The new social housing apartment block at 331 Kingsway, Hove was given the name The Vega Building to fit with the art deco styling of the proposal. The site was formerly a garage built in the 1930’s that was modelled in the art deco style – sadly demolished in 2001, it was much loved by the local neighbourhood.

The name Vega relates to the Lockheed Vega, the plane famously flown by Amelia Earhart across the Atlantic single-handed. The plane is from the art deco era and is often in the classic style of polished aluminium.

The brief for the building identity and brand was to hint at the clean line of the art deco style, in a contemporary way. We researched the lettering style from the period and developed the design strategy.

Building on the narrative, we developed a system that utilised the elegant form of the plane and chose a font that is modern, legible and contemporary, and which complemented the building and the developing story.
We wanted a ‘light touch’ to the design, avoiding ‘blocky’ signage panels, proposing a sensitive approach that used an accent colour for each floor and signage lettering that was mounted directly to building surfaces, respecting the architectural lines.

VEGA plane silhouette shapes have been used as navigational devices and the information and signage lettering laser cut from stainless steel and installed as individual letters raised from the wall surfaces giving a modern take on the industrial clean nature of the style and time.

The main VEGA sign lightbox letters are 480mm high each fabricated from white perspex mounted within a stainless steel casing that wraps around the front forming an elegant border. Creating a strong identity both in the day and at night when they are lit up.

The car park continues the theme where dotted lines indicate parking spaces with the VEGA plane motif labelling the space numbering system. Planes on the floor surface also direct users to bay areas and four disabled bay areas are clearly marked in blue.

Secondary signage throughout the building is signed using a matt black vinyl and statutory signage silk-screened onto stainless steel panels to maintain the aesthetic.

Photographs by Jim Stephenson photography.

The VEGA building is the first project designed and implemented by Yelo Wolf, a strategic partnership between Yelo Architects and Wolfstrome with the intention to brand buildings and place by creating sympathetic modern contemporary design for building identity, signage (incl. statutory) and wayfinding.

Poster for an experimental project and exhibition which considers digital scanning as an alternative to photography. Featuring works by Gem Barton + others. www.gembarton.com/scanit

Poster for RSA and University of Brighton symposium Making better places. How do we create places of excellence – beyond the mediocre? And how do we take collaborative responsibility and ownership of our spaces? How do we get sustainability right? A series of thought provoking presentations followed by a live debate discussing how we can make our places better.

Bringing meaning to place with the made-up stories from local communities was the idea behind Lightwriting. We worked with four different County Durham communities and constructed a narrative form that was presented at Lumiere Durham 2011. Over each of the four evenings the narratives changed – each night being dedicated to the community that came up with their own stories.

Projecting coloured light to form words through a matrix of holes, the Lightwriting cube tells a story 4 faces at a time, changing every 20 seconds. Run around and follow the story before all 4 sides change to the next "page". Richard Wolfströme invented and designed this new form and Ira Lightman guided local groups to write in it. Lightwriting showed County Durham people's great gifts with story telling, Ira's skill with catching the actual language people use, in all its simplicity and fun, and Richard's typographical mastery with setting the words in their perfect sequence of colours and spacing. Every screen was a delight of language caught in all its quirkiness, and all the screens taken together told heartwarming and hilarious stories as they came naturally.

The ambition is to now take the Lightwriting cube to other locations and communities to hear and display their true and imaginary stories. Please get in touch if you want to know more.

To see a video of Lightwriting in action:
Vimeo: http://bit.ly/szTLH7
YouTube: http://bit.ly/tabhf0

Concept & design: Richard Wolfströme (www.wolfi.co.uk)
Words & workshops with County Durham communities: Ira Lightman
Fabrication & technical: Martin Warden, Hi-lights (www.hi-lights.tv)

Commissioned by Lumiere Durham 2011 (www.lumieredurham.co.uk)
Produced by Artichoke (www.artichoke.uk.com)

Video edit: Joe Murray

Website design for the UK's leading specialists in the design, installation and maintenance of solar thermal and solar electrical systems. The design reflects the modular solar panel systems, creating a functional and adaptable architectural design that can be developed and changed in response to latest information and campaigns.

www.southernsolar.co.uk

Topographic Tweets partnered Richard Wolfstrome with Chalk Architects to create an installation on the Chalk studio window for The Welcome Trail, curated by Gem Barton, as part of the Love Architecture Festival 2012 in Brighton, UK and Threshold. A ‘pop-up’ installation taking just ten days from idea to finished artwork, it engages and creates a community narrative with the face of architecture.

Topographic Tweets invited tweeters to express an opinion, a view, an idea, contentious or otherwise, about architecture, which were designed into a typographic urban landscape. Strips of texts rising up the window in different shades of white, grey and frost give the impression of a skyline where the lettering, absent their counters (spaces in letters), ‘light’ up the architectural form. Fabrication and installation by Nik the Brush.

Creative Partnerships’ two-year pilot programme ran from April 2002 to March 2004, with a budget of £40 million, it covered schools in 16 areas chosen from a list of England’s most economically and socially challenged neighbourhoods. Creative Partnerships was the government’s flagship creative learning programme, designed to develop the skills of young people across England.

The award-winning book Footnotes to an Idea – celebrated a number of the projects with narratives from the participating artists, students and project leaders along with inspiring quotes from well-known visionaries. The book expressed their stories in overlapping threads using a variety of creative printing techniques on multiple layers.

BrightType 2 is the fourth in a series of design talks and the second on typography, organised by the Brighton branch of the South Coast Design Forum.

SCDF are very pleased to announce our speakers for this event: Simon Garfield author of best-selling book Just my Type and Freda Sack, president of the International Society of Typographic Designers and type designer.

Poster for contemporary concert – a forty strong choir, a rock band, and an adventurer, all for one night in the heart of Cambridge.

My own site demonstrating one of my specialisms (and passions) in the art of place-making, where I explore and work with communities to engage and bring meaning to place through wayfinding, embedded artworks and typographic narratives – installed in the landscape itself and supported by the use of augmented reality and digital applications. The work supports developers and stakeholders, in the UK, with Section 106 and the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) with unique, elegant solutions. www.wolfstrome.com

Design for coffee table book Fine Art Photography – Creating Beautiful Images for Sale and Display. The book shows the portfolios from a number of photographers and demonstrates ideas behind the process.

This coffee-table book examines every kind of propaganda, and how either positive or pernicious messages have been conveyed in the pages of comic books over the last 100 years. A fascinating global, visual history of some of the most contentious, outrageous, unbelievably unusual, and politically charged comics ever published.

Classical concerts music poster for Brighton Festival

A guitar tutorial CD-Rom – an engaging and easily navigable resource for aspiring guitarists at all levels. Drawing on a wealth of media, from video, animation, voice-over, graphics and text, the program was structured into manageable sized modules of learning.

pam is a software service that enables personal and organisational development, business management and engagement of ecosystem partners – a new website that is contemporary and describes the full range of services and options. Photos by André Lichtenberg (www.photoandre.com). www.achievemorewithpam.com

Proposed designs and ideas for a new housing development in High Wycombe. Following a primary school’s workshop experiences of the area’s heritage – these designs took some of their ideas and instilled them into wayfinding and narrative applications – from seating to bollards and wooden meeting posts. Texts, poems, directions would be sand-blasted into wood and concrete along with a series of brass-rubbings to create a series of narrative and informative trails, based on heritage, ecology and sustainability.