Cool Blog Alert - Tamsin Allen Creative

We thought we'd bring to your attention to a super inspiring blog by our art director friend Tamsin. She writes about the things we love including branding, design, photography and interiors. We always direct our mouses to her blog for a fix of daily inspiration. We really enjoyed a recent post on the iconic Selfridges brand. Being obvious fans of yellow we are ever appreciating of this amazing British brand whose design is beautifully consistent and recognisable. Great stuff Tamsin, long may your blogging continue!

 http://tamsinallencreative.wordpress.com/

Our Shop featured...

Ashley from Live Like The Boy blog, contacted us back in December to do a blog chat on us about Our Shop. Check it out here... Thanks Ashley!

Happen Projects

We stumbled upon this great project, based in East London. Various artists and designers collaborated with small local businesses around Dalston to create bespoke installations between the shopkeepers and the artists.To help boost the high street. Happen Projects organised this project, called the Exchange Series. The great thing was Hackney Council helped to fund the project. The installations actually end today, however you can take a peek here and find out more about the project. Artists that took part were, Hato Press, Damien Poulain, Alexandre Bettler, Aurelie Dellasanta, Olivia Hegarty, Pipa Greenbank, Sarah Cockings, Laurence Owen and Agi & Sam. Hato Press are a graphic design and print collective, they used their riso colour test prints that they had produced from printing flyers, posters, zines in 2011, to make up the wallpaper of their window installation. Which was really effective, and great as all materials were recycled. See BBC feature here.
Images from Happen Projects.

Elphicks

Hope you enjoyed your weekends. Not long till Christmas! Today, we strolled down to Columbia Road, to do a spot of Christmas shopping. As we were down there, we also popped into Elphick's, a gorgeous art/print shop that also stocks some of our Tree series products (Tree Towels, cards, postcards and Tree prints). Sharon Elphick, the owner of this cute shop, found us at the recent Bust Christmas Craftacular Fair. We're so pleased to have Elphick's showcase are work. The shop is packed full of goodies, from limited edition prints, tea towels, cards, ceramics and books. The perfect weekend mooching day.

Olympic Posters 2012

The Olympic posters for next year 2012 have been released. Designed by british artists, Ofili, Martin Creed, Anthea Hamilton, Gary Hume, Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin. The artists brief was to celebrate the Games coming to London and to look at the values of the Olympics and Paralympics. They are all pretty abstract, which we like. Our favourites are Tracey Emin, Sarah Morris, Martin Creed and Howard Hodgkin. It's unusual for Olympic posters to not have the hosting country's landmarks in, which we found quite refreshing! (tho Sarah Morris' Big Ben is evident, though very abstract too!)
Via BBC

Mary Mary

We were mooching around town last week, and decided to pop by and see Mary Portas' shop in House of Fraser. We've been watching Mary's 3-part tv series, on her creating a fashion collection for women. As we arrived on the third floor, it was very buzzy in Mary's shop. Mary's shop felt very quite different to the rest of House of Fraser, it even had it's own shop signage by the entrance. What struck me was how edgey and modern this was and I loved the little details, like the small area where you could have a perch and drink a Mary coffee and flip through some fashion magazines while you wait for your friend/partner etc shop or change in the changing rooms. It felt like a lifestyle store, abit like Anthropologie, but on a much smaller scale. Selling coffee, gorgeous notebooks, ceramics, beauty products as well as clothes, shoes and accessories. The branding of the shop was great, really consistent and still quirky. There was even a 'moan phone' so that you could pick up and call and leave a message on Mary's voicemail. If you had a complaint or wanted to voice your opinion you could, and apparently Mary picks up the messages herself at the end of each week. I thought that was a nice idea! The mannequins made were fun, they're all Mary clones, with her trademark orange burst hair and statuesque frame. I came away thinking, this is a great shopping experience and also all the products were of high quality too. It's true, Mary is the queen of shops!

Sheep Couture

While roaming around London, we stumbled across Esprit's collaboration with The Royal College of Art project, The Sheep Couture Collection. The RCA invited graduating Knitwear students to create a collection for Esprit. The outcome was fun and interesting, and the winning entrants had their quirky designs made with british yarns and are being showcased in their stores for a limited time only. Some of the pieces are quite sculptural and the more wearable pieces are available for sale to the public too. Well worth a peek, check out the mini pop-up gallery spaces in Esprit stores around London. The show catalogue is also really well designed and quirky! Illustrations are by Kevin Lyons.

Thanks!

Last week was a very busy week for us, preparing for the Thames Festival, which was this weekend gone. We asked Hato press to print our tree series for us. We were amazed by the vibrancy of the colours, and we're so happy with the end result! They featured us on their 'Print of the week' section. Thanks Hato! you did an amazing job printing them. These prints were on sale on our stall at the Thames Festival. They will also be launched on our shop in a couple of weeks.

ROB

We'd like to share with you a funny and clever product that caught our eye. Jemil Saka's eyeglass stand is just so quirky! Inspired by an old teacher of Jemil's, 'Rob'. For the spec wearers out there, now you have a cool accessory to display your specs on when you're not wearing them, so there is no excuse for losing them again! Check out more of Jemil's work here.

The Broom Brigade

We found these amazing photos on The Guardian website. Makes us so proud to live in London! When all the worlds eyes are upon us for something so negative, it's so great to see people pulling together to help clean up our neighborhoods.

Post-It!

Japanese architects, Tato Architects, Yo Shimada has created a stunning installation series of Post-it Note Structures. Created in collaboration with students from Kyoto University of Art and Design. The installation consisted of 30,000 post-it notes in its full neon glory. Each note was positioned onto one another carefully
to form a structural wall, which ran throughout the gallery space.
Via pics via Designboom.com

Cake + Art

What a perfect combination, Cake + Art! We do like cake over here at Our WorkShop. So when we found out about artist, Amy Stevens' cake artworks, it made us smile. Amy first started making Martha Stewart's cake recipes, then realised that her cakes didn't look perfect like Martha's, hers looked more imperfect. So she thought they were better off imperfect. It's the cakes imperfections that make them so striking to look at. Amy also uses handmade and vintage fabrics and wallpapers for backdrops for her photos. More of her cakes here.
Via cocandme and amystevenart

P.S OUR SHOP'S 1ST BIRTHDAY GIVEAWAY, ONE MORE DAY TO GO!!! Talking about cake....it's Our Shop's 1st Birthday tomorrow! Pop over to our Facebook page and help us celebrate, by giving us a 'LIKE' and you'll be automatically entered into our 1st Birthday giveaway! Click here to enter. We'll announce the winner over at Facebook tomorrow. Good Luck!

Say it in a letter

Check out this website that plays homage to letterhead designs for the famous. It's quite intriguing to see what Bowie, Johnny Cash and Marilyn Monroe's personal stationery looked like, to name but a few. Have a peek at letterheady.com for more designs.