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Picture courtesy of Timeout

Football gaming has come a long way from those first big old arcade games into what is now a hugely popular and surprisingly important money making machines. With teenagers on youtube recording themselves playing matches and attracting millions of views in the process and players and coaches now openly admitting that they give attention to the player statistics from the latest FIFA it’s clear that gaming is now a big part of the beautiful game.

Manchester’s National Football Museum is now hosting the Pitch To Pixel exhibition, the worlds first football gaming exhibition where you can see how the gaming industry is now affecting the sport and what its place was in previous decades.

Image courtesy of Creative Tourist

Today marks the start of Design Manchester 2015, so we thought we’d give you our top three run down of what you need to see at this years festival.

Manchester In Mind

On display at Kosmonaut until 22nd October, Manchester In Mind is a collection of original print designs that explore and celebrate the significance of Manchester’s minds. The works were selected by the likes of Clint Boon and Stanley Chow who has been featured on our blog a few times, many of the prints are available for a very reasonable price and entry is free so it’s well worth making the short journey down from Piccadilly train station.

Manchester Print Festival

After the success of last year the Print Festival will now run over at a full weekend hosting over 50 stalls selling affordable work and hosting various work press in screen printing, letterpress, badge making Origami.

Manchester Moleskine

Closing the festival with a bang, Manchester Moleskine looks set to be a fun packed evening of music, live illustration and general creativity with a quirky little idea running underneath it.

An A5 Moleskine® sketchbook will be hand delivered to 52 diverse Manchester based creatives inviting them to contribute a unique piece. The exhibition will showcase a selection of the work inside the books.

For mor information on any of the events we’ve mentioned then head over to Design Manchester’s Website.

The ongoing arts and culture festival, Liverpool Biennial, has commisioned South Korean artist Koo Jeong A to design a skate park as part of the Biennial’s commitment to work in Everton Park. The Park not only features the ideas of Koo Jeong A, such as her familiar use of diamond shapes, but also is influenced by the ideas of young people in North Liverpool and local skaters.

The design is certainly intriguing so a day trip down to Everton would be well worth your while, however stick around until the evening and you’ll see the park in its full glory as it’s the UK’s first glow-in-the-dark skate park. Whether you’re eight or eighty, you can’t say that doesn’t sound cool.

Picture courtesy of Liverpool Biennial

Louis Oosthuizen featured in the Ping Golf Autumn/Winter 2015 campaign produced by The Agency+. You can catch Louis playing today in The Open Championship and for the rest of this week.

On a recent shoot for Ping Golf’s Spring/Summer 2016 campaign.

Head over to 1stdibs.com to read an excellent feature on New Yorks’s king of graphic design, Milton Glaser.

Whilst browsing on the net recently we stumbled across the website of photographer Danila Tkachenko. We were almost immediately blown away by his work but in particular that of his project, Restricted Areas.

The focus of the project is on great achievements by man that were once the focus of so many individuals that have since been forgotten and left rooted in the past, forgotten by society. The combination of the strong designs of the various subjects in the photographs with the barren wastelands that they have now become a part of certainly makes for a strong impression and we will definitely be watching out for Tkachenko in the future and for any exhebitions that he may be hosting here in the UK.

The abstract sculpture Barbara Hepworth has been a favourite of ours here at The Agency+ for a long time and we have featured her on the blog in the past. Being fans of her work we were pleasantly surprised to find out about the work of Artsy.net and their aim “to make all of the world’s art accessible to anyone”.

On their page you can find out about her past and current work as well as many other artists. Be prepared to end up going down many different avenues on their site with such a great deal of information waiting for you to delve into.

Click here to view the Artsy.net page Barbara Hepworth.

As part of the Look 15 photography festival in Liverpool Tricia Porter’s photographs of Toxteth are on display. Toxteth has long since been an area associated with a great deal of negatives, from racism to rioting. Though her photographs do show the less attractive parts of the area, it is also apparent that Porter has captured the sense of community, a component that is often key in creating the vibe that areas like Toxteth normally have in such abundance.

You can catch the exhibition at the Bluecoat Chambers in Liverpool until July 5th.

Over the weekend we payed a visit to Liverpool and The Bluecoat Chambers and stumbled across ‘Nitrate’. This exhibition by Barcelona born photographer Xavier Ribas charts the exploitation of the Chilean Atacama Desert for the extraction of nitrate, chiefly led by British companies. Nitrate once processed can be used both as a fertiliser and as a part of explosives. The exhibition traces the route of both paths.

The exhibition will continue to run until July 5th.