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Here’s a little video from the Lily Allen shoot, shot by Grazia Magazine

In a detour from our regular “Chippy Friday” lunchtime taste sensation, this week we picked up a couple of Chip Shop Awards last night! One for Best Stationery Design and one for Invent Your Own Category, both in collaboration with Ian Hogg.

With a night of befriending bouncers and getting a little too intimate with the chips after the awards show behind him, Andy managed to drag himself and the trophies back from London this morning so we could all wallow in the majesty of the handmade yellow beauties and set up lighthearted photos of them with our usually-sofa-bound stuffed toys.

You can check out the full list of winners on the Chip Shop Awards site.

We popped down at dinner to see how Rebecca was getting on, here’s a few pics and you can check the live web cam here

Our friend, Rebecca Manley will be participating in an exhibition on Friday 20th March and we wanted you to know / spread the word / come and visit her. She will spend eight hours, from 10:00 – 18:15 ‘locked’ in the window of Nexus Art Cafe, Dale Street, Manchester.

We asked her what it’s all about:

“I will fill this space. I will fill it with colourful, three-dimensional paper shapes inspired by the basic design tool Microsoft Word’s AutoShapes. I want my one day installation to grow, glow and inspire! You can view my progress live using the latest technology. I am going to work as fast as I can to do as much as I can under the watchful eye of the GREAT BRITISH PUBLIC.

Warmest thanks to GF Smith for paper sponsorship and Creative Spark for their help.”

All this week soon to be graduates, Shaun & Tom are doing some shameless self promotion, displaying themselves in a shop window. Their idea is “To collaborate, to use words, to interact, not just to design but to create. To be on constant show, to prove to the world that the creative mind is always doing”. We got in touch to say hello and they’ve done their own interpretation of our ‘spark’ to spruce up their window display!  Keep Us Busy

Everyone at Creative Spark would like to wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Thanks to Laura for the illustration!

Recently we had a client asking about just how environmentally friendly recycled paper is, as they’d heard that the sheer volume of industrial chemicals used in the recycling process outweighed the benefits.

We felt we had the responsibility to do lay out the facts to help point our customers down the best path.

There are a few different methods for creating recycled paper, some of which are more environmentally-friendly than others. For print-quality recycled paper, the ink has to be removed from the pulp through either washing, flotation or both, neither of which are particularly damaging to the environment. The ink removed in the process(es) can then be put to various other uses including compost or road material.

The issue comes when the paper is then bleached to get it as white as possible. The idea of this being environmentally-unfriendly comes from when chlorine bleach was most commonly used; nowadays the most common agent is hydrogen peroxide which breaks down to water and oxygen and is much kinder to the planet.

Where possible we use environmentally-friendly recycled or FSC-certified paper.

For most people it’s not all that common to get very-raisiny spotted dick and a trophy in the same night but here at Creative Spark, it’s all the rage, at least, it was on Thursday when we won a silver award for Best Use of Illustration at the Fresh Creative Awards. A big thanks and well done to Deanna for working with us on this.

As some of you might already know, last week ourselves and Laura were taking part in YCN LIVE. Here’s some pics of the lovely things she did for us.