Arvon Foundation

I will be teaching a Text and Image residential course with Margaret Huber (Mrs Rawle) this summer - August 13-18 at Totleigh Barton as part of the Arvon Foundation's Creative Writing courses. It's an incredible place: Totleigh Barton is a thatched, pre-Domesday manor house, surrounded by farmland in one of the most peaceful and beautiful parts of Devon, two miles from the village of Sheepwash. Workshops are held in a newly refurnished 15th century barn. Our mid-week guest lecturer is Professor George Hardie.

TEXT & IMAGE
For anyone interested in telling stories using words and pictures, this course will help you explore the fascinating relationship between text and image and how one can be made to affect the other. We welcome writers and visual artists of all abilities, keen to investigate this subject through any medium, such as illustrated books for children or adults, cut & paste fiction, visual diaries, comics and experimental typography. More information about our course, other Arvon courses and booking details HERE. 
'In honour' of our course Arvon have organised a word art competition where you can win a week on an Arvon course of your choice worth £600. I will be judging entries. More details about that HERE.

THE CARD - Book jacket final choice

This is the book jacket for The Card as it finally ended up. I had a slightly different colour scheme and a different edge colour, but when the proof came back from the printers, I didn't like it and so decided to change it to this. I'm much happier with it.

Graphic Design: Now in Production

Woman's World is featured in a major exhibition, Graphic Design: Now In Production which was recently at the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis. The show travels to the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York (May 26 - Sept 27 2012), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Sept 30, 2012 - January 6, 2013), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (July 19 - September 29th, 2013) and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (October 24, 2013 - Feb 24, 2014). There's more about the exhibition with films, interviews etc at the Walker website here. The exhibition is curated by Ellen Lupton along with Ian Albinson, Andrew Blauvelt, Jeremy Leslie and Armin Vit.

This major international exhibition explores how graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool. With the rise of user-generated content and new creative software, along with innovations in publishing and distribution systems, people outside the field are mobilizing the techniques and processes of design to create and publish visual media. At the same time, designers are becoming producers: authors, publishers, instigators, and entrepreneurs employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences.

Featuring work produced since 2000 in the most vital sectors of communication design, Graphic Design: Now in Production explores design-driven magazines, newspapers, books, and posters as well as branding programs for corporations, subcultures, and nations. It also showcases a series of developments over the past decade, such as the entrepreneurial nature of designer-produced goods; the renaissance in digital typeface design; the storytelling potential of titling sequences for film and television; and the transformation of raw data into compelling information narratives.

Graphic Design: Now in Production is the largest museum exhibition on the subject since the Walker’s seminal 1989 exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History, and the Cooper-Hewitt’s 1996 comprehensive survey, Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture. Appropriately, this exhibition is co-organized by the two institutions. A comprehensive, illustrated catalogue produced by the Walker accompanies the exhibition.

Pick Me Up - Somerset House

I'm doing a weekend fact-gathering workshop with Peepshow on the weekend of 31 March and 1 April at PICK ME UP Contemporary Graphic Art Fair at Somerset House. More about Pick Me Up here and what Peepshow will be doing during the rest of the event here.
This is the workshop. Do come along.

I DID NOT KNOW THAT!

The Peepshow Encyclopaedia of Things We Didn’t Know

Did you know that emus can’t walk backwards or that Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button? We did. Did you know that Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise; that rabbits can’t vomit; or that Barry Manilow is an anagram of Library Woman? We knew all of those things too. Why don’t you tell us something we don’t already know?

In our quest to compile a comprehensive Encyclopaedia of Things We Didn’t Know, Peepshow and guest researcher Graham Rawle invite you to provide us with a fascinating fact to add to our archive. It can come from the world of science, history or nature––or it could be something personal: your father’s hat size, the opening hours of your local Costcutter, or what your Uncle Roy likes to spread on his toast. From the astounding to the trivial, all of the facts we collect will be gathered together in a giant Peepshow online encyclopaedia, providing a fountain of knowledge to delight and enthral all of humanity.

HOW TO TAKE PART

At the I Did Not Know That! workshop, each participant will be provided with an exciting jamboree bag ‘kit’ containing everything he or she might need to create a special collage, drawing, written message or mini-sculpture. Each completed piece of artwork will be photographed for inclusion in the online archive and displayed during the workshop in an ever-expanding wall frieze of little-known facts. Your contribution can play a vital part in building this extraordinary archive; The Peepshow Encyclopaedia of Things We Didn’t Know. Take part today!

Peepshow book

Peepshow's book, celebrating 10 years together as an illustration collective is out now, and a very lovely thing it is too. Beautifully designed by Emmi Salonen, it's jam-packed full of Peepshow pictures, info and fun. There are even introduction pieces by Alex Bec, Margaret Huber (Mrs Rawle) and me. Take a look here and at the review in Creative Review here.