ADC Young Guns X

Maricor and I were selected for this years Young Guns award which were announced earlier this month. The Young Guns is an international portfolio based award presented annually by the Art Directors Club and is open to creatives under the age of thirty. This year 34 were given and we're beyond happy to join alumni we very much admire and are inspired by such as Kyle Bean, Deanne Cheuk, Johnny Kelly and Alex Trochut to name just a few.

We weren't able to make it to the awards night that were held in New York earlier this month but our friend Matt was kind enough to snap some pics of our work on display.

Field Trip Sydney

We've mentioned it on twitter but not on our blog yet but Maricar and I will be speaking at the Sydney instalment of Field Trip this December. It's a creative conference presented by our Australian agents Jacky Winter and Australian Infront. They held the first in Melbourne earlier this year with Beci Orpin, Jeremy Ley, Tin and Ed amongst the stellar line up so we're pretty proud to be asked to speak in Sydney.

Field Trip is a little different to the usual conference, speakers are encouraged to think of it as more of a performance rather than a talk, as we'll go through the nitty gritty process of creating work, live on stage with a lot of tips shared. Both creative tips as well as technical short cuts. For Sydney there is a great variety of skills represented by the speakers: the highly respected traditional illustrator Nigel Buchanan, paper engineer Benja Harney of Paperform fame, letterist Gemma O'Brien aka Mrs Eaves, 3D digital wizards Forge & Morrow, infographics designer Anthony Calvert and the motion gurus from Flutter. Hopefully we won't be too nervous on stage but I'm slightly freaking out about the prospect of presenting in front of a big crowd. But it's a interesting format for a conference and one which we would have enjoyed going to as a student and young designer to get an insight into the creative processes of some of our creative heroes so we're glad to be involved and I hope what we have to share will be interesting.

We'll be going through a brief from start to finish, discussing the ways we tailor our work flow to working with such a labour intensive medium as embroidery. We'll share some of the digital techniques we use, but most importantly we'll be doing some live embroidery on stage.  If we have any regular visitors to the blog I hope we see you there, please say hi :)

And also if anyone wants to ask us a question about how we work please leave them in the comments section of this post and we'll try to go through them during our talk.

Field Trip Sydney takes place on the 7th of December at the Seymour Centre. Tickets are still available through Australian Infront, details are all on their site. But if you do a bit of sleuthing on the Desktop magazine website I think they're offering a reader discount!

Hope Shines Here

Earlier this year I had an incredible experience travelling with TOMS on one of their Giving trips to Peru and Guatemala visiting schools, clinics and orphanages. There is more info at the TOMS site on their One For One movement and here are some videos from the trip.

I spent a couple of days with Visualiza in Guatemala, their aim is to provide "quality eye service to everyone", their private practice helps to fund their outreach clinics and the treatments they provide to patients who are less able to afford quality ophthalmological care. I had the opportunity to see the great work they do in providing access to eye care to remote parts of the community and also to sight saving surgery. With the the support TOMS provides with its One For One movement they were able to pay for more surgeries and operate more out reach clinics.

The rest of the trip was spent in Peru helping to distribute shoes with Buckner International. We met a lot of incredible people who are there helping the community day to day. Seeing first hand the difference they make was a humbling experience. I also had the opportunity to design a mural which we painted with the help of the children in the community. The text translates to Hope Shines Here which we painted on one of the community halls Buckner has helped to establish in Lima. It was nice to be able to do something fun with the children, we all enjoyed ourselves and while we all got pretty messy and dived into the paint the mural turned out beautiful.

Photos courtesy of TOMS Shoes