Art Map Wolverhampton

Art Map Wolverhampton is an integral part of Project Dandelion, a public art project that enables new art commissions and projects to take place across secondary schools in Wolverhampton. Supported by Centro, Substrakt were brought on board to work alongside the students to produce a printed map and website showcasing art and culture across the city for visitors and residents.
We began the project by visiting the King’s CE school for workshops with the students. Over the sessions we introduced the students to various stocks, inks and finishes. We took samples to spark debate and presented existing maps to engage in discussions, using the feedback to work towards our design. Within their lessons, the students were producing artwork in response to public art within the city, which we were to incorporate into the map.
During the research the students realised they were keen to produce something that stood out from the other tourist maps; we explored different folds, introduced them to Pantone swatches and looked at various ways of illustrating Wolverhampton in a clean simple form that would translate into print and web.


We collated the students’ research and mapped out places of interest and public art onto a vector-illustrated map. Using tones of grey with fluorescent red and green we ensured a bold contrast, the grey representing the industrial city and brights celebrating the culture and vibrant art scene.

The result was 22k A2 art maps; 24pp printed black, Pantone 803 and 805 onto 130gsm uncoated stock.
The accompanying website is based on the visual style of the printed map, and expands on the initial idea and concept of Art Map Wolverhampton. Using the online version people have more information available to them, such as bus routes, transport type accessibility, links to further information on other websites and easily accessed directions through Google Map.

It's built on Wordpress to manage the content, Google Maps API 3 to generate, style and control the map & locations, and is responsive to the browser size & device being used. This means users on larger screens will see a scaled site, with larger images, larger maps and more info on screen, where as small screens still get to view the site at a scale more appropriate to their display. It also works with mobile, meaning people can take an optimised version of Art Map Wolverhampton with them to the art locations instead of, or as a companion to the printed map. www.artmapwolverhampton.co.uk

Cinemagraphs: What it looks like when a photo moves

It’s somewhere between a photo and a video, a piece of artwork that seeks to perfectly capture a fleeting moment in time.
New York City-based photographer Jamie Beck and Web designer Kevin Burg “hand-stitch” together her photos and his Web design to make animated gifs they now call “cinemagraphs.”

Beck and Burg first started making cinemagraphs at Fashion Week in New York earlier this year, spending a day or two to capture Vogue magazine’s Anna Wintour examining the catwalk, or the fluttering of a fashion model’s hair. People loved their work so much that Beck and Burg soon expanded to longer narratives, about how Dogfish Brewey makes its beer (below), or profiles that captured a moment in the life of a couple in love in Brooklyn (above). Companies even asked their help in making food come alive.
“It’s taken over our whole lives,” Beck says.
Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha was one of their earlier cinemagraphs:
Along with Anna Wintour:
Both artists say making cinemagraphs, which starts with a photo that becomes a .gif file and goes through Photoshop, have changed the way they think about their art.
“I was shooting a building to make a cinemagraph one day, and nothing moved. I thought, well this is dumb,” Beck says. “But then the light changed, a bird flew by, and I realized that everything is alive. I just had to start training my eye. I had to start visualizing cinemagraphs.”
Burg agrees. “I’m forced to learn new things every time I create a cinemagraph. I learn how to better control things, and how to better explain what’s happening in the picture.”
Both Beck and Burg live in New York and they now often make cinemagraphs that tell about a simple aspect of the city:
Some day, they hope to do a whole study on New York.
For now, they’re content with a month-long project they recently completed on Dogfish Brewery, in which they captured the strawberries, hand crushing, sorghum, and molasses that are all part of the beer-making process:
Burg says the favorite cinemagraph he’s created is of Beck on the top of Rockefeller Center in New York. “The motion is subtle, and it’s fairly simple, but I just love the angle of the shot.”
By Elizabeth Flock

The Comedy Carpet, Blackpool

Created by artist Gordon Young, with typography by Why Not Associates, the Comedy Carpet is a celebration of comedy on an extraordinary scale. Referring to the work of more than 1,000 comedians and comedy writers, the carpet gives visual form to jokes, songs and catchphrases dating from the early days of variety to the present. Sited in front of Blackpool Tower, the 2,200m2 work of art contains over 160,000 granite letters embedded into concrete, pushing the boundaries of public art and typography to their limits.
A remarkable homage to those who have made the nation laugh, it’s also a stage for popular entertainment that celebrates entertainment itself.
The £2.6m Comedy Carpet was commissioned by Blackpool Council as part of the multi-million pound regeneration of the sea front including vital sea defence works. It was funded by CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) as part of it’s Sea Change programme.

 With the tourists came the comedians – a double-act stretching from the teeming early music halls, through films by Gracie Fields and Frank Randle, end-of-the-pier matinées and risqué postcards, to the record-breaking Summer Seasons of the 1950s and 60s. In today’s twenty-first-century culture of Little Britain’s laydees and Leagues of Gentlemen – when it’s Peter Kay, not Charlie Cairoli, who packs the Tower – this town still lives and breathes laughter.

Commissioned by Blackpool Council and created by artist Gordon Young, with typography by Why Not Associates, the Comedy Carpet sits on the Tower Festival Headland in front of the Blackpool Tower. Crafted from granite and concrete, with over 160,000 individually cut letters, it is a unique celebration of comedy on an extraordinary scale, covering a staggering 2,200 square metres.
Here you’ll find the work of over 850 of the best comedians and writers of British comedy in a remarkable homage to those who have made our nation laugh. Every step offers you a catchphrase, gag, sketch or one-liner – from George Formby’s legendary sauce to a whiff of the Mighty Boosh’s soup. Underfoot, the silly, the side-splitting and the surreal: the Goons side-by-side with the Royles, Billy Connolly toe-to-toe with Tommy Cooper, Victoria Wood back-to-back with Lily Savage.

The design is inspired by the history of theatre posters and ‘bill matter’ and its content is as subjective as our sense of humour. There’s something for everybody – the hen party, the casino high rollers, the dirty weekenders… and your Auntie Elsie.
From this amazing location you can see all points of the comedy compass and – even now – Ken Dodd is revising his Giggle Map of the UK! The Great British public have always been ‘bovvered’ about their comedians – so where better to walk the talk than here on the Comedy Carpet?

Personalized QR Codes

At the How To Web conference in Romania this week, I moderated a panel discussion on mobile trends. The general view on stage was that QR codes were boring and passé but just a few hours later at the evening party, a group of developers were showing off an app that they hoped would change our minds.
QRhacker, created by a small team at Hungary-based Carnation Group, is a bit different from your average QR code generator Web app, allowing you to quickly and easily personalise the familiar square barcodes without the need for any Photoshop skills.
The first step is to choose whether your QR code will link to some text, a URL, a phone number or a Vcard containing your contact details. From there, it’s time to get customizing. You can give your code rounded edges, and change the background and foreground colors or even upload an image to be inserted into the background or overlaid across the code itself.

If you want to brand the code, you can upload a logo to insert into the design. You can even edit on a pixel-by-pixel basis, letting you ‘paint’ designs onto the canvas. While it’s easy to get carried away, the app will let you know when you’ve gone overboard with a little too much customization to the point when your QR code may be unreadable. Finished designs can be saved as a PDF or PNG file.
While I’m still not convinced about the long-term prospects for QR codes (advanced image and object recognition will replace them sooner than you might think), if I ever need to generate one it will be with this useful, well designed and fun app.

Digital agency builds a better city experience

Birmingham’s architecture is being showcased to city centre visitors through a new iPhone app that allows its users to access background information, imagery and guided tour routes of interesting landmarks whilst on the move.
BAApp: Walking Architecture, an iPhone app from the Birmingham Architectural Association (BAA), was created by digital media and design agency Substrakt, and utilises location-based technology to provide users with detailed information about particular buildings as they move through the city.
Andy Hartwell, managing director at Substrakt, said: “It was really important to create an application that appealed to both users who are interested in architecture, and the general public who either may have an interest in the buildings that they interact with on a day-to-day basis, or who are visiting and keen to learn more about their surroundings.
“BAApp: Walking Architecture is free to download and contains themed walking tours, such as a historical walk around some of Birmingham’s oldest buildings, providing users with an enjoyable, low-cost activity to participate in when visiting the city centre”.
Substrakt has also designed a website to accompany the app which allows users to easily create their own walking tours that can then be shared across social networking sites.
Gavin Orton, president of the Birmingham Architectural Association, said: “It is important for us to reach new audiences in Birmingham which is why we were keen to work with Substrakt. The team is based locally and has a proven track record of working with location-based applications in an innovative and exciting way that will appeal to lots of different types of people.”
The app was created in partnership between the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Birmingham Architectural Association and the Birmingham Five Counties Architectural Association (BFCAA).
For more information about the services that Substrakt offer, please visit their website.