Sherry

If you’ve ever been to Charing cross tube station, you would have passed the platform-length mural, which shows scenes from the construction of the original Charing cross designed by David Gentleman in 1978.

Sketching london for decades, David Gentleman has collected over 400 pages of beautifully illustrated sketches of the capital which he has compiled in his new book London, You’re Beautiful: An Artists Year.

His previous book David Gentleman’s London is a must have, for anyone who loves the historic city of london, full of superb visuals crammed with personality and factual accounts of every aspect of London.

Hopefully swim!

This coming Saturday, the 28th April, I shall be participating in the Swimathon 2012, the world’s biggest fund-raising swim, at York Hall Baths in Bethnal Green. For the third consecutive year I will be raising as much money as I can for Marie Curie by tackling the individual distance challenge; which is 5 kilometres. My training has been underway at full throttle and the past few weeks has even seen me running to work (seriously). Aiming to beat my completion time from last year of 89 minutes I will need to be swimming at a rate of under 26seconds per lap (of which there are 200) so it’ll need to be non-stop front crawl.

My sponsorship page can be found here and i’ll be sure to let you know how I get on. I’m already clearing a space in the Sherry trophy cabinet for my medal.

This week, the generally close knit and united Sherry team split in two and became arch enemies for our annual ‘bowl off’. True colours came out from behind polite office banter and competitive streaks surged forward like tsunamis. Secret team meetings, spying, name calling and even poisoned popcorn we’re all part of the build up.

Although the ‘Finger Bowls’ competed fiercely with sometimes dangerous strength, their special hand actions and unique team noise couldn’t distract the ‘I can’t believe it’s not gutter’ bunch who triumphed with their experience and accuracy.

The All Star Lanes on Brick Lane was the setting for the epic event which lasted approximately 43 minutes. But I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear at the end of the battle, after a large American meal and cocktails we are again one team Sherry.

At college, many students would ask the same question – “Do I need to know how to draw to be a designer?” The answer was always ‘no’, yet we were all taught the value of good process work. Despite the obvious value to the design process, hand-drawn idea generation is often forced into the backseat by the technology we have at our fingertips.

However, it seems that this very technology is now developing full-circle.

Taking hand-drawn to a new level, is the current iPad App of the month, Paper. The app functions as a drawing tablet, yet without the co-ordination issues! Paper is said to deliver the highest artistic performance than any previous drawing-based apps, giving the user the ablity to create anything from a simple set of notes to an expressive painting, with a wide variety of pens (each displaying a different quality). Idea sketches, storyboarding, artistic drawings, color pallettes, or just doodling are all easily accomplished, ultimately streamlining the brainstorming process if utilised to it’s full potential. What fun!

Image source

Moreover, the reappearance of drawing isn’t exclusive to the creative community either. Draw Something, a social drawing game fashioned on the concept of the classic board game, Pictionary, continues to increase in popularity. The game removes any sense of competition by eliminating time limits and punishments for incorrect guesses, so it really does make drawing fun for everyone.

Could we say that drawing is making a full-circle come-back? Well, whether you try it for work or play, I’m pretty sure you’ll get drawn in at some point too!

It’s very busy at Sherry HQ and so we are looking for a Project Manager to join our team. To find out more about the role please download the job description here. We look forward to hearing from you.