Airside recently finished production on an NHS campaign to increase awareness and screening of Hepatits amongst prisoners of UK women’s prisons.

We worked with creative agency Sainted, who were using digital kiosks installed in prisons to get the message to an audience with restricted access to traditional media.

The kiosk’s interactive content features animation and live action footage –designed and produced by Airside –which needed to appeal to a tough crowd about issues such as sexual activity and drug consumption.

Therefore our designs had to be gritty, engaging and entertaining. So, as well as drawing lots of scratchy characters having sex, sharing needles and getting tattoos on their bums, we got to mess around with fake movie blood for those ikky live action scenes.

It’s hard to appreciate how happy we were when we heard about the latest competition taking place over at the Association of Illustrators (AOI) website. AOI have teamed up with Transport for London (TfL) to select entries for a special exhibition at the London Transport Museum about cycling in London. For Airside, and in particular Jamie, this was a chance to enter one of our favorite pieces of unpublished work.

Joy of Cycling is a rejected idea from a job we did for TfL a number of years back. The campaign was to promote winter cycling by offering some useful tips on how to improve the experience. Unfortunately TfL didn’t go for our take on the classic 70’s illustrated sex manual, The Joy of Sex – possibly due to all that disturbing facial hair. So, we’re delighted to finally take this one down from our top shelf and expose it to the world.

OK, so we’ve all gotten into bed with someone we really shouldn’t have at some point in our lives. But the crucial difference between our drunken dalliances and the barely believable ConLib coalition, is that the people of the UK hadn’t put their faith in us to simply have a few quiet pints and go home alone.

For LibDem supporters, the election outcome is like seeing your partner shack up with your worst enemy, and then assure you that it’s all for the best because they’re going to sort out a way for you to hook up with loads of other people instead. Hmmm, this analogy is losing its way a bit, so let’s move on.

Mangled metaphors aside, the point is that some Airsiders are jolly annoyed that their support for Nick Clegg and his party has put the man with the moon-face in the master bedroom at 10 Downing Street. And when we get angry, we design t-shirts.

These are a few of our efforts to express our exasperation at recent events. As Airside Shop is still undergoing renovation, it is unlikely we’ll actually make these t-shirts, but we thought we’d share them with you anyways.

As spring turns into summer, it is time for a new intern to pass through the hallowed doors of Airside’s studio. We are delighted to welcome Jeeyun Michaella Chung (or just Michaella) to the team. A 2008 Graphic Design graduate from Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Michaella has since worked with the ICA and on a bunch of other freelance projects.

She mostly specialises in print materials and moving image, but Michaella has also worked in exhibition design and installations among other things. We love her notebooks for left-handed and right-handed people, whose ruled pages slant to meet the natural body positions of the writer. You can find them, along with Michaella’s other work at www.jeeyunmichaella.com.

Airside was recently commissioned to design a t-shirt for Central London studio space, Mount Pleasant Studios. With a regular stream of film industry professionals flowing through their studios every day, Mount Pleasant Studios wanted to create a gift they could give to their clients as a thank you for using their space, which would also advertise their services. Reasoning that riggers, gaffers, cameramen and the rest of the crew working indoors under hot lights tend to wear short sleeves, they figured a t-shirt was a good idea.

But the t-shirt needed to be more than just a company logo. Mount Pleasant Studios wanted a design that crew members would love wearing no matter where they were, as well as having some reference to film production. Airside’s t-shirt achieved that with a double-sided design. The front shows a typical movie monster rampaging through the city of London, while the back reveals the reality behind film’s smoke and mirrors – the sets and the production crew who create movie magic in places like Mount Pleasant Studios.

Whilst visiting Tokyo earlier this month, Henki caught up with our former intern, Yoshi, and saw his contribution to the 2010 Tokyo Type Directors Club (TDC) Annual Awards. The TDC was established in New York in 1946 in order to support excellence in typography. Their Tokyo wing was set up in 1987 and, according to their website, is committed to exploring the world of type that goes “far beyond conventional character designing”. Their annual international design competition showcases the year’s best explorations in type. This year’s exhibition was held in Ginza and included work by our man Yoshi.

Yoshi’s entry, entitled Maori Iwi + Maori Koru, was inspired by a year he spent in New Zealand. The country’s indigenous Maori people have their own spoken language, but it has never had a written form. Wondering what kind of system it would follow, Yoshi invented a written language, based on the organisation of spoken Maori, whose glyphs are developed from a mixture of Maori icons and some Latin script. Besides exhibiting at the 2010 TDC Awards, Yoshi’s work will also feature in the 2010 TDC Annual. For more on Yoshi and Maori Iwi + Maori Koru, visit www.kufolio.com.

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. . .