The London 2012 Olympics

I’d like to get right to the heart of the upcoming olympics and say a few unpoetic, yet pertinent words, through that powerful medium the poster.

The London 2012 Olympics

The London 2012 Olympics

Fuck the Olympics, Fuck the tube delays, Fuck the huge waste of money, Fuck the swimming team, Fuck the canoeists team, Fuck the curling team, Fuck the horse jumping team, Fuck the yachting team, Fuck the rowing team, Fuck the javelin, Fuck the shot put, Fuck the discus, Fuck the hurdles, Fuck the long jump, the short jump and the high jump, Fuck the opening event, Fuck the Olympic committee, Fuck the sponsors, Fuck the McCartney ‘designed’ slutty outfits that look like the bottom half will ride up all the athletes butts, Fuck the shitty advertising (except the illustrated tube posters. Those are rather good), Fuck the crappy logo designed by a group of morons trying to be ‘street’, Fuck the athletes going on talk shows to constantly bore us with their ‘training schedule’ stories, Like anyone gives a crap, Fuck the sponsors, Fuck the mascots, Fuck the raise in prices, Fuck the cuts to the arts, Fuck the BS, Fuck it. All of it.

Enthu Cutlet Update

Enthu Cutlet T-Shirts

Enthu Cutlet Skins

Update:

Prints (Framed, Unframed, Stretched Canvas), T-Shirts, Sweatshirts Laptop & iPhone skins of Enthu Cutlet now available!

Boy do I feel like a proper legit business type person.

I’ll put more of my usual stuff up over time.

All this enthu-ness has exhausted me.

Travel Guides: Website Design

Continuing the Travel Guide posts here’s the website I designed for them. (Click images to view actual size.)

There are 2 small tabs at the top that switch the website from white to black.

I can’t put up the links yet because this website is taking AGES to build. (It has to be slotted in-between paying projects. Whaddya gonna do?)

Black Version. Click to view actual size.

White Version. Click to view actual size.

Typography Exploration for Travel Guides: Round 2

So here we go, following the previous round of travel guides typography/image exploration these are for Buenos Aires & Monaco.

I really tried hard to be more creative with the typography for these 2 although I got placed a more pressing (and duller) project  while the intern was left to finish 2 of the images for Monaco

DAMN HER! THAT WAS MY BABY!!

Anyway most of the images are from Flickr (since these guides are free) except now that the EVIL and highly priced Getty has its mucky little paws all over the internet’s image libraries, it has grown increasingly hard to find images under the creative commons. (Or as I know it – Theft.)

Also you really need to be careful when using Flickr’s Creative Commons to correctly credit the images or ask for permission, depending on the author’s permission preferences. Except most people on Flickr don’t bother to check their messages. So don’t expect replies in under less than a month.

I made this AMAZING excel spread sheet of every image I downloaded from flick: Name of the file, guide it was for, Creator name, Link and even Common notes. Don’t you love using excel for these mind numbing ordering tasks that you secretly quite enjoy? Well I sure do!

(Mumbai, Goa, Kerala, Copenhagen, Amsterdam guides are already up and running. Click here for the links.)

Buenos Aires & Monaco: Click to see any large. Image credits below. 

BA Image Credits:

  1. Content: Textures by Kim Long
  2. Stay: La Boca by Matt Gillman
  3. Eat: Ricos Tacos! by Matt Gillman
  4. Drink: Martinipalooza 30 by Tom Hilton
  5. Play: Sunset (almost night) by Flavio Ensiki
  6. Do: Tango show in Buenos Aires by Jennifer
  7. Perfect Weekend: Recoleta Cemetery by Kyle Lease
  8. Local Knowledge: Buenos Aires a las seis de la mañana by Joao Vicente
  9. Contributors: Flor en la Parque by Matt Gillman

Monaco Image Credits:

  1. Stay: Monaco Panorama by Paul Downey
  2. Eat: Petit déjeuner complet by Everjean
  3. Drink: Bubbly by Quinn Dombrowski
  4. Play: Destiny by Dave Gough
  5. Perfect Weekend: Mar em Monaco by Jhcaputi
  6. Local Knowledge: Monte Carlo casino, Monaco by Julian Fon

Work Update: The Intern

Summer Sky, Near the Tesco in Soho Square.

I’m trying to cultivate more patience with the new intern. I rarely have patience with interns.

I don’t know why, considering I was an intern only a little while ago and a fairly duff one at that I’m sure.

During the first few months of my first job, my boss yelled at me a lot for getting things wrong. He even made me cry once (I cread privately of course. You can’t be bawling in an office. So not done.)

My job entailed setting up an email newsletter that got sent to 25,000 people. I knew NOTHING about html, newsletters, coding or designing for web before I started working there. At one point he was essentially re-doing everything I had spent an age on. He was a little controlling but still, that’s never a good sign.

I had months of email related paranoia – I’d be checking my email constantly worrying that an irate email would suddenly pop up scolding me for some hideous gaff I’d made. Mornings and late night were especially nerve-racking.

In the beginning sometimes my code would be dodgy, links would be wrong, I’d schedule something to go live at the wrong time and then I’d get furious emails at all sorts of hours along the lines of

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE???? FIX IT! FIX IT NOW!!!”

So this new intern is a recently graduated B.A. art student who’s very inexperienced and therefore needs a lot of hand holding. This means a lot of corrections, multiple notes back and forth, double checking everything and general frustration all around.

I can now sympathize with my first boss yelling at me. I must have been a really, really annoying intern. I’m glad they didn’t sack me, because I eventually shaped up (thank god!).

I do feel guilty that I’m so intolerant of someone who I was exactly like a little while ago.

Additionally I have a tendency to rush instructions and/or explanations, which means generally they come out entirely garbled.

So even though it’s my fault for being unclear, I then I feel quite irritated by the utterly blank expression on the interns face.

Can’t the intern just pretend to understand what I’m saying???

Some facial expression of some kind??

Is that so unreasonable?

Travel Guides

At long last, these guides are complete. My company is also doing a free app which looks pretty good (I think so anyway)

Design of the Flashbooks by Paul. Content for Goa, Kerala, Amsterdam & Copenhagen by Mr. Mirani, Mumbai and Moscow content by me. Coding by Hannan. All images by me. (That was the fun part.)

Feel free to let me know if any of the listings are incorrect or just plain garbage.

Goa: Click image to view guide

Kerala: Click image to view guide

Mumbai: Click image to view guide

Amsterdam: Click image to view guide

Copenhagen: Click image to view guide

Moscow: Click image to view guide

9 Mothers

Fairy Tale Kings X. This photo (I think) has a magical fairy tale quality. No?

I’m very behind on all my blogging. I’m still organising all my Espain holiday photos. There’s something very enjoyable about organising things, especially photos.

Colour correcting and renaming and multiple folders and colour coding. Mmmmm colour coding. On a more geeky note I finally figured out how to use Automator.

Until I finally sort out the 700 or so photos me and the trigger happy ex took, a brief work update:

The new app dev team (Russia) told us they could do the app but it would take 51 days using 30 developers.

My boss tried to persuade them to speed up the process.

“If you put 80 developers on the project could we bring the time down to 30 days?”

Svetlana (the team leader) replies in true Russki fashion,

“Even 9 mothers cannot give birth to a child in 1 month.”

My boss had to to concede she had a good point.

It’s hard to argue with a Russian proverb.

Work Update

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I’ve accidentally on purpose stopped paying for the hosting package for my website. (Streamline.net)

They’ve sent me 2 emails. One suspending my account, the other telling me my website will shortly be booted off.

Pffft like whateveas. You don’t scare me you fucking crooks.

I had a big fight with them 2 years ago when I found out they had doubled my yearly cost while at the same time inviting new customers to join with some seriously dirt cheap 2 year rate. I was furious.

So I called them up and yelled about how they didn’t give a shit about their existing customers and asked them if they were just going to screw me over.

They said yes.

It was too much trouble to move, and I couldn’t cancel payment.

But NOW I will. Assholes.

My website is flash anyway. I like it but flash is a pain to manually update. It hasn’t been updated in about a year now.

I prefer my wordpress blog, although it’s far from ideal. Sigh. What to do? I need a good free, content manageable website template. So far Behance has probably been the best.

Went to a client meeting and even though it was pretty warm I couldn’t take off my coat because my sweater had a hole smack bang in the middle over my right breast. That kind of thing never leaves a good impression.

I’ve been getting various emails at work spelling my name wrong. Not from people emailing the first time but from people who I’ve emailed back and forth repeatedly

The app developer called Jorma, who is pissing me off no end, with his shoddy coding and inattention to detail keeps sending me emails titled: ‘Jamine’ or ‘Janie’ or ‘Janice’ or ‘Jamie’

Instead of telling any of these people to spell my name right, I rather passive-aggressively started responding to their emails with their names spelt wrong, trying as far as possible to make it look accidental but simultaneously using the letters they got wrong in my name to misspell their name.

You get me?

So in response to L. Harry’s email calling me ‘Jamie’, I began his email with:

“Dear L. Hami…”

While an email to the app developer Jorma (who called me ‘Janice’) was:

“Dear Jorna,

Thank you for your shoddy email, your worthless code and your frankly rotten work ethic.

Please fucking spell my name right you cunt.

Kind Regards,
Janine”

I only wish I could be so forthright. The only part of the correspondence above that is true is the opening and closer.

I don’t know if it worked or if they noticed but I enjoyed making a subtle point (well in my own brain anyway.)

This developer has been inconsistent, communicated poorly, skiving constantly and refused to work from the London office. He has also missed every single deadline set.

The boss had to tell him to pull it together man, stop crying (he actually cried) and just finish this project.

Uphill work.

Typography Explorations for Travel Guides

Having studied illustration, by far the most jobless course ever created (No job post graduation but brilliant fun at the time), I know very little about typography.

In fact I widely shunned typography work at our end of year exhibitions. The typography crits were by far the most uninteresting crits in the world.

I just can’t fake enthusiasm for ligature and kerning. I really can’t.

But I’m warming to it, and I wish now, that I knew more. (Unfortunately I still find reading about it as deadly dull as I ever did. Really, kerning, I mean how interesting can that get? Or line spacing for that matter?)

The images below are for work, as part of a iPhone travel guide series of various cities. Originally started out as just pictures with a line or two of information about the place.

That evolved into quotes, and over time the fun of making them interesting to look at took over, and now I spend far too long on these at work.

Monaco, Moscow and Buenos Aires coming soon.

Click to view large