Jon Henley reports on The Guardian website about ‘the poster we can’t stop buying’. I first remember seeing it displayed in the wonderful Barter Books, and the slogan has since spawned an industry around K-C-A-C-O products. Some people are even making a living out of the phrase.

A chance to exhibit at Spike Design, along with a restricted palette of black, white and red, was too good an opportunity to miss. And so I present my version of Keep Calm and Carry on, updated for the Credit Crunch:

The original 1939 poster was part of a series of three. The posters were designed to inspire and comfort a population nervous about the future. Here are two more versions for modern times, click on the thumbnail to see the full poster:

The group exhibition ‘If I was…‘ is on until Mar 20 at Spike Island.

Thanks go to Steven Dawson and Hannah McVicar for putting on the show.

As a part-time MA student in Information Design, and some experience of google maps, I’ll be interested to see how these are used over the coming months.

Although the newspaper article runs through the political arguments for and against crime mapping (which appears to have started in US cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles) there are only three links to examples provided:

1) A national view from the Home Office

2) West Yorkshire Police

3) Metropolitan Police (Greater London)

Without going into a detailed comparison, the London Met’s map seems the most impressive but what’s striking is that there are such different colour, navigation and mapping systems across only three examples.

So the article raises the worrying possibility that there are a further 40 types of map in use nationally and that there could be little consistency between them.

The topic of the event was Design for the Future, with a focus on the impact of young people on design, and how design can be ethically and socially responsible. If anything, my talk was about designing for the past, with examples of using local historical archives in film and on websites.

To keep things snappy, the format of the evening employed a Petcha Kutcha approach (pronounced pa-charch-ka in case you’re wondering). Each presenter is allowed 20 images, shown for 20 seconds each. That’s a pithy 6 minutes 40 seconds per person with a strict one minute gap between talks.

With presenters forced to be concise, and the audience not looking at their watches, the pace and length seems perfect for a brief overview of any subject. The other speakers were Lyndsay Grant and Clara Lemon from Futurelab; Scott Farlow; Claire Selman; Conway and Young; Kate Rudman; Rob Law of Trunki; Romy, Sandra and Tanya from Knowle West Media Centre and Walter Jack. Big thanks goes to Holly from RIO for organising the event.