While everyone else in Copenhagen is away at a summer house in Sweden I’m sitting in our lovely Smoke & Mirror Studio office in Vesterbro trying to get some work done and trying harder to cool the office down. Luckily, to keep myself occupied between the work I found this interesting article on the BBC website: Do Typefaces Really Matter? Always good to hear about these things from a non-designer perspective. It’s a basic article but you can show it to your parents or hairdresser when they ask you what you do.

Hello again. Wow, it’s been too long but we’re back. Just a quick post to draw your attention to the most amazing design event going on back in my old country of Ireland. Offset 2010 is a three day creative conference happening in Dublin from October 1st - 3rd and it has attracted the most fantastic collection of international designers to speak and present at it. Some design legends (eg. Mark Farrow, pictured), some on top of their game now and the rest all operate on the high levels of awesomeness. You can buy tickets through their website now and god knows if you’ll ever have as good a reason to get your ass to Dublin. SAS and Norwegian fly there.

Here’s a selected group of speakers…

Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook (Unit Editions)
Graphic Designers / Publishers
www.uniteditions.com

Alan Clarke
Illustrator
www.mralanclarke.com

Daniel Eatock
Artist
www.eatock.com

David Carson
Graphic Designer
www.davidcarsondesign.com

David O’Reilly
Animator
www.davidoreilly.com

George Lois
Ad Executive/Designer
www.georgelois.com

Lance Wyman
Design Legend
www.lancewyman.com

M&E
Graphic Designers
www.me-me-me.se

Mark Farrow
Graphic Designer
www.farrowdesign.com

Nate Williams
Illustrator
www.n8w.com

Poke London
Advertising Agency
www.pokelondon.com

Scott Dadich (Wired Magazine)
Graphic Designer
www.wired.com

Steven Heller
Art Director
www.hellerbooks.com

Zach Gold
Photographer
www.zachgold.com

Well, intending to post a straightforward shot of the impressive Templehof airport building I turned the corner to find a tree of balloons sprouting out of the top of a signpost. No particular reason for it, but it was beautiful. That was the week - seven shots from an old Polaroid 600. It’s a beautiful way to make a photo - you really have to commit. No editing. No copies. You live with the faults. Hope you enjoyed the week of photos – now back to organising some more SweetTalking.

Polaroid resurrection team The Impossible Project have just started to remake the monochromatic PX600 film. It was launched on Friday 30 April and the sample results they have look fantastic so if you have an old 600 camera do try to get some.

It seemed very appropriate to photograph a Stasi office with the Polaroid, and sure enough you get all the pre-digital gloom and authority of the Stasi’s former HQ in this shot. They have kept one floor almost exactly as it was after the fall of the wall in 1989 - which is almost exactly what it was like in 1960. Another room full of hidden cameras in it is a boys’ paradise – cameras in buttons, watering cans and even logs. You can even sit and have a coffee in the Stasi canteen on the way out, like the cold war never ended.

Certainly not included for any great photographic purpose (I totally missed that there was the huge TV tower at Alexanderplatz just behind them) but it is included because the two greatest people you could hope to meet on a Tuesday in Berlin are Rilla and Steve from Rinzen, who some of you will remember from their SweetTalk Cph presentation some years back. We had a fantastic long, leisurely Mexican lunch with plenty of good natured ranting and I felt like I’d had my brain massaged back into life by the end of it. The enjoyment of Berlin, like many places, is ALL about the people you meet.

A quick apology to all you subscribers who received yesterday’s post in your mail box too. It was not meant to happen and we are updating our subscriber mail system very soon so this won’t happen again and you will easily be able to unsubscribe and so on.

After a long trek to find a laundry café, only to find it had closed down, I sat in the window of a beautiful but washing-machine-free café near where the old one was. After a bit of time I noticed people were coming up to a tree that was outside the window and they seemed to be taking books from it. Sure enough - it’s a ‘lending tree’ of some sort where you pop along, have a look at what books are lying in the carved, weather-proof shelves in the wood, take any you want to read and leave any you wish for others to borrow. In Dublin it would be vandalised, in Copenhagen it would be ignored but here in Berlin it was working well with people stopping every 5 minutes to get involved. I would have waited for someone to be in the picture but it was raining and I had dirty socks to wash.

Finally some heat is in the air. Between a morning coffee and the search for an ice cream I stumbled upon THE KING OF AUTOMOBILES just sitting there in the sun. A Jaguar XJS - but not just that – A WHITE one in PERFECT condition. I had to run away before I stole it, but I stole this picture of it anyhow.

Last year I was lucky enough to meet the great German designer Erik Spiekermann for breakfast in his favourite Saturday morning haunt, near Savignyplatz. He has the same table reserved every Saturday in this fantastic old-style establishment, which has waiters in full white linen aprons, daily newspapers from all over the world and a lot of intelligent-looking Berliners, all at least older than 35 (rare enough here). He explained why the coffee in this fantastic old-style establishment was the best in Berlin and it is. I didn’t get up early enough to catch his ritual this time but I still ventured out there for the first coffee of the day and sat beside his still-reserved table. A wonderful middle-aged German talked to me in excellent English about Polaroid cameras after he saw me take the picture. Then the short walk back to Savignyplatz to visit the best design bookshop in Berlin followed by a 10 minute stroll to the Helmut Newton museum. The perfect start to the weekend.

Right beside Anker-Klause café in Kreutzberg you’ll find a Turkish market every Friday. At the entrance to the market yesterday was a bunch of guys from a mariachi band and this lady was hanging out with them. After my coffee arrived she had disappeared and I have no idea if she was with the band or not. Then the band got all their instruments and went off to play - yet I never heard a single note from them. No idea where they were but all their coats were still at their table. Most unusual.

Well the unusual game of layer tennis that Simon played last Friday saw him post the 9th out of 10 Photoshop volleys. Of course he managed to get the dear Queen’s birthday in there.

All 10 images can be seen on the Layer Tennis homepage here.

Simon is down in Berlin at the moment with nothing but a Polaroid camera and a spare pare of socks and will attempt to post one Polaroid photo a day for the next seven days. News from Berlin is that it’s cold. No snow but no summer dresses either. Looks like global ‘warming’ has failed. Boo.