[In case you missed it, this short piece appeared in Design Week on the 6th of January.]

In the spirit of Alan Kay, who said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, here are my ’predictions’ for 2011.

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.