A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to take part in a workshop run by D&AD, called 'Typography - Love Letters'. It was part of a wider group of design orientated professional development courses that they run; they're definitely worth a look. The course was run by Phil Baines, professor of typography at Central St Martins, where the course was held. The basic premise for the workshop was to spend the day as far away from a computer as possible*, get our hands dirty with good old pencils, paper, scissors and glue, and have a good look at some letters.

We started the day by drawing out lots of letters, many times. Phil provided us each with two pencils sellotaped together that looked at bit like this - 

I've just seen a video that made me quite excited; it's a film about the making of a book called 'The Complex of All of These' by a printmaker called Abigail Uhteg. I thought I'd share it here as it links in nicely with my recent Pech-app Cake-cha, called 'Hands'. I spoke about why using your hands to do stuff is good. And look - here's proof.

This video is made up of about 3000 photographs, taken over the course of 2 months - the time it took Abigal to illustrate, print and bind 35 copies of her book (all by hand).

'Une Semaine de Bonté' or 'A week of kindness' was the third collage-novel by Dada artist Max Ernst, made and published in 1933. The original collages that form this novel currently make up an excellent exhibition in Paris at the Musée D'Orsay, which I had the pleasure of visiting on a recent break.

Ernst was born in Germany in 1891. He began painting after abandoning his philosophy studies at Bonn University, but after 5 years he was enlisted to serve in World War I. This caused a big interruption to his career as an artist, but nonetheless fueled his imagination ready to resume his work once his service was over.

After the war Ernst founded a prominent Dada group in Cologne, Germany with several other artists, and began his experiments with collage. In 1922, Ernst moved to Paris to join another Dadaist group. Rather than transporting masses of paintings from Germany to France as a German ex-soldier, Ernst was able to post an exhibition's worth of collages to himself in Paris.  At this time the Parisians were just beginning to come to terms with the Dadaist movement, where existing standards in art were rejected and replaced with more chaotic and nonconformist ideas, which many referred to as 'anti-art'. Ernst's new collages made a big impression, giving him a new found notoriety on the art scene. These collages marked the first of a series of three collage-novels that Ernst would make over the following decade.

It is the final novel in this series, 'Une Semaine de Bonté', that is currently displayed at the Musée D'Orsay, and is made up of 184 collages. As you might expect, the themes running throughout the images are rather sombre, and the images strange, uncanny and unsettling, but also exciting.

Here are a few images from the series.

Last week I made my way to Imperial College London for the I Love Design 8x8 event. The basic premise was 8 speakers who could each talk for 8 minutes about their ideas, inspirations and motivation. Similar in theory to the Pecha Kucha format but with a bit more flexibility, it kept the presentations varied, interesting and, well, nicely concise.

The speakers invited were well chosen, ranging from a couple of recent-ish and very successful graduates HudsonBec, via design pro Vaughan Oliver, to the youngest ever Black Pencil winner Matt Dent. The evening was hosted by Ben Terret, author of the Noisy Decent Graphics blog and partner at Really Interesting Group.

Which brings me nicely onto this. Actually, Tristan has already written about it here, but I like it a lot so I'll mention it again quickly. Really Interesting Group made a limited edition newspaper called Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008, 'Like a Daily Me, but slower'. It's beautifully designed, and packed with great ideas. Read more about it here.

NB:  The headers in the newspaper contain tweets. The header in top right image says 'sometimes I wish milk with tea was a food'.

I went up to London yesterday to see the Royal College of Art's graduate show, which was a real treat. I saw loads of great work - here's a small selection: An exciting plug anyone? This one is designed by Min-Kyu Choi from the Design product course. It's brilliant.

Really nice illustrations by Hannah Warren

Haruka Shinji had put a book together called Once a Year about the annual concert of a 'Batphonist, the world's only bat player', and also made some great screen prints to accompany the book.

I just took at trip to see the University of Brighton degree shows and saw some great work. Here's a few of my favourite bits.

Richard Carey had a beautiful screen printed poster commemorating Edgar Allan Poe's cryptography work. Apparently Poe claimed in 1840 that he could break any code that was sent to him, and this poster shows his working method.

Emily Cross did a really nice series of screenprinted illustrations responding to an 'almost alphabetical' journey made around East Sussex, called From Alfriston to Wilmington.

Benjamin Phillips filled his space with loads of little drawings, paintings and etchings, and it looked great. He's got a mad imagination - some of his images reminded me of one of my favourite artists Marcel Dzama.

Ian Smith and I have just got back from Newcastle after the launch of the Great North Museum, for which we provided lots of AV and interactive displays. I took a couple of hours to explore the city and visit the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

Ten Thousand Cents is a project where a digital representation of a $100 bill was created by thousands of different people from all over the world. This project caught  our attention because it was made using Amazon's Mechanical Turk - a tool for sourcing people to perform Human Intelligence Tasks - or tasks that computers are unable to perform.

Individuals were asked to reproduce  a 10,000th of a $100 bill using a custom drawing tool, but were not told anything about the project.

Our senior designer Ben stumbled across a great site called Ffffound this week. It's an image bookmarking site, that allows you to stick any images you find online into one place, so you can easily keep track of lots of inspiring and exciting things.

Ffffound will recommend other images that you might also like, showing you parts of other users' collections where your selections cross over, and by showing you similarly themed images.