You may have noticed I’ve added a couple of buttons to the top right of the blog. Maybe you didn’t notice them; they are pretty small. But they’re also neat, and I like em. The ‘F’ is Facebook and the ‘T’ is Twitter (obviously). They were pretty simple to install, and for those of you with a WordPress blog just copy and paste the code below into your header and change the image location and button destination.

Okay, so i’m now on twitter; which sucks ass. I’ve kept away for as long as possible, but since I may be acquiring an iPhone soon, I’ve decided i’m going to tweet away my innocence.

I’ll possibly put a twitter feed of my amazingly interesting, soon to be famous tweets in my sidebar, such as “I’ve just eaten breakfast, not half bad” and “Boy, doesn’t my life suck!”

Enjoy. I know I won’t.

So this is the scenario. I get on the train with my girlfriend; it was pretty packed. I look over to the other end of the train and see a caucasian male, probably about 6’5″, overweight wearing circular glasses and really, was not too dissimilar to ol’ St Nick. Standing uncomfortably close to him was a 5’4″, chinese kid of, oh, let’s say 16-17 years old, at tops, and i’m stood there thinking to myself; “If this train wasn’t so packed, something would be wrong here – wait…” The kid looks at the man, and then they smile at each other – the kind of smile you give your first girlfriend when you’re still a bit too scared to go over and talk to her in the playground. That’s when I notice their hands. Are they… no, they can’t be holding each other’s ass on the train?! Oh thank God, they’re only holding hands…

What?!

The sexual tension between these two unlawfully different people was becoming unbearable! The suggestive staring, the secret stroking, I kid you not, I was like “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!” It was the kind of horror story you hear about in the papers; a girl meeting a guy on the internet, etc, only in this case the kid looked into it and the old man couldn’t believe his luck! Don’t get me wrong, i’m fine with homosexuality, but this looked like it was one kiss away from a lawsuit and a news report.

However, I could be wrong and they could end up living happily ever after on santas boat just chillin’ right?

It was cold. Very cold. Still sunny though and we went to a good few agencies, all with their own little “thing” that makes them different from each other. The agencies I went to throughout the trip and the main speakers were;

Concept Farm – Griffin
Exposure – Tom
What If! – Gareth
R/GA – Courtney
Cunning – Lara
Naked – Paul
Rapp – Camilo
JWT – Renetta and Andy Clarke

They were all very nice people and I was quite surprised how many English people there were in the agencies (some even from Bucks!). We even randomly met one of the founding four of ZAG on the street outside Concept Farm who gave a few of us an impromptu talk about the industry. Thanks Georgia .

Overall it was a good trip, plane there was good, plane back was a fucking nightmare, but you’re reading this so it wasn’t that bad.

Now on with the pics! This isn’t all of them, and they will all look different from each other because I was pissing about in photoshop.

I have to start with this one because it’s by far the most globally relevant, the rest are just holiday snaps whereas this is porn frozen into the middle of Central Park’s lake – epic. The next one is of a taxi on fire… sort of.

I’ve set up a website for my illustrator vectors under the brand name of Norman Hurtz. The main reason behind the alter ego is because people love exclusivity. One man who no one really knows who he is (except you) making these, in my opinion, pretty awesome vector artworks of people. It’s not batch made, or illustrated with hired help, it’s one man, every single piece is original and they can’t be obtained on a willy nilly basis.

Plus, I also made the logo a couple of years ago and wanted a use for it.

Here’s some of the work thats up on site. Norm is also on Twitter.

A Team Awesomepants Production (Facebook Page)

This is the product of a ‘feel good’ brief in which we have to make people feel good. We targeted the Advertising/Graphics students at Bucks New Uni – what better way to make students smile after a bad crit than blowing up tutors heads… right?

I’ve just come across an old collage I did at college. The brief was simple – make a pice of work to a song the the tutor sets. I got Sympathy For The Devil by The Rolling Stones.

This is my song at the moment. Ain’t no rest for the wicked – Cage the elephant

I was skimming through some Blogger blogs and I came across an image that just stopped me.

I was sitting there thinking about the stuff i’d do, then it hit me like a brick – why am I not doing these things?

I’m surprised I haven’t heard of this quote since now, but as it goes, this is definitely up there with my favorites along with Grace Hopper’s “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission”.