They’re looking to commission regional artists and designers to devise and produce a piece of live art that will be featured inside the iPhone app. It says here that inter-disciplinary collaboration is favourable.

The full brief is here. If you’re interested, you need to submit your idea by 8 Feb (that’s tomorrow). They’re only looking for 200 words and your contact details though, so it’s not too bad.

This summer Creative Republic is running a project to help raise awareness of the many creative ideas that happen in Birmingham. To nominate your favourite creative concept, project, event, exhibition, individual or company simply register for free and ‘nominate’. Winning nominations will be included in a book, video and a final event at the end of the summer.

The project is called Invisible City.

I’d heard Creative Republic were gearing up again recently. This is the first peep to be heard from them in a while.

The name of the project is slightly reminiscent of the ‘Birmingham – The Forgotten City’ prints that Smile sold in the CiB Shop (v popular they were too).

The programme includes a fair amount of local talent (I’m no expert in this area but I recognise the names of David Osbaldestin, Smile, Ben Waddington and the Baskerville Project) with some international flavour added by Henrik Birkvig from the Danish School of Media & Journalism and John D Berry from Microsoft Typography in Seattle.

It’s £25 for most folks, £15 concessions. Here’s the full programme and you can register here.

Speaking of Smile, they went to visit Airside recently and written it all up on their blog. Well worth a read. This quote from Jamie Wieck stood out:

“We’re now a design company competing with advertising companies that have design and digital design subsidiaries. They know how to talk… some call it strategy, others might call it hot air, but either way we have to learn a bit of that now in order to compete.”

Matt from Smile Creative Consultants put together this photo-montage. He says:

We all said how cool it would be to get on top of the tower for a 360 degree joiner of the Birmingham skyline. Does anybody know if it is possible to get up there, and if so, who to contact? If you do, drop me an email

Nathan Monk, director of the Smile Creative Agency, is working on a new project called Font Lorry.

I intend to create an online distribution platform for emerging typographic talent. Whilst at first this may appear to be a font foundry, I believe I can make this into a viable structure for typographic goods of all natures.

I will turn Font Lorry into a reliable distribution channel for designers to get original content noticed by a global audience and increase future interest in their work.

I plan to catalogue typefaces, novelty items, icons, merchandise, desktop wallpapers, limited edition prints and typographic essays

He’s looking for launch content although, by the looks of the Font Lorry Twitter account, this is starting to come together nicely.  If you want to get involved then contact details are on the Font Lorry website.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service.  Smile is a creative consultancy.  Smile don’t have a blog as such but they have a Twitter account and a Smile website.  They’re working on the Baskerville Project (as is Alex Hughes, whose well-timed post has just dropped into my RSS reader) and they’ve put some beautiful photos on their site and Twitterered to tell interested folk like me that they’re there.

I don’t quite know what they’re doing but I’m really interested in seeing the finished product now.

More photos on the Smile website.