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