Saturday 11 December
11am-4pm. City Library (253 Flinders Lane, Level 1 gallery)

Image: Cat Rabbit, Christmas Card, $5 at December Craft Hatch.

The Craft Hatch market is the perfect place to pick up a unique Christmas card, gift or stocking filler, like one of these screen printed Christmas cards by local label CatRabbit.

A market veteran with a practice encompassing soft toys and jewellery, CatRabbit has developed a dedicated following over the last five years. Every

Christmas the label produces a limited edition set of cards printed with the Japanese Gocco Screen Printing machine.

The Happy Christmas Bear card sells for $5 and is printed on recycled paper using the Gocco screen printing inks. The cards are sold in a limited edition of 100, so you can rest assured they are as rare as that special someone in your life.

The Craft Hatch market is a one stop shop for locally designed homewares, jewellery, clothing and accessories. Every market presents a newly curated selection of the best emerging craft and design.

Also exhibiting at Craft Hatch in December are: Ellka Design, Erica Bramham, FUNKYWOMBAT textiles & The Curious Girl, Genna Campton, Goldenink, Gwendoline Page, Handmade Life, Jaylene Falkner, Rose Megirian, Rebecca Martin & Aldis Kossdottir and Urthly Organics.

Craft Hatch markets are presented by Craft Victoria in collaboration with the City Library on the second Saturday of every month, 11am-4pm. Please note there will be no Craft Hatch market in January.

See more at Craft Victoria

Images R-L: Karim Rashid designs at the RG Madden stand, Modula fir treet at the Büro North stand, Glow in the dark Zip Zips at the Zip Zips stand.

Melbourne’s original pop up design market continues to be the place for style hunters to gather, be inspired and shop.

Since 2005 the Melbourne Design Market has been popping up twice a year for ONE DAY ONLY and transforming Fed Square’s underground car park into designland.

On Sunday December 5, 2010 there’ll again be a diverse collection of over 50 exhibitors from small design brands just launching to well-known and much-loved brands all showcasing their latest and greatest. Plus the cool sounds of DJ Madee River, fine fair-trade barista coffee from Bean Ground and Drunk and fantastic paella from the Beer de Luxe on-site kitchen all add to the party atmosphere.

So come along, experience Melbourne’s best design market and you can even knock over your Christmas gift buying in just one day.

MELBOURNE DESIGN MARKET 10am-5pm, Sunday December 5 at Federation Square undercover car park.

Enter via Russell Street extension or Riverside Walk.
Disabled parking and facilities nearby.
Entry is free.

More info here

The Melbourne Design Market is a one of its kind event that continues to be the place to be and be seen. For stallholders it provides the opportunity to get your new products and ideas out to over 10,000 stylehunters in just one day. Since 2005 the Melbourne Design Market has been popping up twice a year and transforming the Federation Square Car Park into a design show presenting some of this country’s greatest creative enterprises.

For shoppers the Melbourne Design Market is the place to see a fantastic array of merchandise, acquire the latest must-have pieces and enjoy the party-like atmosphere. For successful stallholders it’s a day of sales, orders, and most of all, meeting new clients and receiving valuable feedback on your business.

Do you have a new product or idea that you want to get to the people who’ll appreciate it? Then go to www.melbournedesignmarket.com.au now to look through the FAQs and make your application.

Distinguishing the Melbourne Design Market from all others is a rigorous selection procedure for prospective stallholders to ensure the quality and diversity of the products on offer. Given that it’s such a successful forum to launch new products, the market receives many more applications than can possibly be accepted.

APPLICATIONS CLOSE 5PM FRIDAY October 15, 2010

More information here

Sinead O’Connor, John Cale, Robert Lepage, Jack Charles, Hotel Pro Forma, Michael Clark Company, Thomas Adès, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Akram Khan Company, The Black Arm Band & Beck’s Festival Bar

The 25th Melbourne Festival, and the second under the artistic direction of Brett Sheehy, announces a dynamic and emotive program of work from some of the finest creative minds of our times. Over 16 days, from 8 to 23 October, the Festival presents an unparalleled feast of music, dance, theatre, opera, visual arts, multimedia and outdoor events from renowned and upcoming Australian and international companies and artists.

Festival highlights this year include free outdoor aerial spectacular K@osmos; Hotel Pro Forma’s awe inspiring, large-scale operatic spectacle, Tomorrow, in a year, featuring the groundbreaking music of electro-pop masters The Knife; world renowned recording artists Sinead O’Connor (in her exclusive Australian performance), John Cale and Meshell Ndegeocello; one of Australia’s most highly regarded performers in his one-man show, Jack Charles V The Crown; the residency of British composer, Thomas Adès, the most inventive contemporary composer of his generation. As part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival: Beck’s Festival Bar at the Forum Theatre, will be featuring some intriguing acts: Boredoms (Japan), Low (USA), Ponzu Island (Australia), The Drones (Australia), Dead Meadow (USA) and more.

Boredoms

Ponzu Island

The Festival features two Australian premieres. come, been and gone, the bold new dance work from the world renowned Michael Clark Company featuring the music of the legendary David Bowie with Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Brian Eno and internationally revered director, film maker and actor Robert Lepage’s  magical journey to modern China with The Blue Dragon, a heart-wrenching love story told with Lepage’s trademark striking theatrical vision.

Come, Been and Gone, Simon Williams, Photography: Jake Walters

The Festival closes with a one-off spectacular finale, Seven Songs to Leave Behind, a unique concert featuring international music legends Sinead O’Connor, John Cale, Meshell Ndegeocello and Rickie Lee Jones, with award winning Indigenous artist Gurrumul Yunupingu and festival favourites Black Arm Band and Orchestra Victoria at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl on Oct 23.

For more info see the festival site here

Semi‐Permanent a celebration of all things art and design is back in 2010 to inspire Melbourne’s thriving creative community yet again. While some may think it’s the forum where design nerds gather to fight against the evils of Comic Sans, Semi‐Permanent offers an eye‐opening insight into the broad streams of design, and where those varying crafts can take you.
Designed to inspire and educate, renowned artists and specialists in their field will come together at the Melbourne Convention Centre on Friday 17 September and Saturday 18 September to share their knowledge and passion for their work. Semi‐Permanent Melbourne 2010 boasts a line‐up of 12 speakers including newly announced Simon Allen from Academy Award winning animators Pixar, photographer Claire Martin, Art Director for Girl Skateboards Andy Jenkins, UK post production house Framestore, Melbourne based visual artist Leif Podhajsky and creative agency and artists representatives Big Active.

Buck, Semi-Permanent 2010

Brought to life by Sydney’s Design is Kinky, Semi‐Permanent is a conference which unites exceptionally talented artists and designers to speak at a conference which sits within a broader program of side events including exhibitions, workshops and parties. “It’s not only our speakers that make the event special. It’s the atmosphere and spirit that the audience brings with them,” said Design is Kinky’s Andrew Johnstone. “It’s a casual atmosphere where new friends are made and new colleagues discovered. It’s this that sets Semi‐Permanent apart from other conferences, a shared feeling that you belong to a community.”

Now in its eighth year and with 22 conferences under it’s designer belt, Semi‐Permanent is the internationally acclaimed conference of its kind, year on year, proving an exciting line‐up of talented speakers spanning the art, film, motion graphics, illustration, photography, and visual effects disciplines.

Framestore, Semi-Permanent 2010

Semi‐Permanent is on at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on Friday 17 September and Saturday 18 September 2010. The official program is yet to be released but for regular updates and tickets check here

Become a subscriber to Lost & Found, an online insider’s guide to Melbourne, and you have the chance to enjoy up to four nights free accommodation at the bespoke Lost & Found hotel room in Melbourne’s CBD.

Located in the top corner of the Little Collins Hotel, the hotel room will bring the Lost & Found guide to life by showcasing Melbourne’s design highlights from Aesop products to linen, furniture, music, books and artwork. Every aspect of the room will tell a story about the types of people and products that exemplify the city, providing guests with the ultimate Melbourne experience.

Part hotel, part gallery, part cultural therapist, the Lost & Found hotel room is a unique and creative gesture designed to offer something special to its subscribers. To ensure guests get the most out of their trip to Melbourne, the Lost & Found room even has its own concierge who can make bookings and provide insider tips on Melbourne’s hidden secrets.

Once inside the room, guests can sit at the Arte Veneta work desk built just a few suburbs away or relax on the Pierre and Charlotte couch and listen to the new Darren Sylvester album on the vintage turntable. After enjoying a bite to eat next door at Bar Lourinha, guests can pamper themselves with Aesop products, read a few pages of Melbourne ex-pat Amanda Maxwell’s novel Nobody Told Me There’d be Days Like These and then fall asleep on linen provided by local artisans Third Drawer Down.

Any subscriber to Lost & Found can apply to stay at the hotel room free of charge. All they need to do is register their interest at www.wearelostandfound.com.au. The room is available for up to three nights on weekends (Friday to Sunday) and up to four nights during the week (Monday to Thursday) from 1 June to 31 August 2010. Terms and conditions apply.

Lost & Found is a free online guide produced for Tourism Victoria by creative studio Right Angle. For the past four years, Lost & Found has been the insider guide for culturally conscious people living outside of Melbourne, revealing its discreet cultural joys and the creative people who make the city hum.

Lost & Found hotel room at Little Collins Hotel
Free for Lost & Found subscribers (conditions apply)
27 Little Collins Street, Melbourne
The room is available for stays during June, July and August 2010
Find out more here

Held in a former glass factory in Sydney, Cloud Formation: a forecast of dream shapes featured multimedia work by artists Morgan Veness (Japan), Haruka Kokubu (Japan) and Malou Dunkley (Australia), architects German Perez Tavio (Spain) and Didier Ryan (UK) and designers Patrick Santamaria, Sam Painter and Billy Ryan (Australia).

Babekuhl: Black ink white paper

Kate McCurdy

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Held in a former glass factory in Sydney, Cloud Formation: a forecast of dream shapes featured multimedia work by artists Morgan Veness (Japan), Haruka Kokubu (Japan) and Malou Dunkley (Australia), architects German Perez Tavio (Spain) and Didier Ryan (UK) and designers Patrick Santamaria, Sam Painter and Billy Ryan (Australia).

Over two days in the informal, underground setting for the unofficial Biennale event, contributors and guests were invited to participate in lively group discussions, making the exhibition not only a showcase of multimedia work, but also a productive and provocative cross-media forum.

The Cloud formations theme was not only reflected in the work of the artists, but also the presentation of the exhibition itself. This was shown in the way the works were overlaid into a ‘diffuse, cloudy form, allowing site specific relationships to evolve and engage viewers’.

Cloud formation: a forecast of dream shapes

The artistic backgrounds of the artists ranged from textile design to photography, architecture, graphic design, product design and visual arts.

The work of artists Morgan Veness & Haruka Kokubu was characterised by mythical and imaginary figures in floating, dreamlike states. Veness used bold, energetic forms to reveal a myriad of pulsating elements in the details. His technique combined fine pen drafting with soft brush painting to build deep visual fields. Kokubu used textiles and painted fabric to construct ‘Dream cap’ a mythical device for carrying children into the dream world. The space was shrouded in painted quilts with scenes from the journey.

Morgan veness: 'boom, Boom treasure hunter's 7'

Babekuhl Productions designed a meditation space using a psychedelic cloud pattern from their recent Black Ink and White Paper publication, presenting their book and forthcoming vinyl toy Babucloud. Featured designs from the book showed subliminal emblems such as Smile and Wolf in dog’s clothing in which friendly silhouettes revealed more sinister compositions.

Undercurrent architects presented a recent project; a design influenced by Sydney’s outdoor lifestyle and the desire to integrate with the environment. The building responds to the landscape using an architectural language of cloud, rain, tree, leaf, branch and fire and defines an ethereal and heavenly space used as a garden studio.

Undercurrent architects: Sydney Studio Roof

Malou Dunkley produced a photographic series on the relationship of the building and garden, focusing on shadows, reflections, superpositioning and its atmospheric qualities.

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In a recent issue, DG magazine online covered Studio Output’s interior design for Seven, a small hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Intrigued by their approach to this brief, we decided to take a closer look at the work done by this UK studio.

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In a recent issue, DG magazine online covered Studio Output’s interior design for Seven, a small hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Intrigued by their approach to this brief, we decided to take a closer look at the work done by this UK studio.

Ministry of Sound; Saturday Sessions Summer 2008 campaign, May

Studio Output (SO) was formed in the UK summer of 2002 by three partners: Dan Moore, Rob Coke and Ian Hambleton. Dan and Rob had formed the senior creative team at another small design agency in Nottingham – in the UK’s East Midlands – while Ian was a friend of theirs who had also been an occasional client. Feeling that it was time to branch out and try something that reflected their own values, Dan and Rob decided to go out on their own, with Ian looking after all of the non-design work.

A little history
Creative Director Rob and Art Director Dan are both originally from the suburbs of London. Rob studied a BTEC – the equivalent of a foundation but more vocational – in Design and Typography at the London College of Printing (now London College of Communication) and then moved up to Nottingham to study his degree. After graduating he started working for a friend at a local studio called Twelve:Ten. As the lead designer in a growing team, this was an exciting position, working quickly on a vast amount of club flyers and sleeves for small independent labels.
Around the same time, Dan had graduated from a Fine Art degree in Derby – Notttingham’s nearest neighbour – and started designing his own flyers when promoting and DJing at local clubs. He joined Twelve:Ten as a junior designer and quickly established himself as a brilliant all-rounder, and eventually the time came to leave and set up Studio Output.
Steve Payne, SO’s Senior Designer, joined the company in 2005 from another Nottingham agency, where he’d spent ten years working his way through the ranks from Junior Designer to Creative Director. At Studio Output, he has been able to work on more creatively rewarding work, offering him an outlet for his own brand of ‘creative weirdness’. Similarly, Stewart McMillan had been working on projects for ‘large yet dull’ clients at an events company before he joined Studio Output as Designer. Stewart began working in-house for SO at Ministry of Sound, and in June 2006 he joined Ian (Account Director) to set up the second studio in Clerkenwell, London.

Studio Output - Ministry of Sound, Genres

The work environment
The most unusual thing about the work environment at Studio Output is that it is spread across three sites; as well as the studios in Nottingham and Clerkenwell, there is a designer who is based in-house with their client Ministry of Sound who works with the internal marketing team under SO’s art direction to create all the campaigns required by the club and international tour schedule.
Management across the three sites aims for consistency, with the Studio Manager controlling the workflow via an online job-tracking system and constant communication about the status of jobs – an essential piece of organisation that allows SO to continue delivering to their client’s, and their own, satisfaction.

The essential open dialogue policy
The nature of the work at SO is so multi-disciplined that the designers aren’t divided into layout, typography or illustration, but rather they are expected to be able to combine all of these elements to answer the brief in the most innovative way.
SO has never employed account handlers, which results in the clients having an open dialogue with the creatives leading the project, or even the designers doing the day-to-day work.
‘This helps both parties to gain an understanding of each others’ aims and gets rid of the misinterpretation you can get from a longer chain of communication,’ SO explains, ‘we can only do this by employing well organised people, who thrive on the challenge of creative thinking, for each position and keeping them on top of their game through regular brainstorming, training and teambuilding.’

Studio Output - Ju$t Another Rich Kid Fall?winter

Creative collaborations
In the past, Studio Output have always tried to keep their creative process in-house where possible, employing designers with a range of skills to handle any project. However, on a few occasions this rule has been bent where they have commissioned illustrators such as Jon Burgerman, or worked with motion artists like Up the Resolution. They also have a reciprocal relationship with interactive agency AllofUS, who helped SO with their website in return for helping to bolster their knowledge of print design. Now that it has grown to the ‘right size’, SO are now also looking at pulling in more specialist expertise on a project by project basis.

Project highlight 1 – Bluu
A few of Studio Output’s stand-out campaigns are the work they have done for Bluu, BBC Radio 1, Seven and Ministry of Sound. The varied nature of the client’s work reflects SO’s versatility and ability to prove its design talent across media and design discipline. Studio Output’s collaborative work with Macaulay Sinclair for Bluu, an exclusive collection of bars, restaurants and basements in London, Manchester, Nottingham and Glasgow, displayed not only how well the company can work together with other creatives but also on a package for a client including a coordinated identity, print campaign and interior graphic scheme.

Project highlight 2 – BBC Radio 1
BBC Radio1, one of the company’s first clients, employs Studio Output on an ‘ad-hoc’ basis, following successful identity and marketing campaigns for One Live in Nottingham in 2002, and the more recent Miami Winter Music Conference and Radio 1 in Ibiza. Each project is assigned to one or two designers who will liaise directly with a corresponding member of the Radio 1 marketing team, in keeping with Studio Output’s policy for an open dialogue between creatives.

Studio Output - BBC 1Xtra

Project highlight 3 – Seven
In a recent issue, DG magazine online covered Studio Output’s interior design for Seven, a small hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Inspired by Thai culture as well as a theme of a room for every day of the week, SO created a stylish graphics package which included textile design for the bed linen, but which was also applied to other fixtures and furnishings throughout the hotel. The strong thematic approach SO took to the design, along with the distinct Thai influence, are key to Seven’s success in attracting young, professional tourists to the hotel.

Project highlight 4 – Ministry of Sound
Studio Output have been working with the flagship club since Spring 2005 when they were approached to pitch ideas for their London club and global tours; a relationship which has continued to flourish.
Keen to revitalise and reinvent their international identity, Ministry of Sound gave Studio Output a brief for their Summer 2005 Ibiza campaign. Studio Output responded by creating a series of images which allowed the recognised Ministry of Sound logo to appear in new locations, most memorably shaped by swimmers in a pool and in cloud patterns. After successfully helping the club to launch the new Friday nights concept ‘Switch’ and also develop a strong tour publicity campaign in 2006, Studio Output have most recently helped Ministry of Sound celebrate the return of summer in the UK with the bright and colourful Saturday Sessions Summer 2008 campaign.

Up ahead
Keep on the lookout for Studio Output’s graphics work on an exciting (and at time of publication, hush hush) new game for the PlayStation 3, as well as new projects with the BBC’s digital radio stations 1Xtra and Asian network.

Kate McCurdy

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