The publication includes new work by Peter Finnemore and Paolo Ventura, a short story by Rachel Trezise and essays by Russell and the late film historian David Berry.

The book launch is tonight (10th Feb) at Turner House, Penarth. More on the ffotogallery website.

UPDATE: the publication is now available on amazon.co.uk - order The Silent Village on amazon.

Having built Martin’s website for his psychotherapy service in London, Martin approached us to build a site for The Long Boat Home, in a series of incarnations. Initially the site consisted of a handful of elegant, black and white pages designed to encourage the therapeutic community to lend their support to the project. The reception overwhelmingly positive and has led to people such as James Antrican, currently chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy agreeing to take part.

The current incarnation of the site is as a flat list of therapists who have offered their services, but we are working with Martin on converting this list into a dynamic, searchable database.

Visit the website at: http://www.thelongboathome.co.uk

The Long Boat Home - home page (design layout)

The Long Boat Home - directory of therapists (design layout)

The site uses a clean, attractive interface which is built upon WordPress as the Content Management System, so that Martin can update the site as often as he likes, without needing to call upon our services. The site also features a downloadable vcard (so that site visitors can easily add Martin’s contact details to their Address Book or Outlook Contacts), a Google Maps driven location map and a secure contact form which enables visitors to contact Martin whilst hiding his email address (to prevent being inundated with spam).

Website: http://www.psychotherapyw2.co.uk

PsychotherapyW2.co.uk - home page

Screenshot of location map

The project also involved a rebrand for the Workshops, working closely with Jeremy to develop a new logo and colour scheme to delineate the educational side of the Workshops’ activities from the work of the designer makers based at Wobage.

As with all our other sites, accessibility and usability were key concerns for the final product and, because it’s based on WordPress, the content management system can be updated cheaply and easily, to keep up with developments in technology.

For more information about Workshops at Wobage, please visit the website.

Workshops at Wobage - home page

Screenshot of the booking form

There’s also a talk by artist Tim Brennan (who’s currently exhibiting at Turner House) on his recent publication ‘English Anxieties’ plus a load of stalls, zines, other diverse activities and some cake. There’s more info on the Ffotogallery blog.

Great poster too.

We’ve uploaded the slides for each day below, as well as our ‘recommended reading list’ for print design and book design. Underneath that there’s a list of links to useful sources of further information.

Course Slides

Day 1 - Setting up print projects, introduction to InDesign
Day 2 - Stocks, getting the most out of your budget, working with printers, more about InDesign
Day 3 - Looking at books, binding options, using multipage features in InDesign, grid systems etc
Day 4 - Sending your work to print, contents pages, indexes and other information management features in InDesign, using ISBN numbers

Recommended Reading

The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst
Grid Systems in Graphic Design: A Handbook for Graphic Artists, Typographers, and Exhibition Designers - Josef Muller Brockmann
Designing Books: Practice and Theory - Jost Hochuli and Robin Kinross
Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a Book (Classroom in a Book (Adobe)) - Adobe
Japanese Bookbinding - Kojiro Ikegami and Barbara Stephan

More Information

Stock Suppliers - There’s lots of stock suppliers in the UK, some useful ones for getting hold of swatch books include PaperCo and Robert Horne.

Font Suppliers - Again a long list, some of the main ones are MyFonts; Fontshop (who also produce Font Book) and Fontfont

Font Identification Services - I find identifont the most useful - you answer a series of questions about the font (or not if you only have a limited character set in front of you) and get rewarded with one or more ‘best guesses’. There’s also MyFont’s What the Font? service - you upload a jpg or gif image of the font. I’ve never used this one so don’t know how useful it is.

Book design, printing, grid systems - About.com has a good introduction to page impositions and Wikipedia have quite a useful (if incomplete) section about book design.

For grid systems still the best series of articles on the web is Mark Boulton’s simple steps to designing grid systems. The New York Times’ Book Design Review is great on a regular basis too.

Fonts and Typography - Personal favourites are: I Love Typography; The Elements of Typographic Style (Robert Bringhurst’s book applied to the web). The My Fonts newsletters and interviews with typographers are quite useful too.

We made use of the form on the Welsh School of Aromatherapy’s site and needed to offer the form bilingually (Welsh and English) so we thought it would be a good idea to make the language file available to other people. Kevin Donnelly kindly helped out with the translation and proofing of the language file (whilst simultaneously developing a free (GPL) Welsh-to-English translation service - http://cymraeg.org.uk/).

The language file has now been added to the download, so if a Welsh secure contact form is just what you’ve been waiting for, your prayers have just been answered. Or something.

Oh and it’s 116 pages long, 110mm wide and 180mm high (so it fits snugly into a pocket) all beautifully printed on 100% recycled paper stock.

Excerpt from the Preface by Simon Whitehead:

Crwydro and Marcheurs des bois involved a group of artists from two continents in a series of flights and forages into two remote and contrasting territories. The searches were often random, and involved a process of group and solo expedition, in which each artist sought a way to bring their practice into a relationship with what was found.

Originally, these projects emerged from a conversation between artists Jeane Fabb, Tedi Tafel and myself at the International Symposium on Ecology and Performance ‘Between Nature’ at Lancaster University UK, in 2000. Continuing online and through a residency at the artist-run centre Boreal Art/Nature in La Minerve, Quebec in 2001, the dialogue culminated in two place-engaged residential exchanges between artists groups from Wales and Quebec.

The artists from ointment and Boreal Art/Nature completed these major field adventures in the spring of 2003 and the winter of 2005. In Crwydro (Wander), the artists were based in a small centre in the Preseli Hills of west Wales, responding to and engaging with the conditions, both collectively and individually. Marcheurs des bois (Walkers of the woods) was held in the depths of the Quebec winter on a wildlife reserve and frozen lakes within the Laurentian forests. Both phases of this collective immersion used walking as an impetus for the integration and development of ephemeral art in the surrounding environment. Both expeditions culminated in public showings within their respective rural communities.

Details:
Crwydro / Marcheurs Des Bois: A Wales Quebec Ambulation edited by Simon Whitehead.
Paperback: 116 pages.
Published by Shoeless.
ISBN: 978-0955402029

More about Crwydro / Marcheurs des bois on amazon.co.uk

Marcheurs des bois

Spread showing video stills by Sylvie Tourangeau (left) and drawings by Francois Morelli (right)

We’ve done lots of bilingual websites in the past of course, but this was the first time we’d tried to apply our skills using WordPress as a CMS, in two languages and with direct translation from one page to its equivalent in the other language.

The plugin we opted for in the end was xLanguage by the extremely helpful HelloSam which, whilst our php skills weren’t really prepared for such a steep learning curve (and with several very supportive pointers in the right direction from Sam), did eventually do exactly what we wanted it to do. In the process we also ended up creating a welsh version of Mike Cherim’s excellent Secure Contact Form. There’s a few bits in the welsh language file which still need translating, but once we find someone to do those, we’ll send Mike the finished version to add to the download. In the meantime if anyone wants the incomplete version (it’s just missing a few error messages) drop us a line. You can see the file in action on the Aromatherapy Wales site.

Thankfully, the work wasn’t all coding and we did find time to have fun with some of the School’s ideas for a logo. The first go at this was a graphic version of a narcissus which, whilst it worked fine, didn’t really hit the spot. But salvation came in the form of David Attenborough, as usual, whose beautiful show Amazing Rare Things at the Queen’s Gallery included an illustration of a poet’s narcissus, apparently the first narcissus to arrive on British shores way back when.

We’re also planning to make the theme available along with some instructions as to how to set up xlanguage to work in Welsh and English (if only to remind us how to do it). More on that story later.

Unfortunately they then sat in a box whilst ointment decided how best to release them into the wild. Fittingly enough, the launch is to take place in the location where the project started in the first place - Ty Canol woods in Pembrokeshire (a National Nature Reserve with 400 species of lichen amongst other things). And what better way to launch a book about artists walking, than with a selection of walks.

It all kicks off at 2pm on 26th July 2008, at the Urdd Centre, Canolfan Pentre Ifan, Felindre Farchog, Crymych, Pembrokeshire SA41 3XE with a selection of walks including: botanising; meanderthal; elasticated; outdoor philosophy and short, followed by the launch of the book and some ‘light refreshments’ - biscuits, booze or both.

All you need to do to take part is to let ointment know, by emailing enquiries[at]ointment.org.uk

Update: for those of you who simply can’t wait till then, you can now buy the book on amazon