totalcontent - the blog.

packaging you can Count on.

Thought this would be the perfect date to share one of my all-time favourite pieces of packaging. I’ve had it quite a few years now, and picked it up at my local Budgens, so I have no idea who was responsible. It certainly makes a change from the usual flimsy string bag – and shows eloquently how tapping into a shared mythology can add character and humour, even to a humble bulb of garlic. The gradiated colour, gothic type and creative folding techniques are great. The die-cut crucifix lifts it into the realms of pure genius.

I’ve just realised the past three posts have all been a tad ghoulish. Pure co-incidence, I assure you. ’Scuse me... just off for a quick pint of the red stuff.

Happy Halloween everyone.

Design Week jury service.

Gown… check. Wig… check. Nose for a winner… check.

Jim will once again be taking his place as one of the judges for this year’sDesign Week Awards. He’ll be working on the Print jury for two days in early December with a brief to take a close look at the overall standard of writing.

It’s always a real eye-opener to take a look back at the year’s best print graphics as a body of work. Having tables and tables of work spread out before you can be daunting, but it’s a rare opportunity to see trends emerging and to measure one piece against another. In these tough economic times, it will be interesting to see whether designers are managing to pull out the stops creatively to compensate for smaller production budgets. There will certainly be no hiding behind extravagant print techniques and fancy finishes. It’s back to basics time – which in some ways is no bad thing.

Other jurors this year include friends to totalcontent like Malcolm Garrett,Adrian Shaughnessy and Sea’s Bryan Edmondson, as well as design industry luminaries including Simon Waterfall, Apple’s Harriet Devoy and Boots’ Jon Turner. You can find full details here, and the winners will be revealed at London’s Hilton Hotel on 2 March 2010.

a window on our world.

If you’ve visited the ‘recently’ section of this website of late, you’ll know that we’ve finally decamped to a sleek new studio directly underneath our previous space (and just a short hop and skip from our bedroom).

As it happened, we also inadvertently created our first piece of external branding for the totalcontent franchise. Look carefully at the photo on the right and see if you can guess where we’re probably beavering away as we speak. The clue’s most definitely in the colour.

our new home.

A new chapter in the totalcontent story. After months of chaos, mess, electricians, decorators, trips to the tip and furniture deliveries, we have finally moved into our shiny new space downstairs. The commute from bedroom to work is now a mere four paces.

With a view of autumn-kissed lime trees and the town’s 12th century church spire, we’re calling it the studio, because we hope our creative juices will get truly fired up in there. The colour scheme – you may not be surprised to hear – is white with bright splashes of orange. Just a few pictures to hang and we’ll be right at home.

Many thanks to the multi-talented Tony, our highly obliging next-door neighbour, for 24-hour tech-support and the all-action photo.

bloody marvellous.

Film title sequences have become a mini art form in their own right, with the incomparable Saul Bass showing the way in the 1960s and more recent exponents like Kyle Cooper breaking new boundaries with his work on Se7en. Budget constraints have meant that TV has been left lagging behind, especially in the UK, where you immediately think of the perennially wet, sloping roofs across Manchester’s Coronation Street or the stock footage of a lumbering tortoise that heralds the opening of ‘One Foot in the Grave’. But True Blood, HBO’s excellent swamp-goth vampire series, has significantly raised the bar. The sublime opening credits, by Seattle’s Digital Kitchen, create an evocative visual tableau that perfectly sets the scene for what’s to follow. Fast cuts of slo-mo snakes and bloody roadkill are skilfully juxtaposed with Pentecostal rapture, sleazy sexual encounters and ancient car wreckage. Decay, blood, religion, voodoo, and the brooding intensity the Deep South, seep through in 65 masterfully edited shots. Jace Everett’s sweetly sinister country song ‘Bad Things’ provides a fitting soundtrack. Catch it if you can – the series starts on C4 on 7 October.

True Blood Main Titles from DIGITALKITCHEN on Vimeo.

keep it simple.

Although I wasn’t exactly sure what rooibos tea was when I bought this, the packaging (designed by the good people at Pearlfisher) made it irresistible. And actually, as it turns out, I really quite like the stuff. Apart from the background being a perfect shade of orange, the anthropomorphic, hand-drawn type has an arresting, child-like quality, which cleverly suggests the tea’s natural, organic provenance. The doodle-like illustrations not only convey energy and fun, but show you that you’re about as far away from a slick, processed drink as you could be. The copy wasn’t bad either, personable without trying too hard:

“Here at Kromland Farm, we’ve been cultivating rooibos since 1902. But that's nothing – South Africa’s indigenous Khoisan people have been enjoying its rich flavour and potent heath benefits for millennia”.

Unfortunately, it seems I won’t be. Sainsbury’s seem to have stopped stocking Kromland Farm.

white man in helsinki art gallery.

With a couple of hours to kill in Helsinki, I wandered into the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, an intriguingly shaped glass-and-zinc building designed by the US architect Steven Holl. The exhibits were a mix of Finnish and international modern art, which were beautifully set off by the gentle, organic shapes of the rooms. Of course, you can always judge an art gallery by its gift shop, and Kiasma’s was packed with curious gems. Though I was sorely tempted to trade my Euros for various arty, esoteric books, I held back to retain my hand-luggage only status on the flight back. I did, however, pick up this card designed by a pair of English illustrators – Bob and Roberta Smith. Of course I agree entirely with the sentiment, but I’m also busy trawling through Chris Salewicz’s mighty biography of Joe Strummer, so I just had to have it.

In case you’re interested, Bob and Roberta's cards are available – along with efforts by David Shrigley, Magda Archer and Vic Reeves – at www.politecards.com.

having your cake and eating it.

Last week I visited Helsinki for the first time. It was at the behest of my client Nokia, who wanted me there for an afternoon’s workshop. It can be hard to get an impression of a place in such a short space of time, especially when you are working for most of it, but Helsinki seemed at once strange and familiar, with its unusual mix of Scandinavian and quasi-Soviet architecture, and often striking juxtaposition of old and new.

What won me over to the city and its people (apart from feeling incredibly safe as I trod unfamiliar streets, even at the dead of night) was its endearing quirkiness. For example, after said workshop, Kokoro & Moi, the buzzy design company who’d hosted the workshop, invited us to a totally mad ‘cake party’, organised as part of Helsinki Design Week. Fashion, architectural and graphic designers had been challenged to create a conceptual piece (of cake). These were exhibited to a discerning crowd of designery types at a chi-chi furniture store. Among the various entrants were a cake as a giant coin, a loose self-portrait, and a chocolate offering shaped as a poo. Kokoro & Moi’s effort was a ‘build-it-yourself’ cake – plain sponge slices on which you could plaster jam, cream or hundreds and thousands with the provided plastic spades. A flouring of self-expression, you could say.

mugs of England.

The latest patriotic offerings from our friends Mark Faulkner and Gill Naylor at the highly esteemed repeat repeat. The ‘Britannia’ range proudly wears its heritage on its sleeve with a variety of graphic interpretations of the phrase ‘Made in England’. With people increasingly concerned about the carbon footprint of the imported goods they buy, it’s reassuring to know that these bone-china beauties have been designed and made in this green and pleasant (if a bit wet and miserable) land.