March 22, 2008
absent
Going to Oldbury this morning I noticed another absence, this time in Ladywood.
We said goodbye to Spectacle some time ago, but it was still a bit of a kick to see that whole area of buildings knocked down. What’s going to replace them? Some nice flats?
…and more importantly, are there going to be any more spaces run by the next generation of up-and-coming arty folks?
revolve
Walking over to Ikon this afternoon there was something missing.
No more slowly revolving door between Paradise Forum and Centenary Square. You could just walk straight through.
Uncanny. …and yet what a fantastically simple idea!
I’m not sure if this is permanent or not, but there’s perhaps a chance considering the lack of impediment to getting into the building from the Chamberlain Square side (discounting all the steps!).
Is it wrong that I’m missing a revolving door?
Fern Cottage
I generally have a couple of website clients on the go alongside my main commissions as an artist [caution: superficial divisions – not always useful!]. I don’t do the web design full-time so, in addition to being a supplementary source of income, these commissions are really important to me as a way of keeping my skills as up-to-date as possible.
After several months working alongside Joe and Kelly in Rednal, we’ve now launched the website for their new holiday home Fern Cottage. Well, when I say new, I mean about 250 years old…
Fern Cottage was built circa 1750 and, as well as being one of those places that’s tucked away in it’s own quiet niche so you can forget that you’re just on the edge of Birmingham, it’s also famous for being one of the childhood homes of J.R.R. Tolkien. Yes, that J.R.R Tolkien .
I’m happy to say that, in true Grand Designs stylee this project met with several delays linked in with the renovation of the cottage, but the results were worth waiting for. I just wish we were a bit further on into Spring so the turf and garden had had a chance to get going a bit.
So, what was I up to whilst Joe and Kelly were sanding the wooden beams in the ceilings and debating over the light fittings? Where was I bringing in a bit of learning curve to the web design?
Paperwork
This was the first challenge. As the projects I’m getting involved in get progressively larger in scale it was time to get the contracts and other paperwork up to standard too. I’d already learned my lessons (the hard way) with regards to fighting project creep and making sure there’s a design brief that sets out exactly what’s to be done for the price quoted, but it was time to make sure things like copyright and liability were explicitly covered too. Fortunately AIGA (founded as the American Institute of Graphic Arts, now a professional association for design in general) have already done most of the hard work with their Standard Form of Agreement. Perhaps a bit O.T.T. for most of the jobs I do for artist portfolio sites, but we felt it was necessary here. And of course, now I’ve developed my own templates from this, these can easily be adapted for future projects. Phew!
All this was backed up with Slim Timer so I could compare how long I estimated things would take with how long they actually did.
Blueprint
I’ve been implementing my own frameworks for coding sites for several years now (particularly with regards to browser resets and typography), but with the Fern Cottage project I decided to give the Blueprint CSS framework a try.
This felt sort of alien at first, however it was very easy to implement and yes, it did speed things up a lot – particularly with the usual fun and games getting compatibility across browsers.
This article sums things up quite nicely.
After a bit of wrangling I decided to leave the Blueprint classes in the code for all to see. Does it feel like cheating? Maybe just a little, but I’m sure I’ll get over it!
Libraries
I’ve been playing with javascript libraries more and more recently, but have been very strict when it comes to using them within live sites. It’s very easy to start using transitions and effects just for their own sake. Since I’m coming at this web design stuff from a process and architecture point of view rather than as a graphic designer (probably evident in the rather flat style I seem to be developing!) I’m generally cautious about following the crowd with whatever the in thing currently is.
The Fern Cottage rooms and facilities slideshow however was a perfect situation to use glider to add a bit of interactivity and compress what would otherwise be a fairly mind-numbing list.
Setting up the tea and cake shot for the dining room section was quite fun too!
Getting social with Flickr
After a few photo shoots it became obvious that we had loads more photos that we wanted to share than we had space to put them on the website. Flickr came to the rescue and although it wasn’t appropriate to embed slideshows within the Fern Cottage site, Flickr was a nice way of extending stayatferncottage.co.uk out into the wider world. The We’ve stayed at Fern Cottage group is an important part of this and I’m hoping it will be both an appealing way for people to get involved (complementing the guestbook) and also an easy way for Joe and Kelly to document the cottage as it grows into itself.
Joe and Kelly would also be really interested in hearing from anyone who has any photos of Fern Cottage from the past so please get in touch with them if you have any Fern Cottage photos, or perhaps just add them to the Flickr group.
zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one
Installed Ubuntu; needed flash plugin for Firefox; went to Vimeo to test; saw this; liked it; shared it.
invigilator invites
We’re currently getting excited about the re-appropriated business cards we’re using for the Invigilator: Digbeth invitations. Hope you do too!
INVIGILATOR: DIGBETH
paul conneally + nikki pugh + you + them
Saturday 29th March, 2-5pm
meet at VIVID at 2pm
bring a red top if you haven’t already arranged to use either one of ours or one from a different venue
npugh.co.uk/blog/invigilating_digbeth
enquiries@npugh.co.uk
invigilating Digbeth
Since May last year, Paul Conneally and I have been invigilating.
First I invigilated some of the New Forest. Then Paul replied by hopping on the train with the morning commuters and invigilating a building site in Derby.
Shortly after that I wanted to explore what would happen if you had more than one invigilator. I wanted to see how the presence of multiple invigilators affected the dynamics of an area that has to be walked through (rather than just a point location that people can walk past).
I was in Japan at the time so this gave rise to Invigilator: Tokyo and – inevitably – a whole barrage of further questions!
More recently, Paul and I met up in Nuneaton for the first of the invigilations that we have done together. More questions!
We now feel it is time for us to turn the process around on itself and use the next invigilation to examine its origin: my old part-time job invigilating the gallery space at VIVID.
We want to dissect what we have learned so far.
We want you.
We’re currently gathering people who would like to don red t-shirts and join us on Saturday the 29th of March for Invigilator: Digbeth. We want to scale up the Tokyo action and send small teams of invigilators percolating out through Digbeth: turning the whole cultural quarter thing inside-out to extract people from their barricaded, security-protected warehouses and onto the street for an hour or so.
As a nod to how this series of works came about, we’ll be using VIVID as a base, liberating their red t-shirts, and also returning there for the debrief session and refreshments afterwards.
The invigilations themselves involve following a set of left/right/straight-on directions and then probably about 30 minutes standing around that location being watchful. What we’re after, in order to give Invigilator: Digbeth some clout is a) as many invigilators as possible so we can properly cover a large area and b) some suggestions for relevant starting points for the random walks.
So, for now, we’d like you to do three things for us:
- Put that date in your diary: 29th of March, 2-5pm.
- Suggest some cultural venue/art institution-esque starting points that the random walks to the invigilation locations can start from. We know about the obvious ones near to VIVID such as Ikon Eastside, the Custard Factory and the soon to be opened Eastside Projects, but we’d like more. Are there any? Bung something in the comments and let us know about it!
- Let us know if you’d like to take part. All welcome, but we’d be particularly keen to hear from anyone who would normally work as one of the aforementioned venues.
More details to follow a bit closer to the day, and further invites are being circulated in the real world too.
with increased confidence and positive mind
The recording session lasted only a few hours, but we felt kind of strange for quite some time afterwards.
(Well, until we got to the pub.)
The Institute of Psychoplasmics
curated by Pil and Galia Kollectiv
Pump House Gallery
Battersea Park, London
SW11 4NJ
9 April – 26 May 2008
Preview 8 April 2008
6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
slutspurt and matterhorn
Click Opera shares observations on observing a city in a couple of interesting posts from Copenhagen including taking photos through shop windows early in the morning and comparing matterzones as reported by 4 different ‘travel guides’:
a copy of the Time Out Guide to Copenhagen which I browsed in a bookstore, the guide and listings section of an English-language newspaper called The Copenhagen Post, a Japanese magazine’s Copenhagen special edition I spycammed in a sushi bar, and recommendations from Click Opera readers who knew me and knew Copenhagen.
Check them out and then look again at your own place!