Oct ‘11

Journal

The talented Nicolette has a gig coming up in London on the 25th October at Native Tongue EC1 (it's on Long Lane, between the Barbican and the Smithfield meat market).

The gig is part of a project Mark Hucks is running to photograph and record a selection of different musicians. Each of the musicians will perform a short set including the song they recorded with Mark, all of the portraits will be exhibited in the venue and all the money from the door will be donated to Oxjam.

You can listen to Nicolette’s song here, or read more about the Singing Faces project and the other musicians taking part at singingfaces.com.

Play: Paper Scissors Stone

Made for fun in Javascript with MooTools have a play here.

Photo: Traffic Light Trees

It looked like we were watching autumn move across the park tree by tree.

Consumed this month:

From the web:

A Sister’s Eulogy
Donkeys (Equus Asinus)
Elegance, Lightness, and Nothing
(I've been working on a drafting desk and a stool for years.)
On Parenthood
Cow Clicker
The Limits of Human Rationality
It's more likely that I was doing 911km/h

From the library:

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

From the box:

Frozen Planet on BBC iPlayer

Sep ‘11

Journal

Autumn is arriving with the usual abundance that nature likes to lay on, all the trees and bushes are weighed down with fruit and berries, the plants with beans, seeds and peppers. Each plant producing thousands of seeds, each seed with the potential to grow into its own plant. Though while nature may be generous in autumn, it is cruel in winter and spring, those thousands of seeds one by one are whittled down to the strongest or luckiest few.

New years resolutions for myself:

With ideas and creativity be as generous in the conception, ruthless in the selection and focused in the development as nature is with it's seeds.
Try not to ramble so much in journal entries.

Work: Planted

The Planted project we are working on at broadbent that I was talking about in the last update is going well, we have all the stories collected, the plants drawn and only a few more recordings to take.

I've pasted a few visuals of the work in progress site below.

Planted Home

It has been a great process, everyone has a connection with plants and it's a great key to allow people to tell their own story. The same pattern kept on happening, people say 'Why would I have a story about a plant?' and then suddenly it would unlock something and they'd remember.

Photo: Autumn Sky

Consumed this month:

From the web:

From the library:

Solaris by Stanisław Lem
Carte Blanche by Jeffery Deaver

From the box:

The Bi-Polar Ape on YouTube
Tape Generations on Vimeo

Apr ‘11

Journal

I'm going to put the site relaunch back a few months to give myself a chance to get some projects wrapped up. Probably going to be a bit sparse with the updates until Summer is out the way.

Work: Planted

Planted is one of the projects we are working on at broadbent. We are collecting stories and memories from people in Stockbridge Village, Liverpool that are connected to a plant or flower. You can read a bit more about the project and listen to a few example stories at http://planted.in/stockbridge-village/

We will be collect more stories on the following days:

4pm - 8pm Thursday 26th May at St. Bridgids SPACE
9am - 11am Friday 27th May at The Craigs, Breakfast Club

If you have a story and can't make it to one of those days you can email them to stories@planted.in

Consumed this month:

From the web:

From the library:

Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
The Modern Scholar: Hebrews, Greeks and Romans by Prof. Timothy Shutt

From the box:

Tortoise Bites Cat on YouTube
Old Fangs by adrien merigeau on Vimeo

Mar ‘11

Journal

The weather is getting warmer, the nights lighter and signs of life are appearing from the ground. As you are reading this you’ve probably noticed signs of life are also appearing from this website, this is the first post in what will become a monthly roundup of work, thoughts, links and photos.

Designing anything for yourself is hard, there are dozens of unused designs, themes and concepts for this site that have never seen the light of day to attest to that. Instead of trying to create a fully resolved design that does and encompasses everything but stays forever just over the horizon, this is a stripped back down to basics site that can be planted small (and more importantly now) and grow organically in new, hopefully unforeseen directions.

Bonus features: If you are using a screenreader and would prefer to hear my voice instead of having the site read by a Dalek there is a link to an audio version in the header of each entry. If you prefer the text-to-speech Dalek or have trouble with my accent that’s fine proceed as normal. ~~Also up in the header is a link to a version of the entry formatted in Markdown for those partial to a bit of plaintext.~~ Changed my mind, sorry.

Work

There are some great community projects we are working on at the moment at broadbent, one that was just unvieled last Sunday (27/03/2011) on Salford Quays opposite the Lowry and is part of the unlocking Salford Quays project. The artwork is a tribute to the casual workers on the Salford docks. The artwork resembles the union cards that the workers had to carry to get a chance of being picked out for work, each of the 12 iron ‘cards’ has a glass circle in the top corner with images of some of the workers printed on. The stoires, names and photos were found and brought in from the community groups, there are some interviews with the families on the Lowry website .

Play: Connect4 Stop Motion Animation Tool

I made this little tool to help plan stop motion animations using connect4, you can design the individual frames and flick between them using the arrow keys. For anyone that wants a play enjoy. I've not done much testing as it was just for my own use, but if there is any interest I'll put it up on github for improving. Update: now online and ready for playing with.

Experiment: CSS Masks in Webkit

While clearing out my job folder I found this demo along with a tutorial on css masks in Webkit I was writing this time last year, (another little project never to see the light of day) and I'm posting it here as reminder to myself to do something with it. It could be brought up to date and made to run a lot more efficiently, as it is there is no javascript only css, however it does rely on the vendor specific -webkit-mask, though as far as I'm aware a year later no-one else has caught up and implemented a version.

Feel-good photo

Like the last item of the news, designed to round everything up in a general feeling of wellbeing. Unfortunately we don't have any snorkelling piglets but here’s a photo of the chickens pecking on the studio window asking for their breakfast.