So last weekend we (g/f, +2) took a stroll down to London’s south bank for a bit of culture.

Started off at The Design Museum with a look at 2006’s Designer of the Year entries. The 2 that stood out for me were The Guardian re-design and Jamie Hewlett.

The Guardian room is jam packed with loads of great detail about how they went about analysing and re-designing every aspect of the paper. It’s a real testiment to the curators that they were able to portray the detail involved in designing something so vast.

The Jamie Hewlett room is brilliant. I’ve been a distant fan of hist work for a long time and loved the Gorillaz concept from the first day I heard about it. The way that it subverts Pop culture and siddles in the back door with music that just wouldn’t get to where it is any other way. The room is packed with his work, 2 huge tables filled with sketches and storyboards for promo videos. One end has a huge projection of 3D animations, which personally I still don’t think are quite right. There are a couple of smaller monitors one looping through Gorillaz’ MTV cribs which is very amusing.

For me it was worth the entry fee just to see the Hewlett work, but I’m a fan so that’s not surprising.

After The Design Museum we grabbed some lunch and headed down to Tate Modern for their Long Weekend art extraveganza. Sadly we chose the “Surreal Day” for out visit. Someone had the bright idea of combining Surreal Art with Performance Art, in a word it was…rubbish! It was noisy, ugly, meaningless and most of all boring. Quite a lot of people seemed to be “watching” though, this may have had something to do with the weather which was pretty miserable.

So if you haven’t been to The Design Museum recently take a day and go get inspired, also check out Daniel Brown’s talk on 12th June he of Play/Create fame.