Style counsel

Apart from The Guardian not knowing their en dashes from their em dashes, I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone interested in the written English language.

"Guardian Style will help you distinguish between the so-called rules of grammar that are an aid to good writing and those that you can cheerfully ignore. It is also a mine of information about everything from spelling to punctuation, from commonly misused words to foreign terms and expressions. If you're not sure what the difference is between principle and principal, if you have ever been puzzled by the rules governing the use of that and which, or if you are unsure as to whether brackets and parentheses are the same thing, then this superbly straightforward and straight-talking reference guide is for you."

It is not as pedantic and dry as it may sound. That said, don't expect the grammar on this blog to be perfect as a result. Available here.

Closing shops

I hope that the trend for closing up shop doesn't increase, as this week, Design Assembly blog announced its closure after 3 years of excellent design writing. If you haven't seen the blog previously, they are honouring its memory with 3 books, available here. My copy is on order.



This comes a few weeks after Airside announced they were winding down next year, see the Creative Review article about it here.

Childhood Remixed

I've been working on an identity for some colleagues at University Campus Suffolk recently. The first unveiling of the results came this week, with the above logo, in a call for submissions for Childhood Remixed, an electronic academic research journal themed on childhood. There's more work to do on designing the publication itself over the coming months as submissions come in and are peer reviewed.

The launch of the first issue is expected in spring 2012 and will initially only be available to those from within the institution. This PDF based downloadable journal will act as a publishing opportunity for UCS staff, alumni, postgraduate students and final year undergraduates producing both written and image based work.

Stock replies

As someone who suffers intermittently from RSI, I get tired of writing the same email responses over and over again. I have therefore started building a database of stock replies that I can just cut and paste as needed and amend according to the specific enquiry. Here are two that I use most regularly:

Reply to poorly written emails
As a university student, it will be worth getting into the habit of ensuring your emails are grammatically correct. You don’t capitalise your ‘I’s on many occasions, your spelling needs greater attention, and you use colloquial phrases throughout. I know emails are not essays, but if you get into the habit of ensuring you pay close attention to how you write in all your communications, this will become second nature and much easier when you do have to write essays/dissertations. It will also make sure you don’t accidentally write like this when sending emails to prospective employers, which would pretty much cancel out any chances of getting an interview.

Reply to request for free design from students by local businesses/organisations
Thank you for your email and details of what sounds like an interesting project.

Firstly, as I’m sure you can appreciate, students are approaching the end of the academic year/at an important stage in their studies (delete as appropriate) and therefore all levels of the course are currently extremely busy.

The ideal situation for this sort of project would be to include it as part of an appropriate academic module, but unfortunately we are too far into the teaching programme to introduce something new—we plan our scheme of work well in advance of actually delivering them. While this brief is something I would be happy to field to students as a personal project, as we could not include it as part of the curriculum, it would be up to students individually as to whether they got involved or not. I therefore cannot guarantee any would take up an offer of involvement.

Secondly, as for the idea of a competition, I would not consider offering this up to students unless there was some sort of appropriate reward. We are asked a lot by different organisations if students would like to be part of a live project, which has obvious benefits for a student’s portfolio, but I believe it is ethically responsible to offer some recompense for what would otherwise constitute a free piece of design. The additional benefits of this are that it would offer some sort of incentive for a student to take part.

(In light of the above, if there was any extension to your proposed deadline, this would further encourage students to get involved as they are always looking for work to do over the summer break once the intensity of university projects subsides.)

Once again I’d like to thank you for your enquiry and I look forward to hearing from you.