Hasta La Ideas

Being based in offices overlooking London’s busy Oxford street, it certainly hasn’t escaped our notice here at CR towers that Christmas is nearly upon us. And, as ever, it’s great to see enterprising creative types creating lovely cards and other seasonal treats for fans of their work. Here are a few of our favourite such Christmassy things so far this year…

Hand lettering artist Alison Carmichael created packs of 10 Christmas cards which she is offering for sale to friends and clients at a thoroughly reasonable £6 for 10 cards. “It’s a totally non profit making enterprise,” she tells us, “but cheap enough that if you felt guilty about buying non-charity cards, you can still afford to fling a couple of quid to a charity of your choice!”

No Brow commissioned Bristol-based illustrator Bjorn Rune Lie to create four Christmas card designs for them which they’ve hand screenprinted in their Shoreditch studio so that each card comes in four different colourways. The cards are made using 100% recycled stock and you can buy a pack of four for £9 (including p+p for UK buyers) direct from the nobrow.net.

A hand grenade-shaped bauble may not seem like the most festive of decorations for your Christmas tree – and that’s actually the point of these grenades, conceived and designed by Manchester-based Dorothy for Ctrl.Alt.Shift in association with Suck UK. Entitled Chistmas Declarations, the grenade baubles are meant to remind people that despite the joy of Christmas, all is not rosy in the world.

The limited edition decorations are available to buy in packs of six from Suck UK (£20) with a donation being made from the sale of each pack to support Ctrl.Alt.Shift’s fight against global conflict. And they’re also being stocked by numerous independents including the Saatchi Gallery. More details and stockists at ctrlaltshift.co.uk. Photographs by Tim Sinclair

We received this charming illustrated postcard from Owen Gildersleeve of collective Evening Tweed. While he originally produced the postcards in a limited edition of 40 on his Gocco home screenprinting kit to send out to friends and clients, Owen tells us he’s hoping to use the jumper illustration on Christmas cards as well.

Ah, wrapping paper – always handy this time of year… We were sent a couple of rolls of this Manchester Gift Wrap, designed by Peter Saville in collaboration with Howard Wakefield of Studio Parris Wakefield for visitmanchester.com. To see what the wrapping paper looks like unfolded, click this link

Last year the Christmas By Colour project saw the good folk at Raw Design ask a host of designers and image makers to submit a pantone reference to a colour they felt summed up the festive season. GF Smith provided the paper that allowed CBC to print posters showcasing the results of the submissions they received. This year CBC asked which of a selection of 40 pantones which featured on last year’s poster were peoples favourite – the top 12 have been made into Christmas cards  – which are available this year in two different packs of six:

The top twelve hues (which all have suitable name) are thus:

Quality Street (Guy Moorhouse)
Sprouts (John Dowling)
Yellow snow (Nick Greenwood)
Mulled wine (Tash Willcocks)
End of the Sellotape (Pete Clarke)
Park Lane & Mayfair (Jez Burrows)
Bank balance (Tom Heaton)
Granny’s whiskers (Jordan Nelson)
After Eights (Shane Phillips)
Bucks Fizz (Gil Cocker)
Pigs in blankets (Sean Rees)
Walking in the Air (Kelly Mackenzie)

Each pack costs £3.95 and they’re available to buy from christmasbycolour.co.uk

Paper company Fedrigoni turned to Studio8 to design their 2010 calendar, which takes the form of a pile of coloured paper, a sheet for every day of the year. A number representing the date is perfed into each sheet meaning users can push it out and stand it up on the top of the pile each morning…

YCN (Young Creatives Network) is set to launch a Christmas shop at its Rivington Street headquarters later this week. The shop will be full of specially commissioned exclusive goodies designed by a raft of interesting creative types including Donna Wilson, Mother and Johnny Kelly. Shown in the image above are some examples of the shop’s stock sent to us by YCN – a sheet of wrapping paper designed by Toby Pennington, two one-off, hand-illustrated christmas cards (the one on the left is by CR favourite Johanna Basford, the one on the right is by Jamie Portch) and a pack of four cards by Valero Doval. Also available will be Dominic Wilcox‘s By A Thread walking stick (below), whereby multi-coloured cotton thread reels have been painstakingly transferred by hand onto a wooden walking stick. Each stick is completely unique with a random combination of coloured thread.

The shop is open from 10am to 6pm Monday to Friday at 72 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3AY. Tel: +44 (0) 207 033 2140. email: info@ycnonline.com

Have you produced something nice to send to clients at Christmas – or created your own Christmas cards? If you have, we’d love to see the work – with a view to doing more of these posts through December. Email me at gavin.lucas@centaur.co.uk