I’ve been trawling the Degree show hauls online today and there is some absolutely cracking stuff. I’ve still to get my arse into gear and get out to see some of my favourite shows around London before they finish. But one thing I love about this time of year is the energy and general charged [...]

Last week a colleague placed a stack of old journals and design magazines outside his office for anyone to take if they so wished. As usual, I was late to the feast and discovered only a cursory stack of heavily thumbed, two year-old Architect’s Journals remaining. A good read, but not for my already burdened [...]

Seems like  only yesterday when I wrote a post on last year’s midwinter solstice. But how glad I am to have had my dinner in the warm garden with no shoes on tonight and to have been blessed with a fine flamingo-coloured sky that is still looking rather splendid in its last turquoise phases. Solstice [...]

Typographer and illustrator Jessica Hische has been running her sideline project, Daily Drop Cap since last year. Although I’ve not been checking it religiously, I have recently revisited it and was totally surprised how it has taken off and just how much content she has added. What I love about this site is the spirit [...]

I’m currently in revision purgatory for my fast approaching RHS Horticulture exams and it seems to me that I need a break. Some time back on my course I designed a series of revision-aid posters in a vintage biology book style. I produced the first three of diagrams to highlight some basic botanical principles of [...]

It wasn’t so long ago that I used to find charity shops very difficult to handle. The smell, the diabolical selection of men’s clothes, garish glass trinkets and a thousand copies of Dodgy’s Staying Out for the Summer on CD single. Yes, it was all too much for me. I had to be in the [...]

Summer holidays were once about a genuine and sincere lack of responsibility. Most of them were spent pootling around on my bike through the spicey-scented English countryside. Occasionally I shifted the indoor/outdoor ratio around quite significantly. This involved the ritualistic drawing of the curtains during the day in favour of being able to see the [...]