The Something Of Somebody Something with Stan’s Cafe & Birmingham City University

“On Thursday evening @ A E Harris over forty first year illustration students from Birmingham City University exhibited their response to our front cover design challenge. They had five weeks to explore, experiment and deliver a cover inspired the something in that content. The results were spectacular.

 To see so much enthusiasm and time and effort and imagination and passion invested in reinterpreting our back-catalogue was very touching.

I loved it, we loved it, it was loved.”

James Yarker, Artistic Director, Stan’s Cafe, May 2018

Initially designed up as a module-based project for first-year undergraduates on the Illustration course at BCU university, the project was expanded and gained broader funding. The initial project required learners to respond visually to the back catalogue of Stan's Cafe scripts with an outcome that could be used as a book cover. After the 5 weeks module duration and after a range of visual making workshops inspired Stan's Cafe's own devising methods a pop up one-day exhibition was held at Stan's AE Harris venue in May 2018.

The project was then developed by Birmingham City University's Institute for Creative Innovation and received funding from the European Union's Regional Development Fund. A set of book cover designs were created with final year graphics student Aimee Chapman before being developed by the Stan's Cafe company (with training and technical assistance by myself) into a collection of print on demand publications. The first book, The Cleansing Of Constance Brown, was published in 2019 with others to follow. The books can be purchased here.

Illustrations in the images by Helen Mason, Arthur Kearns, Diana Hainey, Georgia Wright, Steph Dunn, Imogen Long.

Photos are taken from the exhibition.

Our Work Beyond BCU - blog post from Birmingham City University (Aug 2021) on the project.