Great art­icle in the Sunday Tele­graph a few weeks back that said we should be very excited, because this sea­son is all about the tra­di­tional, mixed with flea-market finds.

And we love flea-market finds. Which is why at Coulson Macleod we try to recre­ate this with many of our art collections.

Hand­made. Hand painted. Reclaimed wood. Dis­tressed typography.

The key theme for the autumn/winter 2010 interior is “heir­loom”. The art­icle says we’re crav­ing time­less pieces that will look just as good a dec­ade or two down the line, and retail­ers are grant­ing our wish with hand­made accessor­ies using tra­di­tional fabrics.

Which is exactly what we at Coulson Macleod are doing.

We com­mis­sion local crafts­men to hand­make our dis­tressed typo­graphic prints. We com­bine their tra­di­tional skills with our con­tem­por­ary art. So again, we’re bang on trend!

One of the com­pan­ies high­lighted in the piece is Anta, who we fea­tured back in August. Anta has been a per­sonal love of mine for many years. In fact, here is my col­lec­tion of their slightly wonky, hand­painted, stone­ware mugs…

Related art­icles:

• Failte. That’s Wel­come To You And Me.
• Two Two’s Are?
• Freeze, Freeze Thou Bit­ter Sky

Fol­low­ing on from yesterday’s post about fonts, I was read­ing the Novem­ber issue of music magazine The Word

and lo and behold there’s an art­icle on clas­sic rock typo­graphy. The art­icle, which I’ve shown below also says about Hel­vetica, “The face that took over the world you just sort of breathe it in. It’s all over the New York sub­way — Amer­ican Apparel, BMW, Saab, Amer­ican Air­lines — the swift, clean, post­war mod­ern typeface. So it’s per­fect for an obvi­ous, com­mer­cially ambi­tious act like Oasis. Inter­est­ingly they dropped it for two albums — which bombed — but brought it back for their Greatest Hits.”

And Futura, “The 1920s Ger­man typeface used on the Volk­swa­gen ads. Influ­enced by Bauhaus, lots of artistic and intel­lec­tual bag­gage — per­fect for the intel­li­gent col­lege band Vam­pire Week­end claim to be. It was used on the moon plaque almost cer­tainly because of its name — it is futur­istic, very clear, the poin­ted Vs, the sharp angles, the sci-fi connection.”

Related art­icles: Coulson Macleod Loves Fonts Too

Great art­icle in this Sunday’s Telegraph…

Nigel says, “You may not know it, but you care about fonts…” He hadn’t quite real­ised how much he cared about fonts until he read ‘Just My Type’ a book by Simon Garfield.

Ikea’s old font

“New York is wall-to-wall Hel­vetica.” A “cool and con­fid­ent, neut­ral and hon­est” font

Nigel goes on to say, “Once you get into the won­der­ful world of fonts it soon becomes an unhealthy obses­sion. Once the typo­graphic addic­tion takes hold, it becomes impossible to walk past a shop­front or read an advert­ise­ment without try­ing to identify the font.”

Accord­ing to Alice Raws­thorn, design critic of the Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tribune and a former dir­ector of the Design Museum, there’s a far greater interest in fonts now than ever before.

Yay!

Related art­icles:

• Two Two’s Are?
• Coulson Macleod Cre­ates Far More Than Words
• Coulson Macleod Is All Loved Up

We want to give you £150. Yes. That’s right. A whole whop­ping £150 to spend on Coulson Macleod typo­graphic art from our website.

We can hear you all shout­ing “Ooh me please!”

So this is how you can enter our fun little com­pet­i­tion in the run-up to Christmas.

First of all you need to be a Coulson Macleod customer.

Then simply take a photo of your typo­graphic print hanging in your home. Aren’t we nosy?

We’ll post your pho­tos on our Face­book page, on this blog, and then when we have enough we’ll put all your pho­tos on a ded­ic­ated page on our web­site.

To get you star­ted here are some pho­tos of Penny McCormick’s apart­ment in Dubai. Penny is the editor of Emir­ates Home and her apart­ment also appeared in the 2010 issue of ‘Hot 100 Homes’ magazine (also based in the United Arab Emirates).

Now we don’t expect you to have a magazine worthy pad like Penny’s. We just want to see what our typo­graphic art looks like hanging in your home.

We’ll announce the win­ner on 10^th Decem­ber. Just in time for you to pick some­thing out for Christ­mas. Ding dong mer­rily on high!

Hope this gets you into the fest­ive spirit.

Related art­icles:

• Coulson Macleod is Hot in the Arab Emirates
• Coulson Macleod in Coun­try & Town House
• Coulson Macleod in Easy Living

Yes, that’s right. Four. An unlucky num­ber if you’re Chinese. But not if you love Coulson Macleod’s typo­graphic art. Launched 1^st Septem­ber, our four new collections…

‘Wilde Grey’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art on reclaimed wood.

‘Wilde Blue’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art on reclaimed wood.

‘Wilde Red’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art on reclaimed wood.

‘Nap­kin Not Ser­vi­ette’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art.

‘Lunch Not Din­ner’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art.

‘Pud­ding Not Dessert’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art.

‘Hel­vetica’. Coulson Macleod’s typo­graphic art on Vic­torian roof timbers.

‘Futura’. Coulson Macleod’s typo­graphic art on Vic­torian roof timbers.

‘Times’. Coulson Macleod’s typo­graphic art on Vic­torian roof timbers.

‘John Len­non’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made solid oak framed art.

‘Bob Dylan’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made solid oak framed art.

‘Keith Richards’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made solid oak framed art.

Today is a good day. Why? I hear you cry.

Well folks, we have beaten our sales record. We have sold more prints in August than in any other month in the entire his­tory of Coulson Macleod. And we’ve been up and run­ning for almost eight­een months.

We have a white­board on our office wall. Every time we make a sale we wipe off the old num­ber and write up the new one. I say we, but actu­ally I usu­ally do this, partly because my hand­writ­ing is neater, but mainly because it gives me a huge amount of pleas­ure. Every month we write down how many we’ve sold, whether they’ve been sold via Not On The High Street or through shops or if they’re bespoke and how many came via one of our adverts in Elle Dec­or­a­tion or Livin­getc.

We love our white­board. We quite often catch each other star­ing at it fondly. Because every month the fig­ures go up. And that is super exciting.

And this month, only half way through August I might point out, we’ve notched up the biggest num­ber since our records began. To let you into a secret, we only star­ted record­ing this on the board since Novem­ber, which was when we star­ted selling in ser­i­ous num­bers and the idea of a white­board sprang into our heads.

So ladies and gen­tle­men, tonight we may clink our glasses and say a little toast to our little boom­ing busi­ness that we love so much.

A bit of a strange post today. It’s all about packaging.

Coulson Macleod HQ has been try­ing to buy shred­ded newspaper.

Why?

Well firstly by its very nature it’s recycled. Which is good. And it’s in keep­ing with what we do. Typo­graphic pack­aging. Perfect.

But can I find a com­pany that does it? No.

We recently ordered some plants from a nurs­ery in Corn­wall. Inside the box was shred­ded news­pa­per. And we thought how much bet­ter that would be than using bubble wrap to keep our art safe on its journey.

So I Googled. And Googled. But could not find any­one that sells it. I con­tac­ted our local coun­cil. They didn’t provide a solu­tion. So I con­tac­ted the nurs­ery and they buy it as animal bed­ding. But the com­pany they buy from only sup­plies Corn­wall. Then I found a com­pany in Scot­land. But their min­imum order was 20 x 20kg bales. Yikes! We’re not farm­ers and we don’t have a spare barn.

So if any­one read­ing this knows of a com­pany, prefer­ably within the Mid­lands, that sells clean shred­ded news­pa­per, please let us know.

Yes I know it’s a Bill Wither’s song, but there really is just the two of us. And we can make it if we try (I’ll ignore the castles in the sky bit).

Coulson Macleod is a teeny weeny company.

There’s Mark, he’s the Coulson half. And there’s me, Han­nah, the Macleod half.

The busi­ness is built on love and driven by pas­sion. This is true. This is not some made-up mar­ket­ing spiel.

Mark and I met, fell in love, moved in together and then got bored of star­ing at blank walls. We knew what we liked. But couldn’t find it to buy. Or if we did, we couldn’t afford it.

Then we said, “I bet there are other people out there just like us,” (or words to that effect).

Coulson Macleod is our baby. We love it and nur­ture it. We wake in the night to think about it. We proudly tell oth­ers about it. We glow with pride when it does well. It is ours. And we’re on a won­der­ful journey.

Per­haps Mark and I are build­ing big castles way on high. Just the two of us. You and I.

Lim­ited edi­tion vintage-style art print by Coulson Macleod

Our latest typo­graphic col­lec­tion ‘Words’ is now avail­able to buy online at Coulson Macleod.

Coulson Macleod’s oak-framed typo­graphic art. £125

Coulson Macleod’s oak-framed typo­graphic art. £125

Coulson Macleod’s oak-framed typo­graphic art. £125

Our ‘Words’ col­lec­tion is made in the exactly same way as our hugely pop­u­lar ‘Love’ col­lec­tion. Gor­geous chunky hand­made prints. But only half the size, just 29cm x 29cm x 8cm.

We’ve kept the lovely vintage-style, with a rough-sawn solid oak frame sur­round­ing a white-washed oak panel prin­ted with dis­tressed typo­graphy. All hand­made with love in the UK.

Our ‘Words’ col­lec­tion is unlim­ited in print quantity.

For any­one inter­ested in know­ing just what goes into a Coulson Macleod wooden art piece… the oak panel is cut and sanded by hand before being covered with a coat of diluted white lac­quer wash to fill the grain, and then sanded and re-washed with the lac­quer a second time. The panel is then over-printed with UV ink. The mitred frame is hand­made using rough-sawn solid oak with a shadow rebate on the groove. We pur­pose­fully retain any defects in the oak to add to the charm and char­ac­ter of the piece. These can include knot holes, warps and water marks, so each frame is totally unique. The prin­ted panel is then encased into the frame which is then glued and pinned, ready for hanging.

Inspired by a cus­tomer who wanted a ‘Love’ print, but just half the size. And we loved it so much, we just had to cre­ate some more. Let us know if you like them!

Our latest typo­graphic art col­lec­tion ‘Land­marks’ can be per­son­al­ized. And we think this would make a totally superb wed­ding present.

All you need to do is give us a list of words (we use roughly 70 words to make up the ones in our ‘Land­marks’ col­lec­tion pic­tured below).

You could cre­ate one that was based on their hon­ey­moon des­tin­a­tion. Or cre­ate one that focuses on places in their lives together, such as where the couple met, the pub they hang out in — you get the idea.

And we at Coulson Macleod HQ do the rest. We’ll find an image that suits the art­work. The res­ult is a one-off piece of bespoke art­work. A totally per­sonal gift. And you’d be loved by the couple forever!

Per­son­al­ized typo­graphic art­work (£149) based on the above ‘Land­marks’ print (£99)

Per­son­al­ized typo­graphic art­work (£149) based on the above ‘Land­marks’ print (£99)

Per­son­al­ized typo­graphic art­work (£149) based on the above ‘Land­marks’ print (£99)

Your per­son­al­ized art­work based on our ‘Land­marks’ col­lec­tion fea­tures a hand­made frame and pan­elled back­board made from reclaimed antique Vic­torian roof tim­bers. The planks used to make the back­board vary in size for each print and we retain all those lovely defects in the wood to add to the charm and char­ac­ter of the piece. These can include knot holes, nail holes, warps and water marks, so each art­work is totally unique.

The fin­ished item is then over-printed with dis­tressed image and typo­graphy in UV ink.