1 Religious Illustrator
A Sikh man wearing speedos approached me in a Longridge sauna, and asked if I could draw his family being blessed by the Guru Gobind Singh Ji. To this day I have no idea what Singh Ji should look like, but this didn’t seem to be an issue. I knocked out several more for his friends, all in pencil crayon, before this bizarre seam of work dried up.

2 Hi-Fi Salesman, Preston Town Centre
Neds would run in, yank up the volume on the biggest hi fi systems, and run away in a wall of white noise. Phil the Manager played Simply Red as a demo tape endlessly. Dark, dark days.

3 YMCA Daycamps Instructor, Lakeside, Windermere
The kids arrived by bus in the morning and we’d have a brilliant time running them ragged and telling them rubbish until teatime. Once week a co-instructor and I convinced our group that we’d been co-joined twins, attached by the earlobes and recently separated – hence our ‘leaning’ walks. By Thursday they’d figured out not to trust us, as we had terrible backache.

4 Life Model, Edinburgh
Harder than it looks. I supplemented my student grant by taking my clothes off in a variety of life drawing classes across Edinburgh, and still get approached by ex students who are SURE they know me, but just can’t place it somehow… something to do with clothes….

5 California Coffee ‘Barrista’
In a classic case of ‘up-selling’, I converted one of my regulars at the iconic Edinburgh police boxes into my first client, by flogging him a coffee table to go with his espresso. Shameless, but effective.

Follow Paul Kerlaff on Twitter: http://twitter.com/PaulKerlaff

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

For those who didn’t make the trek to the Sub Club on Friday, Stephen Cappello was the winner, receiving a cash prize of £500 and a licence agreement for his design, ‘The Devils’ Church’. Four of the remaining shortlisted designs were also awarded a licence agreement, so Kavan Studio, Veeny, and Titas (two patterns) will all have their designs offered as part of the Shadow Screen range. As with the existing patterns, the designers will be paid a percentage royalty based on the selling price for each screen sold.

So, how did the judges come by this decision? It’s probably fair to say that the immediate impact of the patterns is hard to shake – it’s pretty clear whether a design is visually arresting, and this rarely changes. When we met for shortlisting, we looked at nearly a hundred entries in total, and it was pretty clear which of these should make it into the final ten. Although we didn’t pick a winner at this first meeting, we all had our favorites. It’s probably fair to say that even though we took pains to keep the comments on the designs fairly equal, it’s hard not to hope that your favorite wins.

What really showed through from the facebook comments is that each of the patterns works in a different way, and arguably four or five of them could have been the ‘favourite’. It made the final choice immensely difficult. Should we choose the pattern with the most immediate impact (which for me was the ‘bubbles’ pattern by Chris Veeny)? Or the one that received the most positive reactions (the beautiful ‘Smog’ pattern by Daisy Macdonald)? How about the patterns most likely to be used by interior designers looking for a compliment to other materials (Titas’ work)? Or the pattern that looks simple but is actually more complex than it looks (Mathew Kavan Brooks)?

In the end, the shortlist was so strong that I decided to offer licences to the five patterns which were most likely to be commercially viable for use as a cut screen. This decision left some fantastic patterns out, not due to the quality of the patterns themselves, but because they had a major issue with production – Dele Adayamo’s lovely collage of children and balloons, for example, didn’t offer an obvious positive and negative for the cutting process, and Daisy Macdonald’s Smog was stunning but very hard to crop due to the areas of uncut sheet. Daniel Sunden’s Untitled would be great as a piece of art in it’s own right, but hard to incorporate into an interior without overwhelming. The simplicity of Catrin Lewis’ work, though very strong in the right context, could be mistaken for a standard pattern, with the same going for the undulating waves of Titas’ third pattern.

Offering several licence agreements also freed up the choice of winner, and the judges felt that it’s clear concept had been executed in a refined way, pushing both the intellectual buttons but also subtly the right visual ones. What clinched it was that the pattern offered the possibility for customizing a screen to incorporate a hidden message of particular relevance to a client, or a context. It’s simplicity of form might also offer the potential of more economical production techniques, should the volume be sufficient. I’m looking forward to working with Stephen and with all those who have been offered a licence agreement to develop the work.

A huge thankyou to all those who entered, and I hope that the experience has offered some value even for those who didn’t win.

Along with elements of optical illusion, the pattern repeat also makes reference to the abundance of sleek and linear architectural forms around us. Be it a window, door, gate, or railing, the changing pace and width of apertures are forever present, creating bold shapes and lines that weave a sense of structure and order. The nature of the pattern on the screen aims to emulate this in it’s shadow, which is directly affected by the ever changing angle and position of the light.

Above all, both the screens surface pattern and it’s three-dimensional projection into space aim to provide a visually exciting experience.

Another question is would the patterns remain the same after being done from its actual material?

Questions and ponderings above are just my personal observations, and I would really like to know how others would describe the winner. So please feel free to comment :)

The architectural importance of shadows was was so described by Eighteenth Century writer, artist and architect John Ruskin.  His approach to design was to manage the light and dark areas within a building to create the ultimate impact within a space, and to highlight interior details.  These ideas are universally important in design and architecture, and later in photography and film.

With this in mind, there are many interesting effects that can be achieved through the use of patterned shadow screens. The main challenge for me of this project was designing a screen that would be adaptable to many different environments.  I was keen not to allow too much light through, for the ultimate dramatic effect, and to keep the pattern abstract but dynamic. I was also interested in the projection of the shadow, how this would change with the movement of the screen – I tried to align the pattern so the most interesting effect would be created.

One other thought that inspired me was reading some of Japanese author Junichiro Tanazaki’s I933 book In Praise Of Shadows.  He describes his regret of the elimination of shadows by the introduction of the electric light, and the acceptance of the Western obssesion with brightness. He writes ‘Surely you have seen in the darkness of the innermost rooms to which sunlight never penetrates, how the gold leaf of a sliding door will pick up a distant glimmer from the garden, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow upon the horizon at sunset.  Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.’

Perhaps the Screens of Paul Kerlaff will bring the beauty of shadows back into our Western homes.

Why is it that when we look up at the sky our eyes interpret the clouds as images we connect to? There goes a flock of sheep or indeed a bus load of sheep, I swear I even once saw a killer sheep (strange connection I know). Or when we look up at the stars, in the constellations we see great bears and little bears, a big dipper, heroes and bulls. And why is it that we see a man in the moon?

I think our minds construct meaning and mental associations out of arbitrary pattern to transport us there, to allow our imagination to exist in that place that cannot be physically reached however surreal it may be. This is why in my own shadow screen design, ‘Playtime’ the child figures depicted are not intended to leap out at you at first glance; rather they are hidden amongst the rising balloons. The eye therefore discovers them only after a prolonged gaze as if conjured from the imagination.

We cannot physically return to childhood, to those playful afternoons of long shadows but this scene hopefully transports the imagination there to reignite that same wonder.

Dele Adeyemo
www.pidginperfect.com

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

My design has been adapted from a project I started at college.  It was a conceptual project in which I explored how electro magnetic radiation was present in the home, leaking from various different technology.  I made maps of EM leakage in my home, and represented the ‘Smog’ shapes that were formed with various patterns.  I was inspired by the structured form of traditional craft patterns in quilts and other textiles, as a direct contrast to the boundless invisibility of the EM waves.

It was very interesting to take the project in a new direction and consider a different format and material.  I think my design could be an effective Shadow Screen with or without this original concept in mind.

As I considered the functionality of a shadow screen, first thing that came to my mind was the importance of background cosiness it creates.  How would it contribute to the harmony of a different space. However, I found it quite challening to generate a design that would provide every single space with something fresh and fulfilling.