So I have to say a massive congratulations to the artist Rydal Hanbury (my mum) for winning a competition at the Tower of London, which essentially meant that one of her drawings got blown up to over 90ft high to cover the central tower while it’s being refurbished for the next three years!

We all went down to the unveiling this morning, and there was a surprising amount of press coverage there, in fact you can watch the lunchtime report from BBC London news here. I was also very interested to find out that apparently getting a picture blown up and printed to that size costs £35,000! (good job it wasn’t in colour?!)

More info on the BBC news site + check out my photo’s on Flickr

There’s nothing better that a good bit of typography (particularly when it’s drawn by hand), and Smashing magazine has done a smashing post on some nice examples of caligraphy, lettering, and experiments with type - check it out here

Interesting to hear that Flickr are now moving into video sharing territory, everything seems to work in that minimal Flickr-like way - though I found it interesting that they’re limiting video’s to being only 90-seconds long to promote the idea of the “long-photo”:

“Video on Flickr grew out of the idea of “long photos” and as such, we’ve implemented what might seem like an arbitrary limit of playing back the first 90 seconds of a video. 90 seconds?We’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new.

Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the “good bit.” In fact, even Tara at FlickrHQ hasn’t made it past the first 90 seconds of her own wedding video”

View examples on the Flickr ‘Video! Video! Video!‘ group

This is a great little blog by a guy called Todd Hart who basically buys up old cassette tapes from the Oxfam shop in Dalston then digitizes them and shares them on his site. Having a quick flick through I’ve found some pretty cool tracks by Gill Scott-Heron, Groove Train and a nice James Brown mix by Matt Black (right-click and select “Save Target As” on the links). www.dalstonoxfamshop.blogspot.com

Thanks for the link Chris

Following on from that last post, I quite like these from Japanese design firm D-Barcode which specialises in sprucing up barcodes to make them easier to incorporate into an overall package design.

Quick Response Codes – what what what? Well they act in a similar way to a barcode except when you take a picture of them with an internet-enabled camera phone, your phone will bring up information or take you to a link of a particular website.

It’s something we’ve trialed a bit at the BBC (we ran an experiment in London zoo a couple of years back with these images next to the animal cages so visitors could get more information), also I noticed when I was in Japan last year that they got used quite a lot on billboards and advertising to provide a link back to the product.

Anyway I thought this was quite an interesting use of the technology by Munich-based clothing label Emma Cott, basically you can generate a link to your own website, social networking site etc, they’ll then print it out on to a t-shirt. Here’s the code to my facebook profile (I’m sure there could be some interesting uses for this?):

Really like this video by the artist C215 workin his magic across London. To find more stuff check his flickr account or myspace page.

There’s something I really love about this Muxtape site, it basically allows you to upload mp3’s and create online playlists or mixtapes. However I think it’s the interface which is almost over-the-top simple, but there’s something really beautiful and art-like about it?

Web design, good CSS practice and search engine optimisation - all to a pretty fly beat! Watch here

“design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production

your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned

please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time”

Found this on Tonteau’s Threadless Blog which I thought was pretty funny, a classic British tabloid headline?

In other news related … news, check out the redesigned bbc news site, which is finally starting to drop those Real/WMV pop-up players and replacing them with the new embedded flash video player I was working on before Christmas.

I’m really loving this post on CDM of some guys who have remade the tron movie without the use of any computer generated imagery! Watch the video here - Genius!  

Then again when you combine ‘homemade’ with ‘tron’ you’re always bound to come up with a winner - who can forget good ‘ol Tron Guy a few years ago (incidentally I forgot just how tight those trousers are around the crotch - ewwwww!)

Interesting to see the new ITV Catch Up site, there’s a couple of things that I like about it (though there are a LOT of bugs when using it on a mac) - My main gripe is that rather than using flash video (which everyone has) it uses Microsoft Silverlight (which no-one has?!)

… is on, you can’t go wrong for $9 each?

Here’s are the ones I ordered:

On Saturday a friend of mine booked out a room for a birthday party and asked me to bring some music along. Unfortunately, for some reason just plugging my iPod into the mixer produced a horrible sound quality so I was forced to use the CD decks - this would have been fine except the only CD to hand was a 3 disc ‘Best of the Eighties’ album which I had to make last for over 3 hours (I think towards the end of the night I’d played Grace Jones ‘Pull up to the Bumper‘ about 8 times?!)

Anyway here’s a picture of me posing like I’m doing some cool DJ scratch move or something (in reality the most advanced bit of skill was a fade in)

All in all it was quite possibly the worst bit of DJ’ing ever, though someone came up to me at the end and said that “never had one person done so much with so little” which I thought was nice - and most people seemed to be feeling the fly beats I was laying down:

Creative Review have written a great post featuring some current cool new music video’s. My favourite of which is this one, directed by Keith Schofield for the Supergrass song ‘Bad Blood’. It basically features a wicked trick of locking the camera axis point to random objects and actions in the video … though rather than trying to explain it’s better to actually just watch it.