Blaze Forum

Today I was in Preston for a much needed catch up with the Blaze Arts team, at one of the periodical Blaze Forum events which are open to all young people who’d like to get involved – check out the Blaze website here or get in touch with Laura for more info. Today we met at a new location – The Lancashire Archives, a strange concrete box which sits on stilts, almost as though the architects were preemptive of some future flooding in Preston…

The interior was old but still nice – almost like stepping in a time machine, with the abundance of wooden veneer and period fittings…

But less about decor, today we discussed the three existing projects from Blaze Festival 2013; Blaze Lounge, Level Up and Portable Projection, and how we were going to keep these projects going and include them as part of Blaze Festival 2014.

We then discussed one of my pet projects, Culture On A Shoestring, focusing primarily on how to widen its distribution across the north west. As designer of the publication (the latest issue of which can be found here), I spent time discussing my planned design overhaul for Issue 5 which will be released this summer. I’ve yet to start work on it, but I have already made a few preliminary sketches on my iPad.

We also spoke with Paul Kelly from LCC regarding Blaze as an organisation, and getting membership passes and other goodies for members and staff.

Overall it was really nice to see everyone again – especially Shona who runs her own blogs which you should definitely go and check out. Also be sure to check out Shona’s project on O2 Think Big! Anyway, I also ended up nosing through some of the archive’s books (from 1789 no less!) and found the beautiful old graphics…

I also snuck into Lush on my way back home and picked up a little Easter Bunny for my sister… It’s really cute and smells great too. One day I will walk past a Lush shop without buying anything, but that day is not today. I am going to go and eat more snacks and poke around typography.com for a while longer.