Artisan Roast – Edinburgh

With the Fringe programme produced and on the streets (check your local HMV all your Brits, time for another example of things I've stumbled upon and found interesting.


Seen this morning outside Artisan Roast, Broughton St, Edinburgh as I walked to work.

Handstand Press

Live at last.

I've been squeezing the design and construction of Handstand Press' new website in around my rather busy days at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. After too-ing and fro-ing, proprietor Liz Nuttal and I settled on this simple site, inspired by both Mondrian and the Cumbrian countryside, not a usual combination, it must be said.

Handstand Press publishes local history, fiction and poetry by Cumbrian writers and about Cumbria from her home in striking distance of the book town of Sedburgh.



Logo designed and drawn by Ellie Chaney

Inspired by @salidatious who, in turn, was Inspired by @cityferret

Inspired saliatious who in turn was inspired by @cityferret (but I can't find a link to her list, or gave up too quickly), I've decided to track my 2010 reading on this very blog post. Instead of creating a list of what I will read this year, which is a recipe for bitter self-contempt, I'm going to update this list throughout the year and see how I get along. Keep in mind, I'm a mighty slow reader (a little bit dyslexic, but have learned to get around it, and have trouble finding time), so it might not be as extensive a list this time next year as I'd like. But, to begin with... (Bold ones underway, bold notes in brackets are my 'review' once complete.)

Last book of 2009
Phillip Roth, Operation Shylock (eh, okay)

January 2010
Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting (one of those little Pocket Penguins, not even I will take long)(Indeed, didn't take long, but not entirely my style, a bit dated in tone, but it was great to read a Proper Writer again)
Peter Carey, Short Stories, (a reread from 10 years ago)
Forgotten just how entirely brilliant Peter Carey is. I think when I first read these, I stopped after The Crab, which is a rather mind bending story that I find entirely disturbing. By casting it aside back then I managed to miss some of the best, insightful and clever short stories I've had the chance to read. Great.
March 2010
Kazuo Ishaguru, Pale Remembered Hills in my possession, but not started yet and must go back to the library. At least I know where to find it.

Don Di Lilo, Libra In progress, and brilliant. A mix of carefully researched history, conjecture and conspiracy theory. Wish I wasn't so tired I can't read more than a page at a time. (fabulous, great book, interesting history, interesting conjecture. Love Di Lilo)

Stephen Fry in America (don't judge, it was a present, its a good read and better than that Bryson fellow)
April 2010
Gill Scott Heron Vulture, still waiting in the library to pick up. (Man, was that April. Since taken out and given up on, let's just say he was 19 when he wrote it and you can tell.)

August 2010
Hanif Kureshi, The Body
(underway, not going well, however. Premise so far, young body more attractive than old body, so get a young body and get laid. Sigh)

Wish I'd designed that

Taken in Valvonna and Crolla in Edinburgh.

Flax books on Issu Bookshelf

I was glad to see a Litfest and Flax blog with this lovely virtual bookshelf of the digital publications I designed for them as they were uploaded to Issu. Nice to see them all collected together, even if the two at the top left have lost some of their transparency.

Mostly Truthful Postcards

Postcards to promote Flax019, Mostly Truthful I'm very fond of the typography of the monospaced font at the bottom of the cover image.

Unsaid Undone in print

At some point in the development of Flax book's range of digital anthologies, a decision was made to re-purpose the, to offer a de-digitalised version. The digital versions were still given primacy, published first and the navigation marks left in place, but they would be printed so the audience could read them in bed, or in the bath. From Flax017, Unsaid Undone, I began designing the anthologies with this in mind, keeping them within the bounds of an A3 folded sheet so the text would remain at a decent font size. Above is the cover and below an in side spread featuring John Siddique's half title page, and the back cover.





Flax018, The Crowd Without, has also been printed this way and I'm told it is equally successful, but alas I've not had a chance to see it yet.

Both books can be purchased online, download or downloaded to be printed at home (if you have an A3, double sided printer) from the links above.

Found: Henderson's Gallery

I found this lovely bit of gallery advertising outside Henderson's Gallery, part of the Henderson's veggie restaurant complex (2 restaurants and a food store, does that make a complex) on and off Hanover Street in Edinburgh.


The lovely exhibition graphics adorn a wall in a quiet alley and look just great, in my humble opinion.

Mostly Truthful, Flax018

Feeling a bit Douglas Adams in this... Despite the The Crowd Without, Flax018, being my last digital anthology designed for Flax, here's another one.


Mostly Truthful is a collection of non-fiction from authors based in the North West of England. For the cover, we were trying to find something a little humorous, a reflection of an information source which claims to be authorative, but not quite (oddly, on the very day I completed this project, I waited a good hour for my wife to arrive in Edinburgh on a train that, according to railway boards not disimilar to this, had been cancelled – the ghost train arrived, unannounced and unheralded about 55 minutes late).


When editor Sarah Hymas saw this cover in its initial idea stage she laughed, so I knew we were in the right area. As the designs for these anthologies have tended to work in pairs, I wanted to move away from the dominantly white, kind of serious looking covers we did in the spring and move to a more lush and amusing style.


Mostly Truthful is available for free download from the litfest website and contains some really nice writing, including an interesting piece by Kate Feld on long term emigration and what it does to our understanding of our youths to be totally immersed in a foreign culture. The digital publication also contains links to the authors reading samples of their work and to their blogs.


If you are in Lancaster today (October 24th) you can pop to the Storey Building and enjoy the launch event which may or may not involve brass band music.

Design Jack Website

Another update to my website driven by a client. I've been experimenting with driving Flickr images to a website to create a flexible site for a local (Edinburgh) photographer to showcase her work. I came across the excellent Pictobrowser, a free, online gallery maker which can be embedded in your webpage of blog. So you get much of the convenience of a Content Management System without the database hassle. You can change the images called just by editing your Flickr sets. Alas, only for photos.

North West Playwrights web launch

Congratulations to Chris Bridgman and the rest of the North West Playwrights team on the recent launch of their new website. I'm sure there was a lot of hand wringing and heated discussions, but it looks like the results are great. The site was designed by Chameleon Interactive, who look like they do a lot of work in the arts and charity sectors.

I really like that the site is blank slate with style, so it will grow as the organisation adds content and will be flexible to carry whatever type of content they put up there. It shows a good development team that can put the urge to over design aside to create something useful for the organisation.

And now for the self-promotion. North West Playwrights asked me to produce a flyer for the launch event for the website. My approach was to give a sneak peak of the site through plain brown wrapping. Chris Bridgman felt a little more should be revealed, so before an after images below.

Ambition reflects Litfest's ambition

Andy Darby of Litfest has recently been interviews as part of the Art Council North West's Ambition project to encourage the use of IT in the delivery of the arts. In the interview (which you can see here) Andy talks about several of the projects I worked on with the organisation, included the website and blog I templated, various Flax publications, including a poster commission we published on line and a whole lot more.

Fantastic that the organisation has been featured like this as it has been a hard slog for an organisation with such limited time resources to move so far into other forms of delivery in such a short period of time. Andy, Sarah Hymas, Jonathan Bean and Catherine Salder should all be commended for their efforts. And it is great to see my work showcased like this. Make the three years we worked together all the better.

Passport to Style

Sharon Gibson has featured my t-shirts designs on her Passport to Style blog.

Sharon writes a blog to support her Lancaster based style consultancy and chose to use the designs to advise men on the types of designs they might look for. She suggests the colours are flattering to most skin tones and the themes suggest spirituality, energy and strength.

Most of her blog posts feature advice for women on what to where this season. I'm pleased to see that the advice looks back to the classy style of 1950s and 60s Hollywood. Let's face it, there has been no era since that comes close to the class and style of the 50s and 60s. If I could find the old suits again – my old ones are a bit thread bare these days – I'd wear them daily.

Sadly, the designs haven't left my computer (except for blog presence) but I'll hopefully submit these and others to more t-shirt companies in the future.

Thanks Sharon, hope the business goes from strength the strength.

Mad dogs and Lancastrians

In the months before I left Lancaster, I had the fortune of being asked by two of its more creative denizens to create business cards and other stationary for them. Both are free spirited, open minded artists, though of quite different artistic temperaments.


I've worked with poet, editor, puppeteer and performer Sarah Hymas for three and a half years. She has a definite sense of aesthetic and an openness to outside ideas, and there is something about her that has always made me think of the early modernists, and Art Nouveau's Alfons Mucha's relationship with Sarah Bernhardt. I took a photos Sarah uses on her blog, Echo Soundings to create this image, a hand drawn, slightly distorted version of Sarah's intense performances. The colours and style are drawn directly from modernist traditions. and the energy of her pushing out her own name I find quite dynamic.

Meanwhile, Hilli McManus, set, prop and garden designer extraordinaire, asked me to create business cards. Her starting point was her identity, Hilli the Fish, Monty Python, some semi-nude shots taken of her for a theatre company and a few fishy books borrowed from the local library. And the rest is history, or something similar, photohsop montage perhaps.



Hilli's definite ideas of what she wanted combined with an openness to new ideas made her an ideal friend/client. Like Sarah, she was demanding but direct.

Denizen, interestingly, originally referred to people who had come from elsewhere to inhabit a place, perhaps distinguishing them from citizens. Both Sarah and Hilli have come from across the Pennines, Yorkshire and Newcastle respectively, to inhabit Lancaster. And both have come to represent what is best of the city, an embracing comfort that allows the right artistic minds to prosper.

The Crowd Without, Flax018, poetry from Flax

For three and a bit years I have worked part time with Litfest, a literature festival and literature development agency in Lancaster. They have underpinned my freelance business, but now, as I've moved to Edinburgh, I've had to make the difficult decision to leave the warm comfort of the organisation.

Above is the final item I produced for Litfest, The Crowd Without, an anthology of new poetry. Working with editor Sarah Hymas, I've helped create six anthologies. In our efforts to create a comfortable, online reading experience with added bells and whistles– like links to audio files of the author's reading from the work and to online biographies – we've asked questions, experimented, got it wrong, got it right and started all over again. The most recent pair – though I never intended them to be pairs – are the one's I'm most proud of. They are clean, a little edgy and mysterious and read well without being stuffy.

Thanks to Sarah for her help and support on this and their predecessors, as well as Jonathan for his photography work and confirming eye and Andy for his hands off guidance of the process.

The Crowd Without and the short story anthology Unsaid Undone are available for free download from the Litfest website, on the Flax page. They are well worth a read, featuring some excellent new voices from the North West of England.

t-shirt Designs

I recently spent a few days working up some designs to submit to Ltd Ink's launch of a new series of t-shirts. Sadly I designed for adults and the ones they chose were a bit younger, perhaps, so none were picked (I'm sure there are other reasons as well).
Above is one I designed working from a photo taken from Kate Rawles Carbon Cycle (with permission, of course) webiste (which I designed a few years back). Wind Power is Beautiful, Baby is a celebration of the elegant technology of the Wind Turbine.

In the Glory of the Beest is another photograph based one, just a lovely image, I think. Initially it was to be The Love Beest, with a big heart, but I decided I preferred the rays of sunshine.
Below are two more joking ones, Ernesto's Original Argentinian Bar and Grill and Molotov's Cocktail Bar, imagining what Cold Warriors might have ended up doing had they not been Cold Warriors. They go along with Big Ron's Seven Step Program for Failed Actors and The Dulles Brother's Fruit Stand.

Litfest Summer 2009

Litfest's Summer programme of readings has begun, and above is the cover and back/calendar of the publicity I designed for it. This season celebrates the return of Litfest to The Storey building, now a centre for creative industries. I took the design which I created for this event years (Autumn, Festival, Spring and Summer) and added the pushed image of the front of the Storey Building (photo by Jonathan Bean of Beanphoto). I seem to often use this method to reduce the subtlety of an image so that it become flat colour. In this case, I reversed it as well so the base colour is white. The text is easier to read on the white and green of the cover, while, with the white further knocked back, black bulk text is accessible. I use this on the insides (below)...
...but a better example of this is the related A4 poster (for want of a better term) I put together of Jacob Polley's Welcome to your mouths and tongues (clicking this link will download the pdf). the method, but the way, is to use levels to increase the black and white (so the contrast) and then eliminate the grey. Then choose the dominant bits, turn it into a path, export the paths to illustrator, open in illustrator and fill the image with whatever colour you choose. You might have to play a little in illustrator, but that's okay.

Welcome to the Dance

Going through my portfolio, weeding out older stuff and found this, my first commission some eight or nine years ago. Welcome to the Dance is a book of writing produced in long term care in and around Bristol and was published by Poetry Can, Bristol's poetry development agency.

We were trying to give a sense of loneliness without despair. The disco ball in the corner and the light from the bottom right are meant to give a sense of hope and somewhere to go, a bit like dawn.

I wonder what Hester Cockroft is doing these days.

When you need a hand (Ms Diva's Khabaloush)

Ms Diva is a small but vital theatre company who devised a mad sounding play which took place last week (sorry, should have blogged this earlier) at the Contact Theatre in Manchester. Hanneke Blower, one of the principles was left in a spot, designing her own publicity at the last minute, so I offered some help and this is the result. A quick, but lovely job to do. Font is Unit Rounded.

Hope it went well, Hani.

Jenn Ashworth's All Stood Together

Late last week Jonathan at Litfest posted most, if not all, of Litfest and Flax's publishing output up on the writing social media space, scribd. Since then, the books, posters and what not have received a pretty good number of hits, the recently published Unsaid, Undone, for example, has been viewed 43 times in the last five days. Jenn Ashworth's All Stood Together poster (designed by yours truly) has been viewed a whopping 1500 times and counting in the same period.

Jenn's lovely very short fiction is one of six posters Flax published last November all of which can be viewed on the Poster Commissions page of Litfest's site. There are three poems and three short stories. If you like them you can download the A3 printable versions and print them at home – yep Flax are giving them away. And two are available for purchase.