Hasta La Ideas

Bad Woods 1, 2011

Stanley Donwood‘s solo show at Outsiders gallery in London, which opened yesterday, offers a first glimpse of some of the artwork he’s created for the new Radiohead album, The King of Limbs…

“There’s three new screenprints here and a fucking great big drawing,” he says. “This is all from the work that’s to do with the record.” The artworks are inspired by nature, Donwood goes onto explain, and the northern European heritage of fairy tales and myths based around forests and woods. “It’s very much about natural forms. I’d heard something about the northern European imagination, in the sense of all our fairy stories and mythical creatures. They all come from the woods – Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel & Gretel…we’ve got all these stories and myths.

“Me and Thom were working on these ideas of strange, multi-limbed creatures that are neither malevolent or benevolent, they’re simply there, part of the living spirit of the forest. That’s come through into all of the work.”

Bad Woods III, 2011

Donwood worked on the artwork for the new record at the same time the band was putting the songs together. “It works at the same sort of pace as the music,” he says. “It’s something that grows very organically, which again went into the style of the artwork.”

Fans of the band can pre-order a special edition of the album, featuring a number of artworks from Donwood, online now. For the main cover artwork, he worked in oil for the first time. “It’s really, really hard,” he says of the medium. “I’ve only painted with acrylic before, which is bascially coloured mud that dries really quickly. It’s very forgiving, but oil paint isn’t really. It doesn’t dry at all quickly. Eventually, after a lot of disappointment I figured out how to use it. I use it in conjunction with Halfords spray paint, which is the magic ingredient.”

White Diamond Heist Bear, 2010

Donwood documented the development of the paintings with a high-definition camera, and the resulting images are used on the cover. “I was photographing them throughout the stages, because it takes so bloody long to do them,” he says. “Then with these huge digital images, where you can see the weave of the canvas and every brush mark, you can make quite incredible layered pictures.”

The special edition is centred around a newspaper Donwood has created. “The last one, In Rainbows, was like a coffee table book. It was this big thing – I felt quite sure that with determination you could probably beat someone to death with it, it was very heavy and hard. So I wanted to do something that was completely different for this. Also, the other thing was the sense of the music not coming to a halt – it was almost like this was kind of a report on its current status. What I like about newspaper is its ephemeral nature, I like the way the paper goes yellow and brittle when you leave it out in the sunlight.

Atoms For Peace – English, 2010

“I wanted to do this thing like a really annoying Sunday paper,” he continues, “you know when you buy the paper and all this crap falls out? I wanted to do something really annoying with all these crappy bits of floppy, glossy paper. I was going to do Hoover adverts and get the band to pose with a Hoover, and all that kind of thing. Which was a really dumb idea… so I didn’t do it. It would have been funny, but would have probably dented some reputation they might have… So it evolved into something else.”

In addition, the Newspaper Album will feature 625 tiny pieces of artwork, though Donwood refuses to be drawn on what these might be. “I’ll keep that as a mystery,” he says. “They’re sort of attached to each other but not quite – they kind of are and kind of aren’t. As soon as anyone sees it they’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Atoms For Peace – Farsi, 2010

The Outsiders gallery show brings together the new works with new editions of older pieces by Donwood. These include a striking set of recent posters for Atoms For Peace, Thom Yorke’s ‘rock supergroup’ formed with Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea, amongst others. There are also a number of Donwood’s books for sale in the show.

The exhibition reveals the wide variety of artistic approaches Donwood has used in his work for the bands. Despite this diversity, he sees connections between the different series. “I can’t imagine doing the same thing all the time,” he says. “I don’t know whether that’s because I’ve got a short attention span, or because I’ve been doing record covers for such a long time, and you don’t want to have the same record cover each time. But there are linkages [between them] in my head that probably make absolutely no sense to anybody else.”

Lucky, 2011

Stanley Donwood: Work on Paper is on at Outsiders until March 5. More info is here.

Our interview with the founder of one of the world’s first iPad-only magazines

In the digital revolution’s wake, popular stances have it that only publications developed specifically for these new mediums are truly relevant. Post, one I recently spent time checking out, uses sound, video and interactive technology to cover the usual milieu of topics. We recently sat down with Post’s creator Xerxes Cook to find out more about how they made the entertaining application, available for download from iTunes for $3.

Why iPad and why now?

We felt the iPad has created another medium for experiencing information, one that sees us act beyond the traditional parameters of magazine editors, and also in some way as television programmers, film producers and computer game developers. It is an exciting time to be in publishing.

We consider the first issue of Post, called “Matter,” to be issue zero—a proposition for what can be done within this new medium. It is very much an experiment, one which we imagine will be continually evolving.

How long did it take to create Post?

It took us around four months, and it is a process far removed from print publishing or the blog-based format of most websites. Some of our features—especially in the next issue—take as much programming as other apps in their entirety, so we have now learned the order in which we need to produce and program the different elements of the magazine.

Was all of the content produced with the iPad in mind?

Other than the video art triptych by Sema Bekirovic, all of the elements were produced in-house. We were constantly exploring the different ways in which we could execute and communicate with the iPad in mind. If something could be replicated in a print magazine, we scrapped the idea and started from scratch. This also had an effect on Currents, a front of book section that can display videos from performances that have happened, yet had only been reported as previews or reviews in the press.

We also had to consider sound—how does a magazine have a soundtrack? Where shall this sound be placed? We wanted the sounds featured within the magazine to enhance the content of the magazine and create a “gesamtkunstwerk” of sorts, in which nothing falls out of the register of a total aesthetic experience. So, seeing as the first issue takes the shift from the physical state to the digital, an exploration of the tangibility of matter, our sounds came from the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. They are the sounds of particles colliding at the speed of light—these sounds were created by collating the information from these collisions and feeding them into an algorithm to create individual sound “objects” which we then rearranged to create a soundtrack that runs throughout the entire magazine.

Will subsequent issues be separate apps or releases within the one now available?

Yes, and our next issue, Post “Gravity” is an outer-space theme special that marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space walk. Post “Gravity” explores the many ways in which humanity has sought to transcend the invisible forces that bind us to the earth, and we are collaborating with the International Space Station on many of our features. For our cover shoot, we wanted to create a fashion spread in which a single tap brings up a 3D wire-frame of the model’s body, which you can then rearrange and distort before flipping back to real video. To do this we had to crack the Xbox Connect software and write computer code of the fly, during the shoot itself. We are previewing this cover story during Paris fashion week at both Colette and the opening of La Gaite, the multimedia AV museum that opens then.

Can you comment on initial downloads and session times as they relate to typical magazine consumption?

We hope to reach 10,000 downloads before we release the next issue and we are nearly there. It would take an hour to experience all the features within it, which is probably the average amount of time someone spends with a magazine other than “The New Yorker.”

However, we do accept that it is a very data-heavy application. At the moment we are experimenting with various ways of streaming content, creating almost two versions of the magazine, one that can be viewed both off-line and online without compromising the audience’s experience.

Accompanying the news that Radiohead’s new album, The King of Limbs, is actually available to download from today instead of tomorrow, a video for new single Lotus Flower appeared on the band’s YouTube channel earlier…

The video, directed by Garth Jennings, features a lone Thom Yorke dancing his little self around, complete with that archetype of jazz and tap, a bowler hat. His jerky, twitchy moves were choreographed by Wayne McGregor. The director of photography on the film was Nick Wood.

The track, incidentally, sounds a bit like a not-so-fired up Idiotheque from Kid A.

More on the new album at thekingoflimbs.com.

This week’s Workspace of the Week is Ron Ron’s ingenious workspace:

When I came upon Ron Ron’s office, I knew I had to feature it the same week we had a banana-themed unitasker. If you look at his headphones, you’ll see that they’re stored on a Banana Hanger. Genius! The banana hanger does a marvelous job at keeping the headphones from cluttering up the desk. Additionally, I really like the Arc Stand doc for the laptop and how it frees up even more desk space. The shelving unit above the desk is from Ikea and can be adjusted with whatever kind of shelving you might need, which is also a convenient addition to this workspace. Thank you, Ron Ron, for your wonderful submission to our Flickr group.

Want to have your own workspace featured in Workspace of the Week? Submit a picture to the Unclutterer flickr pool. Check it out because we have a nice little community brewing there. Also, don’t forget that workspaces aren’t just desks. If you’re a cook, it’s a kitchen; if you’re a carpenter, it’s your workbench.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Frustrated by the weekly onslaught of mailers from photographers and illustrators, a group of US ad creatives have set up an online alternative

“Our creative department gets about 60 lbs (28Kg) of paper promos a month from illustrators and photographers, most of which ends up in the trash,” says Lance Vining, an associate creative director/art director at an agency in San Francisco. They made this video to illustrate the problem:

To discourage the use of paper promos, Vining and a group of friends launched First-Stop.org as a side project to showcase the work of illustrators and photographers in the hope that they would use the site instead of sending out printed materials. “The only thing we ask of the artists whose work we display is that they agree to significantly reduce the amount of paper promos they send to ad agencies,” Vining says. “If they’re already ahead of the curve and not sending out any paper promos, brilliant, we are also happy to show their work! It’s also absolutely free.”

And before any of you eager readers point out the fact that CR has carried a fair few printed inserts in the past, we do carry far less of that kind of thing these days, in part because of the opportunities afforded by this here website (especially Feed) and our Creative Handbook site.

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Our April 2007 issue looked at a lot of the issues regarding sustainability and the creative industries.

Anna Gerber also wrote a series of features for us on Design & Sustainability, available online to subscribers here and here

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