Excellent work on the part of Andrew, Ry, Paul, Nick, Angelo and Tanja here at Heavenly HQ and also the web bods at Clusta.

Check out the Stapleford Park, Visit Britain and NBC Universal pages to see some of the stuff I’ve contributed over the last year or so, but otherwise just have a nose around at some of our top work.

Roughly a year ago I started a collaborative side project with my friend Andy C, where we planned to sell bits and bobs that we’ve been making in our spare time just to flex the old creative muscle.

Well, now a year older (some may say not necesarilly wiser) and the Handmade By Machine collective now holds the lofty figure of Ben Brears and Ry “The Matrix” Coleman under its wing. And what better way to celebrate our expansion than the release of our first product, the Just My Type range of greetings cards.

A range of cards using typefaces as the basis of some geeky chat up lines, these award winning cards can be purchased as a set or individually over at the shop. What with Valentines Day coming up and all, it’s the perfect way to win the heart of your type-geek crush.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get on with some work. It’s been designated to me especially as one of the other teams couldn’t crack it…

After battling through the crowds of the identikit indie/artist types notorious around London’s east end, it was refreshing to see some beautifully crafted work from designer types such as swash-tastic typographer Alison Carmichael, Anthony Burrill and the overactive piss-take gland belonging to New York based duo Karlsson/Wilker.

The latter had opted not to produce any physical artwork of any kind, but instead wrote a 12minute prog opera with a former intern. I wish I could hve recorded it and posted it here, however I couldn’t and so instead here is a picture of what it sounded like…

Awesome or what? Sounding somewhere between something off The Mighty Boosh, Flight of the Conchords and the Pet Shop Boys, lyrics included references to wolves of love, bubblegum fun and climbing through girls windows. Something for everyone to relate to then…

Moving on, here is some epic type from Alison Carmichael, Craig Ward and Sean Freeman.

Some smart building/type here via Praline and The Model Shop:

Handily available as font here.

Numerous other bits of inspiring stuff can be seen over at the exhibition website, although sadly the physical space shut on Saturday 23rd of Jan. Tough luck for you if you didn’t see it.

One more thing…listen to Torche. Bring on the summer.

Made from what appears to be a Subbuteo table (pre-pitch markings), Ry apparently found this in a box in his attic full of VHS recordings of the 1988 Olympic Gymnastic finals, a pack of 1st edition hamburger flavour Monster Munch and a Game & Watch.

Still, working within a branding and design agency, we at least managed to find him a Pantone swatch mug to match this velour monstrosity.

It turns out that although the residents of Little Venice appear to live on the fabled “Streets of Gold” in London, they still find time to slip in a decent gag when comes to house numbers:

That'll be 2a then?

We soon found ourselves in the age old quest to find a pub, succeeding at the third attempt (some of our party may or may not have been wearing shorts and sandals, which may or may not have been deemed inappropriate dress for drinking in the posh pubs in Maida Vale). We were delighted to find not only were we allowed into the Prince Albert (giggle!), but there was all sorts of fun to be had with the Scrabble game at our table.

That was until about 3 rounds in when I was dealt the hand below and sulked about my crap luck for pretty much the rest of the game:

No chance

Needless to say, I lost. Badly.

Other highlights of the evening involved dictionary checks on the following words:

ungritted, any thing that isn’t gritted
– disallowed due to it clearly not being a word.

grimxkin, some rubbish skin
- see above

littlepony, a small pony
– not putting a space between words does not automatically make one word

sea/pony/grittedtax, tax applicable on the sea/a pony/something gritted
– adding “tax” as a prefix or suffix to an existing word does not make it a word

…and just as I’m finishing up this post the man on the tannoy has asked for the Milk Manager to head to reception. It just goes to show what a great opportunity being Milk Monitor at school was. If only the rest of us had grasped the opportunity with both hands like this fellow then we’d all be laughing into our silver-tops like he or she is right now. Adios.

One such project, Banter, was an identity and campaign for a volunteer organisation wishing to bring back the art of conversation. As part of the campaign we had plan to stage some flash-mobs (flash-chats, if you like) in public areas. Seeing how much T-mobile are riding off their own self-satisfaction after pulling of the huge scale flash mobs for those bloody annoying as hell campaigns, I can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed at how many people got involved in the Banter flash-chats!

Saying that, it was a hell of a lot of fun working with my film-study-buddies Andy and Dom, and even resulted in Andy coming out with one of his most notable vitriolic outbursts yet when he screamed “I’M THE DIRECTOR YOU SON OF A BITCH” from the top of the office block from which he was filming.

Anyways, below is the video we filmed for it. Bring on the Banter!

Thanks to the heartwarming generosity of the chaps and chapettes over at Sell!Sell!, we now have this handy reminder on our walls ensuring we keep things simple here at Heavenly towers.

Note: it is actually carefully positioned by our account directors/strategy director, as they freely admitted they were running on a “healthy bullshit economy”.

Cheers Sell!Sell!

Get your own here.