Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen is now selling the latest edition of writer and editor Max Fraser’s London Design Guide, and we’ve also got five copies to give away.

Released today, this third edition of Max Fraser‘s 208-page guide to design in the British capital features reviews of more than 150 new and established retailers, galleries, museums and bookshops, including our Dezeen Watch Store retail space on page 191.

The book is divided into ten neighbourhood chapters, each accompanied by detailed maps and listings for specific streets that feature copious design venues.

A selection of restaurant, bar and café recommendations for each area are picked for interior design credentials as well as food and service quality.

This issue also includes essays about the state of retail and the future of physical shops, written by a series of experts.

You can buy the London Design Guide 2014-2015 here for £12, or in combination with our Dezeen Book of Ideas for just £18.

We’re also giving readers the chance to win one of five copies. See details of how to enter below.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “London Design Guide 2014-2015” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.

You need to subscribe to our newsletter to have a chance of winning. Sign up here.

Competition closes 10 October 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Read on for more information about the London Design Guide 2014-2015:

London design guide 2014-2015 edition, edited by Max Fraser

London’s only comprehensive design guide returns with new content and contributors in this totally updated and rewritten third edition.

For fans of contemporary and vintage design and those looking to access it, London Design Guide gives a fresh insight into the city’s design retailers, galleries, museums and bookshops. More than 150 new and established hotspots are compiled and reviewed, providing a tantalising viewpoint of the design capital of the world.

Each entry is categorised by neighbourhood and accompanied by detailed maps to help navigate the best that the city has to offer. In each of the ten neighbourhood chapters, we’ve honed in on streets that demonstrate a healthy mix of independent shops and services and asked selected business owners to comment on their evolution and attributes, with contributors including Stephen Webster, Ally Capellino, Sam & Sam Clarke and Michael Anastassiades. Furthermore, restaurant, bar and café recommendations are featured for each area, selected as much for their design credentials as for the quality of food and service.

Every edition of London Design Guide includes themed essays from a variety of design experts and commentators. In this edition, we’ve examined the state of retail during a period when shops are undoubtedly struggling with a weak economy, tapered footfall, high rents and the great might of internet shopping. We ask retailers and analysts, including Sheridan Coakley (scp), Simon Alderson (twentytwentyone), Lina Kanafani (Mint) and Magnus Englund (Skandium), what’s the future trajectory of bricks-and-mortar shops?

The 208-page London Design Guide is a snapshot of the design scene today, a celebration of creativity and a practical tool for Londoners and tourists alike. There’s no better incentive for exploring the wealth of design in the capital.

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by Max Fraser appeared first on Dezeen.

Every graphic designer seems to have a children’s book in them, says hat-trick‘s Jim Sutherland. Having just recently helped to create one, he considers why so many in the profession, including Alan Fletcher, Paul Rand and Milton Glaser, have decided to work – and play – in the medium…

As designers, often the best time in our job is when we get to play, so it’s no surprise that we like the idea of children as an audience. This was neatly summed up by George Bernard Shaw: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing”.

Working as a professional designer can be incredibly serious. Sometimes it seems that we all have to be grown up far too soon. So when the opportunity to approach projects with a sense of unadulterated joy arises, it’s one we grasp. Even the word ‘unadulterated’ suggests a lack of adults being involved.

Children may be a tough audience but the rewards can be tangible and joyful (how many of our grown-up clients’ faces light up when we present work?) I think there’s a parallel between the joy we feel when solving projects and the reaction of a child who sees it.

When I look at the work of some of my favourite designers, it seems that all of them have made at least one book. It’s great to see designers who are happy to turn from large corporate identities, to a small hardback book to inspire and entertain children, not to mention adults.

I love the idea that one minute they might be doing a title sequence for a Hitchcock film or IBM’s identity, and the next they’re drawing a strange frog. I think it’s this balance of serious and playful work that appeals to us all.

Bizarre animals, typography, cut paper, colours and wit all make an appearance between the pages. What follows is just a personal choice of some my favourites, hardly touching the surface of what designers have created over the years. Feel free to add your own favourites in the comments.

Bruno Munari seems to be a good starting point (see the first two images in the post, above). An amazing designer, educator, writer and publisher. His educational and book work is phenomenal. Some of my favourites include the books ABC and Zoo.

Unsurprisingly, one recurring theme is alphabets and letters. A lovely example of this is Alan Fletcher’s Ant Eaters to Zebras (‘O’ spread shown, above) and the recently published book featuring his ‘abecedarium’.

Another example is the typographic beauty of Alphabeasties by Werner Design Werks. Above is an elephant made, of course, from the letter ‘e’.

Designers have often worked with their partners, too. Paul and Anne Rand published Little One, Sparkle and Spin (above) and I Know a Lot of Things (see ‘dog’ spread, shown above).

Milton and Shirley Glaser collaborated on If Apples had Teeth (above) and The Alphazeds.

While long-time collaborators Saul and Elaine Bass worked together on Henri’s Walk to Paris (above).

Another couple of favourites from the US would have to include Seymour Chwast’s 12 Circus Rings and Get Dressed! (cover shown, above) and Bob Gill’s What Colour is Your World? (below).

Then there are those illustrators who are also obviously designers in their own right. Eric Carle originally worked as graphic designer in the promotion department of The New York Times, before going on to worldwide fame with The Very Hungry Caterpillar (cover shown, below); while Dick Bruna, creator of Miffy, was a graphic designer and illustrator.

More recently we have seen Marion Deuchar’s wonderful drawing books Let’s Make Some Great Art and Let’s Make Some Great Fingerprint Art (below).

And it’s not always just books – just look at Ken Garland’s amazing work for Galt Toys. One of the nicest identity projects ever, where he was designing the toys themselves as well as all the packaging and all the print.

At hat-trick we have been lucky enough to recently publish a book of our own, Hide & Eek! (below), working with Rebecca Sutherland. Not in the same league as the above, but it’s a start.

Perhaps we could all put more of our efforts and abilities into things to inspire children, rather than spending time discussing brand onions. It would be nice for us and, more importantly, nice for our children, too.

Jim Sutherland is creative director at hat-trick design. Hide & Eek! is out now – more details on the book (which should be read in bed with a torch) in our post on it, here. Art directed by Sutherland and Gareth Howat and designed by Sutherland and Laura Bowman, it is published by Californian publisher Knock Knock and launches in the UK in the autumn.

Promotional sign for the Penguin Crime series, designed by Romek Marber, on the floor of the Minories Gallery space. Image courtesy The Minories Galleries

Colchester School of Art’s Minories Galleries has launched a new exhibition on the work of graphic designer Romek Marber. Best known for his innovative Penguin Crime Series, the show also provides a chance to see his work for The Economist, the Observer Magazine and a range of other clients…

Born in Poland in 1925, as a teenager Marber was deported to the Bochnia ghetto in 1939. Three year’s later, he was saved from being transported to the Belzec death camp by the actions of a sergeant Kurzbach, the commander of the forced-labour workshop in the town.

Various Penguin-related material designed by Marber

Marber arrived in the UK in 1946, reuniting with his father and brother, and studied at St Martins in the early 1950s, before attending the Royal College of Art in 1953.

Having worked on covers for The Economist, in 1961 Penguin’s Germano Facetti commissioned the young designer to design two book covers for the author Simeon Potter before giving Marber the chance to work across an entire sequence of titles for Penguin Crime.

“To launch the new Crime series I was asked to do twenty titles,” the designer recalled in a talk given to the Penguin Collectors Society in 2007 (later published in the book, Penguin By Illustrators). “The month was June and the books had to be on display in October. The ‘grid’ and the rather dark visual images, suggestive of crime, had an immediate impact.”

Penguin Crime covers

The design approach – the ‘Marber grid’ – which evolved from his work was so successful that, as Rick Poynor suggests, “Facetti applied it, effectively unchanged, to the blue Pelicans and to the orange covers of Penguin fiction. Before long its spirit pervaded the entire list.”

Some examples of Marber’s covers for The Economist from 1960-67. Image courtesy The Minories Galleries

While Marber’s Crime series has become a classic of modern book design (though at the time his role in its development was underplayed), the Minories Gallery covers his wider graphic output, and includes images of his earlier covers for The Economist (which had led Facetti to invite him to Penguin), New Society, Robert Nicholson’s London Guides, Town, Queen and the Observer, where he worked as the Magazine’s first art director in 1964.

From 1964-65 Marber was appointed as art director launching the Observer Magazine and continued until 1966 as design consultant. Image courtesy The Minories Galleries

Curated by Kaavous Clayton, Graphics also has displays of Marber’s lesser known logo and identity work (below, left), including a series of panels of designs for the wire fencing company, Norvic (second image, below) in which a familiar shade of green pops up once again.

Now in his 88th year, Marber has rightly assumed his position as one of the most interesting and important graphic designers to have worked in Britain – his efforts in book publishing alone are worthy of an entire exhibition. This new show looks to widen his appeal to those interested in the history of book design and also in the development of mid-century graphics.

Romek Marber: Graphics is at the Minories Galleries, Colchester School of Art, 74 High Street, Colchester CO1 1UE. until October 26. More details at colchester.ac.uk/art/minories.

Work for the London Planetarium, above right

“The Wrights preached practicality over the ‘total absurdity of the Old Dream,’ and no place was riper for implementing their vision than ‘The Vanishing Dining Room.’ Conceding that, to ‘a reader accustomed to a room devoted only to dining, with fixed and formal furniture, we may seem to have done frightening and unstabilizing things,’ the Wrights’ iconoclastic solutions included placing the dining table on lockable casters, so that it could be rolled next to the sink for clearing after the meal; using disposable paper plates and cups to eliminate part of the dishwashing chores, upholstering chairs in plasticized materials, and streamlining meals to limit the number of dishes and utensils needed—no more soup to open dinner, followed by salad, a garnished roast, and dessert; the one-dish, freezer-to-oven-to-table-casserole was king. Some of these suggestions have stood the test of time. Others have been dropped or modified to marry convenience with convention and aesthetics, although the rolling dining table, however intelligent, will always evoke images of Marx Brothers mishaps.”

-Culinary historian Cathy Kaufman on Russel and Mary Wright‘s 1950 Guide to Easier Living in “The Vanishing Dining Room,” an article that appears in the latest issue of Vintage Magazine

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Inside Outside. From left, ready-to-color versions of “Oath of the Pond” by Koichiro Takagi and “Pizza Face” by Ohara Hale. (Photo: UnBeige)

It’s that time of year again, when even those who haven’t stepped inside a classroom for decades feel the unbearable urge to stock up on school supplies. Break out that fresh box of Crayolas—or Prismacolors or Copics—for Outside the Lines, out today from Perigee. This “artists’ coloring book for giant imaginations” is the brainchild of Souris Hong-Porretta, who gathered line drawings (most commissioned especially for this book) by the likes of Shepard Fairey, Exene Cervenka, Gary Baseman, Ryan McGinness, Jen Corace, and 100 other creative masterminds ranging from animators to video game artists. We asked Hong-Porretta, a self-desciribed “art enthusiast, idea enabler, and yay-maker” to tell us more about the colorful project.

What led you to create Outside the Lines?
My daughter, Lulu! She has lots and lots of coloring books and I noticed that she had a preference for coloring books with illustrations by established artists such as Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. After watching her scribble outside the lines of a Moebius coloring book, I thought it’d be cool if she could color artwork by our creative cabal so I wrote a list of folks I knew and one by one asked them if they would contribute work for a coloring book. I had several dozen yeses in a short amount of time—enough to motivate me to write a book proposal. The rest came together rather quickly.

How did you select the artists whose work you wanted to include?
Nearly all the artists included in the book are personal friends. Some very old, some newer. A few are friends of friends. But nearly every artist in the book has a relationship with me by way of previous projects or a social tie. Also, because I had once worked for a lifestyle magazine called, Tokion, I was able to call upon friends I had made from the ’90s, before they were rockstar photographers, illustrators, fine artists, graffiti artists, musicians, and much more.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.