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 - 

The results are in folks - the first ever Brighton Munge-off (patent pending) has come and gone and the winners have been announced.

You may want this explained a bit - which is fair enough. We recently took our in-house developed Facemunger application on its first outing to Glug Brighton 2 (a designers' networking event held by Crush and Agency Rush). Here willing gluggers (or glugites? Glugians?) were encouraged to snap photos of themselves with their friends and let the application work its magic to swap their faces. The results were... interesting. The application, created by our Head of New Technology Joe Baskerville, proved to be extremely popular, and with almost 400 images captured that evening alone, going through them to find the ones to share was a tough job (on both the decision-making faculties and, much more prominently, the eyes). But here they are - the best of the best of the Facemunges from Glug Brighton 2.

2010 is billed to be the year of many things: the tablet (if Wired and PC World are correct), the smartphone (going by some analysts and journalists), 3D TV (according to some) and of course, the Tiger (no relation to Apple's OS though I'm afraid). However, with all the hype and speculation, one trend that will be making its public debut in 2010 that has so far been missed by critics and foreseers alike is the new art of facemunging.

Before you recoil in horror trying to dream up the possibilities of what this might be, allow me to elaborate a little. But, in line with the old adage that 'a picture paints a thousand words', allow me to do it with an image. It's not a pretty image by any stretch of the imagination, and for those of you who know Ben or Eleanor personally, this will bear an extra, far more disturbing weight than usual. However, it displays perfectly the power of facemunging. Be warned; what follows is not for the faint of heart.

Ready? This is your last chance to turn back now.

Okay, here goes (but don't say I didn't warn you):

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).

The dictionary on my trusty Mac tells me that 'glug' can be either a verb meaning to drink liquid with a hollow gurgling sound (e.g. he glugs down half his beer) or a noun meaning an amount of liquid poured from a bottle (e.g. a couple of good glugs of Dubonnet). I tell you this because I feel the two examples listed about the word probably give you a better impression of what the first ever Glug Brighton was like than any amount of material I could write ever would. But I'll try anyway:

Firstly, apologies for the increasingly tenuous and odd Pech-app Cake-cha blog titles. If it's any consolation, I'm more disappointed in them as an author than you as a suffering reader will ever be.

Now, onto the topic at hand: the latest round of Pecha Kucha presentations held over cake, tea and the like brought with them a combination of art, film and technology. For those of who who haven't immediately popped out to the bakery, here's a rundown of what went on at Cogapp's Pecha Kucha 3.0: In his own unique style, Colin kicked off proceedings with his long anticipated 'Sketcha Kucha' (again, really sorry about the dire puns). Having, over the last two weeks, asked us all at varying points to do quick self portraits, Colin displayed these to us with a few musings about his first love: pencils. Re-igniting in us a passion for the importance of designing with our hands rather than mice, Colin displayed the incredible results achieved by using age-old tools over modern techo-easels.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend i-Design, a one day conference and showcase for anyone with an interest or passion for interactive design and the digital arts. The programme certainly lived up to its aims as I came away truly inspired and entertained as well as being somewhat perplexed too!

The day kicked off with a panel debate centred around the idea of ‘Post Digital’ asking the question, 'If everything is digital, then what's next?' In a world where everything references digital media, how does our industry need to respond? This was a fascinating insight into the minds of the panel members more than anything, with the illustrious Adrian Shaughnessy leading the discussions.

This then lead the way for the first 5D interlude of the day by MOTH who beautifully showed their passion for experimental technology and for pushing the boundaries of traditional VJing. MOTH bridge the divide between video mixing and street art, generating site-specific video graffiti designed in response to the morphology, texture and ambience of the spaces and structures of the outside world.

Another presentation that particularly caught my interest was one by Lichtfaktor. You might recognise the work of these lords of luminosity from the TalkTalk television adverts (which also bookend each segment of ITV's popular X-factor). Their work in light-writing is spectacular, ranging from relatively standard incarnations of the practice, through to an amazing light-printer that allows pre-written messages to be created and captured in the same way as standard light-writing.

Open Frameworks is a technology that we here at Cogapp are very keen on - Joe, for example, implemented it to develop our people pong game.