Music plays a big part in everyday life here at Mat Dolphin. We’re constantly listening to it, discussing it and plenty of our work has been inspired or related to it in some way. In fact, like many graphic designers, it was a large part of the reason we became interested in design in the first place. Pouring over the typography and layouts of our favourite album covers played a massively important part in shaping our design understanding and tastes. With the record sleeves shrinking from a 12inch gate-fold to a pixelated square on your phone, the art of record sleeve design has obviously changed and will probably continue to do so. I’m sure many of the brilliant examples of cover art we know and love wouldn’t exist today if they had to go through the approval process of any major record label. Which is a shame.

That said, we’re all about embracing change and this blog post certainly isn’t about crying about the good old days and getting nostalgic about the crackle of limited edition vinyl. Beautifully designed ways to package music releases in (physical or otherwise) is still with us and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

I’m fairly sure we’re not alone in our love of the marriage between great design and great tunes. There are countless books, websites and articles dedicated to the craft of creating the images which to go with music. One thing that often seems to get either overlooked or even completely ignored when discussing cover art is the music itself. With this in mind, we’ve come up with our pick of the design-geek-classic-covers of recent years, along with the actual songs contained within (sometimes not the most obvious choices). Sound & Vision will be a regular feature on the blog, showcasing music artwork we love alongside the tunes so you can listen while you read. Click below to have a look and, equally importantly, listen.

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Hello World.

Our blog has been comparatively quiet over the last couple of weeks, mainly due to ridiculous amounts of client work (which we’re not complaining about), looming deadlines and a couple of well deserved holidays in the sun. Feeble excuses aside, we’re back in your face like a plate full of shaving foam with another Five Things that have caught our interest this week.

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Recently we were surprised and delighted to be asked to become regular contributors to Typetoken, a new blog showcasing the best typography from around the world. The site is a collaboration between graphic designers Mike Sullivan of Mister and Mark Millic of Modularlab, and web developer David Cole of Mayfield Digital. The three have joined forces and created a beautiful looking site, which will be a constant source of typo-inspiration and other design related goodness. With contributors from all over the UK as well as Paris, Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo, you can guarantee there’ll be plenty of good stuff to check out.

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That’s a fairly big number right? Well, it’s a slightly daunting number when you think about that number being actual people… And they’re all looking at you… Waiting on your every word. ‘Perform Monkey!’

Well, it wasn’t quite that bad, but following our The Tweet Goes On… post this week, I guest edited Creative Review’s twitter feed for one day yesterday. They had in excess of 374,000 followers before we took hold of the reins, and I’m glad to say that the number is still rising and it would seem as though their great magazine hasn’t been affected too much by my diatribe.

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Last night we traveled to The Parfitt Gallery to attend the opening of ‘The Designers Republic Come Home To Croydon‘ – a solo exhibition of work by Ian Anderson shown in his childhood home town. The founder of the legendary Sheffield based studio was showing various pieces of work curated from the last 25 years.

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So it’s award season again. Well — least it is at the D&AD — the one we all know about and keep tabs on.

At some point as a hungry ‘n’ thirsty new design agency eager to succeed, you mention the word ‘AWARDS’ amongst yourselves. You only need chat for less than a minute though as straight away reality kicks in when you consider the entry fees and who you’re up against. You soon realise you’re punching above your weight and think to yourselves ‘…what’s the point of wasting the money?…’ and back to work you toddle.

Mat Dolphin is coming up for its second year in business soon so awards are definitely something we’ve discussed (and dismissed) in our small studio on more than one occasion. With a heavy dose of risk involved entering into the fray, we wanted to explore some of the merits, pitfalls and woes of being a small agency in a big award pond.

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A while back we told you about some of the design blogs we look to for inspiration. The sites we check out on a regular basis barely skim the tip of the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s out there and with this in mind we thought we’d share some more bloggy treats with you. The last set we looked at focused on specific design-related disciplines – this time we’re going to have a look at sites which, whilst covering a broad spectrum, are aimed squarely at the purist design geeks like us. All of these sites are quite different in what and how they blog, but all of them are a constant source of interest, inspiration and entertainment.

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Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The time has come to announce the winner of the Mat Dolphin x Creative Review competition!

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Being the kind, sharing types we are, we thought it was only right to shine the spotlight on a few other design blogs out there. We regularly stumble across new blogs and thought it would be an idea to share some of the best ones with you. We’ve catagorised them by discipline but most of them tend to cover a wide range of topics so you’re bound to find something of interest. By no means a defintive list, the sites we’ve listed below should at the very least be a good starting point. Get bookmarking!

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Five Things is back, the first installment in the series this year takes a look at some of the creative goodness we’ve seen over the last week. Covering film, photography, advertising, printing and erm… eggs, there’s sure to be something for everyone. Dive in and check out what we’ve been looking at.

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Last night saw the momentous occassion of the first Mat Dolphin studio outing of the year. The destination was the headquarters of London advertising agency JWT to hear a talk entitled ‘To Go on a Journey, You Need Strong Legs…’ by Simon Sankarayya, the art director better known in design circles as Sanky.

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Believe in™ is an Exeter based design and art direction studio. Since the studio was established in 1996, they’ve created some beautiful identities, branding, print, digital work, illustration packaging and art direction. The creative brain behind the operation is Blair Thomson – self proclaimed ‘Design obsessive. Rock bloke. Food freak. Creative Director…’

As well as the above, Blair is very nice bloke and agreed to take time out to take the hot seat and
answer our Ten Questions.

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Yo-Hello is name of the website James Nelson uses as, in his own words ‘an entity for dumping output from my brain into the world.’ The output of James’ brain involves experiments with typography, shape, composition, screenprinting and colour. The forms and images he creates are complex, multi-layered pieces which often form the basis of the work at his ‘day job’ – part of the design team at Research Studios, headed up by Neville Brody.

James was kind enough to take some time out to answer our Ten Questions.

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Hello again. Amidst another busy week here at Dolphin Towers, we are proud to present the tenth installment of our regular Five Things series. A quick trawl through some of the interesting creativity we’ve spotted over the last seven days.

Click below to check out what’s caught our eye recently.

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Neville Brody is one of the most influential graphic designers of the last 30 years. His groundbreaking work for The Face magazine in the eighties played a key role in the development of British Graphic design and, for many, showed the possibilities of what a creative mind could achieve with words and images. After his role as art director of the magazine from 1981 – 86 he founded his own agency, Research Studios, and has gone on to grow rather impressive client list. Redesigning The Times newspaper and the BBC website – not bad work if you can get it. If that wasn’t enough, in March this year The Royal College of Art announced that Brody was to head up their Communication Art and Design course.

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It’s been a busy week here at Mat Dolphin. In between meeting lots of nice new people and talking about lots of nice new projects we’ve been keeping our eyes peeled for interesting stuff. Here are some of the highlights we’ve spotted over the last week.

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We’re a relatively new design agency, and as such we’re still discovering how we work and ultimately what direction we want the business to go. Naturally one of the hot topics in the studio is ‘How do we grow our business?’. Last week we attended the ‘Grow Your Own event at the Design Council. With an opening introduction of ‘Looking for ways to grow your design business?’ we made sure we got our names on the list to get advice on everything from intellectual property to international markets.

The Design Council has a simple philosophy – They place design at the heart of growth and renewal in Britain. As one of the world’s leading design institutions, they are a centre of new thinking and insight into new ways to do business. We learnt a huge amount at the event, but two main points stuck with us after the visit:

1. The Design Council are there and supportive of us, and all creative studios.
2. That managing client relationships is one of the most important aspects of running a design agency.

One of the guides we picked up was written by Creative Choices and was on the subject of Managing Client Relationships. It was such a great insight that we wanted to share the information with everyone.

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Roya Hamburger is an artist and illustrator based in Amsterdam. Her work is a mix of illustration, photography and typography which aims to cross the boundries between the worlds of commercial illustration and fine art. Since graduating from the esteemed Willem De Kooning Academy of Arts in Rotterdam, Roya has worked for a long list of international clients including Cosmopolitan, Elle, M Magazine, British Airways, Postbank, Deloitte and Martini.

Roya was kind enough to take some time out to join in with our Ten Questions series.

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We started the Mat Dolphin blog as a simple platform to share information – we’re constantly consuming design and we meet a great number of inspirational people involved in our industry which gives us plenty of design-related ’stuff’ to share. However, as well as having this dialogue with our peers we always saw the blog as being a great way to converse with clients. From previous experience working in design agencies, there’s all to often a barrier between client and designer that, in our opinion, doesn’t need to be there.

With this in mind, we thought it would be a good idea to write an easy to follow ‘guide to briefing’ to make the process easier for clients and designers alike.

The design process starts and ends with the client. A person or organisation has a design requirement and approach the designer – so far, all simple enough. The next stage, the client relaying exactly what it is they want to achieve, can be a bit more complicated.

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Kubrick: A Film Maker’s Odessey is an exhibition on display at The Museum of St Albans, a few miles away from the former home of the man himself.

We decided a Mat Dolphin field day was in order. Last weekend saw a trip to St.Albans to check out the exhibition and get a first hand look at some behind the scenes photography, original props, concept sketches and other Kubrick-related artefacts. Curated by The Museum of St Albans and University of Hertfordshire, the exhibition was fully supported by the Kubrick Estate and the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts.

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