Maggie’s Centres are places where people affected by cancer are welcome whenever they need support – from just being diagnosed, or undergoing treatment, to post-treatment, recurrence, end of life or in bereavement.

A £3million centre has recently been completed at the City Hospital Campus at Nottingham University. The architect, Piers Gough CBE, was a personal friend of Maggie Keswick Jencks, and is famous for his bold and imaginative architecture. Nottingham born Sir Paul Smith has designed the interior.

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Cancer, Maggie's Centres, Nottingham, Paul Smith, Piers Gough

I attended the Typo London conference last week. The event which hosted a wide range of speakers from Neville Brody to Lawrence Weiner, had the theme of ‘Places’ but to be honest was much broader than that. It was brilliantly facilitated by Erik Spiekermann and Adrian Shaughnessy (among others) and was easily the best conference I’ve been to in some time. One of the best things about it was that most of the speakers stayed for the duration and watched the other presentation, which created a real feel of community.

It’s the first time this event has been held in England, having previously been in Berlin and judging by the feedback from everyone, it looks like it’s going to return to the capital next year. I will be putting together a presentation covering all the amazing talks which will be shared here but for the time being here’s additional reading about it from Creative Review and Design Assembly.

Conference, Places, Typo 11

These are a selection of illustrations by Will Haywood who recently visited Linney Design to show us his portfolio. He has a very unique style and some great work. What are your thoughts?

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Illustrator, Print, Will Haywood

Life & Fate TVC from devilfish on Vimeo.

I’m a sucker for all things Saul Bass inspired, and this TV ad for BBC4’s dramatisation of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate is particularly good. Illustrations were by Ben Newman, the ad was produced by Wonky Films.

BBC4, Life and Fate, Saul Bass, TV, Vasily Grossman

Cheeming Boey is a cartoonist whose medium of choice is the Styrofoam cup. While seemingly innocuous, original Boey’s routinely sell for hundreds of dollars, sometimes even over $1,000. Trained in computer animation, Boey found himself in a coffee bar without any paper, so he doodled on a discarded polystyrene coffee cup. Boey’s drawings often take the form of some kind of narrative or theme, such as Japanese woodcut art, and have become so popular that he is a spokesperson used in promotional campaigns for Sharpie permanent markers.
Thanks to Comics Alliance – see more of his cup art here

Cheeming Boey, Styrofoam

A stratochrome is an image or object developed or executed in multiple planes or layers of colour’. Chinese artist Xia Xiaowan has produced these amazing pieces of art using paint on multiple layers of glass, creating a surreal holographic experience for the viewer. While his choice of imagery is a little scary, it’s ideal for this medium. His pieces seem to take on the feel of scientific exhibits suspended in jars. (more…)

David Spriggs, Stratochrome, Xia Xiaowan

Compressed 02 from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo.

Compressed 01 from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo.

A couple of intriguing other-worldly films created by Kim Pimmel using ferrous printer toner and water. The magnetic properties allow the ink to be manipulated using magnets. Beautifully shot, the ink weaves its way through the complex structure of soap bubbles and creates strangely ordered and uniform patterns as it moves to the magnetic force.

More info can be found on Kimm Pimmel’s Vimeo profile

Kim Pimmel, Science, Time lapse, Vimeo

Believe it or not, this image has been created, from scratch, using only Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Bert Monroy took over 2,000 hours to create this hyper-real rendering of Damen Station in Chicago (measuring 120 inches wide x 40 inches high and weighing in at just over 1.7 gigabytes), using almost 50 separate Photoshop files containing over 15,000 layers, 500 alpha channels and over 250,000 vector paths. While this undoubtedly demonstrates Bert’s astounding digital skills, someone should really buy the poor guy a decent camera.

You can see more of his work at BertMonroy.com

Bert Monroy, Digital Art, Illustrator, Photoshop

Object Abuse is the latest exhibition at the KK Outlet in London, featuring work by leading designers and artists including Wilfrid Wood, Noma Bar and Hudson Powell. The project aims to take everyday objects and recycle them into something new (and useful), using little or no additional materials. These paintbrushes repurposed as coat hooks are particular favourites of mine:

More details and examples can be found at the full Creative Review post, and at KKOutlet.com

Creative Review, Dominic Wilcox, Exhibition, KK Outlet, London, Max Lamb, Noma Bar, Object Abuse

I visited Yorkshire Sculpture Park over the bank holiday weekend, and there are some fantastic temporary installations on there at the moment. Jaume Plensa’s enormous figures built from typographic characters from different cultures are beautiful, especially when viewed up close, and the scale models on display are equally interesting for their intricacy and the way the artificial lighting interacts with their forms.

But for me, Aeneas Wilder’s work really steals the show. Untitled #155 is a free-standing structure built from 10,000 equally sized pieces of wood destined for parquet flooring, supported by nothing more than their own weight – no glue, no nails, no fixings. There’s an amazing sense of scale and fragility, and the fact that viewers are able to walk right up to the structure (no touching!) is brilliant. The installation reaches its climax on 3rd November with a big ‘Kick Down’.

Well worth a visit if you’re looking for something to do this weekend. I’ll post a few pics shortly.

Aeneas Wilder, Jaume Plensa, Untitled #155, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, YSP