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).

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:

We thought it would be selfish of us to keep all these delightful morsels from the Cogapp internal blog to ourselves, so here's a few highlights of the latest in creative imagination, digital inspiration and technical innovation for your perusal:

On your Bike: Avid cyclist, techophile and all-things-quirky enthusiast Tristan has been oggling the latest in the way of wierd and wonderful bicycle designs. Below is one of his personal highlights, check out a few more ingenious two-wheelers here.

2D or not 2D: That is indeed the question that out Head of New Technology, Joe, has been pondering - in this case with regards to YouTube's new 3D experiment. Whether or not people will be jumping out of their seats at the prospect of images jumping out of the screens at them remains to be seen, but it's an exciting idea nevertheless.

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.