Hasta La Ideas

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue

The lead feature in our June issue is an interview with Aubrey Powell who looks back on his relationship with the late great Storm Thorgerson and the work the two of them created for bands such as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and, of course, Pink Floyd at their Hipgnosis design studio.

For the piece, Powell allowed CR access to the Hipgnosis archive so that we are able to show, for the first time ever in some cases, treasures such as the original contact sheet for Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma album, revealing how the final repeating image was made, a rejected sketch for the Animals sleeve and contact sheets for Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy sleeve.

We have a special effects theme for the issue. While Storm and Aubrey created most of their work ‘for real’ we contrast their approach with the latest R&D from leading CGI houses

Plus we take a look at an intriguing collaboration between artists Rob and Nick Carter and visual effects house MPC which brings old master paintings to life as digital artworks.

In contrast, we interview the authors of a new book on hand-drawn illustration – The Purple Book explores symbolism and sensuality in contemporary work with five original pieces created in response to key literary texts.

Also dealing with illustration and storytelling will be an ambitious new show at the V&A. Novelist Hari Kunzru was commissioned to write a new piece for the Memory Palace show which illustrators and designers are helping to turn into a ‘walk-in book’. We talk to those behind the exhibition.

In Crit this month we have an excellent piece by designer Michael Rock which re-examines his On Unprofessionalism essay for the digital age, arguing that the idea of the ‘professional’ graphic designer was just a pipe dream.

We also have a tribute to Ray Harryhausen by our own Paul Pensom and, in his regular column This Designer’s Life, Daniel Benneworth-Gray considers the use and usefulness of Twitter

Gordon Comstock wonders why Charles Saatchi wrote his new book Babble and Paul Belford uses a Waterstone’s ad from 1998 to illustrate the dangers of over-restrictive brand guidelines

Plus, Jeremy Leslie looks at the indie football titles giving the game some more nuanced coverage and Michael Evamy asseses Venturethree’s identity for The Palestinian Museum amid brands’ new-found desire to be talkative

Our subscriber-only Monograph booklet this month is rather special. During theis year’s Pick Me Up festival, we organised a felt toy-making workshop with Felt Mistress. This month’s Monograph is a record of the day featuring some of the work made

You can buy the June issue of Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money too. Details here.

Over the past decade, Absolut became more synonymous with college parties and dance club bottle service than with its artistically-inclined, sustainably-minded Swedish roots. This shift in reputation is undoubtedly a…

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: New York designer Stephen Burks tells us how his once rough-edged city is being tamed by world-class architecture, urban design improvements like the High Line and a European-style bike-sharing scheme in the first of our reports from the Big Apple.

“I think New Yorkers all of a sudden are interested in quality of life” rather than just working and making money, says Burks, pointing to the Citi Bike scheme that launches later this month.” It’s the kind of thing you could never have had in New York 15 or 20 years ago. They would have got vandalised.”

New York is becoming more international in its outlook, Burks believes, being both more welcoming to foreign visitors and more eager to employ overseas architects. “There wasn’t an emphasis on great, international architects working in New York, but today it’s a selling point,” he says, pointing to the way that Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond luxury apartment development in NoHo has triggered improvements in the area.

However New York is still a brutally capitalist city, and even elite architectural projects have to pay their way. “In New York you have to understand that everything is about the commercial context, everything is about capitalism at the end of the day, and culture here isn’t necessarily culture for culture’s sake. So a great architect is hired because it allows them to to sell on a different level, or to compete with the building across the street. There’s more of a relationship to commerce here in New York.”

Burks takes us on a tour of New York’s west side, taking in Chelsea (where his studio Readymade Projects is located) and the West Village, where he lives. In recent years the area has been transformed from a dangerous district known for its nightclubs to a sophisticated art, fashion and leisure area.

The change was spearheaded by the arrival of prestigious private art galleries such as Gagosian, David Zwirner and Gladstone, which cluster in the Meatpacking District on Chelsea’s western fringe.

More recently the High Line, a park created from a disused elevated railway that cuts through the area from north to south, has brought swarms of visitors and triggered a fresh round of regeneration.

Dezeen was in New York during NYCxDESIGN, a new annual citywide initiative linking together various design events including the International Contemporary Furniture Fair and NoHo Design District. We stayed at the Ace Hotel.

We’ll be posting more Dezeen and MINI World Tour reports from New York over the coming days.

We drove around New York in our MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured in the movie is a track called You Go To My Head by Kobi Glas, one of the crowd favourites from the set we played at new design show INTRO NY in New York last week. You can listen to the full version on Dezeen Music Project.

The post “New Yorkers all of a sudden
are interested in quality of life” appeared first on Dezeen.

2186, c’est le nombre de morceaux de sucre qu’il a fallu à l’artiste Chris Naylor pour composer cette création représentant Londres. Imaginée pour célébrer le 10ème anniversaire du Museum of London Docklands, cette création insolite est à découvrir en images et en détails dans la suite de l’article.

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