Hasta La Ideas

This year we’ve approached our graduate issue slightly differently. Covering the shows (and talent) on the blog, in print we decided to see just where a creative education can take you – from becoming production designer on Game of Thrones or Rihanna’s creative director, to working as head of visual creative for Save the Children. The Shellsuit Zombie collective also present a guide to ‘what next’; we explore what happens when advertising attempts to ‘do good’; and, from new book TM, we finally get to the truth behind the creation of the Woolmark…

Opening the issue (and featuring on the cover and in Monograph), we look at artist Jim Lambie’s new 100m long path in Glasgow designed to look like a shelf of records, and how it was made. Russ Coleman and Kirk Teasdale talk through how they constructed it from coloured concrete.

We also look at the controversy surrounding Penguin’s new cover for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stefan Sagmeister’s recent take on creative types calling themselves “storytellers”, and examine the Airbnb rebrand which, as Design Week’s Angus Montogmery argues, could well become one of this year’s landmark projects.

In the columns, Michael Evamy explores the trend for identities based on bespoke typefaces, potentially replacing logos altogether; while Daniel Benneworth-Gray looks at the way designers have been reprented on the big screen and decides that a Pixar animation might in fact give the closest approximation of what it feels like to work in the profession (it’s not all like it is in Catwoman).

Shellsuit Zombie open our Grad Guide with a ten-point look at what the next stages might be for graduates who want to pursue a creative career…

… while our main graduate section looks at thinking beyond the agency or studio environment. We talk to six people with inspiring and unusual jobs and ask them how they got to be where they are today.

We start with Jess Crombie, head of visual creative at Save the Children…

… and then meet Gemma Jackson, production designer on Game of Thrones.

We also interview Clair Battison, senior preservation conservator at the Victoria & Albert Museum; Rachel Louis, arts participation manager at Vital Arts; and Brad Silby (below), Framestore lead animator on films such as Where the Wild Things Are and Guardians of the Galaxy…

… before talking to Simon Henwood (above), creative director for musicians such as Kanye West and Rihanna.

We also invite Grey ECD Nils Leonard and William Fowler, Headspace creative director and CR-columinst to a GoogleChat to debate what happens when advertising attempts to ‘do good’; and feature an extract from TM, a new book looking at the history of 29 classic logos by CR’s Mark Sinclair, which finally gets to the bottom of how the Woolmark logo came about in the mid-1960s.

In Crit, Rick Poynor finds much to pore over at this year’s Rencontres D’Arles festival of photography…

… while Sarah Snaith reports back from a new exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion dedicated to the work of US designer, Ivan Chermayeff. At the back, Paul Belford talks through a deceptively simple-looking print ad for the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.

This issue’s Monograph features some behind the scenes images of the creation of Jim Lambie’s concrete path in Glasgow, with photographs of the process taken by Kirk Teasdale. The new issue is available to buy now. To subscribe to CR, go here.