Battle of the Bands

Last Friday night I was asked to take some pictures at the Battle of the Bands @ Mossbank Hall. There were 6 great bands battling to win, competition was tight but, "Organised Chaos" from Sandwick won overall! Well done to all the bands involved!

See a penny pick it up

I have just completed some orders for my Mono "Money" book. I hope to start producing more books for the Mono series again. I love doing them, its such a good way to explore an idea in a short period of time.

When looking for the files on my hard drive I came by a little test video I produced about a year ago, to go along with the book. There's something i like about it, (probably the roughness and mistakes!) So I uploaded it to Youtube for your viewing pleasure.

Please get in touch if you would like to order either of the Mono books - hello@jonosandilands.com

A is for Award!

So after a long wait, I received my award from YCN through the post this week.

Colour matched to my wall?

YCN are a creative agency who run the annual YCN Student Awards, and as part of my final year studies at Grays School of Art (2008-09) I worked on a brief to encourage people to play more ping pong. My results can be seen on my site here, or on the YCN "A is for Awards" archive. I suggest you have a look at the video on my site to give you an idea how it works.

It was very exciting unpacking this. It's made of solid rubber, its quite heavy!

Was a surprise to find enclosed an excellent poster of all the winners heads cut n' pasted onto a pretty awesome background.

And another new addition to my studio is a print by a Co:Lab colleague, New Dead Language, as part of his Belonging set.

Looking good! Thanks YCN and Andrew!

Co:Lab Set 2 complete!

The last print in set two of the Co:Lab project was printed tonight! Now we are almost all set for the Unique Presence exhibition this Saturday 5 Dec, 2pm - 9pm @ Islesburgh Community Centre, Drama Room, Lerwick, Shetland.

Now all we need are some nice little cards to give away to let people know where they can out find more about Co:Lab...

The cards use the test prints we printed while working on this project - we overprint with our details then rip up and give out to people!

In the meantime bookmark the Co:Lab blog where we will post details about future projects and purchasing prints! http://colabproject.blogspot.com/

Saturday is closing in...

... and we're well underway for being ready for the debut of Co:Lab at our exhibition this Saturday. Unique Presence.

Along with Andrew Morrison and Beto, I have been working on a set of collaborative prints, which we printed two more of tonight.

Hope you can make it to Islesburgh in Lerwick this Saturday to see our hard work!

Happy December!

Printing in HD

Co:Lab Print Session from Jono Sandilands on Vimeo.

Timelapse of a Co:Lab screenprint session in High Definition.

Printing for exhibition on the 5th Dec - Unique Presence @ Islesburgh Community Centre, Lerwick, Shetland.

See post about exhibition here.

Getting ready to go live...

Ive been working on a couple of projects with Shetland Drums for a few months now, and this week will see a crucial point in the launch of the new look shop, with the release of the new website! *Now live!

The brief for the website is for it to be totally updatable by phone, by the guys in the shop. So I have seen myself being up into the little hours crunching code, trying to figure out the API's for Twitter and Flickr, so we can pull live content from these social media sites using appropriate tags. The beauty of this is that with all the images hosted at flickr, we use very little of our own webspace, and also don't duplicate things!

There is a few unstable bits, but these can be worked on, and think we'l get a better idea after using it for a while. This has been a great project, i just love the idea of utilizing these websites for ease of updating.

More about Shetland Drums coming shortly...

Thinking outside the box

When freelance journalist, Chris Cope, got in touch with me about photography for a football magazine, I immediately thought, eh no. . .

But after hearing the brief for the job, I thought it was something I would be able to do. We had to capture the antics and goings on of UK's most northerly football team, Unst FC.

The spreads from the magazine below:

Along with capturing the action of the team, this was my first time doing sports photography, I used the match as an experiment and to take photos in the same way I would approach photography for live music, which I feel is probably my comfort zone in this area. I got some interesting shots in this way, and can see definite links between how people move their bodies playing sports, and playing a show at a gig. I think these ideas could make a good series of prints.

Another concept I had for capturing the team was by using Lomography, after the game I passed around the Lomo Fisheye camera, letting the team play around and take photos themselves of themselves. This could have been better executed throughout the day I think, and I only realized how these could be used after gathering the pictures, see below.

Cheers to Chris and Football Punk.

Unique Presence

On the 5th December - Along with Andrew Morrison of New Dead Language and Beto, we will be launching a set of screenprints we have been busy doing over these cold dark months under the name of Co:Lab.

The idea is that for the first week we each created an A4 image which was passed to another member of the trio who would then for the second week create another A4 image to overprint this with. And then week 3, Print!

We have completed set 1 in my garage and are gearing up to print set 2 over this week before the exhibit on the 5th. Very exciting and we will be updating images as we print at our events page on Facebook.

An award winning cactus costume

A bit of fun from last weekend, I was on my friend Kirsty's birthday bus, which had a theme of green. Harder to come up with something for that than you'd think!

After realizing a bogey was going to be quite boring, I got the idea to dress as a cactus. Originally it was going to just be a box painted green with cable ties sticking out, but I found these perfect bits of foam, from an old chair which were coloured exactly right! Bonus. Well they did smell a bit but that didn't matter.

The foam was from the arms of an old chair, and only needed some slight alterations to be right for cactus arms and legs! For the spikes - 100 cable ties, and a couple of hours on Friday night threading them through the foam and box (for main body).

The costume all set to go on Saturday!

Im a cactus! A runner up in best costume prize cactus!

We ended up at the Winter Rally @ Pierhead Bar where the Revellers were playing, was a great night! Above pic my bro and a half unspiked cactus!

Another genius idea I just had to do, and gave to a friend to wear, was the Windmill Costume - green energy. Oh yuss!

Hope nobody thinks I'm a complete idiot now...

Mareel Floor Plan

Im currently on Graduate Placement at Shetland Arts, working full time as a Graphic Designer for the busy Arts Agency. Today in the Shetland Times we released a detailed floor plan for Mareel, Shetland's new cinema, music and education venue being opened by Shetland Arts in 2011. Very exciting. We wanted to give people a better idea of what the venue will be like so I created this floor plan showing the layout and exactly what will be in the venue. You can get more info on the Shetland Arts website. www.shetlandarts.org

Blogging my Love

Welcome to my brand spanking new blog! It's a place to allow me to show my creative process and thinking behind a project and give me a platform to show some of the work and ideas that might never usually be seen by anyone but me!

For my first post I will show the design process of an identity/ business card for the person who is responsible (my inspiration, you could say) for getting me into this here blogging - Abby, from Shetland My Love - a really great blog about life and tourism in Shetland.

It all started through twitter (@jonosandilands) - Abby had seen I was a working graphic designer in Shetland, and after emailing, we met for a brainstorming session at our designated meeting spot, The Olive Tree Cafe in Lerwick. We spoke about alot of ideas but the main objective was to create a business card for her to give out to the people she meets, and obviously, to attract more people to the blog.

First step is for me to go away and think about the project and supply concepts as a basis for what the design will be.

My first experiments were using the love heart shape, cutting it up, playing to create something new from the shapes. Using the shapes to write with, in a tactile manner to create a bespoke typeface for Shetland My Love.

Named 'The Love Mark' the final logo using the font, replacing the 'v' with a love heart.

Moving on, I did a bit more research, asked the question how can I create a dynamic brand identity using something as iconic as the love heart shape, and then it hit me - heart shaped hands...

Reproducing the Heart - Using the human body - hands, to create the heart shape. Adding this deep level of personality to the brand.

The concept would be photo based using landmarks etc across Shetland in the middle of the heart, from the the point of view of the user. One technical issue is taking the photos of your own hands, to create the examples I had to do a bit of stretching and strange body positions to get the shot set up right.

Abby wanted me to push it a little further to really capture the feel of the blog. She was very keen on incorporating the Shetland flag to get the idea across this is about Shetland. The flag is something I try to avoid using if possible, due to over use of it in logos here in Shetland, plus I feel its really quite obvious, and boring.

I found it quite a struggle getting the flag to work, and Abby's idea to use the flag in the love heart worked best. The Shetland dictionary came in handy when researching words to do with love, and these could be worked into the brand. 'Smoorikens' simply translates to 'kisses'.

The Shetland words allowed me to play around with other ideas, incorporating a bit of wit and illustration. Iconic Shetland objects, traditions, folklore and places could be used to show exactly what Abby want us to know she loves about Shetland. A 'Trow' is a creature in Shetland folklore, and a 'ganzie' is a knitted jumper!

By this point I had become quite attached to the font and felt it was totally right but, what happened next shows that the simplest idea is sometimes the best...

I had sent Abby a sheet of experiments of me trying to incorporate the flag into the logo to let her see what I had been doing. On this sheet was this heart map of Shetland, I had just done quickly and then disregarded as I was quite set on where the other concept was going.

Turns out this image says exactly what we were trying to find, its perfect. I realized the other ideas were becoming quite complex and this was great as it is a simple solution to the problem. Everything was simplified and we sent the files to the printer to get these great results!

Big thanks to Abby! And keep up with her goings on @ Shetland My Love.

Please tell me what you think! I would like to find a format for showing the process better. Suggestions are welcome.