Comics Community Overview

The Birmingham Mail ran a feature recently on the comic book creative community in the area. It’s a bit of a surface scratching piece, plugging the Out Of The Bedroom show that just finished, but it does give a nice snapshot of a number of people who are actively doing stuff in the region so … [Read more…]

TAK!

TAK! is a design studio, with an emphasis on website design, based in the Custard Factory who have a rather impressive portfolio. Their work for Thomas Tallis, a specialist art school, is up for a SXSW Award for the Tallis Talk service, a simple but effective IM-style forum in which staff and pupils can discuss … [Read more…]

Plus Design Festival announced

The Plus International Design Festival for 2007 was announced on the Ten4 blog yesterday. It runs from 17-21st October and is seeking participants. We are delighted to announce the launch of Plus 07, a unique design-led festival showcasing all that is innovative, pioneering, and novel in the world of international design. The festival will provide … [Read more…]

Flickr Friday

You probably saw this theme coming… hartlandmartin Matt Murtagh nobody knows anything Pete Ashton (whoever he is…) Photos found on the Birmingham Flickr Community. All copyright as applies. The snow has slowed down my blogging, mainly because I’ve been out photographing it! Normal service will be resumed soon.

Open Mikes

Googling for info on some flyers picked up in Jibbering Records I stumbled across Quoonsweird, a collection of videos on YouTube of live music and poetry performances in the Moseley Area. It’s mainly open mike and acoustic stuff and there’s a lot of things I’ve never heard of here. The open mike scene in Birmingham … [Read more…]

A Festival of Quilts

The Festival of Quilts is another of those seemingly niche events at the NEC that, on closer study, turns out to be rather more substantial. It’s not on until August 16-19th but already there’s a lot confirmed including grassroots quilting, studies of traditions going back thousands of years, surveys of international quilting movements and more, … [Read more…]

Underwater Love

The British Underwater Image Festival takes place at the NEC on March 16-18th. Covering all levels of ability from professional film makers to amateurs with compact digital cameras the only criteria seems to be that the lens must be beneath the water line. Maybe I’ve been in landlocked Birmingham too long but I’m surprised by … [Read more…]

The Big Freeze

One thing I’ve learning about the Arts world is that it’s endlessly concerned with funding, and that funding is the most fickle of mistresses, coming and going like the wind. A phrase that popped into my consciousness recent is “the coming ice age”, meaning, I think, the sudden and cruel termination of a decade or … [Read more…]