Memories

This beautiful image is a piece of artwork by Sarah Yates, who works under the name Fauna Graphic. We’re pleased to announce that Sarah is going to provide one of the ‘memories’ for our book. Three years ago, she was suffering with leukemia and she won her battle with the disease. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say when she contributes to the book. Back when I was young, over in Canada, my friend Tom Preston also survived leukemia and it’s the disease that sadly took my uncle Chris. I’m hopefully going to interview Tom for the book in a couple of weeks time. Anyhow, you can see more of Sarah’s work at http://www.faunagraphic.com.

The writer who has volunteered to work with Sarah on her piece is Simon Kirrane. I’ve known Simon for about 15 years now and he’s currently editing customer magazines with Future Plus. He’s a talented and very well-read writer and I know he’ll do a smashing job collaborating with Sarah and getting her memory down on paper for us. Our thanks go out to him and who knows, I might just buy him a pint of Blue Jay when next I have the opportunity.

Changing subject slightly, we also want to send our thoughts and best wishes to Toby and his wife Kim. Toby has just come out of surgery for a brain tumour. He’s my good friend Paul Tysall’s brother-in-law and we want to wish him a speedy recovery from the operation.

I met Kay Inglis when she was working on Imagine FX magazine at Future Publishing, and I was working on Computer Arts. She’s a great wordsmith, and she told me that she got her love of reading and writing from her mother. It’s her mother that Kay will be writing about for one of our Memories. Sadly, she passed away last year due to cancer of the oesophagus. It was a nasty one – this kind of cancer often goes undetected until it’s too late.

I felt sad for Kay when I heard the news. Not long afterwards my Dad passed away as well. Kay’s no longer working at Future Publishing but she’s still in the words business, so to speak, for companies along the south coast of England. She’s doing a 17 mile walk soon, raising money for a hospice in Salisbury. It’s great to have her on board for the project.

I was talking to one of the writers the other day and that made me think about things. She wasn’t sure whether to focus on a memory that was positive and happy, or one that was more sobering. You could be receiving loads of flowers and chocolates when you’re in hospital, and just feel overjoyed that everyone has thought of you. Or you could be in the middle of chemotherapy, trying on a wig, throwing it across the room and collapsing in tears.

That’s what makes working on Memories so interesting, and challenging - the emotion that comes out when it’s a life and death struggle. Writing about these things really makes you think.

Anyway, we’re on our way to signing up another new writer. I’m just letting her know what we need and will say a bit more about her story when I have the details.

So we got the blog up and running, and looking all pretty, and we thought, “What shall we do next?”

It wasn’t long before we decided to get some traffic coming to the blog by tweeting, talking about it on Facebook and adding it to our email signatures. We’ve had some great feedback, such as this from a very experienced designer we know: “Brilliant, even love the site, it’s great, simple, clean, and modern.  I love the approach!”

As we’re working on Memories with Designers Against Human Rights Abuse, and they have an event coming up in relation to their Tibetan project, I suggested we do a flyer to plug the website. Antony jumped on it and got us a deal with Subism’s printers for some A6 flyers with some A3 posters thrown in. Meanwhile, Luke O’Neill has stepped up to the plate yet again and offered to design them for us. I got some copy together and sent it over to him today.

It’s being done in a hurry, so we’re just sticking to ‘simple, clean and modern’. If you want to check out DAHRA’s other stuff visit http://3minutes.dahra.org and also http://auction.dahra.org. They’re holding an exhibition for their second Designers Against Tibetan Abuse book starting 19 August at The Gallery, 28 Cork Street, Mayfair, London, WS1 3NG. Antony and I will be at the private view on 18 August to talk about Memories – maybe we’ll see you there.

Check out this great mood graphic that Luke O’Neill has created for the Memories project. We’re using it as part of the banner across the top of this very blog as you can see, and on our About>Information page, where anyone visiting this site can find out about exactly what our Memories book is going to be all about.

Luke is the deputy art editor on Computer Arts magazine and he’s been very supportive of the Memories project since we announced it. Aside from being an ace graphic designer, he’s getting more and more into creating illustration pieces. We’re really pleased to have him on board. I just bought him a medium-sized moccha at Starbucks to celebrate… Cheers, Luke!