November 30, 2009Pull out the tombola and get those balls a-rolling, it’s prize draw time. All of you who entered our competition to win our 2010 Airside Calendar, get those fingers crossed and rabbit’s feet rubbed.

Unless you didn’t give the correct answer to our question, what does the strap-line "the year we make calendars" on the Airside Shop listing refer to. The answer is 2010, the film sequel to 2001: a Space Odyssey, which used the promotional strap-line “the year we make contact”.

Anyways the names have been drawn and confirmed by our independent adjudicator and the lucky winners are: Peter Evans-Pritchard, David Emery and Alice (whose surname we don’t know yet so don’t forget to reply to our e-mail, Alice). Congratulations to you three.

The 2010 Airside Calendar is available to buy at www.airsideshop.com. If you’re a Twitterer, keep your eye on the Airside feed as we’ll be running an exclusive competition to win more calendars shortly.

November 25, 2009Congratulations to our good friends at AKQA, whose eco:Drive project for Fiat, won two prizes at this year's British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) awards.

And naturally we're going to award ourselves a few minutes of self-congratulations for our animation work and character design on the eco:Drive project. Excuse us while we imagine ourselves manfully clutching a statue and pumping it in the air, whilst simultaneously shouting "oh my god oh my god" and hyperventilating in the hope of squeezing out a few crowd-pleasing tears.

Ahem. Anyways eco:Drive picked up the top gongs in the categories of Ultraspeed Online Award:Web Application and Microsoft Achievement Awards:Innovation. It also finished runner-up in the Electronic Ink Sector Award:B2C category.

So, well done to AKQA, who also won in a few other categories with similarly baffling titles.

Full list of BIMA Awards winners and first losers.

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November 24, 2009Airside director Nat Hunter is speaking at an event hosted by the Enterprise Centre for Creative Arts (ECCA) tonight, Wed 25 Nov 2009.

The event is called How To Be An Eco-Creative and features a number of guests talking about how their businesses consider environmental issues and the benefits of being green.

As well as representing Airside, Nat will be speaking in her capacity as co-founder of social enterprise Three Trees Don't Make a Forest.

The other guests are Adejare Doherty, co-founder of The Whole Leaf Co., who produce biodegradable plates and bowls from fallen Indian palm leaves, and Guy Robinson, product designer and director of industrial design consultancy, Sprout.

How To Be An Eco-creative takes place at the Lecture Theatre, Student Hub, Davies Street in London from 6-8pm. Tickets are free. You can find more information or pre-book tickets here.

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November 17, 2009Airside directors Nat Hunter and Fred Deakin are giving a talk as part of the 2009 North East Design Event. The talk takes place at 6pm on 26 Nov 2009 at DanceCity in Newcastle.

Nat and Fred will be discussing some of Airside's recent work, including our recent collaboration with Demos. The short animation about political power was created for Design Event 09's Think Tank exhibition and is currently showing at Sunderland's Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art.

Tickets for the talk are available from the DanceCity website or by calling their box office on 0191 261 0505.

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November 16, 2009The agonising wait is over at last. Ladies and gentlemen, the 2010 Airside Calendar is now available to buy from www.airsideshop.com.

The 2010 Airside Calendar is another glorious collection of 27 new illustrations showcasing our work from the past year, all arranged in fortnightly flaps with a brand new date design.

But if you're feeling lucky you can try and win one. We've got three 2010 Airside Calendars to give away. All you have to do is tell us what the strap-line "the year we make calendars" on the Airside Shop listing is a reference to.

Email your answer to info@airside.co.uk with Calendar Competition in the subject. The competition closes at midnight on Sunday 22 Nov 2009. We'll announce the winners next week.

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November 12, 2009Any West Coast Canadian fans of Airside may be interested to note that our short animation, Penguin in a Pickle will be screening later this month at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The film is showing as part of the gallery’s Family FUSE Weekend – a regular series of family-themed exhibitions. This month the theme is Green World, where Penguin will feature alongside other environmentally themed films, photography exhibitions, dance workshops and an interactive Shadow Forest space.

Penguin in a Pickle was original created for the 2007 Live Earth international climate change event, and tells the story of a penguin separated from his family by a melting ice cap.

The Family FUSE Weekend – Green World, takes place at the Vancouver Art Gallery on 21-23 Nov 2009.

For more information visit www.vanartgallery.bc.ca.

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November 10, 2009Airside recently gave a talk at the Design Museum to coincide with our inclusion in their Super Contemporary exhibition. You can now listen to our design-related ramblings in podcast form, thanks to Dezeen Magazine.

In it Fred discusses jobs for big money and small change. Jamie talks branding and protest movements, while Malika gets down and dirty with her erotic alphabet. Then Nat cleans things up with a piece on our environmentally friendly attitude and her not-for-profit social enterprise Three Trees Don’t Make a Forest, before some members of the audience interrogate us with their tricky questions.

Listen to the podcast here.

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November 09, 2009The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency television series has been nominated for a Cultural Diversity Network (CDN) Award. The series portrays the adventures of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s only female detective, and received a nomination for excellence in creative output for diverse content.

Airside designed the opening and closing credits for the series and the titles for feature-length pilot episode were nominated for a BAFTA Craft Award.

The CDN Awards are decided by a Broadcast online vote, with voting open until 16 Nov 2009. So get behind Precious and Airside and cast your vote now.

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November 06, 2009At long last we are delighted to unveil the new website for our favourite bakers, Konditor & Cook.

Airside, with fantastic back-end support from the guys at With Associates, has completely redesigned the London based cake makers website.

Aside from incorporating the Airside pattern that adorns the Konditor & Cook cake boxes, the new site now revolves around a blog that is frequently updated with their latest news, events and photos of their latest creations.

Check out this amazing Halloween pumpkin cake, or the archive photo of Sir Ian McKellen transforming a Konditor & Cook gingerbread man into Gandalf – Lord of Cake Rings indeed.

Elsewhere you can find information on their full range of cakes, maps and contact details for all their London bakeries and links to their brilliant Flickr photostream and Twitter updates.

Meanwhile we’re excitedly waiting for our payment in cakes to arrive. Mmmmm.

www.konditorandcook.com.

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November 03, 2009Airside has teamed up with left-wing think tank, Demos to produce a short animation for a new exhibition at Sunderland’s Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art (NGCA).

Think Tank: A Marketplace of Ideas is part of Design Event 09, the North East’s annual design festival. The exhibition sees Britain’s leading think tanks collaborate with top designers to imagine how we might create a better nation.

Airside worked with Demos to bring to life the findings of their recent study on power inequalities in the UK.

The final piece is now showing at the NGCA until 23 Jan 2010.

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