While I’m on the subject of cakes, I came across this Threadless Cake baking competition (now ended). Basically you had to re-create a Threadless t-shirt as a cake, my favourite was this You Are The Best cake by Leslie Evans. Look at the all the bloody detail on that lettering?! Everyone seems to be using ‘fondant’ though? Not nearly as tastey as marzipan, yum yum, looks like it might be a bit more sturdy to work with though.

Just back from our wedding tour of the north, here’s some pictures of the Eleanor & Andy’s wedding cake that me & Nicky made!

What inspired me to ask Eleanor if I could make her cake was the Eugene & Louise bakery art show. I blogged about it a while ago and have been itching for a good excuse to have a go since. Working the Marzipan was a bit harder than I had expected, not quite the same as plasticine.. Definitely didn’t reach E&L’s standards, but I think El was pretty happy with it none the less :)

The best bit was making all the marzipan men for the top. So much fun in fact that ended up with so many that they couldn’t all fit on the cake. We had extra marzipan for all the kids to make their own, took them about 10 minutes to realise it wasn’t plasticine and start eating it!

I think me & Nicky had the most brightly coloured wedding attire at the wedding! Although with everyone else on our row we almost had the whole spectrum.

Had to post a pic of this amazing old bus ticket machine, I was bus conductor on the way to the church and had to stamp the specially made tickets with it.

I’m afraid we were too pissed to take any pics of the cake actually being eaten.. but I’ve got a vague recollection that it tasted extremely good.

For those interested, more wedding pics and cake making pics on my Flickr.

Pleasantly surprised to see my mate Rob’s face on the front page of iPlayer last night! He’s in the first episode of Dragons’ Den: On Tour (skip halfway through for his bit).

There’s a sneak peek of his new hard cased rucksack which doubles as a child’s booster seat - BoostApak. Apparently there’s a law now that anyone under 12 or less than 135cm in height has to use a booster seat (news to me?), so I’m sure he’ll sell a shit load as it’s dual purpose makes it a hell of a lot more useful :) You’ll have to wait until Spring 2010 to get hold of one though :(

Also if you’ve got a little kiddie, check out his new limited edition Gruffalo Trunki, almost as good as mine & Nicky’s mammoth effort.

Just found these great daily illustrated facts on Cargo. This one seemed appropriate, not because I’ve just been robbed, but it is Tuesday.. By the Manchester based design studio - Young.

No blog updates for a few days, going up to the lakes for a wedding. But after that me & Nicky plan to climb Scarfell Pike, Snowdon and Ben Nevis (in that order) before another wedding in Scotland the following weekend. So we’ll probably post a few pics of our progress to keep you going. If you’re not aware, those are the highest mountains in England, Wales and Scotland. The thing to do is try and climb them all in 24 hours, but we’re not doing that…

Above is the making of my first ever wedding cake, may well be my first ever cake for that matter… The cake was pretty easy, but the marzipan is proving to be more difficult than I had imagined to work with. I’ll not spoil the surprise by showing the finished cake, will post it after the wedding.

Wow, the work of Bulgarian Graphic artist Stefan Kanchev is blowing my mind. Fantastic line, form and colour combinations to die for.

He style inspired by Bulgarian folklore and traditions, reminds me a lot of the more recent Finnish folklore inspired work by Sanna Annukka.

I think I like his stamp designs best out of his vast body of work. It seems I’ve blogged about them before, but never knew the original designer. It’s funny I’ve drawn some trees recently almost exactly the same is these here, weird..

Crap load of great logo designs too.

“Stefan Kanchev was not just talented but also exceptionally industrious artist. All of his works to the last letter were drawn by hand. His passion was so great that often he worked night and day without stopping. The artist’s wife remembered that he was working at his drawing table till the last moment when he was taken to the hospital. Stefan Kanchev died in 2001 at the age of 85.”

Via: grain edit.

God knows how long photographer Chris McVeigh (powerpig) had to wait for these chipmunks to get in position to take these shots.. Worth the wait though, they’re amazing! All shots from the series here »

This one of Chewy handing over the nut cracks me up:

Make sure you check out the rest of his work, consistently awesome.

Via: Erica.

I‘ve seen a shit load of clock variations over the years, been this digital clock display made out of rotating analogue clocks wins hands down. Right I’m off to build one!

Via: Boredom is your fault.

I actually think the packaging design is brilliant, but the name - Anti Baby Condom is perhaps a little too literal ;)

Via: seiz whaa?

Ha ha, Nicky just showed me this three frames site, simple idea really well done, recommend having a look through.

I‘ve a couple of weddings coming up on the next 2 weekends and I just realised that my suit looked a bit stupid on me after losing a few stone walking the CDT… Not to worry, I’m mates Simon & Tig (Social Suicide) make, in my opinion the most interesting suits around. Each one generally tries to do something that has never been done before and chock full of random features and functions that you wouldn’t usually expect from a suit such as their specially designed ‘Razzle’ pocket ;)

Ideally I would of like an orange suit, but I was quite taken by this bright yellow one. One of the wedding’s is my mate El, who I do all the branding for. I think it’ll be quite funny that I’ll be on brand at the wedding!

I got a bit carried away with poses this morning when I got Nicky to take the picture, rest on my Flickr, I really like the jumping shot, but too gay to actually post here.

Also you ladies, they’ve started a women’s line of suits (by Christy), not on the website, but I saw some down in their store.

Just been sent the Flickr portfolio of Theory One by a mate who thought I might like it, damn right! He’s got quite a few different styles going on, my favorite is this one above.

Up until today I wished I made a more unique name than Simon Cook, there’s shit loads of them out there! I could never get near the top of the google rankings, although I’m now slowly making my way up there, currently 5th :)

But I’ve seen 2 things today that made me happy that I’ve got loads of other namesakes. First up is this Personas site by Aaron Zinman from MIT it searches the internets for you and your namesakes and creates a visual aggregation of their online identities. I think the final result is a bit of a let down (I’m sure Jonathan Harris could do some much more interesting with the data). But watching the other Simon Cook’s and things they are up to flashing across the screen was quite fascinating.

Then I randomly went to see what Craig Robinson (Flip Flop Flyin’) was up to. He’s snapped up CraigRobinson.com when it became available, and rather than use it himself, he’s made a site linking up all the Craig Robinsons out there!

I love the idea, I think there should be a law that ‘name URLs’ should link up everyone that shares the name. I would definitely do the same if SimonCook.com ever became available.

Apparently Neil uses old expired Polaroid film to create this vintage look, but it’s not just the colour palette, loving the angles and composition. These 2 shots are taken from his PULP ART BOOK project in collaboration with the rather tastey supermodel Joni Harbeck.

This was the first thing I saw after just watching Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (The Mole), I’d love to see this guy do a remake of it.

Via: ISO50.

Can’t get enough of the cheap inky printing on these Indian matches boxes, pilllpat (agence eureka) has amassed a pretty comprehensive collection of them.