The Long, Hot Simmer

In the design world, talk is particularly cheap and selling excitement is never easy. The task is made harder still when the commotion comes from a place called Adelaide-- a grandmotherly name for a city of churches. Read my recent report on the highs and lows of design in the state of South Australia, in "The Long, Hot Simmer", in issue 70 of Inside magazine.

Sign Language

I'd blogged earlier about my interview with Stephen Banham in The Typographer. The finished article, about the design of signs, has since been published in Design Quarterly.

Click here to read "Sign Language," appearing in issue 45.

The Desk

Damien Wright's model of "Harry's Desk".

Greg places the objet d'art just so.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been working on a story exploring the role of sketching in the process of design. The editor was eager for me to include a discussion of the work of at least a couple of Australians, and I decided to collect some remarks from my friend Damien Wright, a craftsman who makes furniture from native Australian wood. Damien draws a lot of working sketches, but he gets more mileage from the scale models he builds. The other night, he dropped off one of those models with a couple of his sketchbooks for me to look over, to see what might be useful in illustrating the article. I took a few shots of the tiny desk using my tabletop cyc. He calls this one "Harry's Desk."

Inspecting the joinery.

I refused to caption this one.

I took a short break for lunch, and by the time I came back, Joe and Greg had discovered the desk and decided they wanted to keep it for their office. It's a little small, but they complained they don't have anything to write on at the moment, and they thought their Hovitos idol (a trophy from a mission to Peru) looked good on it. I explained they could borrow it for a few days, but that Damien is getting it back. Thus ensued some further inspection and horsing around, until I'd had enough and put the model away.