What could we have as our Facebook, Google+ & Twitter cover images? How could we possibly come up with something as good as any of the work produced by the brilliantly talented community of creatives we have at Central Station? Hang on a minute…

We’re giving you the opportunity to be Central Station’s ambassador, with the unmissable top spot on all of our social pages. Every month we’ll change the image and choose from a previously featured work to find the next “face” of Central Station. All images will be credited to the artist and there’ll be a link to the original featured work spot on our website.

To be considered, just follow us on Behance, Cargo Collective, Flickr and/or Vimeo. We’ll follow you back so that when we choose featured work we can browse your portfolio. It also means that we’ll get updates whenever you upload new work.

Email us if you have any concerns or aren’t sure how to join us.

Previous social cover images:
1. Cities by Atelier Olschinsky [winner of the Central Station 50x50 project]
2. Leg Bound by Sam Spreckley
3. Postcards For Fernando by Alan Wilson
4. COOKIES n BOOBIES by Conzo Throb
5. Optical Nerve by Natalie Kenna
6. Untitled by Lesley Ann Ercolano
7. Bend, Oregon by Sam Brewster
8. Mon Oncle by Andrew Lyons
9. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by Lesley Barnes
10. Christian by Martin D Barker
11. Transition Collective #002 by Luna Jungeun Lee
12. Negative Experiment by Abdul Hye
13. Norway Infographic by Connor Campbell
14. Untitled by Jim Cowan
15. North by Stephen Edwards
16. Thorn by Ben Risk
17. Table Top Goniometer by Jack Sawbridge
18. Never Seen Burnham by Richard Broomhall
19. Morning in the city by Mika Kuusela
20. Behold! The earth giant has risen by Matthew Carey Simos
21. Theatres on the Bay, Singapore by Stuart D. Maitland
22. Roam & Seek t-shirts by Caroline Tomlinson
23. Venice Double, 2013 by Jonny Lyons
24. Illustration by Cosmic Nuggets
25. Paper Sculpture by Sara Cunha
26. Concealment film still by Josh Murfitt
27. Ghost Web by Ben Bainbridge
28. The Flight by Gemma Cotterell
29. She wears a lion on her heart by Karine Fortier
30. Incredible Places by Matteo Romellini
31. Tristag by Peter Carrington
32. K A L E I D O S C O P E by Sylvie McGowan
33. Sarah by Christopher Fernandez
34. Untitled by Samantha Wilson
35. The Saddle by Richard Gaston
36. Untitled by Joe Crogan
37. Dowel Repeat by Kirsty Macleod
38. Composition K12 by Jen Devonshire
39. Portrait by Amy D’Agorne Craghill
40. Photograph by David Dear
41. Paper Collage Illustration by Isen Aliji
42. Androgyny by Samuel Jones

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See more opportunities here.

What’s in the blog:
Dust is the photographic collection of artist and writer Mark Brereton.

Why we like it:
Brereton’s stylish photographs include a touch of humour. He seems to be blurring the boundaries between advertising photography and art. In his ongoing project AdArt, Brereton hijacks adverts and gives them new meaning. Have a look at this one from FontShop.com:

AdArt: Shark Infested Custard by Mark Brereton

Hidden treasure:
Discover the Burger that never ages here.

Where to find out more:
Visit the Dust blog.
Follow Dust on Twitter here & Facebook here.
Dust prints are on sale at Saatchi Online here.

Featured image by Mark Brereton

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Want to take a look at more suggested blogs by artists? Look here.

Think of the huge array of things we own but do not need…

things i don’t need is an illustration project documenting these useless objects and it is also a crowdsourced art project. It began as a zine after clutter, such as dead fairy lights, keys and used corks, was found at the back of drawers.

You can also contribute your own drawings of things you don’t need via their Twitter, Facebook or the Flickr page. Your contributions will be amalgamated into an animation which will be posted on their website.

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

1.  CHCH 220212 Type Branding Poster Project
Behance
Peter Godkin

Both a call for collaboration & a creative response to a natural disaster, the aim of this project is to bring the World’s attention to the continuing problems of the People of Christchurch. The intention is to show support not only to the general public, but to fellow creatives in Christchurch as well. See updates on the project here.

2. Papergirl Zagreb
Twitter – @PapergirlZagreb
Ivana Rezek

If you aren’t familiar with Papergirl, it is a project that seeks to bring art to the community in a new, exciting and participatory way; directly and freely by bicycle. It happens in cities all over the work. Papergirl Zabreb are currently looking for your art to spread around the streets of Croatia’s capital.

3. Sketch a Day
Facebook
Artist

Hoping to inspire a year of drawing, the artist is on a mission to create a sketch a day throughout 2012 and is encouraging input from the public.

4. Smile Project
Behance
Marek Wysoczynski

Originated in Poland, this project is calling for your smiles. The idea is that people from all over the world submit their “autograph” in the form of an image of their smile, the smiles will then be exhibited in Children’s hospitals globally.

5. 28 Drawings Later: February Drawing Challenge
Facebook
Victoria Evans

This is a drawing challenge and social networking project created by Visual Artist Victoria Evans. The result iss an evolving, month-long, participatory online gallery which encourages everyone, artists and non-artists alike, to see what might happen if they made time to draw every day for a month.

Do you have a project that needs creative input? Let us know in the comments below.

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See more Top 5′s selected from the network here.

Recently on Twitter…

#Debate – no pay/low pay
One of our posts caused a bit of a stir a week or so ago, and we thought it deserved a proper forum.

The tweet was about a job which had come through from our membership, looking to fill a design internship post. The position was low pay and this started a number of conversations, the first one being that Central Station shouldn’t have been promoting it.

It’s a difficult one for us to enter into because on one hand we don’t condone anyone being exploited, whether you are in the creative industry or not, but on the other we understand that people only see your work if you are out there making it & getting contacts. We’ve had people let us know that they have been picked up for exhibition or gotten work from participating in an opportunity they found on the site which is exactly what we’re here for, so deciding what makes the cut and what doesn’t can get messy. Our policy is that as long as there are creative projects or jobs going, everyone should know about them and make up their minds if it’s something they want to participate in.

For us, it’s not only the people looking for opportunities that need a place to find them, we also want to give people who have a project or job somewhere to post it for free where they will attract the right person, hence, almost all requests for a post make it to the notice board. In extreme cases (i.e. one where we can’t actually identify the benefit of going for the opportunity) we won’t put it up, but these have been very few in the past. As far as we’re concerned, we’re all grown ups and we all know our own personal & professional limitations.

The conversation grew legs among the tweeters and it became more about minimum wage..

We don’t think there is anyone who is going to disagree that everyone should be getting paid for the work that they do for a company or organisation, but it raises so many other questions. Can small organisations afford to offer paid internships? Would talented but inexperienced people loose the opportunity to gain experience and meet professionals if they couldn’t be offered?

We’d love to hear more thoughts on this – please feel free to comment below. Also, for a bit of extra reading, the topic of unpaid work was brought up by @gailtolley a little while ago in this blog.

Thanks to @i_am_duncan @willagebbie & @welcometohr for their insights and debate.

#Question – Gallery space in Glasgow

@wilfreeborn would like to know about any spaces to exhibit in Glasgow. It would be much appreciated if any of our members involved in exhibition spaces, or members with suggestions could get in touch.

Recently on Facebook…

Just in case you missed them, here are a couple of posts from members on our wall that you might want to know about:

And Finally…
Here are a couple of new twitter followers this week that you might be interested in following yourself:

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This is a place where you can catch up on what’s been happening on the Censta community, find out who is new and participate in the conversation. We’ll try to feed in some past questions and conversations  from time to time too (we’re experimenting here though folks so please don’t go getting upset if not all the questions and discussions are mentioned).

We had just short of a hundred entries by the deadline on Sunday night, so by the time the four judges met, I’d already had a sneaky peek myself, in order to better introduce the projects to the other judges. And also because I could. What first struck me was the breadth of the entries – in subject matter, level of enquiry, and quality of execution. We had everything from first attempts at textile design to uber-slick perfection, taking inspiration from the mundane to the downright disturbing. Clearly, we needed coffee.

The panel was made up of Susie Wright (Channel 4), Alan Pert of Nord Architecture, Damien Smith of ISO and Paul Kerlaff (With Kerlaff). Once freshly recaffienated we did the first sort, which roughly translated into ‘maybe shortlist’ and ‘maybe not’. With the number of entries, this was the longest part of the process, and it stirred up some fascinating issues, some of which I never expected.

In some ways, the first thing that mattered was the first impression. We took care to read supporting comments or supplementary material, and in some cases this swayed us, but if the entry didn’t move the judges on a fundamental level from the word go then it wasn’t likely to be a winner.

I was worried to begin with that this ‘skin deep’ reading would be a lazy one, but it is perhaps the only way of really judging the patterns as a newcomer would; say, when a client walks into a restaurant with one of the screens. You only have that reaction once, and thereafter you know to some degree what to expect. This raises a question of longevity – over what timescale are these patterns for? Should we be looking for patterns that ‘grow’ on the observer, or those which give everything straight away?

Similarly, the judges discussed at length the relationship of effort to reward. With at least half of the judges being active educators, we were well versed in the language of marking, but this was not an academic exercise. Should the beauty of the image be rewarded, even if the entrant had done little to answer the brief?  And if the image needed extensive editing to become a successful Shadow Screen, should this be detrimental to the chances of that entry?

There are two schools of thought on this – one that says that the process of refinement would knock the rough edges off any design that required it – and the other that asks for the brief to be answered, with a corresponding dismissal of those who don’t step up to the mark. Personally, I am hoping that the result of the Shadow Screen opportunity is one or more working relationships, and all relationships require input from both parties, so I like to see a bit of graft. Damien was more of the thinking that the quality of the image was what mattered, with any variation from the brief a secondary issue.

In the process of whittling down the entries to the final ten – which happened unanimously – what struck me was that although the brief asked for certain things, we got entries which offered less in some areas, and much more than hoped for in others. The shortlist therefore reflected not so much the top ten in an objective sense, but more a spectrum of what was offered to us. Each of the shortlisted entries is arguably the best on it’s own terms – we could easily pick out the most striking, the conceptually strongest, the most commercial, the one we could live with every day. But these were different patterns.

This diversity reflects the potentially diverse role of the design. What is it there for? To attract coverage? To make a stunning image? To complement a palette of materials for an interior? Should a Shadow Screen hog the limelight in a handful of interiors, or improve hundreds in a subtle way? How does intellectual stimulation fare when pitted against pure visual beauty?

I’d love to have these questions answered, but I suspect that will only happen over time, through the input of many people. If you would like to comment, please reply below, or comment on the Censta Facebook page here:

http://on.fb.me/SSshortlist

Introducing a social media strategy is an easy win for arts marketeers. Do away with print – save time, hassle and the environment, with the added bonus of being the revolutionary who drags everyone into the 21st Century.

In theory, it sounds great. As black and white as a halftone dot. Except this whole trade-off between design and print, and social media, is a bit of a misnomer. But let’s compare them for a moment:

Print has been around for a long, long time. For the sake of argument lets pick out a landmark year – 1450 – when Gutenburg started getting his fingers inky doing some nice brochures for the Lord. That’s 560 years. Twitter? 4 years. [I’m aware social media was around a bit before that, but then I’m not counting back to The Dead Sea Scrolls, God’s innovative but ill-fated roll-folded direct marketing campaign].

Right now there’s a lot of ‘what’s next?’ questions and prophesizing, and Web 3.0 chin stroking, but no-one really knows for sure where this is all heading. We can see some platforms are already dying (Bebo is the latest casualty, MySpace a hollow Murdoch shell of it’s innovative heyday). Point being, just because this new stuff is great – and we should all embrace it – we shouldn’t chuck out all the brilliant old stuff. So, here’s my 4 part plea to the design/print naysayers…
First off, adopting Social Media shouldn’t be about giving design a bodyswerve. Effective social media marketing is designed – it’s a nuanced combination of images and text just like anything you put on paper, and needs to be considered in the same way.

Secondly, Social Media shouldn’t be thought of as a cheap alternative to design for print – if anything social media takes more time – once you’ve created something it’s only the beginning of a journey that requires constant feeding, monitoring and interaction.

Third, if we’re talking solely about arts marketing, then surely we’re still appealing at core to a visual culture that places intricates values on form, content and aesthetics? Rather than killing off printed material, social media essentially presents an opportunity to focus on making smaller runs of better print. As a designer I take little joy in squeezing on more and more information that could be communicated on a website, or sending out large runs of cheap, digitally printed flyers. I’m a fully paid-up stock sniffing, type fetishising, paper grammage nerd, so I’m biased… but when you are communicating something as potentially complex as artists’s work, combined with the values of a gallery, isn’t it worth the effort to attempt to represent that properly?

Most importantly, design and print is a hugely important part of visual culture, and works in tandem with visual art. A great example of this is Neil McGuire’spiece I wrote about a few weeks ago that was produced for theECA Masters show and in itself became part of the exhibition.

There must be more examples, and better arguments. Am I preaching to the converted, or is print pulped?

Image: Invite for Baldvin Ringsted, +44 141 Gallery by The Press – Emlyn Firth/Edwin Pickstone