Back Soon

Co and I have made a pact, we're determined to blog more regularly. At least once a week to be exact. Blogging more, means working more so we have things for show and tell. That's the plan anyway, we'll see how we go! Oh and hopefully it'll also help us improve our writing and conversational skills :)

Mondays seem like a good time for blogging. We'll have hopefully been inspired by weekend outings and been refreshed by lazy sleep-ins. This weekend I was good and got out of bed not too late, I spent a day at the Biennale on Cockatoo Island and also watched Inception. Both were pretty awesome. I don't want to spoil Inception by over-hyping it so that it can't help but fail to meet expectations, but I gotta say it was pretty darn good. I was lost in the story for the whole 2 hours and a bit. I love when movies do that. Make you forget about everything else except for what is happening right now and worrying about what's about to happen next.

The Biennale was an almost-didn't-happen. I almost didn't see a couple of artworks that in the end were some of my favourites. Just after leaving the ferry, I bumped into my friend Dara who works at the Biennale and luckily she pointed us towards a few works that we hadn't planned on checking out because we were in a rush. Amongst them was Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves. His work was moving and beautiful and to think I wasn't going to see it..

This has turned into a pretty long post. Yikes. So work, I do have some new type experiments to share. I've brought out the watercolour pencils and tried to work in colour for a change. I'm going to keep at it and try a few coloured patterns that i'll hopefully have done for next time. The other one is a sign I made for the newly opened Icarus Store. It stocks menswear (poo I cant fit anything) from the likes of Patrik Ervell, Loden Dager and Commune de Paris. The stylish interiors were designed by Lenny Wong, an exciting young designer from Sydney. Co and I are taking turns working at Icarus Store on Fridays but i'll be there tomorrow. Also a few doors down is shelf/life. I'm keen to have a proper look at their homewares and craft on a day i'm not working.

/ca

New type work

We're busy on some new type work and patterns, here are some bits and pieces. We're working on a new series called "Phrases of Speech" all based on twisted idioms and turns of phrase that Ca and I are guilty of dropping into conversations now and then. "Get All Up In My Goat" is a classic example of me getting my phrases mixed up. It's a mash up of "All up in my grill" and "Gets my goat" and was the inspiration for this series.

"You gotta keep cheering" is sort of like our motto. I scribbled the line down in my notebook a few years back after hearing it chanted at a BSS gig in Sydney. It might seem a bit egotistical (it was Keven Drew chanting it out to the crowd) but it was really the opposite. On the night he was feeding off the energy of the crowd, who were really into the gig, and feeding it back into the show. And not wanting it to stop, anyway, I thought it was a cool motto. Still undecided about the type treatment, kind of needs to have more energy or be more loud to suit the sentiment. Will keep at it and post up what we end with.

Sydney Design: Designer Disco

Co and I are just about finished creating our lightbox design for Designer Disco. "Australian INfront is extremely excited about bringing the Designer Disco to life with the record label Future Classic. This offshoot of Future Classic’s insanely popular underground clubnight Adult Disco burns the disco flame until late, late, late. Meanwhile, in the laneway behind the venue, an exhibition of lightbox artworks illuminate and enlighten. The array of cutting-edge Sydney designers involved include Alter, Future Classic, Greedy Hen, Leif Podhajsky, Like Minded Studio, Miricro/Maricar, Sensory,
Sopp Collective, String Theory, Toko and We Buy Your Kids."

10pm till late, Saturday 14 August
The Civic Hotel & laneway, 388 Pitt Street
Cost: $15

There's a typo in our name (we're Miricro/Maricar) nevertheless we're excited to take part along side these awesome designers. Here are some process shots of our design.

/ca

Album Artwork

A new batch of Global Village albums is live and in stores. This time round we visit South Africa, France and explore African Blues. As always it was an enjoyable mix of hand drawn illustrations, patterns and textiles. Also we have another album artwork design for Universal Music, for the compilation Songs For Sweater Weather. For this one we rummaged through our closets for the comfiest looking knits and broke out the thread and needle for some sewn type. Credits for the stripey sweater on the cover goes to our housemate Karen. This colourful sweater was bought on her recent trip to South America! Me and ca are pretty excited about all the great textiles, patterns and traditional handicrafts from there so it's on our list of destinations we have to visit.

Global Village designs created for Mathematics.

Typography misc I

We'll be updating our website soon with more typography work but in the meantime these are some type experiments from our time at Mathematics for pitches that didn't go ahead.

Oxygon RD2

Part 2 is done and up online, view and vote for it here:
http://play.sydneyoperahouse.com/index.php/graphic/810.html

Please help us get to the last round and vote for our video! Voting ends Wednesday 14 July 9am (AEST). We've also posted a video diary of some behind the scenes footage, a little about the inspiration behind the animation and some bloopers that didn't make the final cut. Click here to view the diary.

Graphic Festival: Meet the Mythmakers of the Modern World is a 2 day festival of performances, talks and workshops celebrating "comic books, illustration, animation, music, multimedia and other new ways of telling stories". Check out the program for a full list of events.

Oxygon Animation

MaricorMaricar and our friends Michael Blanche and Sam Hoh have made it to the second round of Graphic Festival's animation competition with out animation "Oxygon". Oxygon is the story of two lost cosmonauts and their misadventures in space. Thanks for all the support for our clip, you can watch the first instalment here.
We're working hard on part 2 of the series, its another 20 sec animatic continuing on from the last animation. As part of this next round we need to get a Facebook group up and running and get as much people behind the project, so please help us and join our group. Here is the link for the profile, we'll be posting up a video diary and process work as well as some random bits of inspiration along the way.