I was lucky enough a couple of weeks back to visit the Plus design festival here in Birmingham.

Not the most expansive design event, it still managed to bring together an exciting mix of eye candy. Housing a short collection work from students to industry, this concrete carbuncle turned out to be quite deceptive.

It was a small yet interesting mix of interactive and reactive media, hand crafted typography, photography and computer generated imagery. All of which managed to bring a big smile to my face.

The highlight has to be talking to a lady called Linda who at the time was demonstrating calligraphy. Not only were my eyes tantalised by the beautiful lettering, but also my ears were tingling. She informed me of a Museum in the Jewellery Quarter called the Pen Room that teaches calligraphy classes.

I also spoke to a group of students calling themselves “smile” who blew me away with a simple idea I wish I’d took the initiative to start whilst I was at University. These few elite gems started a design group whilst studying and now have an impressive back catalogue of work.

Finally my eyes were attracted to the arresting visuals on light boxes from clusta, which reminds me very much of images in a book recently published called Lemon Poppy Seed published by Die Gestalten Verlag.

Weird mixed visuals appear to be becoming a trend. The new James Bond film has a a very slick introduction and example of this, check out the design group who made it – MK12 at http://www.mk12.com/ to see some pretty interesting work!