Coup de coeur pour l’illustrateur russe Vasilj Godzh qui maîtrise à la perfection ses traits et propose des créations toutes en lignes et en formes. Des travaux et des illustrations splendides à découvrir dans cette sélection, disponible en images dans la suite de l’article.
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We’re sorry to start your morning out on a gloomy note, but sometimes the news just plays out that way. Yesterday, Georgetown University‘s Center on Education and the Workforce published a report entitled “Hard Times,” a look at the employment prospects, or lack there of, college and graduate school students face upon graduation. While there’s been plenty of talk about the national 9% unemployment rate across the board among all graduates, the study breaks down the data by a variety of majors, analyzing just how difficult a time they’ll have finding a job and how much, on average, they’ll wind up making. It’s a fascinating report, though if you are a student in any sort of creative field, the news is, as expected, much more bleak. When broken down by majors in the arts, those seeking a major in design face an 11.8% unemployment rate. That’s eclipsed by fine arts majors (12.6%) and those in film, video and photography programs (12.9%), but it gets particularly grim when it comes to architecture, which ranks at the top for unemployment, coming in at a staggering 13.9%. Granted, none of that’s new, as we’ve been writing about students rethinking architecture programs since 2008, and about how impossible the post-school prospects have been in the proceeding years. You’d expect and/or hope that things had gradually improved at least a little over these long four years, but apparently that just isn’t the case yet. Here’s a bit from the report:
…majors that are closely aligned with occupations and industries in low demand can misfire. For example, unemployment rates for recent college graduates who majored in Architecture start high at 13.9 percent and due to its strong alignment with the collapse in construction and housing, unemployment remains high even for experienced college graduates at 9.2 percent.
You can read the full report, here (pdf).
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Searle reports on Winston Churchill’s last Commons speech for Life. Image: Perpetua
Before I even knew what illustration was, I loved the work of Ronald Searle, who has died aged 91. To call him a ‘cartoonist’ somehow doesn’t do justice to one of our great satirists, artists and chroniclers of the best and very worst of life
Searle’s figures, whether crusty old majors, devious schoolboys or famous names from the stage or politics, had a fantastic rumpled, inky quality to them. All pointy shoes and sharp elbows.
Famously, Searle had been a Japanese prisoner of war during World War Two. In 1942 he was captured in Singapore and suffered the horrors of incarceration in the infamous Changi jail and forced labour on the Burma railway. Summoning the last of his strength at the end of each day, Searle sketched his fellow prisoners, hiding his drawings at great personal risk: “I desperately wanted to put down what was happening, because I thought if by any chance there was a record, even if I died, someone might find it and know what went on,” he told the Guardian in 2010. Searle saw himself as an ‘unofficial’ war artist but his drawings, now held by the Imperial War Museum (see here), are as powerful a portrayal of the horrors of conflict as any.
While a prisoner, Searle also worked on his St Trinian’s cartoons – the anarchic and mischievous schoolgirls who, after the war, would become wildly popular first in print, then as a series of films for which Searle created title sequences. For Searle, the success of St Trinian’s was double-edged: he came to loathe the cartoons and the films they spawned, fearing that they overshadowed everything else. For while in Britain he will always be linked with gymslips and hockey sticks, his work encompassed so much more.
Holiday cover, July 1959. Image: Perpetua
Portrait of Papa Doc Duvalier for Status magazine, New York, 1968. Image: Perpetua
Searle illustrated Punch’s theatre column during the 1950s. Image: Perpetua
After moving to France in the early 60s to escape his new-found fame, Searle worked extensively for American magazines, illustrating almost 40 covers for The New Yorker, as well as contributing cartoons for Life and a number of portraits of political figures for various titles. Also for Life and for Holiday, he produced some superb reportage work, including commissions to record Churchill’s last Commons speech, the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel and JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. Searle also worked extensively in advertising, making full use of his gift for characterisation in campaigns including one long-running series of posters for Lemon Hart rum.
Image: Perpetua
Later in life, Searle produced acerbic cartoons for Le Monde as well as travel books, animation and film posters. Unfortunately, much of this work went unnoticed in the UK, St Trinian’s, as Searle suspected, overshadowing everything else.
This 2000 piece from The Guardian explains far better than I could the breadth, depth and appeal of Searle’s work. But on a personal level, when I think of Searle it will always be as the man who brought to life the self-styled ‘gorilla of 3B’, Nigel Molesworth. To a comprehensive schoolboy like me, large parts of Down With Skool!, How to be Topp, Whizz for Atomms and Back in the Jug Agane – the series of Molesworth books Searle produced with writer Geoffrey Willans in the 50s – were virtually incomprehensible. I’d never heard of ‘prep’, had no idea what a matron did and the idea of studying Latin was baffling. I had nothing in common with the world of St Custard’s, Molesworth’s boarding school, but I was enthralled and delighted by the characters that inhabited it. The teachers were psychopaths, the pupils a distinctly unhygienic mix of “oiks, wets and weeds” as Molesworth would say, and the whole place in danger of imminent collapse in great clouds of chalk dust and spiders. And I loved it.
As I said at the beginning of this piece, the word ‘cartoonist’ seems wholly inadequate to describe Searle – he preferred the term ‘graphic satirist’ which is more like it. If you know little of his work beyond naughty schoolgirls and scowling ‘young Elizabethans’ I’d recommend Russell Davies’s biography, the Imperial War Museum site, the fantastic archive of almost all Searle’s work on the Perpetua blog, his Illustrated Winespeak which pokes gentle fun at the arcane language of wine snobs and, doing the same for book collecting, Slightly Foxed but Still Desirable.
Plate featuring one of Searle’s wine cartoons ‘Fullish body but beginning to fade’. Available here
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.
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.
Yayoi Kusama a pensé cette installation “The Obliteration Room” pour la Galerie d’Art Moderne de Brisbane. En utilisant une pièce à vivre totalement blanche, les enfants de l’exposition étaient invités à coller des stickers colorés sur tous les éléments de la pièce pour la transformer.
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‘I leave you alone for one second…’ Photo by Stuart Addelsee
Visitors to the Children’s Art Centre at Queensland Art Gallery in Australia are handed coloured stickers as they enter one part of Yayoi Kusama’s current show and invited to ‘obliterate’ a previously pristine white room…
The room, shown top, prior to the sticker onslaught (the piano is on the right)
The Obliteration Room revisits a project Kusama created for the gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2002, where she was one of three senior artists, along with Nam June Paik and Lee Ufan, to exhibit works.
Midway through the obliteration
The recreated all-white living room is just one part of Kusama’s exhibition Look Now, See Forever and, since opening in late November, the space has gradually filled with thousands of coloured dots. Kusuma has been producing interactive pieces since the 1960s, often using the human body in her performance pieces.
Detail of image shown, top, by Stuart Addelsee
For more information on the Obliteration Room project, go here. An interactive game for children, Kusama’s World of Dots, is also online, here.
Look Now, See Forever, is on at Queensland Art Gallery until March 11. See qag.qld.gov.au. Tate Modern in London is also set to stage an exhibition of her work in February this year. More at tate.org.uk/modern.
Via boingboing.net; additional imagery at the Colossal blog.
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.
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.
We hope you had a nice long holiday weekend, but now it seems time to get back to normal (or at least a slower version of normal until things really get back to cooking next week). To help you adjust, here’s some miscellany to catch you back up on what’s been going on of late:
Ivanka Trump was likely saved some negative buzz by having a controversy pop up right before the weekend. Designer Derek Lam has accused Trump of stealing the design for one of his wedge shoes for her own line of wedges, issuing a cease-and-desist in the process. The designer says it’s a flat out copy, but Trump has fired back, arguing that the style has been used across brands for years and isn’t Lam’s sole (puns!) creation. “There is nothing iconic about the appearance of the Lam sandal,” a Trump spokesperson said in a statement. Now it’s time for the lawyers to duke it out.
On a sad note, the famous architect who helped popularize modernism and prefabricated housing, Andrew Geller, passed away on Christmas Day, reportedly of kidney failure. He was 87. The NY Times obituary is a good summary of Mr. Geller’s storied career, but if you have the time, we highly recommend reading Alastair Gordon‘s touching piece about the life and work of his close friend.
The battle between Federal Emergency Management Agency and the University of Iowa over buildings that were destroyed during a 2008 flood (including a depressingly now-unusable Steven Holl structure), continues unabated. The university wants to use FEMA’s rebuilding funds to move their art museum to higher ground, both to keep the art safe and to allow them to get said art insured, whereas FEMA only wants to provide funding to rehab the damaged museum (which would render insurance on the art collection impossible). In this latest round, the university has provided FEMA with more information and now is preparing itself for another long wait to hear back.
Finally, Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Fallingwater has now entered the iPad age, with the launch of its own app, offering visitors or architecture fans from afar, to tour the house and learn all its many facts and figures. Here’s the promo video:
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A Brooklyn-based radio trio, the master of animatronics, precision art work, the history of Danish tattoos and a talk with a French fashion design icon make up our top video picks for 2011
All week we’ll be looking back on the past year of CH to resurface our favorite stories and moments. For starters, it was a great year of Cool Hunting Videos—we made some new friends in our native New York and around the globe—trekking long and far to produce our mini-documentaries about creativity, innovation and process. Below are our top five favorites from 2011:
Master music selectors Chances with Wolves gave us a look behind the scenes of their successful East Village Radio show. We spent some time with the dynamic trio—who are childhood friends—and learned about their methods and inspiration.
The godfather of Christmas, Lou Nasti is hands down the most intriguing character we met all year. We had a chance to check out his Brooklyn warehouse where he creates all kinds of magical animatronic installations for clients around the globe.
When talking to the iconic French fashion designer and founder of APC you never know what to expect. We had the unique opportunity to sit down with Jean Touitou in NYC and got some insight into his take on clothing, business and religion.
On a trip to Copenhagen we were welcomed into the city’s most famous tattoo parlor to get educated on the history and progression of the artform. Jon Nordstrøn, author of the book Danish Tattooing, broke down the long evolution of tattooing from its nautical roots to the more complex modern iterations.
We spent the afternoon with Kim Rugg in her London home and studio talking about her work re-imagining newspapers, comics, stamps and cereal boxes using their existing form while rearranging their content. The amount of precision and time her pieces take is truly mind-blowing.
Our interview with the album cover designer behind some of the most memorable images in music
Storm Thorgerson is undoubtedly the man who made album covers a veritable artistic force. Working with bands like Pink Floyd (who gave him his start), Biffy Clyro, The Mars Volta, Muse and so many more, Thorgerson himself is as legendary as the musicians whose work he visually interprets—and for good reason. A master of his craft, he continues to leave both bands’ and fans’ mouths aghast with his visually arresting pictorials, which creatively toe the line between fantasy and reality.
Upon the recent release of A Foot In The Door—a best-of Pink Floyd album featuring remastered recordings of the original songs—we sat down with the iconic British artist to learn more about his own greatest hits, and how he views his own body of work to date.
It’s a real floor that we made, and that’s a real man walking across it and the shadow is real. We made the floor specially for this. The tiles are made with what’s called tongue and groove, over a civilized piece of wood, to indicate the gap between the tiles. The pictures are stuck as photographs and then sealed with a varnish, and then it’s all distressed to make it look a bit older. It was very heavy and after we finished it we destroyed it, because there was nowhere to put it.
No. The things we do are real, not surreal. All the things we do, we don’t do on the computer. We build sculptures, we do stunts, we hold events—it’s all done for real, about 95% of it anyway is all very real. They may be a bit odd, sometimes they’re a bit contrary, but I don’t feel like a surrealist myself.
I’m not particularly interested in dreams or things that couldn’t go together naturally a bit. It’s difficult to comment on my own work. I mean mostly I think my work is crap, but that’s probably an over paranoid view. I just tend to like it or dislike it, but I don’t think I’m a surrealist. I like the real, but with a twist, but not much of a twist. I don’t like anything too blatant really, I like humor a lot. We like to make funny pictures if we can.
I think that our work is sometimes elegant, sometimes funny, sometimes contrary, juxtaposed. I would hope that it’s optimistic because that’s how I feel.
Yeah I suppose I probably would. This is an expression they use to denote when they’re feeling very much in the music zone. They’re becoming at one with the music, playing the best they can, and they’re very in tune with the tune. I think this is a word that they use to denote being immersed in the music. So I wouldn’t use the same words, but there are times when I feel that.
Like with Wish You Were Here, we spent a long time with what theme, what undercurrent there was to the album, which took about five weeks because they didn’t know what the album was about, and I know I certainly didn’t. I think we slowly uncovered—not a concept—but an undercurrent. Something thrown underneath the music but is informing it. Once I found that, or once they told me what it was (I guess we found it together), the rest of it visually, came into place very easily. But it took a long time to get there.
So the “in the groove thing” does happen with me, but it just doesn’t happen very quickly. Sometimes I might have an immediate thought but rarely, mostly it takes a lot of time for the music to kind of sync into me. And when it starts to gel, at that point I would say I was in the groove, but I wouldn’t use that term. I don’t know what I would say, but I think it would be a similar sense: I had a really good idea of what to do and I felt immersed in it. I work pretty closely with musicians because I’m only interested in trying to represent the music visually. The music is the starting point, not always, but nearly always.
I think I always care about it. I mean, do I like it? If you think about it, it would be impossible for me to like all the music that I’m ever given. But what I do, is I certainly respect it. I don’t think that it has much bearing really because I don’t think it’s my job to like it. I mean if you were a Pink Floyd fan or a Muse fan or a Mars Volta fan, I don’t think you’d care whether the designer liked the music or not because you know you do. If you’re a fan, you don’t care who likes it or dislikes it if you like it. I don’t think they’re interested in my view of the music. What they’re interested, hopefully, is in my interpretation of music to visual, or my translation from one medium to another.
Oh don’t ask me that. That’s like asking me how old I am, not a fair question. Probably about 300, I don’t really keep count. I’m privileged to work with music, so I’m happy to work, and we work with all kind of different sorts of music. We work with bands from different countries, different ages, different genres, and mostly it’s just really stimulating. I like my job. So, in that sense, as long as I can keep working, and paying the rent as they call it over in England, then I’m relatively happy.
Yes. I think there’s quite a filmic influence on my work, but I’m not particularly conscious of it. In a way, I think all artists have all sorts of unconscious drives, admittedly they don’t know what they are. Or interests, or preoccupations. I think if you were to go through my work, over the years you’d find that I was probably very interested in things like birds, or water or trees. I’m not sure what it means, and I don’t really care very much what it might mean. They’re things that I like, they’re things that I come back to every now and then. I think that’s just very typical of all artists whatever their medium. Artists are sort of, preoccupied, and often those sorts of things reappear in their work.
I think we use a Pulsar back on a Hasselblad body. I’m concerned with the technology, whether it was 35mm, whether it was digital or film, I’m concerned with it in a sense. The thing that I do, it’s a performance in some strange place that nobody can get to. So if I didn’t take a picture of it, you would never see it and the band would never see it. And if the band never saw it they may wonder where their cover is, you see. So I have to take the picture. The technology is very important but I hire a good friend to do it. He’s called Rupert, he’s been working with me now for about 15 years. He’s probably sick to death of me actually but he’s still there. It’s his responsibility and if he makes a mistake we kill him. It’s very straightforward.
Well I suspect the album cover has a rather short life in some way, although I hear vinyl is making a comeback. I think that music and visual will always invite togetherness. Whether it’s a t-shirt, whether it’s a poster, whether it’s something on the computer, whether it’s a CD or vinyl. Whether it’s an advert on TV or a billboard. Somehow it feels quite natural to do it. All things come to pass, I suspect. In England it’s very popular to do the box set and visually speaking I’m ok with that. I think there’s always a place for visual and music, for the two art forms to coexist. Album covers or CDs may be a dying breed yes, but les choses changent. Things change.
It’s coming to the end of another year in the wonderful world of visual communications. Time to test your knowledge of who did what in the CR Quiz of the Year.
We’ve divided the questions up into the months of the year. If you’re stuck for an answer, you can find them all by digging around either in this website or in your back issues of the printed magazine. Best of luck. Answers to be revealed in the New Year.
1. CR’s January issue introduces readers to six Ones to Watch. One of these young creatives also designed our cover – who was it?
2. Starbuck’s reveals a new stripped-down logo designed by which US consultancy alongside the brand’s in-house team?
3. Intel launches The Chase, an innovative ad featuring a 105-second chase across a wide variety of programme windows on a computer desktop including iTunes, Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite. Which agency was responsible?
4. “It does look like a bulbous penis, unfortunately.” Which major sporting event’s logo, launched this month, was this CR commenter referring to?
5. The Gunn Report reveals the most awarded commercial of 2010. An unlikely tale in French, can you remember the name of the ad and the client?
1. Can you name three of the typefaces honoured in the Best in Book section of our Type Annual?
2. Droga5 launches a campaign to remove all the advertising from Times Square in aid of the new documentary by which filmmaker? Bonus point: what was the film called?
3. VW reveals what would go on to be the most viewed ad of the year at the Superbowl. Name the ad and the agency responsible
4. Unit Editions launches its book on Dutch studio Total Design: can you name two of Total’s founding partners?
4. Penguin Books follows up Great Ideas with Great Food. Who was the art director on the series?
5. Which country threatens to boycott the 2012 Olympics because of the logo? Not as a comment on the quality of its design but because it allegedly spells ‘zion’.
1. The Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award goes to…?
2. CR profiles the designer of pictograms that represent every aspect of life. His work also appears in our Monograph booklet that month: what was his name?
3. Which punk band did we also feature in the same issue?
4. Wieden + Kennedy launches a new commercial featuring cats with thumbs: which client was it for?
5. Eurostar launches its new identity – or should we say ‘brand world’? Who designed it?
6. The Design Museum’s Wim Crouwel show opens. Which London-based designer and self-confessed Crouwel stalker co-curated it?
1. CR announces its list of our 20 favourite logos of all time. Which one came top?
2. Who designed the cover of our April issue?
3. Hat-Trick designs a series of RSC stamps featuring Shakesperean quotes written out by which illustrator?
4. A spoof Royal Wedding video becomes massively popular on YouTube (comments on CR range from “You can feel the smugness coming off the screen in waves” to “I LOVE this ad, it’s funny, and that… as they say, is that! “- which ad agency was responsible?
5. D&AD launches a new award for work done for creative ideas that change the world for the better: what colour pencil will the winner receive?
1. In CR, Rick Poynor interviews someone described as a “musician, artist, film director, writer and patron of great graphic design”. Who?
2. Name three projects honoured as Best in Book in the CR Annual
3. The Little Chef gets a makeover, courtesy of which brand design studio?
4. BBH creates an epic two-and-a-half-minute commercial for Audi in which a driver talks about his experiences of which famous race?
5. The Design Museum stages a show about which soft drink?
6. What was this little feller advertising?
1. CR profiles veteran ad man Sir John Hegarty: what was the name of his creative partner on the 1985 Levi’s Laundrette commercial?
2. The Glue Society creates an installation consisting of a house where it rains on the inside for an arts festival in which country?
3. Name two of the six Black Pencils awarded at D&AD
4. And the winner of the Titanium Lion at Cannes?
5. Wieden + Kennedy launches an innovative scheme by which fans of which band can create their own album cover and even earn a share of sales?
1. Name two of the illustrators featured in the Best in Book section of the CR Illustration Annual
2. And who designed the cover of this issue?
3. Former graphic designer and music video director Mike Mills releases his second feature film, starring Ewan McGregor. What was it called?
4. MoMA in New York opens a major show on interactive design – what was it called?
5. Which Leeds-based studio created this new identity for the National Railway Museum?
1. CR’s Summer Reading issue features a selection of great writing on visual communication. Who wrote this? “Early in my life as a designer, I acquired a reputation as a good bullshitter.”
2. Levi’s releases the latest in its Go Forth series of ads but which event made the timing of this ad somewhat awkward and ensured that it would not be shown in the UK?
3. Which illustrator releases a Daily Monster Maker app?
4. How old would Bill Bernbach have been on August 13?
5. The Radio Times launches a controversial website designed by which studio?
1. CR features a book on the in-house packaging design department of which major supermarket?
2. Name one of the graduates featured in our September Graduate Special issue?
3. Interbrand renames Airmiles as what?
4. At last some interesting work for the Olympics – a series of Paralympic posters by agency McCann Worldgroup and which illustrator?
1. CR features the Comedy Carpet, a major installation in which seaside town?
2. In his regular logo design column, Michael Evamy looks at the Google Android: who designed it?
3. The Imperial War Museums unveil a new identity by which studio?
4. Steve Jobs passes away: in which year was the Mac launched with Ridley Scott’s famous ad?
5. “What an appalling redesign. The choice of font is uninspired. The mark is lazy (ten minutes in illustrator?). The positioning of the mark lacks dynamism. And the strapline is so trite that it must have come out of a marketing dept group ‘workshop’.” Which logo for a major UK corporation is this CR commenter talking about?
6. Name three of the cartoon characters featured in TBWA’s Müller yoghurt Wunderful Stuff commercial
7. As the Occupy movement pitches camp outside St Paul’s it publishes a newspaper, The Occupied Times, using which Jonathan Barnbrook typeface?
1. “I like it to be powerful. I like to have some humanity in it.” That’s why his body of work still speaks to us decades later. It has humanity. Who was Rick Poynor talking about in a major feature in CR?
2. Who painted Coke’s Yes Girl, the subject of a major piece in CR this month?
3. “Such a great twist at the end! Watched the video 3 times and wanted to cry each time!! So heart wrenching… but lovely” Which ad is this CR commenter talking about?
4, Name three of the artists producing posters for the 2012 Olympics
5. “Looks like he spilt his paint and was trying to wipe it up”. Which artist’s Olympic poster was this CR commenter referring to?
6. Students from which college produce alternative Olympic poster designs featured on the CR blog?
1. Which city is the focus of CR’s attention in print this month?
2. Which Dutch designer, profiled in CR this month, increased her body weight by almost 50% during the course of one mammoth project during which she barely left her desk?
3. The Design Museum acquires which weapon and design ‘classic’ for its collection?
4. Which brand suggests shopping with it will allow us to avoid the Walk of Shame?
5. Which rapper-turned-design critic offered this analysis of the work of Charles and Ray Eames: “they was doing mash-ups before mash-ups even existed!”
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from all at CR
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.
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.
There are some documentaries that seem to benefit from what suddenly happened to their already-interesting subject matter during the time the film was being shot. We’re thinking Wilco’s unexpected break-up while I’m Trying to Break Your Heart was being made, or Julius Shulman passing away at the same time as the releasee of Visual Acoustics. This time, it just happened to be director Alison Klayman being at the right place at the right time in making a documentary about artist Ai Weiwei, just as he was entering a very difficult 2011, which also turned him into a household name. The first trailer for Klayman’s documentary, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, has now just been released:
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