Buy my stuff!

For the past 2 months I've been designing and producing 21 products that will hopefully all be sold at the pop-up shop that we've set up to raise money for next year's graduation show. This pop-up shop isn't just a fundraiser but it's also our end of the year project. It was all about 'the designer as producer.' It's been hella intense at times but it was fun and I learn a lot too this term. We all had to keep blog-diaries and having the opportunity of following the work-processes of a 100-something other students, step-by-step, was so helpful. I wanted to get away from the magazine/book/poster design niche for a bit so I thought I'd get crafty again and designed a herbal pillow that functions as a natural sleeping aid. (This involved a lot of Laura Ashley-ing; buying and testing textiles and herbs, -pastel- color matching, sewing, excuses for trips to Liberty's...;) For this project I've played with the concept of worrying about environmental damage and not being able to sleep because of it. I've always been a fan of pandas, so I took this occasion to create a product dedicated to one of the most endangered species out there. The Giant Panda is also the international symbol of conservation, £0.50 of every herbal pillow sold will be donated to the WWF. So yesterday we had to hand-in 1 boxed item with a step-by-step instruction sheet and a product photograph for evaluation and 1.5 kg. lavender, 1 kg. lentils, 500 gr. cloves, 4m2 satin, 1m2 cotton, 1m2 felt, 80 m cotton thread,  5 sheets transfer-paper, 30 sheets sugar paper, 35 brown paper bags, 5 hours image research, 10 hours silkscreen printing, 25 hours hand stitching, 8 prototypes, 1 Martha Steward bitch fit, 2 lovely tension-releasing dates and about 100 change-of-plans later, it may as well be called official; my 2nd year is over! I'll be a 3rd year student for the first time ever and if all goes well I'll be graduate next year, which is a big first for me too. In other news, my previous boss (the creative director at the Jewish Chronicle) thought I was graduating coming June and offered me a job for a year as one of their art directors was going on maternity leave! How great is that? I'm soso thankful for these people. But I'm not graduating this year, let's just hope that next year job offers will come at me just as easily :)

Here they are; my 21 herbal pillows, lined up as proud little environmental activists . The bags, notes and pillows are all hand cut, hand silkscreen printed and hand stitched and go for £10 a pop. So buy my herbal pillows; help the Giant Panda and help me graduate.

Product prepared for final hand-in

And here's a bit of my workprocess.

Context inspiration.

End of term rant.

My MBP crashed last week. Great timing. I'm now in my rehearsal/deadline week and this completely messed up my routine. It's actually a bit ridiculous; even though I've managed to borrow a MB for the week, (big thanks to Marcus & Tyrone) I'm nervous and can't eat or sleep right. I've had to re-photograph most of my work and redesign my presentation, not to mention the agony of having to re-write context. Can you see the big, angry raised up middle finger growing out of my forehead yet? Thankfully my presentation rehearsal went reasonably well today. (see selection of pdf thumbnails below, don't pay attention to the rubbish blurbs.) Now I'm going to finish context and get rid of this god-awful feeling in my belly. DO IT DO IT DO IT!

Homework II.

Pierre Soulages is also known as "the painter of black" because of his interest in the colour, "...both a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens up a mental field all of its own". He sees light as a matter to work with; striations of the black surface of his paintings enables him to make the light reflect, allowing the black to come out from darkness and into brightness, thereby becoming a luminous colour.

Word. You better recognize.

For a brief I had to collect a minimum of 50 and a maximum of 100 texts (or images). I was stuck for about 2 weeks. I then decided to pull the self-indulgence card so I collected 100 black things I own (yeah, not so hard) and had a little improvised photoshoot. Yay, photography + everything black = pins&needles&fun! After editing I ended up with 4 A3 5x5 grids of black stuff. Oh how purdy, I thought at first. But the longer I looked at and mulled over the collection, the more sickening the sight of it became. I felt that I had somehow managed to sum up my obsessions, wants, preferences, characteristics, virtues and vices with a visual collection of a bunch of stuff. So with the realization that this is actually all just stuff and it wouldn't necessarily have to be my stuff, I distanced myself from this collection as it being a personal collection and made the project about the material consequences of everything we experience and every decision we make. Aesthetically the blackness worked to the concepts advantage, so I was lucky. For the final crit I did a full color A1 poster, (see below). It's a first draft, it needs typographic changes and a little less obviousness. Will keep you posted on the end result.

Thinking Design presents Talk 14: Zamir & Antoine / 17 February / 4.30 PM / G12

Yeah, this'll be printed on A3 ascetate with a colored backdroppish version of the same placed behind it, but you get the point. Thank god for your effortless GDDANG EARLY morning coffee & push seshes Cole, you rule. :) x (And also much love to the Square Group for getting me my laptop back in no less than 3 working days. Go to them if you have a MacBookPro that suffers from Black Screen of Death, they're much faster at dealing with it then Apple's Genius bar.)

Homework.

The lovely art direction brief is over, time a for a break. BNZL wishes Andreas Christie Ryalen all the best for his future projects! x

A selection of spreads from our little magazine project.

Not quite yet...

I know some of you are still waiting for more Indo photos. And yes I really really really want to post them but I just can't seem to find the time nor the peace or will to do simple tasks like these. My jetlag decided to linger about longer than I'd wished for, resulting in wanting to sleep at 8 PM and waking up at 4 AM for almost a week. When I'm awake I'm mostly occupied with trying to work hard on uni stuff, catching up and annoyingly enough, obsessing over lesser important and outright futile shit. Getting back on track has been harder than I expected it to be. And when I do find the time to sit down and get cracking my mind wanders of and I draw or end up listening to Erik Satie's Gymnopedies on repeat while lying on my sofa, staring at my ceiling. I'm still very much enjoying the memories of my journey and have come to the conclusion that I have become a happier person but I guess I'm just being (necessarily but temporarily) lame. So, I've given up on trying to work/play/live at the pace that I used to and have given into doing whatever my personal rythm allows me to do. For now. Please be patient, those photos will appear here at some stage. Here are some random photos of what I have actually been doing since my return. x

My favourite Gymnopedie at the moment:


For a while I've been visually obsessed with everything black&gold, these are some of my purse contents. I also keep a handfull of shelves that I picked up from Saparua beach in my bag, I like their texture and the sound they make when I play with them.

I'm doing a collab magazine design brief for uni. I've been to several bookshops and at Claire De Rouen's, where I've been drooling over the amazing collection of books and (exclusive) fan- and magazines the have in stock, my magmate introduced me to Swedish made Acne Paper. The combination of carefully selected subjects, choice of paper and simple binding makes my pills pop. So does (the paper stock of) Exponere. We also went sample shopping for our own magazine.

A hint of some work I've done for the project so far. (This includes doing a typeface out of homo-erotic imagery that I haven't posted up here yet.)

Some old and new late night doodling.

Identity experiment 1

For a while I've been trying to design an identity for myself. It's hard and I haven't been able to make my mind up yet so I've decided to post some experiments up on here.

Transatlantic Consequences

GPO: Modernism & Design - Paul Rennie - 18th November - 4.30 pm G12 - Southampton Row

I picked up the lecture postcards/invitations from the letterpress studio. They turned out so beautiful and precious, these photos are not doing them any justice. I had a hard time distributing them as I just wanted to carry the stacks around all day long and secretly reach into my bag during crits and feel the texture of the rich manilla clothy card and the relief of the letters. Only slightly geekily obsessed. x

Mine:




Magdalena Sobczynska's:

Homework.

Here's some of the stuff I've been working on during the past 2 months.