Ally Carter

I made a Tumblr now

2011-03-20T19:03:00.000Z

"Underwater" Photography

2010-11-27T13:17:00.000Z

These images were taken as part of a recent art direction project. Photographed in collaboration with Hannah Richards.

Missread

2010-09-09T01:10:00.000+01:00

I went to the Missread publishing fair on the weekend, at the Kunst-Werke Institute. It took ages and ages to look around all of the tables which were packed full of nice printy books and zines. I wanted to take it all home. There were some really interesting speakers including Half Letterpress and Zak Kyes who talked amongst other topics, about the successes of small publishing despite the challenges facing the future of print. An inspiring Saturday...

Loanwords Poster Project

2010-09-09T00:37:00.001+01:00

Some pictures of a little project based on the idea of German 'loanwords' — originally German words which have been adopted into common usage in the English language. Scouring the internet for interesting contexts that the words had been used within quotations, phrases or newspaper articles, just for fun I created these series of typographic posters and pasted them up around Berlin.

Spreepark, Plänterwald

2010-09-04T19:10:00.002+01:00

The Spreepark was closed in 2002, after running into enormous debts (and the owner was also since imprisoned for smuggling cocaine). Since then, most of the attractions still stand but with no upkeep, nature has engulfed the park, which is out of bounds to the public (albeit being secured by a very ricky metal fence, which is pretty easy to climb over).

Despite a 5am start, breaking into the abandoned theme park was completely worth it. The photos probably don't do it justice as we had to move quite quickly through fear of being caught by the guards, but it was such an eerily beautifully place, something almost post-apocalypic about the atmosphere.

We visited the park between 6- 7am on a weekday morning — although there are no guarantees if you are going then this seems like a pretty good time as it was quiet on the perimeter so no one saw us climb the fence and if there were guards on duty then they must have still been half asleep because we were there for about 40 minutes without hearing a peep.

Berlin #2

2010-08-16T20:11:00.000+01:00

Some more photographs from the past 6 weeks of living in Berlin...

Buchstabenmusuem — Museum of Letters!

2010-08-15T11:51:00.000+01:00

An amazing little place full of rescued pieces of sinage. It's difficult trying to catch the Buchstabenmuseum when it is open (only for 2 hours a day on thursdays, fridays and saturdays) and as long as you are prepared to feel like a total type-geek (I was the only one in there, I imagine this is normal), then it's definitely worth a visit...

Berlin Aquarium

2010-08-15T11:39:00.000+01:00

I recently made a visit to Berlin aquarium and was very impressed with my what my little camera did. Some really beautiful jellyfish...

Berlin #1

2010-07-27T21:37:00.004+01:00

V&A Designers of the Future Exhibition

2010-05-31T17:16:00.000+01:00

A small but perfectly formed exhibition is taking place in Room 220 of the V&A's Sackler Centre, from June 15th to July 31st. Here is the brief description from their website:

"This display will showcase work by art and design students from the University of Brighton and the Royal College of Art inspired by the V&A and its collections. A related conference exploring museum and higher education collaboration will take place in July 2010."

Seizing a nice opportunity to get some work exhibited by one of country's most prestigious museums, Abby Byrne, Kelly Satchell and myself created a typographic triptych of some of our favourite design quotes in silkscreen. It evolved from the inspiration of the V&A's preservation of precious printed or caligraphically rendered ancient scriptures (see this earlier post). The idea was to create precious, fancifully rendered scriptures for own purposes of guidance as fledgling designers.

This is a little peak at my print — my quote is from David Craib,

The three prints have been bubble-wrapped into their frames and are most likely sat in a cupboard awaiting hanging in London, but once on display I will get some proper photographs of the three of them in all their glory!

Cities Project -- Nostalgia & Berlin

2010-05-30T23:15:00.001+01:00

Following on from a previous post below, I finished my book. As I had intended I made the whole book not using a computer at all. All the photographs are taken on 35mm film and the prints were photocopied. The type was comprised from photocopied pages of type specimen books and some of the older photos were taken from Berlin protest magazines my dad had collected from the early eighties.

The book is comprised of two sections were are individually stitched but then are bound together by an elastic band. The two sections separate the two years, 1980 and 2010. My dad lived in Berlin in 1980 and then re-visted for the first time when we went earlier this year. With the fall of the wall the city had changed drastically since the last time he was there, and the book is meant to express a sense of nostalgia but also to illustrate the changes in the landscape and the feel of the city that have occurred in last 30 years.

History of Art & Design — Private View Invitation

2010-05-30T23:10:00.000+01:00

In partial collaboration with Sally-Anne Burt, we made this invitation for a brief from Brighton University's History of Art and Design courses. They wanted the invite for the private view of their dissertation presentations — although this one didn't get selected, it was a nice thing to work on. Tricky to try and encompass so many different ideas and embody the many schools of thought studied on the courses, into a small space on a page.

The invite is an A3 double-sided screen print, that folds down into A5 for posting.
With references to wide ranging topics, we stitched together the phrase "For Curious Minds" using letterforms from many different typefaces, all originating from many different cultural backgrounds, to mimic how the courses do this with the ideas they teach. The reverse has all the information.

Fun...

2010-04-13T21:48:00.001+01:00

...with a photocopier, some old letraset sheets, a type specimen catalogue and school exercise books found in a junkshop. Think I might try and make it into a little booklet thing, for our cities project — just as an experiment see if I can finish it all completely without using a computer on any part of it.

It's been nice to have the Easter holidays to have a bit of time just to play around with stuff and not be too worried about what I'm actually doing!

This Morning...

2010-03-31T14:10:00.000+01:00

Arrived in Berlin last night...was supposed to meet family here, but their flight was cancelled until 11am the next morning. But it was probably for the best as they would most likely have got bored whilst I spent over an hour in Pro Qm this morning — the most incredible design bookshop...ever. Its bursting at the seems with not just design books, but an extensive collection of weird magazines, journals and stacks of self-published stuff. I felt quite dizzy.
I ended up buying this...

I'm not quite sure where it comes from or who makes it as all the info text in the back is in another language (possibly korean? thats a complete guess) but this issue features the work of students from the Werkplaats Typografie (two year masters program in Arnhem, in the Nederlands which is actually where Marijke Cobbenhagen and Chantal Hendriksen studied incidentally, see post below).
It's very nice!

Cobbenhagen Hendriksen

2010-03-22T14:36:00.002Z

One of the most inspiring visits in Amsterdam for me personally was Cobbenhagen Hendriksen. Set-up by Marijke Cobbenhagen and Chantal Hendriksen, the studio is based in a shared space in an old primary school, slightly on the outskirts of the city. It was Chantal who spoke to us when we visited, and was kind enough to give us all lots of tea to drink whilst we listened. What was most interesting was learning about some of the projects that they hadn’t been entirelly happy with on completion, and how that had happened. The work we were shown was all print based, and stood of for me because of the range of exciting and varied formats that tied perfectly into the concepts behind each project. I especially liked what they had done when presented with one of the large body of tedious reading lists from the Amsterdam School of the Arts. Instead of just setting the type in a nice little booklet and being done with it, all the information was printed in the back of a beautifully covered hardback A4 sketchbook. This then gave the students a reason to hold on to the info, a created a project in what could be done to fill the blank pages.

Chantal also told us about her experiences working as a typography lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. This meant that she really understood how to relate to the kind of problems you experience as a design student. She reinforced the importance of doing work to please yourself, and the perils of trying to design for your tutors tastes rather that your own.

Big thanks to her for what was a much required mid-year motivational boost — will defiantly be keeping an eye on the work that comes out of their studio in future.

(This poster hanging in their studio is made by Radim Pesko).

Amsterdam Study Trip

2010-03-22T14:00:00.001Z

About a week ago, we returned home from our study trip to Amsterdam.

We were lucky enough to visit some really amazing studios which varied from big ad agencies to much smaller business or parternships.

A lot of the most exciting peices of work we were shown by studios had been created for cultral institutions — it’s really cool that there seems to be such a high demand for this kind of work in Amsterdam, and the stuff that comes out of it always seem to be a lot more innovative than the equivelant of what you would see in the UK. We definitily got the impression that these clients were a little more prepared to take risks. Perhaps this has something to do with the same reason the Dutch have a large museum devoted to Graphic Design.

The large glass fronted gallery in Breda, which is about 2 hours South of Amsterdam, houses a permanent collection showcasing 100 years of Dutch Graphic Design, as well as space for temporary exhibitons. Part of the exhibition caption reads,“A systematic and creative approach to complex information became a keystone of graphic design practice”. It was fascinating to see how basic public information such as the telephone book, designed by Wim Crouwel, was given such care and attention and now stands alone as a beautiful peice of design, as well as being a telelphone book.

We also took a quick visit to the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, to have a little look around the building. Many of the professionals we spoke to had graduated from here, and much of the students work always seems to be popping up online. I was pretty jealous of how the workshop spaces that were open to them — having screenprinting and printmaking workshops at their disposal, all lined up along the same corridor as bookbinding and letterpress. The week we visited, the normal timetable wasn’t running, so unfortuntly we didn’t manage to meet any of the students were below are some nice examples or work we spied in the cases.

Soundwaves Festival Rebranding

2010-02-28T00:18:00.000Z

We were briefed by the Brighton experimental music festival, Soundwaves to give them a complete image overhaul, which they were well in need of looking at the previous publicity material they had been using. Working collaboratively with Kelly Satchell, in just 4 days came up with this concept, based around abstract imagery from photograms. Here a just a few of them:

We then developed this into the brand, our key ideas being to reference the Fluxus art movement but retaining accessibility through colour and typography. Very hectic over such a short timescale, but made me realise how much better I work when under pressure. There was some really amazing work across the course group — weeks like this one make me super proud to be in Brighton :). The logo was developed from the dots punched in an old pianola scroll found in a junk shop.

What I have been doing for the last five weeks.

2010-02-27T23:46:00.002Z

Amongst a lot of other things, we had a project to redesign 3 book covers and make 3 posters also, from the list of winners of the award for the strangest book title of the year. Here are two of mine until I get photographs of the actual books. Format was dictated to us (1 had to be collage, 1 hand drawn and 1 photograph). Most of us felt dictating the medium before the idea was formed went against all we have been taught previously. So not ecstatically happy with them but learnt quite a lot I think.

Tattooed Mountain Women and the Spoon Boxes of Dagestan

How to Avoid Huge Ships

Another big book...

2010-02-27T22:16:00.000Z

Having a bit of a thing with MASSIVE books at the moment, clearly. Here's one we found in the uni library, a huge collection of broadsheets from the second world war that have been bound together! It's pretty amazing. Found some nice type in there too. Reference only though, unsurprisingly!
Here I am trying to lift said book, with difficulty.

And some interesting ads from inside it, I particularly like this:

More.

V&A Brief

2010-02-12T18:06:00.000Z

Our course has been offered the opportunity to create a piece of work in response to something in the V&A collection, to demonstrate how it can be used as an inspirational resource. If the work is chosen, it will be put into an exhibition at the V&A in June. Very exciting! A collaboration with Kelly Satchell and Abby Byrne, our idea is a piece inspired by this amazing massive Qur'an from the 14th Century. Will be interesting if it all comes together.

Grandma's Hand

2010-02-03T13:16:00.001Z

Why don't people write like this anymore? With ink pens? I have always been jealous of people who have beautiful handwriting. Maybe it's the biro's fault.
I found this in an old book that used to be my Grandma's and it just occurred to me how pretty it was. My handwriting seems to change everyday, is half joined up and half not, and tends to alternate between lowercase and uppercase within words, generally making me look like a 14 year-old on paper.

Around this time last year...

2010-01-31T01:32:00.000Z

We took a little trip to San Francisco to visit some design studios. I just remembered how much fun it was and dug out some cool photos.

As a second year, a little bit older (and a bit wiser I hope) I am now extra excited for the Amsterdam in March! Better start thinking of some good questions...

Univers(al?)

2010-01-21T22:33:00.000Z

The finished result from our latest project brief. Everyone had to pick a typeface out of the hat and create a purely typographic page for a broadsheet newspaper to support their typeface. We also had to write some informative (but lively) copy to accompany. This is my case for Univers — my elder male tutor felt uncomfortable, my younger female tutor enjoyed it. Funny that.

If, Helvetica is your comfiest pair of baggy M&S Y-fronts — the ultimate utility and the ever reliable fail-safe in times of indecision — then Univers is your best fitting shortbreifs. They are cotton and comfortable, but black, with a touch of french lace trimming.

Designer Adrian Frutiger honed his machinist masterpiece for type foundry Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Educated in Zurich, Frutiger’s Univers was built upon Swiss objectivity. With the enormous variety of different weights, he has achieved a careful balance between unity and diversity.

The elegant detail (the lace trimming if you will) can be found in the condensed weights, which hail the French cinema posters of the 1970s. Currently enjoying a revival, ultra condensed Univers can regularly be seen at 200pt running into monochrome photography in an offbeat fashion magazine.

The comfy part that hugs your bum will be found in Athens International Airport, directing you to baggage reclaim. Or pinned to the side of a Westminster building confirming your successful location of Oxford Street. Univers’ expressively intentional anonymity – it’s sincere, clean geometric forms – make it part of the handful of typefaces considered the best for signage and wayfinding systems.

Despite its beautifully diverse functionality, Univers will sit comfortably on your skin, and wouldn’t dare cause a wedgie. It can be void of personality and blend seemlessly into well designed surroundings. It can be a dramatic centre piece to a page spread, or — exercising it’s full variety of stroke widths — can create dynamically intricate hierarchy systems.

Time-of-the-month or a hot date, Univers does it all with style.

Eventually...

2010-01-15T20:15:00.000Z

After having just about recovered from Christmas sluggishness, I have managed to get into the studio and take some photographs of recent work. Last night I had some self indulgent fun updating my website, a welcome break from the headache inducing geometric-monochrome-ness of our type layout project.

Curious Typography...

2009-12-18T14:28:00.000Z

This was picked up by my sister Ella, who works as an editorial assistant for the Marine Biological Association. It's a scientific print found in the Royal Society Archives is from 1785 and contains some of the most wonderfully strange use of ligatures throughout the entire 59 pages of text. Very weird but quite beautiful I think.

Book Crit With George H!

2009-12-15T00:10:00.002Z

Such a lovely crit to end the term with. Everyone had worked so hard on their batch production project that the spread on books laid out on the table wouldn't have seemed out of place in one of those quirky little arty thing shops.

We delivered the fruits of our 3 week long labour at 10am sharp, and left George to consider them for an hour. Some books were picked out and placed into categories for comment, including as "exquisite" and "interesting idea" but also some stingers... "so what?" and "unfinished". Having produced 5 of each book, some controversial editions even managed to traverse all of these categories.

In terms of my effort, a screenprinted & inkjet visual discussion on the future of the printing press, George briefly waved it about and deemed it "intriguing" – I'm pretty happy with that :)

Will get some nice photos of it together soon.

A little bit of typographic rendering

2009-12-14T23:14:00.002Z

Something I knocked up for my extension studies hand-in. Not what I had originally set out to create (see older posts) but a shortened deadline and technical issues forced what would have otherwise been real growth into virtually rendered growth. However the photograph I pulled apart and spread over the letters did come from the cress I grew myself in preliminary experiments.
I intend to pursue with my original ideas in my own time to see what I can create.

Some Exciting News!

2009-12-14T11:40:00.002Z

I was told on Thursday that the imagery I submitted for the Audio brief was selected by the Brighton club as one of their next promotional listings posters along with illustrators Rhiannon, Dan & Ivan.

Along with the other finalists, the artwork I supplied (image above) will be circulated as an A3 fold out poster – about 10,000 of them I think, sometime after the New Year.

From what I gather, Audio intend on exhibiting all the work chosen later next year, which will be great.

They selected the original image I created as part of my summer project for the poster, and chose to use the image that I developed based on that, for some Saturday night flyers this December. As good as this is, unfortunately they have daubed some rather clunky typography on the top of it and blanked out the face at the bottom with a clashing turquoise bar.

I don't mind really – I'm only to happy for the opportunity and perhaps it's a lesson in not being to precious about your work. I was assured that this had been a rushed job and I'm not angry about it. I just generally don't understand why so many clubs seem incessant on producing flyers that are the graphic equivalent of Haribo Starmix. At least Audio are trying to reach out a bit further by briefing students in the first place.

A big thanks to David Parr from Audio for organizing the competition and for the fun celebration drinks on Friday night.

My trip to the printers

2009-12-02T19:22:00.001Z

I owe an enormous thank you to the staff at Newquest Hampshire who were so nice to me today. Especially to Martin and Richard who toured me around the print hall this afternoon, and put up with my inane excitable noises and gasps every time we turned a corner. I was able to get some lovely photographs of the web offset presses in action, for my book.

These massive tanks are full of INK!

The ink is carried to the presses in the big coloured pipes, which just looks really cool... reminds me of something from Willy Wonka's factory. I really wanted one to burst....(the next bravia ad right there?)

The images are put onto aluminium plates, there are four plates for every page so the image is separated out into cyan, yellow, magenta and black. Then these are inked up and printed onto the gigantic rolls of news print. They are then folded and cut:

and transported through the building on a conveyer belt system like this:

And then they end up stacked and wrapped on palettes, ready to be delivered.

It was really interesting to see how print works on a massive industrial scale. All the waste from all the Newsquest print centres across the country is recycled including the aluminium plates.

The newsprint they print onto is 100% recycled, theres no virgin pulp at all. Despite this it was quite scary to see that before the men calibrating the registration of the print can give the word to start printing at full speed, the press is running for about 20 minutes (albeit on slow speed) printing hundreds, possibly thousands of copies which go straight off the press into the recycling.

I was also shown the printing schedule for the presses – one from 2004, which was completely choc-a-bloc, 24/7 and included many national papers, but on the one for December 2009, the print run only spans just over 3 days, consisting of local papers and advert papers. I was told that there had been quite a few redundancies recently.

The amount of technology that has been developed for the papers to be printed as fast and as efficiently as they are, is really quite incredible. It would be a shame if it was no longer required.

Sometimes I wish I was born in the fifties....

2009-11-28T03:53:00.001Z

Our final project of 2009 is now underway - batch production. Make 5 books for 5 pounds, and look at the word 'book' in the loosed sense of the term. It's such a lovely project that was introduced to us by the incredible Professor George Hardie, who was responsible for this

amongst so much more amazing work. After the lecture, a few of us were discussing it and I just thought about how I almost wish I had been brought up 4 decades earlier, and been working at the time George Hardie was. People asked why, and I felt it was because you could design things - posters, album sleeves, books, and that on its own was enough.

You could be a master craftsperson of the printed page, and no one cared if you could make a flashing-glittery-viral-interactive-social-network-integrated-ad-campaign. I don't resent screen based design or the progression of technology - without this need to make better our ways of disseminating information, the printing press would never have been invented in the first place. Neither am I denying the environmental consequences of print. However it's nice to spend sometime recalling the beauty what what is seen by many as a dying artform.

This is what I plan to do in my book, through the use of both collages of classic diagrams and manuals plus my own photographs which I will be taking on Wednessday when I travel to the Newsquest print centre in Southampton for research.

Personally I'm hoping that even though there will be less printed media in the near future, it will mean what is printed will be better quality and designers will have to think much harder about it. Maybe those who take the time to learn the process inside out, will be all the more valued. As to whether this will actually happen, I'm guessing my generation of designers will be the ones to find out.

All You Need Is...a few white walls and some free alcohol

2009-11-16T00:59:00.000Z

...to tempt people into submitting some artwork. So Saturday night was a great success! We had a chance to pat ourselves on the back and say "arn't we just talented?" at the opening night of the exhibition titled "All You Need Is..." organised by Pat Bradbury and other Brighton Uni Illustration students at the Artist's Residence B&B.

I was excited to have the opportunity to present something on actual-real-paper instead of pixels, and so I submitted an (albeit rushed) but I think just about satisfactory piece of work in response to the brief. It attempted, via a subverted diagram of military ration pack menu variations, to make a comment on the disposable nature of the human beings we send into war-zones and the quantities we discuss them in, similar to the 5000 calories soldiers are attempted to tot up each day. Yes indeed. Suffice to say it may have been a bit far fetched – but hopefully the image could stand alone as something which looks interesting and might raise a question, even if that may be "Ally what the hell is this about?".

More images of work here

Wired Sussex Portfolio Clinic

2009-11-13T19:23:00.002Z

Last night I headed to the Corn Exchange to attend Wired Sussex's portfolio clinic. A wide range of different digital design agencies attended to offer up their wisdoms on how to be more successful in applying for work (or in my case internships) and how to get the most out of your portfolio.

It was a very popular event so most of my time was spent in a que to speak to designers but it was without a doubt worth my while.

I spoke to 3 agencies based in Brighton or surrounding areas – Preview, Red Design and Crush.

They were all very encouraging and supportive of the work I showed them, and it's always nice to get feedback from somebody in industry who isn't one of your tutors and will judge your work solely on face value, without any bias towards a pre-established understanding of you as a student.

The main pieces of advice I took away from the event were

Always push yourself as much as possible – pick the hardest most challenging briefs you can, and don't be put off by that.This being the kind of tutorial advice than can be difficult advice to follow when faced with a looming deadline but it's inspiring to have this message echoed by designers working in industry.
That designers love to get things through the post and sending out things can be much more effective than an e-mail sometimes.
That most agencies do actually bother to look at the pdf's you send them, and that it's still a good way of finding work experience.
Keep at it!

Theres a lot to be said for having these people give you the time of day, sometimes it's all you need to push you further.

Audio Brief

2009-11-06T18:57:00.002Z

A live brief set by the Brighton club, Audio to create the imagery for their monthly listings poster.
I'm currently working into some of the imagery I produced over the summer, with photographs of random textures scanned and manipulated in photoshop.
They are looking for something "left-field" and interesting, I'm guessing along the lines of Village Green's series of posters for Fabric in London.
As a started point I was inspired by these images I saw at the Photographer's Gallery a few years ago of supposed 'ectoplasm', a material produced out of the orifices of seance participants.

I'm quite skeptical about how real these are but I thought the imagery could be reinterpreted in an interesting way. Francis Bacon supposedly also interpreted these photographs for his piece "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion".

These needs working into more but that basic feel of it is starting to look this this:

Thanks to lovely Sally for letting me use her face!

Work is ongoing.....

More than just a pretty face...

2009-11-03T20:19:00.000Z

Beautiful AND intelligent! This flickr set displays some of the loveliest photos of slime mold (not actually mold, it's just a living organism that uses spores to reproduce). They can solve mazes in order to seek out their food, and apparently also have the capability for short term memory. In experiments where a slime mold that did like light was placed in a box, it learnt to shrink down (as if cowering) when the lid was opened, even when the lid was opened in a dark room. Amazing! I'm hoping to use this for an art & science collaborative project (a selected bolt-on to my degree) in some way....perhaps developing on the ideas of natural graffiti such as this lovely typographic work by Anna Garforth

I find really exciting the idea that you can still have the freedom of expression in chance dialogues with the public that comes from graffiti, but in a non-vandalistic, non-permanent way. I'm also inspired by the possibility that the message could interact with the environment and medium in some way. Much more development is needed but the results may be exciting!

If you've got time to kill...

2009-10-16T19:38:00.000+01:00

Delicious.

Research for our latest brief on sequences revealed some pretty funny examples of miscommunication.

...hilarity ensues here

Pictorial Knowledge...

2009-10-07T20:23:00.000+01:00

Clearing out stuff to go back to uni I found these lovely fold out diagrams in the back of some old encyclopedias, called "Pictorial Knowledge" published in the 1930's (of which I discovered Enid Blyton was an associate editor...). All the body parts that fold out have the inverse printed on them, everything delicately and elegantly labeled. If only school textbooks looked like this nowadays...

It could be interesting to try and recreate these using a modern subject matter...

OPEN DAY!

2009-10-07T19:28:00.000+01:00

Pinatas, string, bathtubs, paper explosions and ice creams were all thrown into the ideas pot by Sally and myself in response to the very open open day poster brief last week......however we settled on the [seemingly] more simple concept of cracking open a chicken's egg....

A make shift studio set-up in my room was assembled for some test shots, with some of the results being rather lovely...

The concept is one of freshness, vibrancy and new beginnings, releasing the good stuff inside, encouraging people to make mistakes in their creative development ("you can't make an omelet without cracking eggs") etc etc, that in Brighton you can "break out of your shell" and experience a "free range education" – we could go on. The real challenge was to get an amazing image to back this up.

Several hours and too many eggs later, and as we are adding the type, it's all starting to come together.

After the final crit, one teams design will be chosen and 500 copies will be sent out to collages across the country.....fingers crossed......

Summer Project

2009-09-17T17:40:00.001+01:00

As part of the Brighton University, BA (Hons) Graphic Design, 2nd year, rather ambiguous, rather frustrating, rather mystifying, summer project, entitled 'Animal, Vegetable & Mineral' I have been looking at the humble apple.

After creating an obsessive list about every single kind of pop culture/scientific/literary reference to the apple (there are very many, for example, I was unaware of the rather sweet practice of 'Apple Wassailing' – where cider farmers sing to their trees to bless them for a good harvest) I came across a book called 'The Apple in the Dark' by Clarice Lispector.

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian author and 'The Apple in the Dark' is the latest work to be translated, and is being published in a new edition by Haus Publishing.

I was inspired by the lovely title of the book, and so have been working on a cover design for the book, using some photography as a basis. Some of my photos can be seen here.

Here are a few ideas.