• I’ve received a birthday card from Direct Line Insurance and it almost made me feel ill! Do I know these people? Do they know me? I am a faceless e-customer and occasional telephone caller – not a mate. I’m friendly with their staff when I call, but I’ve never had the same person and have never built up any kind of personal relationship. We do have a lot of policies with them, but they can’t be that grateful.

    And then there is the design. Bland, bland, bland and deliberately inoffensive. The font is bleak. It may follow their corporate style, but this is not supposed to be a sales leaflet – or is it? That crass addition of my name on the front – different colour – no one puts the name of the birthday person on the front.

    The the inside is even more bleak. So as not to identify the manufacturer of the party popper, they have taken the wrapper off, making it look cheap and tacky – it took me a while to work out what it was meant to be.

    Enjoy your special day Shoo, of course, should have a comma before my name, but let’s forgive them that. The words are suspended in a sea of white space with no attention to optical alignment. The words hang in that space so that the little bits of snot can dangle from the E and the y.

    There are codes printed at the bottom, repeated on the back and there seems to be a related raffle number at the top on the back – do I win a prize if I have the right number?
    These numbers make me feel like they are data gathering – not the right spirit.

    Oh yes – it arrived much too early, which adds the the thoughtlessness of it. You either put do not open until the specified date on the envelope, or you send it to arrive on the date with a pre birthday postmark or you are late and apologise.

    Am I being ungracious?

    Uh- uh! Direct Line – you failed – miserably.

  • To celebrate having gone over 10,000 views on my drawing school, here is a video to show you how to draw cute little kittens!

    Click here to find more lessons including how to draw Santa and Reindeer. Seeing that Manga lessons attract so many viewers, I think I’m going to experiment and add the word Manga to the tags and see if it has any effect.

    Interestingly, my daily website stats are down. I guess everyone is shopping or getting ready for Christmas carol concerts at school.

  • Also at the Stoke Potteries Museum and Art Gallerywas this wonderful cinema poster for the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night movie. All the lettering is screen printed and hand cut.

    In those days signs like this would normally be painted by hand in poster paint on showcard, but The Gaumont, Hanley probably wanted a few copies and so screen printing would have been the obvious solution. Printing would have meant boring old letterpress – not a very cool option for the subject matter.

    The stencil would have been shellac coated paper stuck to a backing paper. The letters were cut out with a blade – the backing paper would allow the centres of letters to stay in place while the paper was ironed onto the stretched silk screen. The shellac melted just enough to stick.

    The medium allows for very sharp lettering and a modern style – the lettering for “A Hard Day’s Night” is very funky! A gorgeous piece of work and a classic of it’s time.