Scriberia

Sunny Side Up

admin — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:04:19 +0000

Our latest animation for @intelligence2 – following on from our recent animation of George Monbiot and Simon Zadek’s climate change debate - is now live. Part of the Shell “Switched On” series of events on our energy future, this one sees Professor Michael Düren of DESERTEC argue that we can harness the African desert sun to power the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIWeZQpZ5QE

Scribing Tryout

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:01:55 +0000

Listen to the talk by Kirk Citron below. Create a piece of scribing that you feel captures his key messages and conveys the overall point of his argument in a clear, concise and engaging way. Look at the work shown on this website to get a feel for the way Scriberia work. It may help you get a sense of tone, structure and level of detail, but don’t feel you have to try and replicate a particular style. Bring your own approach to the challenge.

Scriberia usually work pretty quickly, so you may wish to limit the time you spend on it to, say, 2 hours maximum, to make the task more realistic.

Use A3 landscape, 300dpi and email the final image to giulia@scriberia.co.uk

Good luck!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0cphH1jkQI

Putting the Act into Action

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:07:25 +0000

We’re always up for helping our friends and near neighbours at National Austistic Society. As well as our pro bono scribe work, Dan helped out with some illustrations for their Great Expectations campaign last year, and so we were delighted when they contacted us again asking us to illustrate a new publication helping people get the most out of the 2009 Autism Act. This time, Somang took the job on and her ability to capture simple human actions and scenarios with both warmth and clarity was a perfect fit for this sensitive brief . We love these!

The guide’s author, NAS’s Policy & Parliamentary Officer Anthony Houlden, said, “getting involved in a campaign you feel passionate about is an exciting feeling, but it can be a daunting one. We wanted illustrations to both remove the mystique and make the guide seem more ‘friendly’. Scriberia did a great job and, importantly, in a very short space of time.”

Opening Up

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:37:38 +0000

When the Guardian opened its doors to its readers for last month’s Open Weekend, we (James, Karolin, Chris, Dan and Nina) were there to draw the highlights. Director of the event Madeleine Bunting said “Curiosity and conviviality, the two Cs, were our watchwords.” She forgot ‘cartoons and colouring-in’ obviously, but we all had such a great time we can forgive that. It was a unique job for us – working side by side with Guardian cartoonist and honorary Scriberian Martin Rowson was fantastic… bloated cats defecating haven’t featured so prominently on a Scriberia wall since… er, well since we scribed a talk by Martin Rowson actually!

Sessions which saw editor Alan Rusbridger and senior colleagues meet with loyal readers to discuss the Guardian’s future provided us with a lot of our weightier content, and we supplemented that with the comments, quotes and observations from Twitter, the live blog and from passing punters. At the end of the second day we’d almost filled our 7 metre wall… just leaving room enough room to reveal the word of the weekend. Can you spot it? More pics to follow…

Water Matters

admin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:37:07 +0000

Our Virtual Graphic Facilitation work on Smithsonian Education’s Shout programme is always a guarantee of fascinating and important content presented in an engaging way – precisely the stuff we Scriberians thrive on. Following the ‘Live with the Land’ series of talks in 2010-11, we are delighted to be contributing again, through our friends at Learning Times, on this year’s ‘Water Matters’ programme. Presenting online to a global audience, a huge range of Smithsonian’s experts in residence – from marine scientists to folk music archivists – are giving their perspective on various issues of water, its conservation and the lives it supports. Our efforts are obviously a drop in the ocean, but we hope they’ve helped to make a few of these important messages more memorable. We’ve also been able to introduce a few new artists to the Virtual Graphic Facilitation team – thanks to James, Adam, Maggie and Somang for this selection.

The Guardian Open Weekend

admin — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 23:21:36 +0000

On 24 and 25 March, the Guardian will be opening its doors to thousands of members of the public for a special series of events. The Guardian Open Weekend, as well as offering a wealth of talks, workshops, activities, music and food for all ages, serves to launch, address and embody a new way of thinking about journalism. Open journalism, as portrayed in the Guardian’s ‘Three Little Pigs‘ advert this week, embraces the explosion of opinion, comment and reaction to events that characterises news in the age of social media. From eye witness videos shot on phones, through to the sharing of specialist or inside knowledge, our sources of information are now incredibly diverse. Recognising that, the Guardian aims to provide a credible, but essentially ’open’ platform for this broad and vast range of contributors.

The implications of all this, what it means philosophically, creatively and financially for the Guardian and its readers, will be ‘openly’ debated over the two days. And it will be our job to capture those discussions, as well as some of the fun that is going on around it. Look out for live tweets of our scribing over the course of the weekend.

Futurescapes

admin — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:57:36 +0000

What will the world will look like in 2025? Scriberia are delighted to have been working with Sony and Forum for the Future on the exciting FutureScapes project, a wide-ranging initiative bringing together expert thinkers, designers, futurologists, writers and the public to explore life’s challenges and opportunities in 2025. We sent a scribing team to the recent Futurescapes Innovation Workshop in Paris, where Sony joined forces with industry experts to brainstorm technology concepts that we might need for a more sustainable life in 2025. Following that, we were invited to illustrate another facet of the Futurescapes project, the short stories by a number of high profile writers, commissioned by Sony shine a speculative light on the human side of our high-tech future. Directly below is the image Matias created to represent the brief itself, followed by an illustration of each of the five stories.

The Good Listener, Michael Marshall Smith
A young man tracks his late father’s last days using technology in a bid to understand him

Twentytwentyfive, Lesley Lokko
A soon-to-be-married woman is tempted to follow her fiance through real-time tracking technology

The Last Ladybird, Kate Harrison
The surprise discovery of a extinct insect signals hope for the future

Eternal Bliss, Markus Albers
In a world where the balance of power has shifted to the Middle East, Robert makes an unusual business trip to Abu Dhabi

Life in 2025, Marcus Sedgwick
The creator of a dream programming app is worried about its effect on society

Back to the Futurologists

admin — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:52:41 +0000

Following our sponsorship of November’s fascinating inaugural If Conference, a crack team of Scriberia artists has been producing illustrations for each of the 36 talks that took place. The plan is to team up with our friends at Intelligence Squared publish these later in the year, but in the meantime, here’s a sneak preview. The work we’ve done for these takes the principles of live scribing but allows a little more time and space for expression. It’s fantastic to see such a range of styles and approaches gathered under the Scriberian flag(!?) and testament to the diverse talents of the team that’s been developing here over the last year. Click the links to see the talk summaries on the If Conference website.

Mark Post, Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University who works on “lab meat”
Meet the new meat

Matt Jones, Principal at BERG London
Living in the middle

Adam Newton, Manager, Global Strategy Team, Shell
Creating reliable energy, clean water and enough to eat for every city

Chistopher Choa, Principal at AECOM Design + Planning
The New Silk Road; Camels, Air Routes, and the Rise of Aerotropolis

Ricky Burdett, Co-Editor of Living in the Endless City and Professor of Urban Studies at LSE
Living in the Endless Cities of Mumbai, São Paulo and Istanbul

Ian Pearson, Futurologist
The Future of Sleep

Protected: Live Scribing/Animation examples

admin — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:22:25 +0000

Talking Heads

admin — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:01:45 +0000

As a consequence of our involvement in the If Conference late last year, the stylish folk over at Wallpaper asked us to create an illustration to accompany their article on Intelligence Squared, If, and the growth in future-focused, speaker-driven events.

We tackled it as we did the work we subsequently produced for many of the talks at the conference itself (which will be posted shortly). We created a mindmap in the very broadest sense – one that worked on two levels, both as a big overall concept and, within that, as a container for smaller images, narratives and details. It was tough getting so much information into a relatively small amount of real estate, but ultimately we thought it did the job of conveying the lively, adversarial quality of Intelligence Squared events.

We were also asked to create a short animation based on the illustration for Wallpaper’s iPad edition, intended to serve as a kind of trailer for the content of the article. Wallpaper we great to work with, and it was a privilege to grace their elegant pages! Here’s the animation: