Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

That Was The Week That Was — 3rd November 2019

This week I made the decision to move my Produced for Use products to an Amazon Warehouse, so Amazon could not only fulfill orders, but also have the advantage of having my products on Amazon with Prime delivery options. As much as I enjoy packing orders, there will be occasions when I'll be travelling and so won't be able to pack things as quick as I like. Added to that, it means I can free up some storage space in the studio.

I'd read quite a few scare stories about how you must have this label and that label, and how there's even companies who sole role is to help you package products for Amazon FBA, but I honestly must say it was really easy. My products already have official GS1 barcodes, so it was simply a case of labeling each product correctly and creating the FBA shipment inside the Amazon Seller portal, printing off the UPS shipment labels and dropping the parcel off. A few days later the products were checked into the warehouse — nothing went missing — and they then became available on Amazon, complete with next day delivery. Nice. This also means any orders I get through my own shop front can be fulfilled by Amazon too.

On the Wednesday I travelled to London and managed to get time to see the new Bridget Riley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre. I love her black & white work especially, with much of this work almost looking 3D, and enabling you to see interactions — even colours — in the compositions. I especially liked the room showing many of preparatory sketches, revealing the level of detail that went into each piece.

At the weekend I received Rob Ford's wonderful new book Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World, which I'm honoured to say I have a little appearance in, with mention of the Saul Bass site I created back in 1998. This book was some undertaking, and Rob told me he had to leave a lot of stuff out in order to get it down to just over six hundred pages.