Happy New Year one and all! After an extremely busy and thoroughly exciting 2010, we’re salivating at the prospect of 2011 already. We’re kicking off the year with some fantastic new projects for some wonderful clients (check back for more information), and we will shortly be bringing you fulll details of two new Cherry offshoots – an online design shop and a specialist branding service for new startups.

As well as keeping our minds occupied, we’re working on our bodies too! Some of us have signed up for pilates at our neighbours, Frame, in an effort to shake off the Christmas excesses. They also do an 80’s dance class, which we may well end up gatecrashing if the pilates doesn’t work out. We’ll keep you posted on our progress!

Have a wonderful, prosperous 2011!

Currently reverberating through Cherry Towers is this floor-shaker from Abaco Dream (aka Sly and the Family Stone) called Life and Death in G & A. If this is up your street, check out the Cherry playlist on Spotify. It’s pretty eclectic – from deep bleeps to Graham’s wedding anthems.

Alan Fletcher’s retrospective has travelled not just ‘north of the river’ but to the real North and is now residing in the CUBE gallery, Manchester. Packed to the rafters with some of the most highly regarded design examples of the last fifty years you certainly get your money’s worth at a very northern price of £4.50.

Significant highlights include video interviews with Fletcher as he guides you around the studio he built during a career that saw him help establish not only Fletcher/Forbes/Gill in the 60’s but also Pentagram in the 70’s. This is where some of the best work lies as business cards, letter heads and logotypes from countless projects adorn the walls. This more conventional but certainly no less spectacular work shares space with the playful ‘Fletcherisms’ many remember him for and makes for a jolly good afternoon of inspiring design gazing.

The exhibition runs until 3rd April
See cube.org.uk for details.

Lovely stuff.

Let the bowling commence...

Fun was had by all as we enjoyed a little get together with the team at Lonely Planet. The most significant news of the day is that the Cherry Kingpins remain undefeated despite a rather shakey start to the evening’s entertainment. Needless to say the karaoke inspired many moments of hilarity that have been banished to the Cherry archive forever, this way we spare our blushes and more importantly your ears! Well, maybe one clip couldn’t hurt…

Cherry and Lonely Planet show their rage from Sarah Harding on Vimeo.

On arrival we visited Ewald’s typography studio. It’s a treasure trove for creative types with an interest in typography, we were in our element – we couldn’t resist sharing a few photos…

Ewald's amazing studio

Ewald explains the complexities of traditional typography

The experience took everyone back to the heady days of Art School. Perhaps it was this nostalgia that was responsible for the subsequent ’studentesque’ behaviour later in the evening? We’ll never know…

Ewald's legendary library of lettering

All in all a fantastic time was had, with some fairly sheepish looking faces back in the office on Monday morning.

Sarah, Mark and Gimp-Mannequin

Here’s the Cherry team looking particularly ghoulish before heading out to the Opal Nera Halloween Ball last week. We were special guests of our friends at Inspirit, who exclusively distribute Opal Nera in the UK. In case it’s not obvious; Graham, Mark and Adrian went as the menacing Droogs from cult classic ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Sarah took to the skies on her broom as a wicked witch and Tom, er, well we can only assume he was involved in some kind of horrific construction accident! Needless to say, the morning after we all felt like we’d been involved in some kind of horrific accident…

The world truly is a crazy place… can you imagine spending $15,000 (£9,200) on the hair of a dead person (even the King’s). Someone obviously isn’t feeling the credit crunch!

We’ve been lucky enough to have artist Tinsel Edwards at Cherry recently on work placement. Not only has she been doing some great work here, but she’s been dragging us along to gallery openings and upping our cool credentials by quite a bit.

And we think her piece above sums up the Cherry philosophy nicely!

Have a look at some more of Tinsel’s work here on the Stella Dore website.