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

Once again Coulson Macleod’s typo­graphic art has been chosen by interi­ors style bible Elle Dec­or­a­tion to fea­ture in their fab­ulous magazine.

ELLE Dec­or­a­tion, Novem­ber 2010 issue.

ELLE Dec­or­a­tion, Novem­ber 2010 issue.

Elle Dec­or­a­tion chose ‘The Roar of Tree and Crack of Branches’ typo­graphic print from our Winter Trees collection.

We hand make the frame and pan­elled back­board from reclaimed wood. Actu­ally the wood used to be Vic­torian roof tim­bers. How cool is that? We paint the wood and print on top with dis­tressed image and typography.

Each art­work is totally unique. And totally unique to Coulson Macleod.

Related art­icles: Coulson Macleod is in Elle Decoration

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

Coulson Macleod and our typo­graphic art was invited to be part of the very cool online lux­ury lifestlye magazine Hot Brands, Cool Places.

Hot Brands, Cool Places is a col­lec­tion of, as the name sug­gests, the hot­test brands and coolest places and a very cool life­style magazine. Bit like a styl­ish Sunday sup­ple­ment, but one that you can look at and read daily. As well as show­cas­ing estab­lished brands, Hot Brands, Cool Places has become a launch pad for new brands and their cre­at­ors. That’s us! They also take care not to over­fill the Dir­ect­ory. They have grown organ­ic­ally (again just like us) select­ing com­pan­ies that they think are dif­fer­ent and interesting.

Boutique & lux­ury hotel spe­cial­ists Mr & Mrs Smith ran a great inter­view about Hot Brands Cool Places. They said, “ As people with impec­cable taste (for hotels espe­cially, but not exclus­ively), we at Smith are often on the lookout for fel­low style insiders to impart their top tips. Over at Hot Brands, Cool Places, Kaye Thorne is doing just that – hand-picking brands and places she loves then spread­ing the word…”

Other mega names on the site include Van Cleef & Arpels, Fort­num & Mason, J H Trousseau, Biondi, Blakes, Heal’s, Lola Rose, Lin­ley, Astley Clarke, Luigi’s, Sum­mer­ill & Bishop, my ward­robe & The Wolse­ley. And some names that you may not have heard of include Melin Treg­wynt (Welsh design), & Charlie Whin­ney (art of steam-bending wood).

If it’s good enough for them, then it’s good enough for us.

Hot Brands, Cool Places say, “Hot brands become objects of desire; we are pas­sion­ate in our search for them and once found we often build long-term rela­tion­ships with them. It may be because of their iconic design, or the emo­tional attach­ment that we form with them. We are pas­sion­ate in our loy­alty to them, we feel lost without them. They become an essen­tial part of who we are; they are some­thing we love to own.”

So here’s to Coulson Macleod typo­graphic art being objects of desire.

Related art­icles:

• Coulson Macleod on SheerLuxe
• Coulson Macleod Joins mydeco boutique

No. We haven’t won. But we have entered.

The short­l­ist will be announced the first week of Octo­ber. The win­ning web­site will be announced by Doug Richard, former BBC Dragon at a recep­tion held in Lon­don on 16^th November.

If you think we deserve to win Web­site of the Year, please click on the logo above and tell the organ­isers why before 30^th September.

Thank you.

Related art­icles:

• Mumpren­eur Awards 2010
• Mum In Line For National Award
• A Little Bit of PR
• Mums In Business

Thank you Trondheim. Yes, we have another Nor­we­gian stock­ist. Let me intro­duce you to…

the latest shop to stock Coulson Macleod typo­graphic art.

Trond­heim is right at the top of Nor­way. So we pretty much have the whole of Nor­way covered with our five stockists.

The shop is due to open on 15^th Octo­ber and we’ll tell you more about it then. But this is the out­side, pre-makeover…

Chez Nous will also be stock­ing the most delight­ful sta­tion­ery from fel­low Nor­we­gian com­pany Darling Clem­entine

And cush­ions and wall­pa­per from Dan­ish com­pany Ferm Liv­ing…

This is the second shop in Trond­heim for the own­ers of Chez Nous. Their first is Cor­ne­lias Hus. As ever, stocked with the most gor­geous products.

Related art­icles:

• Coulson Macleod’s 4^th Nor­we­gian Stockist
• Ja, Vi Elsker Dette Landet
• Coulson Macleod Sell to New Shop

Age before beauty is acutally the title of a great art­icle writ­ten by Susie Steiner, Editor of Space, the interi­ors sec­tion of Saturday’s Guard­ian Week­end magazine.

The open­ing para­graph reads, “Shiny and smooth is out. Gnarled and chipped is in. Get with the dis­tressed vibe…”

Well, obvi­ously I was excited at read­ing that. Just how ‘on trend’ are we at Coulson Macleod!

Other sni­pets from the art­icle, which was actu­ally about  dis­tress­ing your own fur­niture, include…

“Our hun­ger for the dis­tressed look…”

Interior of Linnea’s Hage show­ing our ‘Winter Tree’ prints

“…the dis­tressed interior makes a lot of sense: it’s easy to live with (no amount of hard liv­ing can dent its charms), it doesn’t jar against period archi­tec­ture, it can be fem­in­ine or util­it­arian, and, well, it’s cool”.  Yes, we’ll second that.

And as Susie Steiner says, “All hail the dis­tressed interior”. Quite frankly who are we to argue?

I don’t often get to air my views as Macleod is always hog­ging the blog, but every now and again I man­age to pry myself away from, you know, work and stuff, to tell all you lovely people about what we’ve actu­ally been doing. So here I am to show­case some of the bespoke typo­graphic art pieces we’ve pro­duced recently.

If you’ve had a look at the bespoke typo­graphic art­work page on our web­site you will see that we can pro­duce unique prints based on most of our art col­lec­tions, but that’s just the tip of the ice­berg. We’re design­ers, and we can pretty much pro­duce any­thing you want, whether that’s a spe­cific shape or size, or art­work in a dif­fer­ent style entirely.

Here’s a good example. This cus­tomer wanted the art­work to fit a spe­cific spot in his hall­way so it had to meas­ure 120cm x 60cm, and to match the col­ours in his striped car­pet… not a problem.

Coulson Macleod bespoke typo­graphic art on reclaimed wood

Hand­made and hand painted bespoke typo­graphic art.

The cus­tomer had this to say…

“Septem­ber: checked the cal­en­dar and OMG it’s our wed­ding anniversary com­ing up fast, what can I get Emm? Had been look­ing at the Coulson Macleod web­site a few weeks earlier and it all fell into place. After a phone call and an email things moved fast. I had an idea of what I wanted. Bespoke typo­graphy. The first verse from our song. Coulson Macleod had a draft over in a few days. Reclaimed wooden frame made the fol­low­ing week. Delivered the week after. Thank you Coulson Macleod. It looks fant­astic. And I’m the best hubby on the block (for now!)”

Here are a few more recent pieces just to give you an idea of the kinds of things we can do.*

*Please note: It is the cus­tom­ers respons­ib­il­ity to ensure copy­right approval has been obtained where applicable.

Related art­icles:

• Coulson Macleod Cre­ates Bespoke Word Art
• Coulson Macleod Is The Per­fect Wed­ding Gift
• Coulson Macleod Gets Personal