Alinea

All aboard the rubbish bus!

2012-02-27T06:55:00.002-08:00

Education is never wasted, and education about waste is the focus of the Northampton Council Waste Bus. After several successful years of travelling to junior schools throughout the borough, Northamptonshire Council's Waste Education Team approached Grove Creative to design some new interactive educational activities and interior graphics.

The key themes are minimising household waste through composting and recycling, so we jumped right in and got our hands dirty with a compostables 'feely' box! The existing feely box was tired and limited in it's interactivity, with the pupils putting their hand into a darkened box to identify an item by touch and then decide if it can be composted but having no feedback on whether their guesses were correct. We enhanced the box by adding illustrated keys to firstly identify the objects in the six compartments and then determine whether the object can be composted. Putting all of the keys in the correct holes and in the correct order releases the lid of the box to reveal the contents. And we even made the box out of waferboard made from reconstituted wood flakes, making it considerably lighter than the original, thereby reducing fuel consumption of the bus.

Still on the theme of composting we designed and built the 'Compost Challenge' testing pupils' knowledge on the optimum criteria for successful composting. What makes the ideal composting conditions - damp, dry, warm, cold, lots of air or tightly sealed? Pupils can try out their theories from a series of illustrated pieces which light up when placed on the board. Red or green lights tell you how compost-aware you are!

Pupils now get a good dose of the 3Rs with the new touchscreen kiosk. We brought the bus's frog mascot to life with games built in Adobe Flash. Cross the river of waste by jumping onto plastics which can be recycled, but be careful - not all plastics can be recycled by your local authority! Then decide which objects can be REUSED or RECYCLED to REDUCE landfill in the 3Rs game in which you catch objects that are being thrown into the bin.

We also spruced up the walls of the bus with a series of colourful posters dealing with composting and recycling different materials.

And our thanks to the Northamptonshire Council Waste Education Team for putting our logo nice and prominently on the outside of the bus!

When it's good to be two faced

2012-02-24T02:18:00.001-08:00

When the team at Edge Hill University Students' Union asked us to create a new identity for them the dual nature of their role soon became clear to us. As representatives of the student body they must communicate and engage with their students, but they also have to be the mouthpiece to the university staff and other stakeholders. We summed up this dual facing role in the new logo by creating two face profiles from the EH of EHSU, making a playful motif to be exploited in a wide variety of visual uses.

The logo is also available in portrait and mono format and can be used as a container for imagery relating to different SU activities.

She bangs the drums

2011-09-06T01:37:00.000-07:00

Can't beat a bit of Stone Roses :) However if you're a she or a he and fancy a go at drum and dance African style, and you're in the North West on September 24th, why not come along to Middlewich Community Church for an African drum and dance workshop!

We knocked up this poster in support of the event for Kasupe, which is a charity involved in helping children in Malawi. See kasupe.org.uk for more information.

Hi

2011-07-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

Excuse us... a few roadies checking everything works before the show...