Would you like some dessert?

After a long night of karaoke and poor dancing, we awoke bright and early to begin our day at the Design Museum. After getting dressed and picking up a quick breakfast, we met with part of our group and were on our way across town. We crossed the London Bridge and arrived at the museum around eleven thirty.

The museum was relatively small but had a lot of interesting work. We even got to design our own typefaces and hang them up on the wall. It was like Graphic Design II all over again, except we had to crank them out in a half hour to move on to our appointment with The Partners.

Around 1:45 we met with the rest of our group at Farringdon to walk over to the studio. The Partners is one of the UK’s most successful design firms. They worked with a lot of really big name clients. One of our favorite portions of the visit was when the presenters, Lizzie Clubb and Brinley Clark, passed around one of their process notebooks. They stressed the importance of stepping away from the computer in order to find inspiration for projects. We noticed that in their book, most of their research seemed to come from things they found in the outside world. 

After we left, we ventured to the other side of town to revisit some of London’s most famous monuments. We walked through Green Park in order to see Buckingham Palace and the monument commemorating the Queen. Then, after a few small detours including a run in with a couple of drunk lads singing Baby Got Back by Sir-Mix-A-Lot, we arrived at Westminster Abbey to take in the beautiful architecture of St. Margaret’s Church and Parliament Square. We really enjoyed the fact that, although we were surrounded by such enormous buildings, this particular area of the city felt very open. We didn’t feel the typical sense of congestion associated with big cities.

We have been seeing a lot of beautiful typography around London. One thing that caught our eye was a logo for the M & S food stores. We responded to the texture on the lettering and we felt that the style of the bird symbol worked really well with both the bolder text and the secondary scripted type.

We trekked back to Trafalgar Square where we spotted the Sherlock Holmes Pub. It was a nice and cozy atmosphere but the waitress was a huge bully. She wouldn’t let Mackenzie order anything from the sandwich menu or starters menu, only a main course. Then she tried forcing us into getting dessert. Instead, we opted to get dessert elsewhere and in our pursuit of cake, accidentally crashed a private party. Whoops...

We continued walking through the downtown area, which is a completely different place after dark. There were tons of night clubs and casinos and movie theaters. We even located the London M&M Store, which is way bigger and better than the New York Store. Overall downtown was very festive and if we have the opportunity, we would like to go back down there some night before we leave.

Some cultural differences we noticed were that on Jess’s orange juice bottle, it says “bits” or “no bits” instead of “pulp” or “no pulp”  which is kind of cute. We have noticed throughout our time here that there are many slight differences in language choice and we are starting to pick up on the London slang. Mackenzie ordered a coffee to “take-away.” Mackenzie recovered from a slight mishap yesterday when she accidentally put salt in her coffee instead of sugar, because apparently salt packets in London look awfully similar to splenda..