April cover featuring a character drawn byJim Stoten in The Layzell Brothers’ Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight video for Adam Buxton
Our April issue presents the work of three young animators and animation teams to watch. Plus, we go in search of illustrator John Hanna, test out the claims of a new app to have uncovered the secrets of viral ad success and see how visual communications can both help keep us safe and help us recover in hospital
In the new issue we pick out three animators and animation teams to watch: the Layzell Brothers, who regular readers might remember are the (warped) minds behind Adam Buxton’s Livin in the Moonlight video. With characters by illustrator Jim Stoten.
Becky & Joe, creators of Tame Impala promo Feels Like We Only Go Backwards
And Julia Pott,whose disturbing tale Belly has been a hit on the festival circuit
Elsewhere in the issue, NIck Asbury goes in search of the elusive Australian commercial artist John Hanna, illustrator of a series of beautiful covers for Country Fair magazine
Mark Sinclair looks at the transformative power of art and design when used in hospital environments.
Anna Richardson Taylor explores the claims of a new app to have discovered a formula that guarantees viral advertising success.
And Paul Rennie delves into the archives of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, and discovers a rich design history
In Crit, James Pallister reviews Anna Saccani’s new tome on typographic installations, Letterscapes
In his regular column This Designer’s Life, Daniel Benneworth-Gray writes on the perils of working with academics and Gordon Comstock discusses the perils of creating YouTube-friendly advertising
Jeremy Leslie asks what makes a superior – and successful – independent magazine?
And Paul Belford argues strongly that the craft of writing and art directing long copy advertising must be preserved while Patrick Burgoyne reports from the Design Indaba conference, where the scope for designers to make a difference to society was vividly illustrated
Plus, in our subscriber-only Monograph supplement, we celebrate the work of art director and designer Gerald Cinamon
The Design Museum’s Designs of the Year show is its usual eclectic self, marrying the gigantic (The Shard) with projects of more modest ambition. We pick out some highlights from the exhibition
The curatorial methodology of Designs of the Year, where various ‘experts’ in the field are asked to nominate projects for final selection by committee, is guaranteed to produce diverse, if not quirky results. The criteria for selection are very loose, trusting in those submitting nominations (including me) to come up with content that genuinely reflects the industry. The overtly commercial tends to get overlooked (not withstanding the likes of Apple’s iPad having featured in previous years). So you won’t find many corporate identities for big companies or much mainstream packaging design. This is, by and large, design as the profession would like us to think of it rather than the bits that really bring in the revenue.
But the role of an exhibition such as this is to inspire and to showcase – to reflect the ambitions of the profession perhaps rather than the day-to-day. As such, in most categories, it does that very well.
There are a lot of projects, for example, which illustrate design’s ablity to tackle ‘needs’ rather than ‘desires’.
ESource by Hal Watts for example is a bicycle-powered waste recycling system that separates the materials within electrical wiring so that they can be more effectively processed with fewer harmful fumes.
And the 3D Printed Exoskeleton ‘Magic Arms’, designed by Nemours/Alfred I du Pont Hospital for Children in Delaware US, allows parts to be individually 3D printed and tailored to children suffering form musculoskeletal disabilities who need upper body support.
In the Child ViSion glasses designed by The Centre for Vision in the Developing World and Goodwin Hartsom, the prescription can be adjusted by injecting a fluid into the lenses, thus extending the life of the glasses significantly as a child can keep the same pair as he or she grows and their eyes change.
Other projects reflected efforts to ‘democratise’ design, such as the Free Universal Construction Kit by Free Art and Technology Lab and Sy-Lab
While the Gov.uk website was a welcome nod to design’s role in public service provision (see our article here)
Its inclusion also helps address a perennial problem with the show, that visual communications can be overshadowed. Talking to some graphic designers after the show opening, many felt that their particular sphere suffered in comparison to some of the ideas above or to a project on the scale of, say The Shard
This has consistently been a concern with the Designs of the Year show, not always helped by the curatorial process which, as mentioned above, tends to veer in the case of graphics toward what we might call the ‘arty’.
But there are some strong graphic and digital projects included this year. Gov.uk will probably have more of a direct impact on British people’s lives than anything else in the show and who can deny that the Olympics Wayfaring by TfL /JEDCO / LOCOG was an important, major work?
I was also pleased to see that the Occupied Times Of London by Tzortzis Rallis and Lazaros Kakoulidis made it in to the show (see our interview with them here)
And as for ‘commercial’ projects, you can’t get much more so than the Wiindows Phone 8 interface
And there’s still room for great projects which, while they may not change the world, are brilliantly done examples of their genre. In such category I would place The Gentlewoman by Veronica Ditting and Jop van Bennekom
APFEL’s Bauhaus book and exhibition design
Identities for the Strelka Institute by OK-RM
And for the Venice Architecture Biennale Identity by John Morgan
Plus Serviceplan’s light-sensitive Austria Solar Annual Report
It was also good to see Uniform’s Digital Postcard and Player in there which uses printed circuitry to combine print and digital (slot the cards into a player to hear music ‘printed’ on them)
And Indian design publication Dekho: Conversations on Design in India by CoDesign
As mentioned, I was a nominator this year, so in the interests of disclosure, here’s what I put forward and the texts I wrote for the catalogue putting forward my reasoning. I also nominated Occupied Times but wasn’t needed to contribute text for that as others had also nominated it
Windows Phone 8 Skeuomorphism in interface design is the digital equivalent of a Mock Tudor house. Why is the database of contacts on a smart phone rendered in faux leather with a tiny ringbinder down its spine? Because it makes us feel comfortable and, in the early days of GUIs, linking digital functions to their real-world counterparts was a very useful means of introducing users to their screen-based future. But it’s time to move on. Windows Phone 8 leaves the world of fake chrome behind. Its ‘live tiles’ and flat graphics are a digitally-native environment which represents a genuinely innovative step in GUI design. Will it be commercially successful? Who knows. Today, Android and Apple dominate the smartphone market: there may not be room for a third player. But this is a design exhibition and Windows Phone 8 proposes an elegant and thoughtful aesthetic and functional alternative to an increasingly frustrating and clumsy status quo.
www.gov.uk Grand public projects feature large in the graphic design canon. Kinneir and Calvert’s road signage programme, Harry Beck’s London Underground map, Massimo Vignelli’s work on its New York counterpart: such projects reassure practicing designers that, yes, what they do does matter and can genuinely improve our lives. The gov.uk website is perhaps the digital equivalent of those great public projects of the past. It may not look particularly exciting or pretty, but that is not the point. This is design in the raw, providing vital services and information in the simplest, most logical way possible for everything from renewing a passport to understanding your rights as a disabled person.
2012 Olympics Wayfaring The London 2012 logo will forever divide opinion, but even its most implacable detractors were forced to admire the consistency and rigour with which the look of the games was applied across London and the other 2012 venues. LOCOG claimed to have taken the development of a comprehensive graphic language for the 2012 Games further than any previous Olympiad, liaising with local authorities, the GLA, TFL, sponsors and all other interested parties to ensure ‘One Look’ applied from the airport all the way to the venues. We were promised a brand and not just a logo, a comprehensive visual experience to an extent not seen in previous Games. LOCOG and its design partners delivered just that.
The Design Museum’s Designs of the Year show is its usual eclectic self, marrying the gigantic (The Shard) with projects of more modest ambition. We pick out some highlights from the exhibition
The curatorial methodology of Designs of the Year, where various ‘experts’ in the field are asked to nominate projects for final selection by committee, is guaranteed to produce diverse, if not quirky results. The criteria for selection are very loose, trusting in those submitting nominations (including me) to come up with content that genuinely reflects the industry. The overtly commercial tends to get overlooked (not withstanding the likes of Apple’s iPad having featured in previous years). So you won’t find many corporate identities for big companies or much mainstream packaging design. This is, by and large, design as the profession would like us to think of it rather than the bits that really bring in the revenue.
But the role of an exhibition such as this is to inspire and to showcase – to reflect the ambitions of the profession perhaps rather than the day-to-day. As such, in most categories, it does that very well.
There are a lot of projects, for example, which illustrate design’s ablity to tackle ‘needs’ rather than ‘desires’.
ESource by Hal Watts for example is a bicycle-powered waste recycling system that separates the materials within electrical wiring so that they can be more effectively processed with fewer harmful fumes.
And the 3D Printed Exoskeleton ‘Magic Arms’, designed by Nemours/Alfred I du Pont Hospital for Children in Delaware US, allows parts to be individually 3D printed and tailored to children suffering form musculoskeletal disabilities who need upper body support.
In the Child ViSion glasses designed by The Centre for Vision in the Developing World and Goodwin Hartshorn, the prescription can be adjusted by injecting a fluid into the lenses, thus extending the life of the glasses significantly as a child can keep the same pair as he or she grows and their eyes change.
Other projects reflected efforts to ‘democratise’ design, such as the Free Universal Construction Kit by Free Art and Technology Lab and Sy-Lab
While the Gov.uk website was a welcome nod to design’s role in public service provision (see our article here)
Its inclusion also helps address a perennial problem with the show, that visual communications can be overshadowed. Talking to some graphic designers after the show opening, many felt that their particular sphere suffered in comparison to some of the ideas above or to a project on the scale of, say The Shard
This has consistently been a concern with the Designs of the Year show, not always helped by the curatorial process which, as mentioned above, tends to veer in the case of graphics toward what we might call the ‘arty’.
But there are some strong graphic and digital projects included this year. Gov.uk will probably have more of a direct impact on British people’s lives than anything else in the show and who can deny that the Olympics Wayfaring by TfL /JEDCO / LOCOG was an important, major work?
I was also pleased to see that the Occupied Times Of London by Tzortzis Rallis and Lazaros Kakoulidis made it in to the show (see our interview with them here)
And as for ‘commercial’ projects, you can’t get much more so than the Wiindows Phone 8 interface
And there’s still room for great projects which, while they may not change the world, are brilliantly done examples of their genre. In such category I would place The Gentlewoman by Veronica Ditting and Jop van Bennekom
APFEL’s Bauhaus book and exhibition design
Photographs: Luke Hayes
Identities for the Strelka Institute by OK-RM
And for the Venice Architecture Biennale Identity by John Morgan
Plus Serviceplan’s light-sensitive Austria Solar Annual Report
It was also good to see Uniform’s Digital Postcard and Player in there which uses printed circuitry to combine print and digital (slot the cards into a player to hear music ‘printed’ on them)
And Indian design publication Dekho: Conversations on Design in India by CoDesign
As mentioned, I was a nominator this year, so in the interests of disclosure, here’s what I put forward and the texts I wrote for the catalogue putting forward my reasoning. I also nominated Occupied Times but wasn’t needed to contribute text for that as others had also nominated it
Windows Phone 8 Skeuomorphism in interface design is the digital equivalent of a Mock Tudor house. Why is the database of contacts on a smart phone rendered in faux leather with a tiny ringbinder down its spine? Because it makes us feel comfortable and, in the early days of GUIs, linking digital functions to their real-world counterparts was a very useful means of introducing users to their screen-based future. But it’s time to move on. Windows Phone 8 leaves the world of fake chrome behind. Its ‘live tiles’ and flat graphics are a digitally-native environment which represents a genuinely innovative step in GUI design. Will it be commercially successful? Who knows. Today, Android and Apple dominate the smartphone market: there may not be room for a third player. But this is a design exhibition and Windows Phone 8 proposes an elegant and thoughtful aesthetic and functional alternative to an increasingly frustrating and clumsy status quo.
www.gov.uk Grand public projects feature large in the graphic design canon. Kinneir and Calvert’s road signage programme, Harry Beck’s London Underground map, Massimo Vignelli’s work on its New York counterpart: such projects reassure practicing designers that, yes, what they do does matter and can genuinely improve our lives. The gov.uk website is perhaps the digital equivalent of those great public projects of the past. It may not look particularly exciting or pretty, but that is not the point. This is design in the raw, providing vital services and information in the simplest, most logical way possible for everything from renewing a passport to understanding your rights as a disabled person.
2012 Olympics Wayfaring The London 2012 logo will forever divide opinion, but even its most implacable detractors were forced to admire the consistency and rigour with which the look of the games was applied across London and the other 2012 venues. LOCOG claimed to have taken the development of a comprehensive graphic language for the 2012 Games further than any previous Olympiad, liaising with local authorities, the GLA, TFL, sponsors and all other interested parties to ensure ‘One Look’ applied from the airport all the way to the venues. We were promised a brand and not just a logo, a comprehensive visual experience to an extent not seen in previous Games. LOCOG and its design partners delivered just that.
The April print issue of CR presents the work of three young animators and animation teams to watch. Plus, we go in search of illustrator John Hanna, test out the claims of a new app to have uncovered the secrets of viral ad success and see how visual communications can both help keep us safe and help us recover in hospital
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Graphic designer Ludovic Houplain and his partners François Alaux and Hervé de Crécy of H5 agency made a splash in 2009 when they produced a short film depicting a world composed entirely out of logos. The 16-minute film, “Logorama” went on to win an Academy Award and gave H5…
Competition: we’ve teamed up with publisher Wiley to give away five copies of their new book Inside Smartgeometry, about advances in parametric design.
The book contains computer renderings and photographs that document over a decade of advances in computer software for architecture.
Edited by Brady Peters and Terri Peters, the hardcover book contains contributions from Robert Aish, Martin Bechthold, Mark Burry, Chris Williams, Robert Woodbury and other members of the Smartgeometry community.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Inside Smartgeometry” 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.
Competition closes 23 April 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.
As spring tries to battle off the last bouts of winter in NYC, we are all anxious to get back to our favorite outdoor spots and explore some new ones. Just in time to answer that itch is Benajmin Swett’s newest release, “New York City of Trees”. The writer…
For his second book, “A Sky Full of Kindness,” artist Rob Ryan has put his paper-cutting skills to use in a story about a pair of songbirds eagerly awaiting the hatching of their first chick. The intricate illustrations marry words with images to create a seamless tale about family,…
Remember when travel involved more than clutching bar-coded scraps and wheeling an ugly black case through “concourses”? Neither do we, but just imagine scenes from Titanic (pre-iceberg) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (without the murder)–all crisp kerchiefs, exotic matchbooks, and hotel labels slapped onto sturdy packing cases. Return to the golden age in the gilt-edged pages of World Tour, out this month from Abrams.
Chilean-born, Paris-based travel writer Francisca Matteoli (pictured) draws upon the vintage hotel labels collected by trunkmaker and traveler Gaston-Louis Vuitton (whose grand-père founded the leathergoods juggernaut) as fodder for a 21-city global adventure illustrated by oodles of illustrations, photos, vintage postcards, and more than 900 labels that live on as graphic souvenirs of getaways from Athens to Zermatt. “I realized that a small piece of paper like a simple label can tell a million stories,” says Matteoli. “Stories of woman and men, travelers, adventurers, gangsters, elegant people…and also of history, architecture, art, countries.” She made time between voyages to answer our seven questions about culling down the collection of labels, some personal favorites, and her own choice of luggage.
How did you come to write World Tour? I was having lunch with Julien Guerrier, editorial director at Louis Vuitton, and I told him about my Chilean great grandfather and my family who always lived in hotels, and about our life in Chile and France…He then told me that Louis Vuitton had a magnificent collection of hotel labels and that we could connect our stories. He knew I liked writing stories, and we thought that it would be a very original way to talk about travel. That is how it all began.
How did you go about narrowing down/selecting the labels to feature in the book? We wanted mythical hotels that are representative of the golden age of travel, that have a real visual quality–many of the labels are works of art. This allowed me to write not only about labels, but also about life, historical events, and people, because travel is connected with everything in life. We wanted a book that was both a pleasure to look at, and a pleasure to read.
What are some of your favorite labels from the collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton? The ones that bring back personal memories. The one of the Hotel Meurice in Paris–so refined, so art déco, because my grandparents liked walking down the rue de Rivoli when they came to Paris, as do the tourists today. The one of the Hotel du Louvre, where I lived with my family when we arrived from Chile. The Savoy Hotel in London–the label is very creative, very modern for its time–because my mother, who is Scottish, used to go to the Savoy when she was young. The Hotel Gloria in Rio de Janeiro, because I lived in Rio, love Rio, and this label is not only historical but also extremely stylish. The Waldorf Astoria in New York, where I have beautiful memories, so chic and a fine example of the architecture of the 50s. continued…
A photograph by Terry Jones taken at the Comme des Garçons showroom.
“My creative inspiration [for putting together these books] was seeing how [my wife] Tricia arranged her wardrobe. Fashion is not about the latest item you’ve bought–it’s an evolution of personal style. Today’s wardrobe is most inspirational when it has a history…
Selecting from the pages of i-D and sometimes making repro-facsimiles of the fashion pages to reflect the graphics of the time, together with transcripts of conversations or interviews with designers, then adding footnotes and facts, gave me opportunity to add a depth of hidden information. I avoided putting the book in chronological order–I prefer the moment being right, and these books are portfolios of moments in time, much like how the brain works. We have included images that I’ve found in i-D‘s archive or been given permission by the designer or some of our photographic contributors. We have also included video stills taken from screen grabs from my personal footage, as I love the blur of fashion.”
–Terry Jones, founder and creative director of i-D magazine, on his new Taschen series on contemporary fashion designers. The first three monographs–on Rei Kawakubo, Vivienne Westwood, and Yohji Yamamoto–will most likely be followed by books on Raf Simons and Rick Owens, according to Jones.
This virtual library shelf would let New York subway passengers read the first 10 pages of a book on their smartphones before directing them to the nearest library to pick up a hard copy (+ movie).
The Underground Library was proposed by three students from the Miami Ad School as a way of encouraging the public to visit various branches of New York Public Library.
Art directors Keri Tan and Max Pilwat worked with copywriter Ferdi Rodriguez to create a virtual bookshelf that passengers can access by swiping their phone against a poster.
There’s no WiFi on the subway, but using the Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology found in many of the latest smartphones, passengers would be able to download the first 10 pages of their chosen book free of charge.
NFC is a wireless, non-contact system that uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data between two devices held centimetres apart.
When they leave the subway, a map pops up on their phone pointing out the nearest library branches where they can pick up a hard copy.
Miami Ad School Student Project: A Simple Solution to help New York’s Empty Libraries
Now that the internet is available almost anywhere, people are able to do “instant research” to learn about anything on their smartphones. The New York Public Library wants to remind New Yorkers that they are still a valuable resource, and a free service.
NYPL wants to take your usual subway ads and make them into something fun and entertaining. They want to give New Yorkers something productive to do on the subway instead of their everyday people watching. New Yorkers will be given a free digital book sample to read on their way to work. Once finished they will be informed of the closest libraries so they could finish their story.
Underground Library is a fictional student campaign, thought up by Max Pilwat, Keri Tan and Ferdi Rodriguez, three Miami Ad School students. This video explains how the campaign would work if it were adopted by the client.
Agency: Miami Ad School Art Directors: Keri Tan & Max Pilwat Copywriter: Ferdi Rodriguez
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Remember when travel involved more than clutching bar-coded scraps and wheeling an ugly black case through “concourses”? Neither do we, but just imagine scenes from Titanic (pre-iceberg) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (without the murder)–all crisp kerchiefs, exotic matchbooks, and hotel labels slapped onto sturdy packing cases. Return to the golden age in the gilt-edged pages of 
