Harvest assembly

Most of the time Xavier was hidden behind his taller classmates, so I drew the children I could see.

By the way what is the point of the drop down menu in blogger giving you a choice of fonts when it makes not the blindest bit of difference what you change things to? I know it was a very luddite method of doing things but I always used to manually change the body text of my posts to Verdana small. However now, when I do that it makes no difference. It still stays the default font

Yet another view from the sofa

Great feature of InDesign CS5

I was able to try out the different size pages feature in InDesign CS5 for a little job I was working on recently. What a timesaver when designing a number of similar items that are going to be output at different sizes. The various items needed for the St Albans Chamber Choir concert in November included A4 flyers, A5 flyers, A2 posters, A5 programme covers and an icon for the website. In previous versions of InDesign I would have needed to create a different file for each size of document. Then if the clients had said, ‘we’ve changed our mind about which pieces we’re going to sing’, or ‘could you change the background colour to green?’, I would have needed to open four separate documents to make the changes. With CS5 I can simply carry out one ‘find and replace’ action and all of the items are changed.


For anyone local to St Albans, who’s interested in listening to excellent serious choral singing, the concert is at St Peter’s Church on the 20th of November. To buy tickets tel 01582 831228 or online at www.wegottickets.com/stalbanschamberchoir
Thanks to Jenny Downing for the lovely poppy picture

Woo-hoo I won a prize for blogging!

I've been blogging for five years and won a blogging competition prize last year. Winning prizes isn't going to pay the bills but it's nevertheless a reason to celebrate.

A couple of months back I shared with you the process of designing a corporate identity for cocona and how I solved the problem of producing printed materials when we only had low resolution photography (as the products being marketed were on a container ship in the middle of the ocean).

Well the lovely people at Moo have decided to give me a prize for my blog post. What’s more gratifying is that the prize offer came long after I’d written the post, so it really wasn’t written with one eye on the prize.*

So now I need to decide how to use my Moo vouchers. Hmm, business cards… post cards… greetings cards…

* though I confess I did change one line to mention Moo rather than a generic ‘variable print technology’

Blue Robin

Quickly rendered hand-lettering inspired by Pablo Ferro’s ‘Dr Strangelove’ titles. The font Strangelove Next which will enable you to do a much better job than this can be purchased at a very low price from MyFonts.

Ashridge woods

While Robin was off breaking a world record (find an obscure enough activity and maybe we all could get into the Guinness book of records) I had a tedious weekend, which was only mildly diverting when I took Xavier and Rufus for a walk in the gorgeous woodland of Ashridge.
I know, I know – you're far more interested in what Robin did, so I won't keep you in suspense a moment longer. He and his fellow paddlers broke the world record for the longest distance covered in 24 hours by a dragonboat team. He is now probably going to have to spend the rest of the week standing up, if the glimpse I caught of those friction sores is anything to go by!

Taking Tom to university

I snatched five minutes to sketch the view of the top of the Radcliffe Camera from the quad in Hertford college. We took Tom’s luggage to his room in the college, had a lovely lunch out and then tea in the college dining room, before being shooed away so that Tom could get on with the serious business of making new friends. It’s difficult to believe that my little boy is at university and all grown up… well sort of…

Bald Hugo

After Tom managed to turn me from an ageing hippy lady into a sophisticated career woman, with his hairdressing skills, Hugo urged Tom to hack off all his hair. I went ballistic, with Hugo for asking for the horrible haircut and Tom for complying. Why is it that a few millimetres here or there on a boy's haircut makes all the difference as to how people perceive you?