What type are you?

Answer 4 simple questions and you'll be told by Pentagram's What Type Are You what kind of type(face) you are. I turns out that I am Pistilli Roman... YES!

"Pistilli Roman

Co-designed by Lubalin and Pistilli in the 1950's; Pistilli Roman is a typeface that combines a disciplined form, notable in the ultra fine lines, carefully joining the bold ones with an emotional geometry notable in the curling circles. If you always demand that things be in order and then are always incredibly moved when they are, Pistilli Roman is your type."

Ha amazing, very true. It's funny though, I've loved this typeface for many a year and now to discover that I am this type(face).... how big of a narcissist am I huh?

Unfortunately it's not available digitally. However, Veer has released a digital revival of an old Didone style (in the style of 2 other super beautiful typefaces Bodoni and Didot) photo-typepositing face. It's called Eloquent and it's based on Pistilli Roman. "This new digital version evokes late 1960s magazine advertising, and includes the rarely seen swash variant, and features several newly created alternate swash caps (A, J, Q, Z, M, K,R) and one new alternate lowercase swash and several lowercase ligatures. The font contains both lining figures and old style figures." A very handsome typeface.

More Hanking

I found some really beautiful typography in an old issue of Harper's Bazaar (I'm now also totally hooked on magazine typography) and did this typo drawing based on it. (This is actually more of a sketch, it's hand drawn, scanned and I still need to trace and tweak it. Which I probably won't do because it's really just practice. And I shipped my tablet off to the Netherlands. And seriously, fuck digital enhancing with a mouse.) Can't decide wether to go with the original black on white or vice versa. You choose. x

Hank is back

For those of you who remember Hank, bird of Paradise, he came to visit me in my dreams quite a bit over the past few weeks. Last night in my dream I was carelessly prancing through Hank's bizarre forrest with aquamarine orchids in my black shiny hair wearing a broken white kebaya that my grandmother had made me. Suddenly I felt a thump on my head and black ink poured all over me. On the ground lay a huge Stabilo. I was like "Wtf?" and when I looked up, I saw Hank, in all his splendid glory, sitting on a branch above me. With a friendly but Behold-The-Metatron!-impact-like voice he told me that now that I've got no excuse to stress about anything and have no work to do until the end of the month I should practice my drawing. And work on my typography.  Or else he'd kick my ass.

We raised £7.500

This amount matched by Saint Martins means we have £15.000 to spend on our graduation show next year. (so far ;) It's over y'all, what an interesting / lovely / chickenballbusting week it was. Safe travels home everyone. x

BNZL in the shop by Catriona Maciver & Michael Faggiani

The Box

In high school I struggled my way through Sartre's Huis Clos (No Exit) as part of French class. Last year when I was doing some personal research I was reminded of the play again and then stumbled upon a sci-fi/thriller/horror flick called "The Box", Richard Kelly's (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales) adaptation of "Button Button", a short novel written by Richard Matheson. (What Dream May Come, I Am Legend) Now wether the references to Sartre's ideas in this film do his philosophies justice I'm not quite sure of, there are some clever and subtle visual references, but the film kinda ends up being a melodramatic blockbuster with stories left untold. But at the time I was watching it I found it super enjoyable. It's one of those films that I can just watch over and over again just for it's aesthetics. Anyway, since getting familiar with Eric Rosenberg's work for the movie and television industry I've been more consciously looking at graphic design and composition in films and tv-series than I have before. I did this post to show some stills of The Box, which I think I watched over 3 times now. I love the visuals and cinematography, highly inspirational. Much love to cinematographer Steven Poster (who was also 2nd Unit Director of Photography on Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) for making this film so visually scrumptious.

London/Amsterdam/New York

I'm flying home in 2 weeks which is really exciting because I get to hang with my friends and family and be shamelessly "Dutch" (my attitude described by London friends) again. But I will be missing London like crazy, I'm still here and I kinda miss it and it's metropolitan awesomeness already. It's all self-inflicted pre-conceived melancholy, I know. I'm very good at it. During the past few days I've just been so enthused about all that's coming up;  Amsterdam, my final year at college, graduation and then the so called real world; finding work, paying tax, paying off student debts, getting drivers license, trying not to get in car accidents. I think I've kinda made a decision about what I really want and what I'll be focussing on next year, next to graduating. It's a broad idea really. I think I might apply for a Master degree in either London (Royal College of Art) or Amsterdam (Sandberg Institute) OR look for a job in either London, Amsterdam or New York. One of my really good friends here in London is going to New York to be with her man for the summer and I'm trying to fly my arse over there as well sometime soon to visit them and the OTHER best city in the world. ;) Is it naive to think that now I've lived in London for about 2 years, have even been offered a job, it's safe to assume that I'll get to a standard of surviving/getting by in New York on my own as well? Because that's kinda how I'm feeling right now. Bold and brazen haha. I get the same feeling from that place as I get from London. As for going to Amsterdam, it's so much closer to friends and family than anywhere else I'd consider living/working/studying and that's gradually becoming more important to me. It's definitely a cool city but it's relatively small and I might get tired of it really quickly. I think I can handle 3 months though. So in all, I'm not quite sure yet. Either way, I feel like I'm getting closer to doing all the things that I wanted to do when I was younger; frequent changes of scenery & work/study in different places. Just knowing that I, well a lot of people in my vicinity for that matter, have the opportunity to do those things if we really want to do them makes me feel much less heavy and trapped. That feeling alone is worth a fat grin. 

These London as seen by night aerial photographs by Jason Hawkes aren't new but I've only seen the whole series a few days ago and I really wanted to share them with you in case you hadn't seen them yet. They make me feel extra good about living here. :) 

CSM Pop-up shop launch

The shop officially launched yesterday evening. It was cold, dark and raining but it was fuuucking crowded. It was so good to see soooo many people showing up regardless of the dirtydirty weather! I'm so sorry about the whack photos but the poison was flowing freely and I spilt vodka all over my pretty ochre colored dress and I still can't find my SB-900 and blehblehbleh. But honestly, who cares! Great music, great people, great stuff for sale and we raised £2600 that night :) x

My favorite things from CSM pop-up shop!

There is a lot of really lovely stuff for sale but I only had about £20 to spend so I only bought 3 objects that I coveted the most from the beginning. They're one of Kar Mun Ho's pill boxes and one of Lucy Verrechia's handmade woolen bookbag and information booklet. (By the way, I'm a bit of a pattern&colorblocking freak so I think these 2 products look phat together) I had them both wrapped up in Sophie Sampson's giftwrapping. Awesome work guys, soso proud! x 

Sophie's product for the shop was a gift-wrapping service, such a brilliant idea! She screen-printed 21 ribbons with all our names on them (they also kinda function as businesscards for BAGD2 too) and had our logo printed on the paper and stickers. She did well, her product sold out on the second day. 

Kar's product is a medical box classification system. She designed packaging for 7 different existing drugs with the intent of "re-selling" the drugs for their side-effects rather than their actual purpose. She's obviously not selling the pills for real but I really like the concept and I veryveryvery much like the graphics.

Lucy designed a woolen bookbag, it comes in 3 colors with different patterns on them. Its concept stems from research into book preservation and in particular the ways that we can look after our book collection. I LOVE IT; the concept, the execution (I've somehow developed a craving for fluorescent pink detailed objects), the pattern, the material and the fact that it's made to fit 2 A5 Moleskin notebooks, and I've been looking for something to carry my sketch/scribble Moles around as a set, for ages. Needless to say, Lucy's done brilliant, she sold out on second day aswel!

Setting up CSM pop-up shop

In approximately 3 days the interior team managed to decorate and stock the whole venue with our 2060 products. We had our first customer when we were still busy setting up the shop, there were a lot of curious passerby's who walked in without knowing who we were and what we were doing, so location wise we're blessed. (We're only a 10 minute walk from Holborn tubestation so we are pretty central.) We opened the shop on 31 May and we sold £500 worth of products within the first four hours of opening.