Three things you should know

1. I’ve been doing some really exciting and super hush-hush work for The National Lottery and Vodafone
2. One of the perks of the latter is that I get to spend a lot of my time in Düsseldorf. I’ll write more about that soon.
3. I really dislike wicker.

Back soon. Promise.

Here’s how I squander my time putting it to use.

Step 1: Divine inspiration

This is where I get to unleash my inner child. I try to come up with at least an A3 sheet full of ideas for every batch of badges I make. I try to stay away from text, because I’m the kind of person who’ll try to cram an essay in there if given half a chance.

Step 2: Doing the work

I lay out all my badge ideas in Illustrator, with a combination of infinite patience, attention to tiny details, and Bushmills. Designing for a 38mm circle sure puts all that moaning about accommodating 800×600 screen resolution into perspective.

Step 3: Printing and cutting

I normally print 12 badges in a single batch. When they’re printed (assuming I’ve not forgotten to turn off the design guides), I get to play with my circle cutter. When I first got this, I didn’t notice the cutting mat, and now have to hide some nice round marks on my floor from my landlady.

Step 4: The best bit

This is what it’s all about. I load up the press with the badge back, front, design and cover, and get to feel all mechanic-like while I pull levers and spin doohickies. I learned the hard way to make sure things are positioned just so before pressing - no-one wants an un-pinnable badge.

Step 5: Finished!

For now, I’ll talk through the process I went through to make a book to celebrate my Mum’s 21st (ahem) birthday.

Step 1: The vaguest of ideas

I don’t really enjoy making blank books, so I normally start with some ideas for content. As with all things, I’ll scribble away on an A3 pad until the ideas seem right, and then get to work on the mac.

At this stage, I like to think about the form of the book. I’m into fiddly things, so I usually turn to the excellent Keith Smith for inspiration, an end up picking a binding style that’s miles beyond me.

Step 2: Signatures

For some reason, signatures break my head. I normally have to print a stupid number of versions of a book before I get it right - in the photo above, I’m trying to fit 16 pages into an 8-page signature. In case you’ve never made a book before, this is a silly thing to do.

Step 3: Binding

Binding the signatures together is great fun. If you like stabbing yourself with a needle. I ended up stabbing myself in the leg doing this one.

Step 4: Covers

This is the messiest part. You take your carefully-cut cover board and your carefully-cut cover cloth and introduce them to huge amounts of glue. If you’re lucky (or not me), the glue stays where you put it. If not, you get to scrub your book covers for hours to get rid of the errant glue.

In the photo above, I’ve gone for some fancy binder-style covers that will be held together with cloth on the spines.

Step 5: Covers, meet book

Getting the book block to stick to the covers requires the use of fly-leaves. The fly-leaves are the heavier, prettier sheets that are glued to the inner covers and attached to the first and last signatures. Shopping for fly-leaf paper is a fantastically masculine pastime that I encourage you to try.

Step 6: Voila!

The finished book, ready for emotionally exploiting my mother. She cried on just about every page.

For more photos, visit my Flickr set.

And so, with the fiery passion of a man who’s wasted too much life on crowded tube platforms, I took matters into my own hands and created THE TUBINATOR!. Every 15 minutes, old tubey updates twitter with any tube lines that aren’t quite up to scratch at the time. It doesn’t do planned outages, which I’m assuming people have already noticed, but it does cover the DLR. Us South-East Londoners are people too, dammit.

Go ahead and say ‘Hi’ to THE TUBINATOR!.

It’s taken me about 8 hours, I can finally take down the ‘coming soon’ page, and I have the final episode of series 4 of The Wire warmed up and ready to go.

To a new age, friends. A new age.