The lovely people at FormFiftyFive asked me to do a sexy header for last week’s FFF blog. I had a think and came up with two headers and as they couldn’t decide between the two, they choose both. Fine with me!

So here they are for you to see : a day typographic naughty birds doing variations on an F. Below, a night more intimate 69. Just a fun thing to do for a nice blog to read.

If you look closer there is also a post on Airside on the page and a image of our Vitsoe stop frame animation which I love. Video interview of our very own Fred Deakin to come next week on FFF.

We’ve only just found this rather old blog post about the title sequence illustrations we did for No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.  But we definitely have to mention it purely for the name of the blog.  Yes, there is nothing we at Airside love more than a good pun.

Kiss My Black Ads is a blog dedicated to ethnically diverse advertising, or as they put it in the astonishing assault of assonance that is their tagline: “an actually almost accurate annex of African American Advertising anthropologically archived & archeologically assessed”. Nice work.

Not content with bursting its colours all over your TV screens, our recent campaign for health care company Simplyhealth, is now appearing at a billboard near you.

So now you can have fun figuring out which roto-scoped Airsiders made the poster, while you wait in the rain for a bus.

A bunch of Airsiders recently went on a screen-printing course at Print Club London. Not content with merely learning, we decided that each of the six participants would produce a print based around a common theme.

What with there being six people and all of them having six on the brain, we called it The Joy of Six. Check out all six prints below along with more on the inspiration behind each of them.

Alex revisited his Penguin Pool t-shirt (no longer in stock I’m afraid) and screen print to resculpt the classic curves of Berthold Lubetkin’s London Zoo penguin pool design into the shape of the number six.

You may have p-p-p-p-picked up on the fact that he added a sixth penguin. It wouldn’t have fitted the theme otherwise.

Chris’ inspiration was the classic six-gun revolver commonly carried by Wild West gunslingers and how it appears in the big bad world of a child’s imagination.

The little kid wears a paper hat and uses his hands for guns but in his head he is the biggest baddest sheriff in the living room/hallway area. Lee Van Cleef with milk teeth if you will.

Our intern Erica took the opportunity to indulge in her latest obsession and draw six dogs in fancy dress.

From a piratical bulldog to the very disturbing hotdog this canine sextet is the wonkiest team of sleigh dogs ever assembled.

Not only does the devil have all the best tunes, he also has the best numbers. Jamie’s print recalls heady days of childhood.

Penny sweets, endless summers and the relentless pursuit of an audience with his Satanic Majesty.

The joy of six. . .mmmmmh 6. . .mmmmh. . .69? Anyone familiar with Malika’s previous work might have guessed her print would go this way.

Her naughty Frenchness kicked in again and here we are: another sexy graphic that’s more about what your mind imagines than what your eye actually sees.

Studio manager and Airside Shop goddess Natalie went down a literary road and ended up as the glue binding the collection together.

Enjoy her marvellous musings on The Joy of Six. The full text is printed below.

Look at the number 6 all happy and proud. For the number 6 is a perfect number.
It creates points on stars, strings on guitars and the word ‘moon’ in a text.
It is so good Satan named it thrice.
It smiles knowing that its day is considered the best of the week and beams as its month welcomes summer.

But in its darkest hour, the number 6 knows that despite being a perfect number not all is peachy keen.
For example nobody likes 6am and 6-packs are on a steep decline.
Its own 6-pack merely a swollen belly; looks that are neither as sleek as the number 7 nor as interesting as the number 4.
He is haunted by and well aware that if he didn’t sound like the word sex, there’d be no ‘Joy of six’.

Airside’s bookkeeper of five and a half years, Colm, recently packed his well-thumbed copy of Accounting For Dummies and headed west to San Francisco, where he now writes self-deprecating blog entries for our website. Taking his place as keeper of those dusty ledger books is the lovely Aimée Furnival. Welcome to Airside, Aimée.

Aimée has brought (a hitherto absent) charm, pleasantness and actual understanding of terms like “credit” and “debit” to the accounts department, and we hope she’s enjoying being part of the Airside crew. You can find out more about Aimée as soon as we get round to updating our Biographies page.  (I’m working on it, I swear!).

Our new Airplot t-shirt was recently spotted at its spiritual home. The photos below show both t-shirts, as modelled by Greenpeace’s finest, at the Airplot site itself. Airplot is a small piece of land that sits in the middle of the proposed site for Heathrow Airport’s third runway.

You can back the campaign to stop airport expansion by signing up to be a beneficial owner of the land. And now you can show your support with the official Airplot Campaign t-shirt, exclusively available from Airside Shop. For every t-shirts sold, £2 of the price will go to Greenpeace.

Deep down in the dark and dank crevices of an Islington basement, your future is waiting. Yes folks, another New Year approaches and that means another Airside Calendar is ready to encapsulate your time in a Gregorian arrangement of days and dates.

But what illustrations will be assaulting your eyeballs in biweekly bursts this year? Will there be more explicit images to hide to from the kids? Which captions will make you chuckle and groan? What does the cover look like?

I’m afraid you will have to wait a little bit longer for the answers. But don’t fret, the 2010 Airside Calendar will be soon available to buy from www.airsideshop.com.

In the meantime all we can show you are the boxes, in which each calendar lies safely tucked up awaiting its grand unveiling. Exciting, huh?

Last week Airside visited the lovely city of Belfast where we presented An Evening With Airside. No, it wasn’t some Saturday evening ITV special where we wore glitzy dresses, sang our hits and duetted with other designers. It was a less glamourous, but no less exciting, talk that was part of the inaugural Build web conference.

An Evening With Airside took place at the Conor Lecture Theatre at the University of Ulster in Belfast. Unfortunately we don’t have any photos from the event, but we did snap the above gem as we strolled around the city earlier in the day, that reveals Belfast’s deep and special love for smoking.

Anyways, our web guru Guy Moorhouse was Airside’s earth-bound representative on the night, giving a 45-minute presentation of our portfolio. And where there’s web and Airside, there will be our good friends With Associates.

Mathew from With joined Guy for a detailed case study of the Vitsœ website, which hopefully illustrated how creative and technical companies are stronger when they partner. After that was a 15-minute Q&A, followed by the traditional mad scramble for our calendars and showreels. Because, let’s face it, conferences are all about the free stuff.

Thanks to everyone who came along and posted nice things on Twitter (unless you tweeted during the talk – shouldn’t you have been paying attention?).

Thanks to the Build crew, especially the tireless Andy McMillan, for inviting us along. And thanks also to Belfast – the city that never quits.

Don’t you just love it when your relationship with a client involves some mutually beneficial give and take?. Or, as in the case of Airside’s good friends at Konditor and Cook, a bit of give and cake.

Konditor & Cook helped Airside create this hot cake that we designed to celebrate the Design Museum’s 20th birthday. And so we have now returned the favour by designing the below postcard, to help announce the opening of Konditor & Cook’s new store at London’s South Bank.

Airside’s woolly wonders the Stitches are the cover stars of a new book from London designers FL@33.

Made & Sold explores how artists, designers and illustrators have become ever more entrepreneurial and are producing their own graphic products for sale via the internet. The book showcases more than 500 of these products by over 90 practitioners from around the world.

The Stitches – available to adopt via Airside Shop – are a prime example of this trend and as well as gracing the cover, they feature on a double-page spread inside. The book also features products from the likes of Anthony Burrill, Jon Burgerman, Rinzen and James Joyce.

Made & Sold is available to buy online now.

Check out the website for a full list of stockists.