Hasta La Ideas

For those who have nothing left to pick over at the local bookstore’s summer display, theNewerYork looks to shake things up in the mainstream literary world by hosting alternatives to the “triumvirate” of poetry, short stories…

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(Photo: Jonathan Blanc)

It’s the summer of children’s books in New York. The Society of Illustrators is celebrating the creative legacy of Maurice Sendak with an exhibition of more than 200 Sendak originals, and his beloved wild things can also be found rumpusing at the New York Public Library as part of “The ABC of It,” a show that examines why children’s books are important, what and how they teach children, and what they reveal about the societies that produced them. Among the books and objects on view through March 2014 is this recreation of the great green room of Margaret Wise Brown‘s Goodnight Moon, complete with a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.

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Having peeked behind the gates of trophy estates and triplex apartments on both coasts and revealed the “lust, lies, greed, and betrayals that made the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Michael Gross is returning to the fashion world he so astutely chronicled in Model, his 1995 tome. The author has inked a deal for Girls on Film, “a look at modern fashion photography from a different angle—behind the lens—focusing on the photographers, and the magazines and marketers who hire them to make images of beautiful girls (and some boys) to sell products and manipulate people,” according to a deal report from Publishers Marketplace. The book is slated for publication by Atria Books in 2015, but you don’t have to wait that long to get a fresh fix. Gross’s House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address is due out in March of next year. Fingers crossed for chapters on Bob Stern and the joys of limestone alongside scoops on residents such as Lloyd Blankfein and Sandy Weill.
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The founders of Huck and Little White Lies are publishing a book about magazine design funded by Kickstarter donations.

Curious Iconic Craft is a 100-page book offering advice on editorial design, cover illustrations and custom typefaces. It’s also a retrospective, documenting the creative process behind film magazine Little White Lies and culture magazine Huck, set up in 2005 and 2006 by The Church of London.

Former TCoL directors Danny Miller, Rob Longworth, Alex Capes and Paul Willoughby have since set up creative agency Human After All (featured in the May issue of Creative Review) and no longer work on either title, but wanted to compile their shared knowledge and experience of working on 85 issues.

“It’s been quite a cathartic project for us,” says Miller, who came up with the idea for Little White Lies while studying design at Northumbria University.

“We were quite sad about not working on the mags anymore, and we had compiled a lot of material on magazine design – Paul had delivered talks on it, we’d put together an FAQ for students who approached us looking for advice and we had years of behind-the-scenes and process material – so we thought this would be a good opportunity to take what we’ve learned and do something useful with it,” he adds.

Human After All came up with the idea just a few weeks ago and since launching the project on crowd sourcing site Kickstarter on June 6, they have exceeded their £13,000 fundraising target and received donations from more than 500 backers.

Unusually for a Kickstarter project, the team has been working on the book while raising funds and it will be printed the day after fundraising ends on June 30. As it’s a one-off project, the only way to purchase a copy is to make a Kickstarter donation before midnight on Sunday.

“We could have self-published the book and set up a microsite for it, but we only wanted to do it if there was demand, which is why we went through Kickstarter. We used a little money we had aside to get started while fundraising – and we were a little nervous that we wouldn’t reach target – but we’ve had a steady stream of donations, averaging about £500 a day,” says Miller.

HAA have provided a detailed breakdown of what the money from donations will be spent on and since meeting their target, they have also introduced some new goals: if donations reach £15,000, for example, the team will introduce pantone ink throughout the book.

While Curious Iconic Craft includes a look at Huck and Little White Lies, Miller is keen to point out that it’s a working guide and not a portfolio. “There will be a lot of best practice sections and breakdowns of how we did things, but there will also be a lot of examples of things we did wrong and anecdotes about times we messed up and what we learned from them,” explains Miller.

“We’re not saying we’re the best magazine designers in the world, but we hope people can enjoy the book and take something from it,” he adds.

To view or donate to Human After All’s Kickstarter project, click here.

Images (from top): CIC’s working cover; spreads from the book; 85 Little White Lies and Huck covers; previously unseen final cover sketches provided by HAA.

Buy the current print issue of CR, or subscribe, here

The Central Saint Martins BA graphic design degree show displayed an impressive range of ideas and approaches, and more than a few references to its relatively new home in King’s Cross…

The new CSM site is still proving new enough to provide inspiration for several students’ projects. The BA Fine Art catalogue, designed by graphic design students Masaki Miwa and Adam Hutchinson, for example, references the space the department occupies – the only course to have a presence on all four floors of the building.

The typeface used, Granary Complex, is by Matt Taylor who based his design on the shapes of various architectural aspects of the new campus. (Images taken from Miwa’s CSM page.)

This hand-cut print of Westminster Abbey (below) comes from Jason Pearsall‘s series, A – Z of London (Royal Albert Hall shown, top of post). More on the book, here.

This is a close-up of part of Rebecca Wood‘s ‘typeface network’, Infini-Tea. Here, two faces are printed onto two separate sheets of tracing paper; one made up of tea leaves, the other railway tracks.

The project “communicates a story of how tea connects two seemingly random people on opposite sides of the world,” says Wood. More details on the work at rlawood.com/Infini-Tea.

I couldn’t find a name attached to this piece Employing a huge piece of paper, Stephanie Byttebier investigated the frequency of letters used in the English language, with the most commonly used words clustering at the centre of the sheet. (If anyone can credit the work, let me know via the comments below and I’ll add them in here).

These clever origami designs for a new tea brand, Fortune Tea, were by Yi Guo.

I also enjoyed Joseph Townshend‘s Weaving Liminality project. Townshend says he took the concept of ‘data-bending’ as his starting point; “a term used to describe the act of intentionally corrupting digital files in a bid to create ‘artefacts'”.

He then opened up a series of image files as text files, editing and rewriting them in the process (two shown). The result is a series of glitch-heavy distortions and Townshend then applied this aesthetic to create a series of hand-woven textiles (learning how to weave in the process).

Yizi Zheng‘s series of five 3D posters, in which a coloured area grows from the centre of each piece of paper, was impressive, too. “Looking into ways to give life to paper,” Zheng says.

Edward Carvalho-Monaghan‘s work was certainly hard to miss (El Topo poster shown above). Some of his brightly-coloured sequential art reminded me in places of comic book artist Jim Woodring’s work, but Carvalho-Monaghan’s style is very much his own.

He also seems happy to work in a purely pictorial manner when constructing a graphic narrative, too – see detail from The Trip, below – which is much harder to do than it looks. Read the rest of The Trip on his website, which contains a host of other great (and strange) pieces.

Mina Pile had a great space to show a range of her work – and it was a pleasant surprise to see so much of it hanging up rather than encased in glass. She also displayed some of the lino she used to create the prints (see below, in light blue). And frankly, who doesn’t like a piece of lino.

And linocut was also used by Cai Lunn to striking effect in a series of illustrations for The Wind in the Willow (two shown).

I also liked the deranged, claustrophobic quality of Clio Isadora‘s Anxiety Portraits – if I recall, they were made using the most unattractive colours she could find. More here.

My camera-work doesn’t do Celia Colantonio‘s Nostradamus print justice (above), so here it is is red, minus reflections, taken from her page on the CSM graphic design 2013 site.

Matt Gardner‘s prints were also really interesting and I would have liked to have seen more going by the range of great examples of both design and illustration on his site, dirtwizzarrd.tumblr.com.

Finally, while I couldn’t see a credit for these posters written in Turkish (above), on display in the publications room, Natalie Braune‘s collection of elegant printed works impressed (below). Image taken from her CSM page; more of her work at her Cargo page, here.

The Central Saint Martins BA graphic design degree show closed last weekend, but the students’ work is well documented on csmgraphicdesign.com.

Buy the current print issue of CR, or subscribe, here