On the packaging of cigarettes

I happened upon the Graphic Design outfit Build‘s blog this morning, where I discovered their post from earlier this month about de-branding cigarette packages. If you’re gonna read my post, it might be worth giving theirs a look first.

This is a government proposal I actually agree with, so I was a little disappointed to see the point in the proposal was a bit overlooked. I was going to suggest Build missed the point, but perhaps it was Icon magazine who missed it, as they set the brief; ‘could [cigarettes] still look good while warning smokers?’.

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FOOD; cooking and eating in and out of Austin

When one goes on holiday, they are prone to being asked what they got up to when they get back. It’s a fair enough question, but I like to go on holiday to relax, so doing nothing doesn’t make for interesting conversation. I realised, though, what we did do while away was a fair amount of cooking and eating- both in and out of home, and even in and out of Austin, and with that came some interesting visual stuff out of me.

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Free Stuff is Awesome

I should probably start this post off by explaining that I’m by no means under any obligation to make this post! This might actually be one of the first good things to come of my Something Creative Every Day project though, so I feel like I should write a little bit about it here.

This summer I got a random email from a company based in Australia called Makedo, which appeared to be offering me free stuff. No, this isn’t advance-fee fraud- they said they really liked Trashbot 2000 and all of the other junk I have on my flickr, and wanted to send me some samples of their product to make stuff out of. Score! I agreed and a week or so later I found this package in my letterbox:

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I like a good Washing Machine

I should probably write about the things that influence me more often. A couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered The Secret Life of Machines, a Channel 4 TV series from the late eighties / early ninties. I used to watch this with my Dad when I was really small- it was on TV when I was between the ages of 2-7 apparently (!) – and despite being so young, it clearly made an impression on my tiny mind!

Here is a clip from the show, where Tim Hunkin describes what the concrete ballast in a washing machine is for, with the assistance of Rex Garrod:

Genius. They picked such an expressive washing machine for the demonstration too! It’s great watching this stuff again as the longstanding lines of influence are pretty apparent. For example, here’s a series of post-it notes from 2007 that bear a subtle resemblance to the above clip:

Which is a concept I revisited last week:

Now there’s an idea that is going somewhere!

Anyway! If you like washing machines, you can see more of my washing-machine-related daily artwork by clicking here, or if you just like machines in general, you can find links to watch more of the secret life of machines on Tim Hunkin’s website.

Paper iPhone TV Set

This was going to be my creative activity for yesterday, but it ended up taking me a little bit longer to make than I was expecting, so it counts for the whole weekend! It’s a paper TV set for an iPhone!!

I’m not sure where I came up with the idea of making a little TV set to slot an iPhone into, but the thought came into my mind to use a magnifying glass lens to give it a nice curved CRT-like look to the screen. I copped this ramshackle bargain off eBay (complete with vital safety instructions) to make it out of.

The iPhone slots into the side like so:

And to prove it really works, here it is playing the title sequence to M*A*S*H, the only TV show Lilly has on her iPhone. The show happens to have post-it-yellow titles anyway, which matches the TV set rather nicely 🙂

Vote for my horse on Threadless!

I have a T-Shirt design up for voting on Threadless! Yes, this is my first design that has actually made it to the voting stage, and now it needs all the help it can get.

It’s such a happy horse- why wouldn’t you want to see it on a T-Shirt? If it walked into a bar, the bartender wouldn’t ask ‘why the long face?’. It’s that happy!

I really wanted to submit this for a kid’s T-Shirt design, but I couldn’t see a way to do that independently. If you grown-ups like it though, great! Wouldn’t it make you smile if you saw someone walk past you with him on their chest?!

Please vote for it, especially if you like it! Get all your friends and all your enemies to vote too! Yeah!

Here he is, modelling his own T-Shirt. Yeahh! Vote!!

This Central Station lark

Shock Horror, I’ve joined another social network recently! This one is called Central Station– it appears to be a network for creative people. I guess it’s similar to Behance, but I never really understood that, and this appears to be a bit more British (well, Scottish, to be precise) and a bit more personal.

Anyway, I don’t really understand this either, but it’s probably because I’m not very good at being social, and to me a network is something you make with CAT5 cables and Wi-Fi. Regardless, it seems pleasant and I approve of the post-it-note yellow, so I’ve put up a bit of work for other members to look at!

Putting stuff up seemed to be the right thing to do too, as people are looking at it! CenSta first added my Post-it book to their blog of things they like in February, which was very kind of them. It’s nice to be nice to the nice!

Not only that, but they then went on to feature my stopmotion experiment from 2008 ‘Full Mouse’ (embedded above or here on Central Station) in a prominent position on their site, which went on to get more views in the space of a week than it ever did anywhere else on the internet combined. Amazing!

So if you’re creative too, or if you just want to be a member of another social network, you should check Central Station out! It doesn’t matter if you’re not Scottish – I’m pretty sure I’m not a Scot, and they’ve been very welcoming to me, as I think they are trying to grow beyond Scotchland.

Update: They’ve put the video on their front page now too! cool!

Speedbeard

This is my creative activity for today, but I’m far too amused by it to only post it on my Flickr-based SCED project, so it’s going up here too! Besides, it looks a lot better via Vimeo than Flickr’s video service.

I took the Vespa out for the first time in the best part of three months this week, and came back feeling rather hairy. I’ve been convinced for almost as long as I’ve been driving this machine that my facial hair grows quicker when I ride the Vespa. It kinda makes sense in a fuzzy (pun not intended) logic kind of way- my face feels the cold, so my body probably tries to do something about it short of growing a scarf!