typical day, overlaid onto a map of the UK. Another showed every Oyster smartcard interaction in (and on the edge of) that happened London in a day. These were shown as briefly flashing dots - red for each tap-in and green for each tap-out. I found this fascinating as it gives you a never before seen (although logical) idea of how people move into, across and out of London during the average work day. A lot of patterns emerge here, such as the amount of morning commutes that begin in outer London (and it’s surrounding counties) and finish in ‘zone 1’. I thought the way these displays were brought together was excellent and was one part that most definitely made me feel this was a great exhibition to visit.

To summarise, there were highs and lows to the curation of this exhibition for myself. I thought that the pieces on show were for the most part well considered and reflected the museum’s description of Smart, connected and on the move. I didn’t feel as if the organisation was all that it could have been, and would have preferred if there was more of an overall hierarchy as to how the various parts of the exhibition were ordered and displayed. It sounds picky, but being a museum officially related to London Transport, you have certain pre-conceptions of what to expect in terms of layout and order, and I didn’t quite think these expectations were met. Needless to say, this is just a matter of taste and personal opinion. But it is well known that anything related to London Transport has traditionally come with a certainly level and hierarchy - something that was not followed through in this exhibition. Preferences aside, I thought the all-over selection and curation of everything on display was very good and successfully kept up the LTM’s reputation of having something for everyone to enjoy.

If you’d like to visit, Sense and the City is open until the 18th March 2012 at London Transport Museum in Covent Garden.

10:13 am  •  24 November 2011