2011. It’s been busy, it’s been stupidly quick and most importantly, it’s been good. Along with the constant stresses and pressures that go along with doing what we do, this year has been a decidedly positive one here at Dolphin Heights. We thought a good way to round off the year was to take a quick look back at what we’ve been up to in the last 12 months. What’s been keeping us busy in and out of work, where we’ve been, what we’ve been doing and who we’ve been doing it with.

We began 2011 inspired. The Christmas / New Year lull had allowed us time to go and check out various exhibitions around London. This got us thinking of the importance of taking inspiration from sources outside of traditional graphic design. Later in the month, the Design Museum gave us a further boost of inspiration with their annual Designer of the Year exhibition. Always a brilliant event, this year the top prize went to British designer Samuel Wilkinson and product design company Hulger for their low-energy Plumen lightbulb.

After we accidentally won a Creative Review subscription (we’re still not sure how it happened as we already had one!), we decided the best thing to do with it would be to give it away. We’re nice like that – although we didn’t want to make it too easy. We held a competition, asking people to take a picture that encapsulated their idea of ‘work’. The entries came flooding in and gave us plenty to choose from. We picked out favourite (see below) and one Mr.Michael Dowell was crowned the winner. Hope you’re still enjoying CR, Michael!

April saw us weighing in on the ever on-going awards debate (we still haven’t changed our minds) and creating a nice bit of dialogue and discussion amongst our peers. We also attended the Designers Republic exhibtion in sunny Croydon to check out the latest work from the tDR founder, Ian Anderson. We even had a little chat with the man himself, which was nice.

Another Creative Review connection came about when we were kindly asked to guest edit their Twitter account. Being given the chance to share our thoughts with their (rather large) audeincce was more than a little daunting, but a great experience nonetheless. After getting over the initial bout of stagefright, we got into our stride and had a brilliant time connecting with our 374,842 new friends.

Exhibiting our work at Tate Britain was never something we specifically set out to do but were more than happy to oblige when we were asked to produce a piece to celebrate the opening of their excellent exhibition entitled: The Vorticists: Manifesto For A Modern World. Our submission was perhaps a little close to the bone, but a lot of fun to produce. You can find out more about it here.

Symbol is an excellent book by Angus Hyland, exploring the world of icons, shapes and symbols from a design perspective. We vistited the lovely offices of Pentagram to hear Angus talk through the ideas behind the book and give a fasciniating analysis of ten of the best known symbols in the world. An elequent and articulate speaker, Hyland’s talk was informative, highly entertaining and certainly got us thinking.

A big part of the reason we started this blog was to share the work of some of the amazing people we talk to everyday. This thought process was at the heart of our One Plain, One Fancy project. The submission series asks anyone and everyone to submit their interpretation of the phrase in any way they choose. This year One Plain, One Fancy really came into it’s own and shows no signs of slowing down. There are some big plans for the series in the new year and although we can’t say too much at this stage, it’s looking very exciting. See below for a selection of the entries and find out more about the project here. Have you got involved yet? If not, DO IT!

A request to exhibit our work in a typographic exhibition was something we were massively excitied about. We jumped at the chance and before too long we had somehow managed to shoe-horn a bizarre Stanley Kubrick reference into our piece.In all honesty, we still struggle to explain exactly what we were thinking with this piece, but sipping beers on a packed opening night whilst watching slightly confused faces try to figure it out was a pretty good laugh. You can find out more about the event and our co-exhibitors here.

As avid music geeks since a young age, the chance to bang on about album cover design is always welcomed. When the legendary UK music weekly NME saw our regular Sound & Vision series and subsequently asked us to write a guest blog for them, we were pretty chuffed to say the least. The only problem was choosing which album covers to get nerdy about.

Speaking of blog series, Ten Questions has gone from strength the strength. We’ve spoken to some hugely interesting designers, illustrators, photographers and artists. All of them have been people we respect and all of them have had some interesting things to say. As mentioned above, one of the things we love about this blog is the chance to share the work of people who inspire us and 2011 gave us inspiration in abundance. Once again, big thanks to all those who took the time out to get involved this year.

Mario Hugo

Blair Thomson

Alex Trochut

Johanna Basford

Simon Manchipp

Ben the Illustrator

Kyle Bean

Michael Johnson

Liam Brazier

Will Robson-Scott

John-Paul Thurlow

John Dowling

Simon Birch

Chad Wys

Everyone listed above played a huge role in making this blog what it is and we massively appreciate their contributions. It would all be a bit pointless, however, if you weren’t sitting here now reading what we write about.

Every person who reads this is the reason we’re doing it and the reason we enjoy it so much. For that, we’d like to say a big THANK YOU. Whilst winding down and preparing for festive season, there’s something in the back of our minds telling us that 2012 is going to be even better. We’ve got plenty of big plans in the pipeline and we can’t wait to tell you about them!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

With love, from Mat Dolphin.