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I know this going to sound a bit bourgeois, as it’s about fine food, but I was so impressed on a recent visit to France that I felt it needed writing down.

 

I don’t profess to be an expert gourmet or a connoisseur of fine wine, but I know when something is really good, and this was it.

 

The last couple of years in England have seen the opening of a proliferation of gastro pubs and celebrity chef restaurants, particularly in the area I live in. The quality and service of these establishments are generally pretty good, but the impact on the wallet can be quite damaging. And the more serious the places take themselves the more the bill goes up.

 

So how refreshing to find an antidote. We discovered this restaurant through the recommendation of a friend who lives in France and this was the second time we’d been there.  I thought from the first visit that we might have just got lucky but the second visit confirmed how excellent it was. The environment is charming; the service perfect - low key, but not pretentious; the food fabulous; the wine list (well, French) and the cost unbelievable.

 

Although I can’t share the taste experience, I can the visual one. And the cost?

 

18.50€ for the 3 course lunch (that’s about £12.50)

 

If you’ve read this and want to know where it is leave a comment!

Muse 'Absolution' by Storm Thorgerson

 

I’m a great fan of Storm’s work and have been keen to get more examples onto the walls of Hypergallery.

 

In case you aren’t familiar with him or his prodigious output of music related art, you can read the Wikipedia entry here.

 

Three years ago Storm suffered a stroke and his recovery from that life threatening illness has been remarkable. Considering that a stroke affects the brain, it certainly doesn’t seem to have affected his creativity or his artistic temperament!

 

So it was with interest that I read that Muse have been voted best British band at the annual NME Awards last night. These awards are one of the few to be exclusively voted for by the public and the band beat favourites Oasis and Arctic Monkeys to the winning post.

 

Storm created the covers for Muse’s 2003 ‘Absolution’ album, 2004 ‘Butterflies And Hurricanes’ single and 2006 ‘Black Holes and Revelations’ album. They are all great pieces of work and typical of his art. In Storm’s words:  “we give performances... not unlike the musicians for whom we work, be they on the stage or in the studio, up to and including various computer drop ins and repairs. But ours are visual - they are done for the camera, otherwise no one would ever see them.”

 

Apart from the twelve Pink Floyd album covers we did with Storm and his involvement in the Led Zeppelin covers, I have now published nine other pieces on the Hypergallery site, including ‘Absolution’.

 

I’m sure that ‘Black Holes and Revelations’ will find its way onto fine art paper at some point in the future, we must just be patient.

 

The first computers I ever encountered were big mainframe monoliths way back in the early 70s. At the time I worked for Honeywell Information Systems, who were known then as the ‘other computer company’ – what an amazing evolution has taken place from then to now!

 

By the time I was running my own business in the 80s, computing had become ‘personal’ and we were early adopters of the IBM PC with 256K of memory.

 

Since then I have stuck religiously with the PC, and subsequently Windows format. For our business it has made absolute sense, as our customers exclusively employ this platform and the tools we use all perform perfectly on it.

 

All through the 25 years I’ve been in business though I have constantly had the "PCs are crap, Macs are wonderful" argument thrown at me. And I have robustly defended the PC.

 

Then late last year I decided that I wanted to digitise my library of home videos and realised that my home PC, though perfectly adequate as a home-business machine, would need serious updating or replacing to deal with the kind of processing demands that this would entail. After some research and good advice I finally succumbed and decided to purchase an iMac.

 

This was on the basis that:

• It came with some very good tools for the video amateur (me).
• It was going to sit in my front room, not my home-office, so look/design was important.

I haven’t been disappointed and after a little initial alienation I’ve got used to the Mac OS. Also it’s doing the job I bought it for very well and it is definitely a design statement in my house.

 

However, what’s been very interesting is that now I am a user on both sides of the camp and can argue my case even more effectively than before. All the rubbish about how user friendly the Mac is, how much faster, how it never crashes, how it works out of the box etc etc is all just propaganda (very good propaganda of course – the ads are very amusing).

 

I’ve had some inexplicable issues with everything freezing, lots of annoying wizzy things happening as a result of a mouse click that I could really do without, huge frustration with its file management, and as far as how fast it is, it’s no different from the high-spec PCs we use in the studio.

 

All in all, they are both just personal computers, the result of 30 odd years of development by extremely clever people, but both are at pretty much the same stage of sophistication.

 

Signals will certainly be sticking to the PC platform for the foreseeable future.

 

The Mac does look good though!

David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust by Terry Pastor

My colleague Symon Bland has been very busy broadening the portfolio of album cover artwork published as limited edition fine art prints.

His latest coup is two really famous David Bowie covers, Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory. Both were designed by Terry Pastor, who has art directed the creation of the prints and of course has signed the editions.

 

What is even better is that Symon has managed to get David Bowie to sign them as well. This is a real bonus as artistes of that stature are not usually willing to do so. And this of course adds real value to the print and to its viability as an investment.

 

A few years ago Eric Clapton signed a Peter Blake edition of his 24 Nights cover, and the few prints that are left from that edition are now selling for £3,500 compared to an original price of £250.

 

I’m really pleased that I’m able to offer these prints for sale, currently Ziggy Stardust is on the Hypergallery site and I expect the publication of Hunky Dory in the next few weeks.

Digital Briefcase comes alive

My colleague Chris Trevallion has written a very good piece on the Signals blog, about the perils of do-it-yourself design in a corporate environment.

 

Following up on that theme I’m very pleased that we are getting a fantastic response to the conversations we’ve been having about our Digital Briefcase software. It’s a difficult thing to get across because as soon as you mention ‘presentation software’ everybody thinks it’s an alternative to PowerPoint. Well that certainly isn’t what it is; in fact Digital Briefcase is a complement to PowerPoint. Of course we are all aware and have been subject to ‘Death by PowerPoint’, but that phrase is about the content and the way that it has been written, designed and formatted, not the vehicle that has been chosen to host the content. I have to say that I’ve been a PowerPoint user since it first appeared, (which I think predates the formation of Signals, so must have been at my last company, RS2) and I am a great advocate of this much maligned software.

 

What Digital Briefcase does is allow instant access, from a well designed, branded interactive interface, to launch any kind of digital file. In a presentation context that’s likely to be PowerPoint shows, videos, PDFs, Flash movies. But it could be Excel spreadsheets, web sites, databases, in fact it’s whatever is (or could be) appropriate in the context of the presentation environment you are in. It’s dead easy to use and makes you look like you’ve been planning it all for weeks and have spent a fortune with a digital agency. In fact as one of our clients so eloquently put it –“I can now put a professional, slick portfolio of presentation material together in the taxi on the way to my meeting, it’s presentation wizardry”

See www.digital-briefcase.com for more info.

Looking for Mermaids - Jon Everitt

Our good friend and long term colleague, Jon Everitt – the man behind our spectacular calendar, is touring an exhibition of his paintings. When we saw them here in the Henley Exhibition Centre I was so taken with his ‘Watching for Mermaids’ I had to put my hand in my pocket. It is now gracing a wall in our house; it is so nice to have such innovative original work to look at.

 

His next exhibition opens at the Oxmarket Centre of Arts in Chichester on Sunday 21^st January. Check out www.throughdifferenteyes.co.uk for more info.

I’ve spent some of my Christmas break sorting through some very old video footage. I acquired a Video 8 camera pretty soon after my first child was born in 1980 and have been building a tape mountain ever since then.

 

Having now made the foolish commitment to get it all in some order, I’ve started the process by getting the necessary kit to digitise the analogue tape. I’m using an iMac, a separate 500GB drive and a box that converts the video signal into bits and bytes.

 

Amongst all the family stuff there was the odd bits of filming I did at RS2, the company I formed back in 1981. Apart from the actual technologies used, not much has changed conceptually from then, in that we employed designers and techies and gave service to marketing and marcoms departments in various blue chip (mostly IT) organisations.

 

But here’s the point of this story . . . all the guys in the studio were wearing ties. Remarkable! Although we get suited and booted now when appropriate, on a day-to-day basis ties are never seen. I’ve noticed this at client’s offices as well; the tie is becoming a ‘rarietie’

I wonder if it will make a comeback?

What happened to December?

 

I hadn’t realised how long it had been since I posted on this site, but I guess my excuse is one of extreme ‘busyness’.

 

Putting me to shame though are the people in my team who are now up and running with our company blog and posting up some interesting stuff. Of particular interest to me is Chris Trevallion’s view on corporate do-it-yourself designers. I’ve been banging on about this for years, specifically in the PowerPoint presentation arena, but it applies anywhere that people have access to digital design tools and are producing material that represents a company’s brand.

 

Anyway, take a look at www.sigblog.com

Storm Thorgerson's 'Pulse'

Seeing news of the pop artist Sir Peter Blake’s latest works for Oasis and the John Peel album prompts a debate that is close to my heart. It is the definition of an album cover image as ‘art’ as in fine art or ‘design’, as in graphic design.

 

Back in the 1950s the 33¹/₃ rpm long playing record appeared in the shops and a new platform for imagery was born.

 

In the main this was a domain for photographers and graphic designers (nee commercial artists), but occasionally the ‘real’ artists dipped their toes into the genre. One example that comes to mind is the surrealist Salvador Dali creating a cover in 1955 for an LP by the American comedian and actor Jackie Gleason.

 

The LP cover was often as important to the collector as the music the LP contained. It was certainly a lure in the displays in the record shop and by the late 1960s would be an eagerly anticipated aspect of the total package.

 

By now we were calling them ‘albums’ and a roster of fine (pop) artists had contributed their work to the medium. To name a few:

 

Sir Peter Blake (Sergeant Pepper)

Andy Warhol (Velvet Underground, Rolling Stones)

Richard Hamilton (The White Album)

That collectors and museums were acquiring original and limited editions of other works by these artists goes without saying, but the art for the album covers remained in the design domain.

 

In 1999 I and a colleague hooked up with the designer Storm Thorgerson, one third of the famous design group ‘Hipgnosis’. Storm had been involved in some of the most iconic album art designs of the last four decades and it was his determination to publish his work as fine art prints. The fantastic advantage of this being that the work can be seen at a size and quality that allows full appreciation of the creativity.

We started (and I think we were possibly the first to do this) with a set of twelve prints of Pink Floyd covers, including Dark Side of The Moon, Animals and Wish You Were Here.

 

These pieces do really look fantastic; most of them are silkscreens, printed by established fine art studios that work with the great and good of the fine art world. The famous Coriander Studios for instance print for Damien Hirst, Bruce Maclean, Tracey Emin, Peter Blake and many more.

 

So put Hipgnosis’ and Storm’s work beside that of these eminent artists and how do they compare? Can Storm be considered as a fine artist? Much of his work is transitory and has to be photographed as a record and therefore could be categorised as ‘installation art’. In that context does it stand up against the Chapman Brothers’ ‘Hell’ or Tracey Emin’s ‘Bed’?

 

I think so – look at the giant sculptures of The Division Bell and the environment they were placed in.

I think that the key debate here is ‘does the album cover image, taken out of its normal context, presented in a fine art medium, make it art rather than design?.

 

The size is important, but so is the quality of the reproduction. Fine art silkscreen printing is a complex, technically demanding process, with anywhere from 10 to 30 screens used to produce one image. A far cry from 4 colour process printing. Even the modern trend of giclee (inkjet) printing creates the most remarkable results and bears no comparison with a litho printed poster.

 

So my premis is that I think we should be taking these pieces as seriously as we would if they were a Damien Hirst or a Tracey Emin.

I’m biased because I’m selling the work, but I am also passionate about it and that’s really what motivates me to represent and publish.