I'm on the new fontstruct poster!

The new poster designed be the online type design community 'fontstruct' has now been printed. One of my typefaces has been chosen to feature on it. My glyph is the big B in the top left corner. The glyph is taken from one of my craziest fonts called 'convention' which I designed three years ago. View the entire typeface here at: http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/convention

Foosball Friday

I've just designed this logo for 'Foosball Friday' in the Redhouselane studio. Next up I'm going to design the league tables, and it's game on!!!

More logo Development

This weekend i've been further developing this logo. I've crafted two custom ligatures in the Centaur typeface, and also tried out a goose quill style swash on the uppercase R glyph. I've now toned down the final result, which I am quite happy with although I do still need to fine tune some of the kerning!

Back on the blog!

I havn't been blogging for a while. It's been a really busy couple
of months. I've moved to the big smoke to start a new job with 'Redhouselane'. It's been absolutely brilliant to say the least, and
a huge learning curve!

I'm not really supposed to start posting up all the work in progress that i've been doing. For that reason, i'll mostly be posting up personal project work. Here's a sneaky peek at some branding
I've been working on.

D&AD NEW BLOOD

Today I've been down at the Brick Lane Old Truman Brewery for the 'D&AD New Blood' awards. I am exhibiting one of my books called Flatland, for which I was awarded an ISTD Merit. I also attended some portfolio surgeries with industry professionals. The university of the west of england stand has been granted a 'best new blood' award, and is situated at stand number 87. The show is on all weekend, and on monday. Please come along and visit!!!

FIRST CLASS BA HONOURS!

Today I have found out that I am to graduate from the University of the West of England with 1st Class BA Honours degree in Graphic Design! I worked really hard to achieve this, and I am really chuffed with my results!

Working with Pencil Studios

I've been on work experience this week down with they guys from Pencil Studios in Frome. It's been a brilliant week due to there great sense of humour! Hopefully I will be working with them again on some of their projects in the near future...

ISTD Membership

On Friday I went to an awards ceremony at the London Design Museum to receive a Merit Award by the International Society of Typographic Designers. It was a great and almost unbelievable experience to meet and chat with the world famous typographer Erik Spiekermann! It was great to join the society, meet other like minded designers, and see all of their really top notch work! My tutor John Paul Downling also received two awards for his brilliant teaching!

DAA Publication

Alongside my final uni projects I have worked on a publication for the Drawing and Applied Arts degree course at UWE. Working with two friends; Tom and James, we have produced a publication that documents the working process of each student on the course. We chose to base the publication around their working process in order to further sell themselves to visitors of the degree show. The visitors of the exhibition can then learn more about the student, from the final finished pieces that are on display in of them. The publication also contains a visitors map and poster of the exhibition that can guide the visitor to the work of each student.

The catalogues went down a storm and we have received brilliant feedback from many visitors and students of the course!

Degree Show Exhibition

This week I am showcasing some of my recent interactive design work at the UWE degree show. I am exhibiting A large self built multitouch table, showcasing a multi user infographic piece that teaches the events that occurred at the onset of the Libyan conflict. The exhibition also contains two of my books and A large scroll poster.

If you haven't already been down to visit the show, please come and see the show!

The adress for the show is: Kennel Lodge Road Bristol BS3 2JT. The show finishes at 20:00 on thursday 16th of June. Hopefully see you there!

Interactive Design Showreel | 2011

Uni is finished!!!!! It's so good to be free again after the mother of all deadlines on thursday. I was very impressed by all of the work by my friends on the course. The degree show at UWE is gong to be incredible this year! Here is my current showreel of interactive graphic design work:



The showreel contains work produced between January and May 2011 as a self directed study titled 'Interactive Experiences in Typography'. My work deals with the communication of current events using typography through new forms of media interaction.

Peter Chasseaud – Tom Paine Printing Press [Creative Letterpress Exhibition]

Yesterday I visited an exhibition of creative Letterpress typography with Heather Kendrick. It was an exhibition by the Tom Paine Printing press who are based in Lewis, West Sussex, UK. The exhibition took place at the ‘Here Gallery’ at 108 Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK.

When visiting this exhibition, it was great to se such an expressive use of letterpress work by designers who live very close to my home town in west sussex. The work showed strong evidence that these designers had a great talent to push the limitations of the letterpress. Some of the work was truely awe inspiring in its form. The prints showed how the letterpress process obviously generates and commands a different way of thinking compared with the approach of typography in computer generated design.

I was also fascinated by the veriety of print formats that were utilised. My favourite pieces were a couple of enormous books
that documented the historical form of londons railways. These enormous books were inspiring as they created a different
user experience than that of a conventional book format because did not require the user to ‘lean’ into the book as they would normally. This reading experience was complemented with the large style of typography used throughout the book, allowing the user to almost lean wack and relax, rather than hunch over the book. Almost a good advertisement for british rail—”Sit back and relax”!

Pm Studios and Kemistry Gallery Visits

Pervasive Media Studios

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Today I went to Pervasive Media Studios in Bristol and attended a really interesting talk about information user interaction at historical tourist sights. It was great to get the chance to chat to some of the guys and girls there, and to see some of the incredible projects that were going on. It was amazing to see such an incredible array of projects, all going on within the same studio!

Kemistry Gallery

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Yesterday I went to London and Visited a new typographic Exhibition called "Roger That!" at the Kemistry Gallery. This exhibition featured some very playfully pieces of typographic print work. the Exhibition combined plain serif typography with large illustrative pieces of print pypography to tell a series of interesting stories.

Wim Crouwell Talk

Yesterday I attended a talk by Wim Crouwell at Londons Design Museum. The talk was really inspiring to hear Wim Explaining his life's typographic work. I also got to ask him a couple of questions at the end, which was really good. Before the talk I met him in the Design Museum bar where he signed a book for me!

The Road To Tripoli

I've made a pretty funny game where you are in command of some fighter jets and you have to help the rebels with air support on their way to Tripoli. Click the mouse loads to drop the bombs, and get rid of mean old Gaddafi!

You can Play the game Through This Link

http://joeallison.co.uk/road_to_tripoli.html

Flatland [ISTD Student Awards]

Today I submitted my entry to the ISTD (International society of typographic designers) 2011 Student Awards, with the hope of gaining entry to their society. It's been one of the hardest weeks of my life this week, with very little sleep, and a lot of cycling around visiting various printers etc!

My entry is a Novel called Flatland written by Edwin A. Abbot in 1884. I have typeset the entire novel, consisting of 23,233 words over 178 pages, using 5 different paper stocks. I've focussed heavily on typographic detailing. Kering punctation throghout the book, and designing illustrative type. I've also designed a set of typographic devices and paper mechanic, that build upon the Novel's Narrative.
I have reproduced all of the illustrations of the Novel, to be in keeping with the choices of typography, and to communicate a very personal approach from the authors first hand tale.

I bound two copies of the book myself, which also required a lot of detailed and intricate paper cropping. Here are a few photographs of my finished books just before they went off for submission.

Hands Across the World

I saw this design project earlier for a mobile phone company called AT&T. The brief was to communicate the global coverage of AT&T, and they solved this by creating images of (hand painted) hands and mobile phones in ways which represent each country. All of the images are so inventive and some of them are really funny.

First Touch Piece

My first piece of touch interaction design that connects user touches with status updates from Facebook

Yin and Yang

Here's a small stitch bound book that I made one day in December, at the beginning of an ISTD project brief. The book display the values of each individual colour in accordance with the rules of the Chinese life force of the universe—Ch'i.