....And it was a very good year for the Manx Rocket Mark Cavendish , who finally got the public recognition he deserved and was duly voted BBC Sports Personality Of The Year.
Long appreciated on the continent for his singular talents - small boys in Belgium crave a Cavendish HTC shirt far more than a N0 9 Rooney or whoever , and he certainly never has to pay for a meal there- he is the finest pro-- sprinter this country has ever produced and is well on his way to racking up even more stage wins in the Tour De France than the great Eddie Merxx . The first to acknowledge that road racing is very much a team effort , Cavendish is now with the UK Sky team - Bradley Wiggins and all - so next year promises to be more than interesting.
20 stages Wins in the Tour de France, The first Uk winner ever of the Green Jersey and only the second Uk road race champion , after the late Tom Simpson.......and an MBE . For once the Real Deal , and a worthy Sports Personality Of The Year.
...The first cold snap of the winter , here , and it is really cold outside so I am stopping in and catching up on some reading..........
...And as part of my on-going research into my MA - about more of which next posting - Jonathan at Artistic Type suggested that I should look at the illustrations of David Hughes , someone I had not really come across before..............
I really like his style -it has a hand-drawn looseness to it whilst still managing to encompass narrative through the inclusion of text and - in some instances - collage. Given that I am looking towards finding some form of architectural representation that allows me to include narrative and text , there is food for thought here.
If you are not familiar with his work , I have posted a monograph on him as ' Book of the Week ' - it's worth a look.
.........so , better get down to some drawing then...........................
Well , it's been a crap week and due to a heavy cold I have felt like shit most of the time , so rather than rabbit on about my MA work I thought that I would cheer myself up by having a look at the way other designers go about establishing that all important designer / client relationship.........
So lets start by having a look at this short clip.....................................
I think that that establishes the basic relationship pretty well , and I liked the way the designer responds with enthusiasm to the client's suggestions.....incidentally , if you want to see it on a larger screen or the rest of these instructional clips - there are quite a few , just google ' Youtube/Client vs Designer '
Ok , this next one is a bit more sophisticated , and is interactive ; if you go to www.wefail.com/twats , click
on the 10 Commandments / introduction header on the left hand side , then navigate your way through the commandments until you reach No.1 and the promised land . An excellent guide , I thought , to dealing with those more demanding clients , and a most useful set of pointers . I just wish that they had told me stuff like this when I was at college . ( Incidentally , http://www.wefail.com/ is an excellent site in its own right - I just singled out the section for dealing with clients ).
Finally , of course , if you are a partnership and studio based , then a warm and inviting welcome will immediately put clients at their ease - this photograph of the reception floor of the Partners offices in London illustrates the point quite nicely I thought......
A few good pointers there , I thought , to help you navigate that all important relationship with the client ; my own experiences are well documented in the posting of 31/07/2011 and Kevin Nolan .
So in those dark nights of the soul when you wonder why on earth you are doing this and there must be easier ways of making a living , just remember - its the same for all of us.
Walk on through the wind Walk on through the rain Though your dreams be tossed and blown....... Walk on , walk on with hope in your heart And you'll never walk alone You'll never walk alone.
It all depends on your appetite ................................
Ok - just two or three quick sketches for the re-vamp of the basement restaurant at Velvet , the hotel on Canal Street in Manchester that has figured before on these postings - this space was originally fitted out some 15 years or so ago, and is now looking tired compared to the bar and hotel rooms on the upper floors . So , time to revist it and bring it up to date. The work is scheduled for a couple of weeks in January and no doubt the finished scheme will feature on these pages sometime after that.....
.......and in the meantime , this building on Canal street is one of the four buildings that I wll be looking at as part of my MA course.......................more of that next week.
