March 5th, 2010 - by Colm
We were digging around the archives recently when we discovered this ancient artifact. After blowing away the thick layer of dust that had settled over the top, we peered over the top of our thickset spectacles at an alternate cover design for our great tome,
Airside by Airside. Once upon a time, mighty battles were fought between those who liked the technicolour mayhem of this design and those who didn’t. Who won? They say, history is written by the victors. Well, they also get to choose that history book’s cover.
You may also notice strange linear scratches across the middle portion of the cover. These are called “words” and scholars believe they were arranged in patterns in order to promote the book itself by describing its contents. These words also contain a little joke at the expenses of a famous graffiti artist (in your carefully-concealed face, Banksy!). Did we ever tell you the story about Alex and the Islington Banksy piece? It’s a good one. . . let’s just get this back to the archive. . . we really ought to digitise this stuff some day. . .
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March 3rd, 2010 - by Colm
Airside recently teamed up with Japanese mobile phone company,
KDDI, to produce an illustrated booklet called
Rangers. The booklet is a free gift for Japanese purchasers of a new KDDI phone, which comes with novelty USB plug attachments.
KDDI asked Airside to tell a story featuring these attachments, which include birds that sit on the USB cord like a telephone wire and firemen (known as rangers in Japan) holding it like a hose.
Our story saw a fiery cat, threatened chicks and some groovy firemen give a new twist to the old story of a cat being rescued from a tree. Written by
Airside and featuring gorgeous illustrations by our former intern,
Erica Dorn,
Rangers is told in a sequential comic book style with accompanying rhyming text in both English and Japanese. Well, at least it rhymes in English. Anyone know if the translation does?
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February 25th, 2010 - by Colm
At Airside, we like to consider ourselves ahead of the game (and not on the game, that’s a crucial distinction). This feeling was confirmed when Wired – the tech-lovers magazine that is so future-focused it probably thinks hoverboards are passé – recently ran an article about the parlour game Werewolf becoming a growing phenomenon in the tech community. Like, hello, Airside have been playing Werewolf for years.
For those of you not in the know (tscch!),
Werewolf is a fiendishly fun game – part-séance, part-RPG – that we like to play to the spooky sounds of Italian prog rockers,
Goblin, and with
Malika as a commanding, yet reassuringly French moderator. Continuing the
Airside link, the
Wired article features our own
Fred Deakin talking about playing a version of the game in South-East Asia in the late 1980’s.
Read the article here.
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February 19th, 2010 - by Colm
When The Guardian called to see if we were available for a job, there was initial disappointment amongst certain Airsiders, that it wasn’t to help James Richardson write puns for the Football Weekly podcast. Still, doing some illustrations and an animation to promote their Better Relationships supplement was a fine consolation – though we’re still waiting for that call from AC Jimbo.
Better Relationships is a two-part guide to getting along with your friends and family that came free with
The Guardian and
The Observer on Valentine’s weekend.
Airside created a number of promotional illustrations that appeared in the newspaper, along with a TV commercial that features the return of the chest bump. All right!
Watch the TV ad here.
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February 18th, 2010 - by Colm
Airside director
Fred Deakin recently removed the design hat from his dome in order to don a very snazzy music Montera and write a new tune for a video game.
Chime is an experimental mix of music and puzzles, which combines elements from various games and integrates them with the accompanying ambient music.
The music – also featuring contributions from Moby, Philip Glass and Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll – changes and expands as you progress through a level, while the beats serve as a timer. Fred’s track goes by the brilliant title of Disco Ghosts, and is a wonderfully atmospheric piece featuring smooth beats and lush electronics.
Given this blog’s complete incompetence when it comes to shapes (get in that round hole, you blasted square ball!), we can’t tell you if the game is any good, but our resident games expert, Chris Rain, has given it the thumbs-up. Though that might have been a thumbs-down – we can’t really tell as his digits have been crippled beyond recognition from too much game play.
Chime is released by
OneBigGame, a charitable organisation that creates video games to raise money for children in need. 60% of the game’s purchase price will be donated to the charity’s fund.
Chime is available now on
Xbox and
PC.
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February 16th, 2010 - by Colm
From simple designs with bold colours, to strong geometric forms and streamlined graphics, the book is a trip down design’s memory lane. Airside’s contribution includes the 2009 Airside Calendar and our Birds wrapping paper.
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January 25th, 2010 - by Colm
Every since our accounts department became decidedly more female, Airside has been sorely lacking in quality beardage, with only Fred bearing the hirsute standard. So, we are delighted to welcome our new intern Giulio Miglietta, whose facial façade has the studio’s beard barometer back to acceptable levels. Oh, and he’s rather good at design as well.
Italian-born
Giulio started training as a doctor before deciding it wasn’t for him. Instead he chose the world of graphics and moved to London where he recently graduated from
London College of Communications with a BA (Hons) in Illustration. In 2007 he was named one of
D&AD’s Best New Blood winners. You’ll see why once you check out his wonderful illustration, video and other work at
www.giuliomiglietta.com.
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January 21st, 2010 - by Colm
When our ace animator
Jimi Newport told us he was working on a film for
David Shrigley, it felt like a betrayal. Our beloved
Jimi had climbed into bed with some other hussy, leaving us alone on a Friday night with nothing but ice cream and reruns of
Scrubs for company. But then we remembered that
Jimi is a freelancer and working for other people is quite a normal thing for him to do. Still, it doesn’t mean we have to like his film. Except we do.
Shrigley’s latest creation is a hilariously offbeat history of Scottish luxury knitwear manufacturer,
Pringle. The film was unveiled last week at the launch of
Pringle’s menswear collection in Milan. The three-minute animation is packed with
Shrigley’s beautifully wonky illustrations, all brilliantly brought to life by our
Jimi. Or
James as he is called in the credits. Well, la-di-da
Jimi.
Watch A Short Film About Pringle of Scotland by David Shrigley.
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January 15th, 2010 - by Colm
This has been all over
Twitter in the past few days, but if you haven’t seen it already, allow us to fill you in. The guys at
Motionographer have posted a review of
The Power Gap – our short film collaboration with left-wing think tank,
Demos. And jolly nice they were about it as well.
Our favourite line is “
Airside deftly used the jester’s tactic to reach its audience: humour mixed with equal parts profundity.” Ahh shucks, thanks you guys. Though we should point out the profundity was mostly
Demos. Read the full review
here.
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January 13th, 2010 - by Colm
As the bells chimed to ring in the New Year, Airside closed our eyes, clenched our fist and resolved, dammit, we resolved. Less than a week later we were back on the fags / booze / pastries / tweak, so it seemed an appropriate time to attempt our remaining resolution for the new decade. Which brings us to this blog about a blog – a metablog if you will.
Airside is kicking off 2010 with a brand new
Photo Blog . The plan was to post a picture on each working day of the year, but as with our occasional early morning smoke / sip / scoff / slam, it turns out our resolve isn’t all that strong. Nevertheless you can already check out some claymation sculpting and fried Colombian ants, and more to come at the new
Airside Photo Blog
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