Hasta La Ideas

One of the finer things to come from the Bush Jr. era. It’s on eBay and the auction ends in a few days! Interestingly enough, the piece in Germany. (via Kempt)

Anthony Burrill is a busy man. Having only just installed an exhibition with Michael Marriott at Mother’s London offices, he’s now popped over to Paris to put up this show at fancy concept store Colette.

The exhibition follows Burrill’s previous collaboration with Colette, where he created temporary windows for the store last summer when it was being refurbished. Burrill decided that he wanted the show to be a contrast with the show at Mother, which is constructed mostly from wood. “I thought about what I wanted to make and knew it had to be bright, shiny and colourful,” he says. “The store is very busy, full of glittering objects, I had to make something that would stand out. I have always wanted to use perspex, the intensity of the colour and shiny manufactured smooth surface fit well with the super simple images I’ve been developing.”

“The body of work is called Geometry in Nature,” he continues. “I like the idea of making something that depicts nature out of a completely unnatural material. I tried to strip down the imagery to its simplest forms – circles, triangles, lines. I used a simple palette of basic colours. The background for all the pictures is black, I wanted the colours to stand out as much as possible. The prints that support the perspex pictures in the show are all monochrome, I decided that the prints couldn’t compete with the intensity of the perspex colours, so made them all black and white. I think it looks tres chic!”

Burrill’s exhibition will be on show at Colette until February 28. More info on Burrill’s work can be found here.

Another gem via Behance.net – this illustration by Spanish artist Jericho Santander is called Mas Pelas. His work is surreal, imaginative and well crafted. Be sure to check out his other equally amazing illustrations.

From the original Macc Book – as used by designers in the 1500s

Before black vinyl folders, and way before the website, the Mediaeval ancestors of today’s graphic designers produced ‘model’ or ‘pattern’ books to show their work to potential clients. Only a handful survive but the British Library has recently discovered a prime example – the so-called Macclesfield Alphabet Book.

“…and with this alphabet we achieved best of breed stand-out in the highly competitive gruel sector…”

Produced c1500, the book is filled with designs for different styles of script, letters, initials and decorative borders. All are believed to have come from one workshop, where the book would have been used not just in ye olde pitche meetinge but also to teach assistants how to reproduce the house styles.

There are 14 different types of decorative alphabets featured, including decorative initials with faces

‘foliate’ alphabets, ie those featuring leaves or other foliage

a zoomorphic alphabet

plus, the Library says, large, coloured anthropomorphic initials modelled after fifteenth-century woodcuts or engravings

as well as two sets of different types of borders, some of which are fully illuminated in colours and gold.

“Yes, very nice, but can you make my coat of arms bigger?”

The Library is appealing for donations so that it can acquire the book, which it describes as being of “outstanding significance” and which has been in the library of the Earls of Macclesfield since around 1750. So far it has raised £340,000 of the £600,000 purchase price. If you can help, please email chloe.strickland@bl.uk or gabrielle.filmer-pasco@bl.uk

UPDATE
I asked the British Library about whether people should use gloves, here’s what they had to say:

“We recommend that people do not wear gloves when handling collection items unless they are touching certain vulnerable surfaces such as un-protected photographs, lead seals or the surface of a globe.

Instead we prefer people to ensure that they have clean, dry hands. There are several reasons for this. Gloves can blunt touch and make people less manually dextrous as they cannot feel the item that they are handling. This can cause them to grab at the item they are viewing or to hold it too firmly. This can actually increase rather than minimise the risk of damage to the item.

It is also very difficult to turn or lift pages with gloved hands. We have recently filmed a series of short videos which demonstrate the best way to handle and use different types of collection items.

This includes a video entitled ‘Using Gloves with Collection items’ which demonstrates how difficult it is to turn or lift pages with gloved hands. These videos can be viewed on our website by following this link.

Lastly gloves can also catch on loose pigments or fibres as well as picking up and transferring dust.”

After 23 years of brain-aided communication, the much-admired, much copied studio, The Designers Republic closed for business on Tuesday. But, as its founder Ian Anderson tells CR, it will rise again

All week, rumours have been flying around the internet that DR had gone out of business. CR can confirm that it is true. On Tuesday this week, the business was closed with nine staff being made redundant. According to its founder, Ian Anderson, the studio became insolvent due to a combination of factors: “We’d lost a couple of clients, didn’t win a couple of pitches, got a tax bill which should have been sorted out and wasn’t and a major client who didn’t pay the money they owed us – in themselves any of those things would have been fine but when they come all at once there’s not much you can do.”

However, while stressing that he is “gutted for the staff” and not wishing in any way to make light of the impact the studio’s closure will have on them, Anderson says that, in some ways, DR coming to an end “may be a blessing in disguise.”

“It hasn’t really been DR for the last two or three years: it had gone too far from what it was supposed to be,” Anderson says. Although, he says, he was happy with the “insightful” work that DR had done for major clients such as Coca-Cola, moving into that world had necessitated changing the business to more of an agency model with the added structure of account handlers that entails. He also says that it became necessary to take on the kind of work that he perhaps wouldn’t have chosen to do in order to keep a larger business going.

“I want to go back to what DR was,” he says of future plans. “Working hands-on and not through account managers. I’ve never liked that agency model – it’s not where creativity lies. DR accidentally ended up there in order to service bigger clients. I’m not being ungrateful to the people who ran the business side at DR – it wasn’t their fault. I’m glad we did it – it took getting there to make me realise that it wasn’t where I wanted to be.”

So what now? Today, he says, he is busying himself “lobbing out 23 years worth of paper samples, which is quite therapeutic”. Then there’s the long-awaited DR book, which he might finally get round to finishing, as well as another book which he is collaborating on with writer Liz Farrelly. “It does feel like the end of an era but really it stopped being DR two or three years ago. DR will go forward after this with me [under the same name] – whether it will be with a new team and a new office I don’t know.”

Anderson says that, for now, he wants to look at working collaboratively with other companies and creative people.

“I’m looking out the window and it’s a lovely sunny day – as it always is in Sheffield – and I think there are a lot of plus points. The Republic is dead… long live the Republic”