On Sunday our friend Ken Kirton will launch the second edition of the Studio Cookbook at the Whitechapel Gallery. Holger will be cooking the one only thing he can cook. Come along and join us. Tickets are much cheaper than going to a restaurant and can be booked here.

Our first taste of London Fashion Week. The SS13 Thomas Tait show on the south bank, for which we designed the exclusive invite which was inspired by a finish from Thomas’ new collection.

Holger was speaking at the Design Museums this morning as part of Designer Breakfasts. The other speakers were Matt Wade from Kin and Matt Baxter from Baxter & Bailey. Very nice to meet you guys and thanks to Mike Abrahams for organising it.

We designed all the common room signs for the IQ student Accomodation in Shoreditch. Today they arrived back from the anodizers all nice and shiny. A big job for the carpenter who has to screw them into the doors now. The room numbers (which were already there) used 2 screws per number and go into 4 digits, so we thought we waste even more screws and made them part of the design. Some of our signs have over 20 screw holes.

Holger just came back from Amsterdam (and cycling half of the Netherlands) where he visited our friends the lovely Pinar and Viola and the very talented Mr. Pataki. Check out their great work.

This one is for the early birds among us. Holger will be speaking at Designer Breakfasts held at the Design Museum on the 18th of September at 8am in the morning (no, they are not joking about the time, this is why its called ‘Breakfast’). If you can make it that early you can book a place here.

Today our ex-intern and regular collaborator in all things fonts Neal came to visit us to show his amazing font kit. Check it out here. And give this man a job (we would if we could), he is a genius!

Today our sign board at Metropolitan Wharf was finally installed. It looks so simple considering that the project was really complicated and took us forever. The complete project can be seen ‘here’.

The Olympics have arrived, big time. The Red Arrows over East London and we can see the top of the stadium from the studio. We watched the opening ceremony on the big screen in Haggerston park and were happy to see that the Olympic cauldron has been designed by Thomas Heatherwick, one of our favorite designers. Time to be proud to be British (even if you are not British).

The last two weeks we had the pleasure of having 15 year old Jake in the studio on school work experience. Thanks Jake it was great to have you and we didn’t have to feel guilty about not being able to offer you a job after your internship.

If you happen to be in Germany this week come to see the ‘Werkschau’ (degree show) in Düsseldorf where Holger teaches. His students also designed the overall identity for the show (which has been criticized for being a bit too silly and meaningless by German taste).

Claire’s decided to work more in France and today was her last day at the studio. We went to the bar at Netil House for a drink with friends and colleagues. We miss you already Claire!

Thanks everyone for coming to our little D&AD talk at the top of Shoreditch Carpark. We somehow all overlooked the notice that said ‘meetings and gatherings of the general public on an organised or ad-hoc basis are not permitted in this area’. But then again we are not the general public.
Harry and Holger did a short video for the event entitled ‘Essential Skills’ (needed to open a design studio) which the D&AD did not show it on their website as originally planned.

The D&AD asked us to get involved in their current No Plan B campaign in connection with this years New Blood Festival. Holger is also giving an informal talk together with Harry Woodrow from Multistorey on Thursday the 28th of June. We are trying to do it on top of a carpark in Shoreditch. Come along (but don’t jump).

Holger just came back from New York where he visited the Sagmeister studio, Pentagram and the Herb Lubalin Archive at The Cooper Union. It was also nice to met with Irene, the first person who ever worked for Mind Design back in the old days when we just had a small desk space in another studio.

We have added a small identity project we did recently to the website and updated the Villandry project with new images..
→ Dominic Reeves
→ Villandry

Monday saw the ‘soft’ launch of Black Cow Vodka, the Dorset based vodka company that we have been working with recently. The launch took place in the former power station on Rivington Street, which is now a restaurant called The Tramshed. Ironically, it was the Damien Hirst cow in the centre of the restaurant that attracted most of the attention on the night.

Finally we have woken up to a brand(ed) new world and offer a whole new client experience. more here.

Today saw the launch of the Silent Poster Sale organised by students of Central St. Martins in collaboration with St Brides, the sale was to raise money for the library and the students degree show. We put together a poster inspired by the once olympic game, ‘Tug of War’. Screen printed by the guys at Print Club London.

Today Claire and Holger visited Bucks University to talk about our work and set the students a live brief.

In true ‘Occupy’ spirit Holger and his students at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf, Germany squatted a room to establish a better and more creative working environment. (Read more about the project here). This was end of last year, now its time to show the world what is being produced in the ‘occupied room’. The students have set up a new blog to show their daily, weekly and monthly output. There are also several events and workshops happening in the room. Bookmark it and check it out for regular updates.
www.raumbesetzung.de

Holger went over to Zurich to meet old Mind Design colleagues and interns. As tradition demands we all went to eat the Jumbo Jumbo Cordon-Bleu (a massive piece of meat stuffed with cheese and ham) in the Rheinfelder Bierhalle. As in previous years Alex finished first, closely followed by Holger and Martin. Patrik and Sarah dropped out for ethnical reasons. Adrian lost due to being jet-lagged.

We received the first samples of the tea packaging range we designed for Villandry. All the old branding will be replaced over time with the new re-design.

Time to introduce Miles, our adopted studio dog. He actually belongs to the neighbours but he regularly pops into the studio to jump onto the beanbags, prevent us from concentrating on work and of course search for food. We might actually have given him some in the past.

We were pleased to welcome a group of Buckinghamshire students into the studio, we talked the students through a couple of current projects as well as a slightly older one.

Romilly went back to university yesterday, this time as a guest lecturer. He completed a talk about the process of, and stages between graduation and employment — He tells us that the current UWE students are doing some great work!

We are still working on the signage system for the Metropolitan Wharf building in Wapping. Today we tested the size of the tenants board on location. From now on we need to start looking for about fifty fairly straight pieces of washed up wood.

Today our intern Elise designed a little postcard for a project by Random Projects . The idea is to create a postcard in response to a randomly generated word related to the upcoming Olympics. Our word was ‘Champion’. We used Wim Crouwels font from his classic Hiroshima poster. A true champion of graphic design.

Today Paul and his lovely family came to bring us the first samples of the vodka bottles we designed for him. Make sure you try Black Cow once its available. Paul makes it from cows milk in the Dorset countryside.

Our play list is on Studio Music. A brilliant website and a very nice idea. Considering the diversity in taste it is surprising that we never really argue about the music played in the studio.

Romilly worked out how the 3d modeling program works. From now on our logos can move and twist around in wonderful animated fashion (actually on this occasion there is a real point as the MOST logo is supposed to be build as a sculpture). It took us a while but from now on all we need is a few pics of us looking very involved in meetings or sticking up post-it notes and we will be fit for the moving world.

Ok, so we have given up on our boycott of social networking sites and decided to go with the times. This means you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook now and check out our hopefully not entirely pointless latest gossip. However, we still prefer to chat to real people in the local pub on friday evenings.

To mark the start of the new year our old studio Buddhist blessing went back to Japan to be burned in the shrine and we got a new one. Nice big projects and good fortune will come for sure. To put the new blessing into place we drank some sake upon it.

We went west of the Old Street roundabout and celebrated our studio Christmas party at Paramount. Amazing views. We could even see as far as the studio. Happy Christmas everyone. From Tuesday the studio will be closed for the Christmas break.

There is almost no point anymore designing websites nowadays even if they have the most advanced Content Management System. It takes a year or so until some so-called ‘web expert’ pops up and talks the client into something much more ‘user friendly’ with little or none consideration for design. As long as it has a big Twitter and Facebook button who cares about the overall identity concept or all those typographic details…
Most recently our website for Paramount has joined the grave where it meets our original designs for Le Pain Quotidien, Tea and Tess. However, our website for PTAL recently miraculously came back from the dead. So there is hope.

We are working on an experimental wayfinding system for a building located right on the river Thames. The idea is to use driftwood. Today we put on our wellies and went down to the river banks in Richmond to collect some.

We have added some new projects to the website and updated the Belmacz Gallery project with new images of the now finally finished shop.
→ Belmacz Gallery
→ The Collection
→ Drummonds Catalogue
→ Tom Dixon Catalogue 11
→ Tom Dixon Review 11
→ Roll Table Base
→ Villandry

Some of our fonts are now available at the newly launched Type Foundry.

A friend got us free tickets to the Typo London conference and we all went. Three days of talks. We didn’t see all of them but at times if felt a bit like a gathering of old mates that were big in the nineties and living of past fame. What really stood out were two talks: Morag Myerscough and Andrew Stevens from GTF (above). Especially Andy’s talk was very inspiring, unpretentious and giving a lot of insight into the production process behind the work. It was a shame that he was talking in the smaller hall at 3pm (and was even cut short by the presenter) while the big stage at prime time was reserved for the more egocentric ‘design stars’.

After more than four years with the studio, today was Craig’s last day. Here you can see him with his new bike we built him as a leaving present. On monday Romilly takes over. But first we went for quite a few farewell drinks in the pub. You will be missed, Craig!

Holger just came back from Düsseldorf where he gave a short talk to the first year students (quite a lot of them). Today we were visited by a small group of Japanese who came to London on a design tour organized by Quotation Magazine.

We would love to work for Paul Smith as he is a fellow cyclist. It might never never happen but today we worked WITH Paul Smith, a sign writer with the same name. Its a shame to see this traditional trade craft being more and more replaced by vinyl letters. Paul did a great job writing the logo signature we designed for ‘The Collection’ which will open next week.

Craig spent the day at the screen printers printing invites for ‘The Collection’. Our intention was to make each invite unique so the printers mixed different colours directly on the screen, something we have not tried before.

Right in time for London Fashion Week our new Belmacz website went live today. Maybe not the most user-friendly design but totally in tune with our new overall identity concept.

Well, again we might actually have a job available soon. It does not happen very often and we will be very, very picky. Please read the detailed description here before applying.
(The position is no longer available)

Today we finished working on ‘Metastasis’ , a new font we designed in collaboration with Neal Fletcher. Sorry Herr Spiekermann, we mean no harm. Meta should be preserved in aspik.

Riots close to the studio. We are used to fair deal of crime and general dodgyness around the studio but now things have gone too far. They boarded off our local pub!!! We hope it will be open by Friday again.

We are currently (well for quite a while now) working on the re-design of the Villandry chain. It will still take a while until everything is produced and the restaurants are re-fitted. The new identity will still be classic and suitable for a French Brasserie but the colour scheme is very bright and unusual. At the moment we are producing lots of dummies in original materials.