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The Emer Swift Bike

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:25:42 +0000

When I first found out about this it was a complete surprise, two friends I grew up riding BMX with have designed a completely new bike. Johann Chan the owner and designer at Emer has a long history in BMX, producing clothes, sponsoring riders, making videos, organising competitions as well as still being a great rider today.

Tired of being overtaken by mountain bikes, racers and folding bikes on his 12 mile commute to work. Johann wanted to design a new kind of bike that rides with modern BMX geometry but with the benefits of the large, fast wheels that you’d find on a cruiser,. It has the same agile body position as a modern BMX but combined with a short rear end making it perfect for manuals, a cruiser for people who want to beat fixies to the pub.

Mark Noble at Deluxe helped with tried and tested quality manufacturing, the design is simple and elegant in gloss black and gold with graphics created by typeface designer Seb Lester – also a BMX flatland rider – bringing the image of the Swift to life with beautiful hand drawn lettering and head badge, also available in gold and black print t-shirts here.

The bike is in prototype stages at the moment, and should be out hopefully by the end of the year.

The Terminal Bar

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:08:01 +0000

There’s an exhibition at Trove Gallery showing 810 of Sheldon Nadelman’s portraits, all shot at Manhattan’s Terminal Bar over a ten year period from 1972-1982. There are some more photographs here and an interesting video interview with the curator Morgan Quaintance here.

Check the Trove website for dates and times.

Not My Type: An Out of Character Experiment

admin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:38:19 +0000

I’ll be bringing forward a big wooden ‘O’ to this project. A typographical exploration of 26 letters (and a few sneaky characters) by 35 talented illustrators, designers and artists, all displayed in one giant alphabet.

The work is going to be stylistically diverse, with artists ranging from Jon Burgerman, I Love Dust, Sam Pierpoint, Lewes Harriot, Dan Westwood and members of The Outcrowd. The exhibition will be showing initially in the Created In Birmingham store, opening May 6th; all prints will be available to buy from both the store and through the Facebook group here, although the designs are going to be kept secret until the day of the opening.

A Beautiful Machine

admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:14:11 +0000

I’ve just finished this new piece of work for an exhibition celebrating everything about bikes, curated by howies & McFaul Studio. It’s a two-week event of art, talk and bikes, based above the howies store in Bristol, with work created specifically for this even from over 50 global artists inluding; Jody Barton, Mr Jago, Stef Grindley, Vault 49, Jon Burgerman and ilovedust.

All artwork at the event will be for sale with all money going to the Save the Children – Haiti Earthquake appeal. The auction will begin at 7pm Friday 26th March and will end at 10pm Friday 9th April.

The website is here.

To Haiti With Love

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:53:59 +0000

I was recently asked to contribute to To Haiti With Love, a worthwhile cause with a slight difference, when you donate you actually get a piece of artwork as a digital file. You can send this onto a friend or simply use the image as your own desktop wallpaper. Each piece of work will be sold as a digital postcard for £1 to raise money to help the situation in Haiti.

There are artists from around the world donating work, with more getting involved as this project snowballs every day. Some of the artists so far include; David Shrigley, Genevieve Gauckler, Bob Kronbauer, Simon Peplow, Alex Trochut and Rob Ryan with photographers Ye Rin Mok, Cass Bird and Valerie Phillips recently getting involved.

The piece i’ve donated was created with Jonny Costello originally in a project with Digiki. We’ve also included a signed one-off print of the work on archival quality paper which will go into a live auction at the end of the project.

Campags and Campfires

admin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:20:04 +0000

In August I made the equally pleasurable and painful journey from Exeter to Bude, on the coast of Cornwall. With a bike a tent a camera and a friend, not realising just how hilly that part of England actually is. There’s a little piece I wrote for Level here with photographs by myself and Simon Peplow. There are a few more photos over at Flickr.

Abracadabra Island

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:46:00 +0000

A new 24 page zine I just made with my good friend Jonny Costello for The Homework Show tomorrow in San Diego (its from 7-11 if you feel like a zine swap). We only made 20 for the show, but will probably be making a limited run of 100 which is going to take a long time and a lot of scalpel blades. I’m not going to be at the show, but we’ll be remotely swapping through fellow mumbler Stef Walker, who’s organising the show.

The first time we’ve done anything like this and a lot of fun, there will be more.

six colours of happiness multiplied by three

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:09:21 +0000

I was intrigued by Threadless after the recent Mumble collaboration so I thought I’d put up an old design that I hadn’t really used and see what happened.

I read the other day they sell over 100,000 t-shirts a month!

The Joyful Bewilderment Goes Analogue

admin — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:19:32 +0000

Back from a ridiculous eight hour drive and an amazing weekend in Edinburgh with The Outcrowd and the guys from Analogue, setting up the second step of the touring Joyful Bewilderment show. Analogue is one of the best bookshops and galleries i’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting and the opening party totally exceeded all expectations. It was packed all night long hundreds of lovely people, although I was a bit worried about the rowdy Scotland football supporters out on Saturday Night for their game against Holland. They didn’t come in for a look though…

The show at Analogue is gong to run all month until April 28th. I’m not sure where the next stop for the show will be, but if its anything like this one it’s going to be great. More pictures from the night on mine and Analogue’s Flickr pages

There’s a little more about the exhibition and the people behind it in something I wrote in October here.

The Joyful Bewilderment
28th March 2009 – 28th April 2009
Opening: Saturday 28th March, 7pm-9pm

Analogue Books
102 West Bow
Edinburgh
EH1 2HH
UK

The Do Lectures

admin — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:27:54 +0000

Originally posted on Club Mumble.

“The idea is a simple one. That people who Do things, can inspire the rest of us to go and Do things too”.

Linked in part with the good people at Howies, the idea came from a conversation between two of it’s founders over the dining table one night about how to do something about the things we care about.

“They can be small Do’s or big Do’s or just plain amazing extraordinary Do’s. But when you listen to their stories, they just light a fire in your belly to go and Do your thing, your passion, the thing that sits in the back your head each day, just waiting, and waiting for you to follow your heart”.

Its an amazing project that took place in the middle of a forest in Cilgerran, Wales. You can subscribe to the podcast here, or go to the website where you can watch or download the lectures. Work your way through, read about the people, there’s a lot to learn and enjoy

Alastair McIntosh was one of the great speakers at the Do lectures, and it was actually a post on the Howies site about him that originally got me interested. It was a list taken from a book of his entiltled ‘rekindling the community’ from a page about how to build a community.

here it is:

turn off your tv
leave your house
know your neighbours
greet people
look up when you’re walking
sit on your stoop
plant flowers
use your library
play together
buy from local merchants
share what you have
help a lost dog
take children to the park
honour elders
support neighbourhood schools
fix it even if you didn’t break it
have pot lucks
garden together
pick up litter
read stories aloud
dance in the street
talk to your mail carrier
lsiten to the birds
put up a swing
help carry something heavy
barter for your goods
start a tradition
ask a question
hire young people for odd jobs
organise a block party
bake extra and share
ask for help when you need it
open your shades
sing together
share your skills
take back the night
turn up the music
turn down the music
listen before you react to anger
mediate a conflict
seek to understand
learn from new and uncomfortable angles
know that no one is silent though many are not heard
work to change this

The lecture by Andrew Whitley ‘Why Bread Needs Time?’ is interesting and scary at the same time. I’d only just started making my own bread about 3 weeks before watching it, now i’m happy that I did.