Hasta La Ideas

When the iPad was first announced, perhaps an Ikea executive said “Uh-oh,” and perhaps not. If the exec had good foresight, perhaps he did this math:

1. The iPad will become popular
2. Competing tablets will arrive
3. Tablets will become ubiquitous
4. E-book sales will rise, print book sales will decline
5. We’ll start selling less bookcases.

As an article in The Economist points out, this is exactly what’s happened. As a result, Ikea is finally redesigning what is arguably their bread-and-butter product, the Billy bookcase, making it deeper and pushing the glass doors option. Why? “The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome,” says the article, “anything, that is, except books that are actually read.”

While Ikea might not like the idea of selling fewer bookcases, they surely see the financial wisdom in e-books: Every year they print 175 million copies of their catalog, more than tripling the number of Bibles printed worldwide, and it eats up 70% of their marketing budget. Their app version of the catalog will presumably change that.

The new Billy will debut next month.

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Devilfish has created this Saul Bass-inspired film to promote the new BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, which stars David Tennant and Kenneth Branagh. The trailer is currently airing on UK TV.

Credits:
Agency: Devilfish Creative
Senior partner: Richard Holman
Creative director: Lee Edwards
Designer: Ben Newman @ Pocko
Production company: Wonky Films

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR website, but if you are not also getting the printed magazine, we think you’re missing out. This month’s issue has a superb feature on the Sainsbury’s Own Label packaging of the 60s and 70s, a profile of new Japanese creative supergroup Party and our pick of this year’s top graduates. Read all about it here.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Visitors to Outline Editions gallery in London next week will be able to stamp out Noma Bar’s graphic artworks by feeding sheets of rubber and paper into the maws of a giant hole-punch shaped like a dog.

The machine’s profile is based on one of Bar’s designs and actually depicts a dog swallowing a cat, swallowing a mouse.

The Israeli designer uses negative space around blocks of colour to create a second, unexpected image in the outline of the first.

Noma bar will sign and number each piece produced at the Cut it Out installation, which will be on show from 17 to 30 September at 94 Berwick Street, London, W1F 0QF.

See all our stories about the London Design Festival here.

The information below is from Outline Editions:

Cut It Out at The London Design Festival 2011

Interactive exhibition of new work from graphic artist Noma Bar

For this year’s London Design Festival, Outline Editions has invited the ingenious and award winning graphic artist Noma Bar to create a one-man show, the centrepiece of which will be his brand new installation, Cut It Out.

Noma will be creating an amazing, interactive art-making machine for the event. ‘Cut It Out’ is a specially commissioned, Heath Robinson-esque embossing device /sculpture in the shape of a giant dog, that will allow visitors to feed paper, rubber and other materials into
its mouth to produce their own cut-out Noma Bar images. These will be signed and numbered by the artist as part of a limited edition series. The prints and cut-outs will range in price from £20 to £300.

In addition to the show, Noma will be holding free live drawing and create-your-own-cut-out-art workshops at the gallery during the festival.

With this simple and clever new work, Bar delves deeper into a recurring theme – negative space. Alongside Cut It Out, the artist, fresh from a sell-out show in Paris, will be exhibiting a range of other new prints, displaying his imaginative mixture of ‘double-take’ imagery and biting social commentary. With bold colours, shapes and pared-down iconography, Bar can capture the spirit of a person or the heart of an issue with arresting clarity and humour.

In addition, for the duration of the festival, a separate section of the gallery will be devoted to a display of work by Outline Editions’ unrivalled stable of artists at the forefront of graphic art, including Anthony Burrill, Kate Moross, Beyond the Valley and Klaus Haapaniemi.

Following the London Design Festival, ‘Cut It Out’ will travel to the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, North East England for their 2011 Design Event Festival, 14th – 18th October.

Noma Bar was born in Israel in 1973 and graduated from Bezalel Academy of Art & Design in 2000. He moved to London in 2001 but it was during the first Gulf War that Bar developed his trademark combination of caricature and pictograms: while staying with his family in a shelter in Israel he sketched the likeness of Saddam Hussein around a graphic symbol for radioactivity that
he found in a newspaper.

Since then Bar has published over 1000 illustrations for magazines and books worldwide, including upwards of 60 front covers. His clients include The Economist, Wallpaper*, The New York Times, The Guardian, GQ, Esquire, IBM, Sony, The V&A and more. He has also released two books of his work, ‘Guess Who – The Many Faces of Noma Bar’ and ‘Negative Space’, to widespread critical acclaim.

Cut It Out runs from 17th to 30th September 2011 at: Outline Editions, 94 Berwick Street, London W1F 0QF

Opening times: 1100-1900, Mon-Sat

Live drawing and create-your-own-cut-out-art workshops with Noma Bar (free) on 17th and 24th September from 1400-1700 at Outline Editions.

See also:

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Dog or Bitch at Konarska-Konarski	Happily Ever by Kim HyunJoo	Cardboard dogs by Burnt Toast

‘Las Calles de Borges’ is a short, beautifully shot piece that imagines how Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges sees what to most is simply mundane life. Watch the rest of it after the jump.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Two first time novelists and titles from four independent publishers make up this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist and, encouragingly, in a sign that printed book design continues to up its game, the covers are in rude health too…

Take Suzanne Dean’s design for The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (published by Jonathan Cape/Random House). Despite the presence of new life in the floating seeds, the cover bleeds off towards a foreboding darkness with the ends of the book’s pages blackened, too.

A striking graphic approach from Dan Stiles works well on the cover for The Sisters Brothers by Patrick De Witt (published by Granta and Ecco/Harper Collins). The book design is by Suet Yee Chong at Ecco.

The placing of the title is what makes the hardback cover of Snowdrops by AD Miller (published by Atlantic Books) that little bit more interesting. The title is Russian slang for a corpse that is buried in the snow (revealing itself as it thaws), so the blood red type seems to suggest a supine position, heightened by the image of the trees as seen from the point of view of a body lying on the ground.

Perhaps the most conservative cover on the shortlist, Peter Dyer’s design for Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (published by Serpent’s Tail) employs an elegant typeface for the book’s title.

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (published by Bloomsbury) has a cover by Holly Macdonald, who makes good use of negative space to evoke the outline of a young boy and, also, some pigeons.

Finally, and possibly our favourite on the list, is the first edition cover for Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch (published by Canongate). Thanks to Tom Gauld in the comments below who let us know that it’s the work of the excellent John Gray at Gray318. More of his covers at bookcoverarchive.com.

So while the Booker shortlist once again provides an interesting snapshot of the contemporary fiction market, the strength of the cover design in this year’s crop is surely also something worth celebrating.

The winner of the Man Booker prize 2011 will be announced on October 18. Read more about the shortlist, here.

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR website, but if you are not also getting the printed magazine, we think you’re missing out. This month’s issue has a superb feature on the Sainsbury’s Own Label packaging of the 60s and 70s, a profile of new Japanese creative supergroup Party and our pick of this year’s top graduates. Read all about it here.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.