tragedy in the fog.

this is the first part of a zine that im putting together to inform train passengers and commuters of the legacy of the forgotten lewisham rail crash of 1957. ive got a couple of really beautiful old newsreel report films which have influenced my visual language in a big way for this work. i love the film noir aspect that comes out of a lot of the footage of the crash. this is the back page of the zine, designed as a sort of poster which you only see once you have unfolded all the inside parts of the zine. i hope that by starting with this, the least important part of the zine [in that its purely aesthetic, not much going on literacy-wise] then my style will develop and improve when designing the more crucial parts of the zine.

interrupt.

this is the rest of the intervention project i did. [the first bit was the benefits poster] for the first of my other two interventions i bought some fortune cookies from LIDL, unpackaged them, removed the notes from inside the cookies, replaced them with my own notes, and returned them to the shop. the reason i did this is because i don't like the boring ambiguity of all those messages [in a similar way to horoscopes] and so all of my messages are a play on taking the ambiguity a big step further. they read as follows:

[Insert Fortune Here]

You will have 1/2/3 children with
your beautiful husband/wife

You will find great success in the
design/construction/media/retail industry

Your husband/wife/partner can be found
where you least/most expect it

Look for the positives in your recent loss of
job/a relative/money/possession

A house/flat/cottage in the city/suburbs/countryside
could be the perfect place to settle down.

Look after your friends/family for
they are most dear to you

It is time to stop the smoking/drinking/junk
food and take up golf/tennis/jogging

Your efforts/laziness at work/home will be
noticed and you will be praised/punished

Your friends appreciate you for being the
funny/clever/reliable/outgoing one


For the second one i wanted to take a look at the value of money in the current economic climate [it may sound clever, but i actually know shit all about the economy]. so i figured the best piece of graphic communication to interrupt is the banknote itself. with a simple stamp on every note i come across, my message has a fast and wide circulation. the message was spend it all at once which for me, worked on two levels, one encouraging the holder to go out and spend money in order to stimulate the economy and save our local businesses, but also as a general life lesson to be more reckless and spontaneous with your money, and enjoy spending it.


i've been stamping notes for a few days and intend to continue for a long while as i rather like the idea. as unlikely as it may be, if you ever do come in contact with a note stamped with spend it all at once please please please please please please please please please please please contact me, id love to hear from you!

derek conway mp

here's a play on a benefit fraud poster ive been working on for an intervention brief. derek conway is the disgraced tory mp for bexley and sidcup who claimed a ridiculous amount of expenses as pay for his two sons who were supposedly his researchers but actually just blew thousands of taxpayers £££s on uni life and running their own westend clubs. for some bizarre reason conway's still the mp, he's just been ordered to pay back fines from his wages for the next year or so.

you know the advert with the fat chav coming out of her council house to do her daily bit of benefit fraud? yeah its that advert but with conways face in the target and a few tweaked words. i first saw this poster on a phone box in peckham, but the plan is to search across conways old bexley and sidcup constituency to find a phone box there which is plastered with the same ad, and cover it over with my pseudo-activist propaganda thus making the location of the poster relevant.

some finished fonts.

here is the finished zip font which i actually kinda like



If you like my zip font you might like this jockstrap font [hah!] by moreismore


it's available to download here

fonts at the tate modern

i went to the tate modern today to complete a brief that i failed to do when i shouldve gone on wednesday, but i guess that was for the better because had i gone on wednesday i probably wouldve wasted the day eating lunch with my mates and not got much done. much to my surprise i seemed to get quite a lot done and being alone in my own thoughts seemed to help me think about the work i was looking at in much more detail. aesthetically and conceptually.
here are the fruits of my labour. well, only some of them. and i can hardly call it labour, i mean, farmers working the cotton fields in africa do labour. i was drawing in a fancy gallery in london. but yeah.



[each work of art is followed by my typographic response]

my first font.

heres a poster ive made using a font that i put together using a zip that i tore out of my manbag. im currently putting the finishing touches to the upper case letters and formatting it into a working truetype font, which once done will be available here for anyone who may someday find a use for writing with zips.

a karaoke film.

i finished this a couple of days ago in time for the crit at college, the last few hours of editing were so stressful. basically its an answer to a 'karaoke' brief, to produce some moving text in synchronisation to our choice of 30 songs. I chose a song called o superman by a performance artist called laurie anderson, who, as im reliably informed by wikipedia, is married to a certain lou reed. i chose it because it was a slightly strange song with clear vocal/lyrical elements that i fancied working on. after reading a bit about anderson and the song i found that some parts of it are about communications systems in america such as the planes, phones, couriers etc so i thought id work on that theme for a visual interpretation of the song. [i hope this is evident to you, the audience] i partly chose the song because i thought it would present me with a bit of a challenge. that turned out to be the case. most of the difficulty i encountered was technical. i struggled with the stop motion section on the fridge and although id managed to get my hands on adobe after effects and premiere pro i couldnt for the life of me figure out how to work them. so i better learn how in time for the next film based project. if there was an ideal outcome of the film, it would all have been shot in one go as one running sequence, because the cuts in the scenes really annoy me. also some parts are shot at night, when the film is set at daytime. and i had plans for the film to go on another minute or so but i left it too late to film these. aside from all this i do quite like some elements and i think my original ideas have come through quite nicely.

then again we cant all be our own critics so let me know what you think


[sorry about the pop-ups, couldnt get the video onto youtube]