I stumbled across Illustrator Ruben Ireland’s website today – I love his illustrative style; weird, wonderful, a little bit dark and utterly unique. He combines traditional materials and methods with very subtle digital manipulation to create fantastic images. Check out his website at http://rubenireland.co.uk/, and be sure to take a look at his brilliant sketchbook section.

So the end has come, and after a month of selfless fluff-growing it’s time to say goodbye to our lovingly nurtured face-space. We’ve managed to raise over £250, supported by a fantastic moustachioed cupcake bonanza, and donations continue to rolling in for our Best ‘Tache Vote. Click through to view the final results of our top-lip works of art… and don’t forget to give what you can for such a worthy cause by visiting the Movember website.

The Lowry exhibition opened at Nottingham’s Lakeside last week – great paintings and drawings, very atmospheric portraits and a reminder of Manchester and Salford landscapes that have largely disappeared. It’s also free!

The catalogue was very well received and is a perfect example of the importance of correctly separating RGB to CMYK, according to the aim printing process. The press run was helped by use of neutral grey patches, enabling quick and visual checks to be made on colour balance. Combined with careful, measured control of TVI – tone value increase (or dot gain for those working with Imperial), the result was an excellent printed job.

Maggie’s Centres are places where people affected by cancer are welcome whenever they need support – from just being diagnosed, or undergoing treatment, to post-treatment, recurrence, end of life or in bereavement.

A £3million centre has recently been completed at the City Hospital Campus at Nottingham University. The architect, Piers Gough CBE, was a personal friend of Maggie Keswick Jencks, and is famous for his bold and imaginative architecture. Nottingham born Sir Paul Smith has designed the interior.

The official opening takes place on 2nd November. I’ll be interested to see how the work of Gough and Smith sit together. I wonder if people in a vulnerable state will appreciate the cocoon-like shape, the soothing, soft curves and green, natural colour scheme – or would they prefer something more familiar and ’safe’? Speaking with very little experience of this kind of thing, I think the further away from resembling a clinic or waiting room the better.

More information on the Maggie’s Centres can be found at MaggiesCentres.org.

I attended the Typo London conference last week. The event which hosted a wide range of speakers from Neville Brody to Lawrence Weiner, had the theme of ‘Places’ but to be honest was much broader than that. It was brilliantly facilitated by Erik Spiekermann and Adrian Shaughnessy (among others) and was easily the best conference I’ve been to in some time. One of the best things about it was that most of the speakers stayed for the duration and watched the other presentation, which created a real feel of community.

It’s the first time this event has been held in England, having previously been in Berlin and judging by the feedback from everyone, it looks like it’s going to return to the capital next year. I will be putting together a presentation covering all the amazing talks which will be shared here but for the time being here’s additional reading about it from Creative Review and Design Assembly.

These are a selection of illustrations by Will Haywood who recently visited Linney Design to show us his portfolio. He has a very unique style and some great work. What are your thoughts?