New Products: Sevens Place mats and coasters!

I just wanted to tell you about one of my new products, the new Sevens place mats and coasters. The design is available in two colours, taupe and red, are sold in a set of six and are all made in the UK. 

ALT/SHIFT 13 December

My friend Derek Yates (Course Leader- FdA Graphic Design and FdA Illustration, Camberwell College of Arts) is the brain child behind this very interesting website and a conference Alt/Shift being held next month on Brick lane, see the details below. I think it is of interest to any small business or designer wanting to work with new graduates and employ the talent that does emerge every year. I am going are you? 

Alt/Shift – examining the future form of education for the creative industries.

How can we connect with and inform emerging creative methodology? Do we need to be more accountable to the industries we serve? Do we have a wider social responsibility? How do we build better relationships with the tertiary & secondary sectors?

What are the priorities that will drive our pedagogy into the 21^st Century?
Artifact or experience? Picture making or problem solving? Craft or communication? Individual or group? authorship or co-creation? maverick or collaborator? Inspiration or evidence? Niche or impact? Practitioner or facilitator?

Altshiftual.com is now live.

Join the discussion via Twitter: ‪#altshiftual, or through the website

Or

Take part in the one day conference on Thursday 13th December at the LBi Event Space on Brick Lane, London.

Tickets are: £40 before 15^th November on their website. I have got mine :-)maybe see you there......

altshiftual

Tokyo Plates 2001

I have been looking through some archive images recently and came across these lovely porcelain plates that I designed and produced back in 2001. They feature images from the amazing Tokyo fish market - of which 'tourists' are no longer allowed to wonder around and photograph at their leisure..... a very sad reality.

anyway I also wanted to high light a link to a recent interview with New Designers - as I regularly am asked about my background and design history, for those that want to read more, click here! 

bye for now!

Thank you Katie!

It has been a very busy 3 months here in the studio and Katie our recent intern is on the move to pastures new! Thank you Katie for all your hard work, and stay in touch!  

Katie Allerston graduated from Plymouth with a BA degree in Interior Textiles and Surface Design. She is inspired by nature and her photographs which she manipulates into 3D artworks. These pieces below are the ones that caught my eye at New Designers this summer

To see more of Katie's work visit her website.

Well spotted

Look what I found, my Sunflower umbrella was spotted in The Great British Bake Off finale on BBC

New Lampshade Collection

"Featuring a range of nine modern and nostalgic patterns including Isabel Garden, Bugs and Butterflies and Artist's Tools, her designs are a great way of instantly freshing a room scheme, and would work well in anything from children's bedrooms to retro living rooms" 

Quote from Red Online who just wrote a very nice article about the collection that you can read here.

Stacks and Stripes lampshade above and Fretwork below

Here are a few more shots from my lovely shoot with Asa - we will have them on our website in a few days time. The lampshades are all made in the UK and are available in 8 different designs; Fretwork, Geo, Isabel Garden, Artists Tools, Gridlock, Sevens Red, Bugs and Butterflies and Plimsoles. They are made of parchment paper and are available in two different sizes at the moment, 14" and 20" inch. But we are always happy to quote for larger or smaller sizes, I'll let you know when they go live. But contact us at the studio if you want more info on bespoke ones! 

Above, Gridlock Lampshade and Geo lampshade below

Bye for now!

The Project Group, Oswestry

I am in the midst of working with the lovely folk at The Project Group up in Oswestry Shropshire. You can read all about the fantastic creative work they undertake with their members here. They are an arts based community organization working on commissions for the public and private sector.

The collaboration has been instigated by Design Nation and the Eureka Project - set up by the late Peta Levi. And my role is to help facilitate creating some products using their surface patterns from their archive and the workshops that I will be running. I was the proud winner of the Eureka award back in 2006, so it is an honour to work with this group both in the memory of Peta and to help continue to promote British Design and manufacture.

So here are a few pictures from our first session.. i asked them all to create designs to represent the ELEMENTS in some way - Earth, Fire, Water and Air and members then chose to work in a particular medium i.e. screen printing, string art, wax resist, sewing etc. and here are a few pictures to illustrate....

these lovely prints are based on pebbles - to represent EARTH

here is one stencil waiting to be screened 

and here is a similar one once printed

this image was a very inspired idea for AIR - a tornado with the eye of the storm driving into the black hole... this was all made out of hand dyed string

and then they chose to depict the same image out of pebbles.....

here are some of the lovely designs using wax resist and ink, designed to represent the EARTH, everything from road markings to tractor marks, when positioned all together like this my mind wonders off to flying over beautiful patchwork fields on a clear day.

               

..... here are a few examples of their wonderful string art - these birds are part of one of their commissions which I will tell you more about after my next visit.  

If you want to see more do watch their inspiring video here I shall update you further as we progress with the workshops.
Bye for now.