CR lecture: Angus Hyland

Sohnar in collaboration with CR are presenting a series of free evening lectures, beginning with a look at ten of the world’s most enduring symbols with Pentagram‘s Angus Hyland…

In his lecture, Hyland will talk through ten abstract and representational trademarks, examining both the history and development of some of the world’s most recognisable symbols. He will also look at how these particular designs have lasted and at the relationships with the brands they represent. Hyland’s book, Symbol, written with Steven Bateman, has just been published by Laurence King and contains 1,300 examples of purely visual marks.

The evening event will take place at Pentagram’s London studio at 11 Needham Road, London W11 2RP on Wednesday June 29 (6.30pm).

We have 60 free tickets to this event. To apply for one please contact Jade Mellor on jade.mellor@centaur.co.uk or 0207 970 6238.

We will also be releasing a number of free places for students. Further details will appear on the blog very soon.

For more information on the evening’s sponsors, Sohnar, click here.

Above: spreads from Symbol, published by Laurence King

Read your Bookcase

Les designers du cabinet italien Saporiti ont crée cette bibliothèque typographique singulière. En effet, dans ce meuble se dessine les mots “Read your Bookcase”, façon d’allier l’utilité du mobilier à son design. Plus de visuels de l’objet dans la suite de l’article.



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Interview with Christiane Lemieux about her book ‘Undecorate’

Undecorate

A little while back this beautiful book was given to me by a super friendly Canadian lady, Corinne Suchy, Vice-President & Editor Online for Chapters Indigo Canada.

A little while back she was visiting Singapore and we tried to meet up but unfortunately we weren't able to. But Corinne and I are currently chatting about possible projects between Chapters Indigo and Bloesem. Will keep you posted of course… hopefully I am able to show you something next week already… 

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But today I would like to tell you a bit more about this book Undecorated by Christiane Lemieux. The founder, designer and creative brains behind Dwell Studio, an interior design label. I had only seen some pics of the cover of the book before so I was super delighted to see it in real.

Corinne thought with me being a person who is not so much into 'set-rules' for decorating, but more loving characteristic an personal approaches when it comes to decorating this would be the perfect book for and and she couldn't be more right… I absolutely love the book and was really eager to hear a bit more from the author, Christiane Lemieux, about the why's and how's of this book so I asked her a couple of questions and she happily replied… click here for the interview.

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Answers by Christiane Lemieux

What do you mean by Undecorate…and what do you like about it?

Undecorate is how I describe what I see happening in interior design righ tnow. I think this movement is multi-factoral in its genesis. First, there is the advent of the design blog. Interior design, design media and publishing is all of the sudden in the hands of everyone.  People who are not professionals in the strict sense – are writing, designing and sharing ideas.  The result is amazing, innovative, organic and personal. Hence Undecorate. Secondly, People are also thinking of their spaces less at something to start and finish. Homeowners are constantly tweaking and refining their homes. Your home, your personal space is a path not a place -ie: your child's room is constantly changing as their lives change.  The family spaces evolve too. Like your life- things are constantly transitioning and peoples homes reflect that. They also share those changes and stages on line. To decorate has a start and a finish.  It's static. Undecorating is constant and fluid. Lastly,  I think the advent of socialmedia – discussing and sharing design ideas has changed the way we think about our spaces.  You can now create a mood-board, send it to your friends and have them comment.  Design has become something collaborative. Its an amazing change from decorator driven content.

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Which house inside Undecorate could have been your home too?

My home is in the book.  I have a very open, casual relaxed loft in NewYork.  I am an undecorator. I am always playing and changing my home. In fact I am in the process of painting my kitchen black and changing my wallpaper. Something as simple as moving around your furniture can make ahuge difference. If I could choose another – it would be Erica Tanov's inBerkeley. It's gorgeous, casual, easy and perfectly undecorated.

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What influence did the making of this book have on designing your new collections?

I think I have always adhered to the idea that people should live with what they love and mix it up.  At DwellStudio we like to give our customers the tools to create this relaxed, sophisticated, casual look with pieces that mix and match well together or with the things that our customers already have.  We just finished our first furniture line and it is very much in this spirit. Everything stands alone as an item but everything can be mixed.

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What do you hope readers will experience from Undecorate?

I hope they will see a whole new world of interior design.  I hope it will empower them to take design risks, live with what they love and create a personal home.

Will there be a next book? Yes!  I am working on it already.

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Thank you Thank you very much Corinne and Christiane for collaborating with me on this post. Like i said I just really like this book, it's fresh, warm and it gave me many ideas for my own home! You can buy it here and see the beautiful  Dwell Studio collection here.

All images are taken by me, Irene. 

Exhibition A BookShop

Rare and limited edition books from the premier member’s-only site for contemporary art

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Building on its model of selling affordable limited-edition artworks produced by marquee names in the art world, yesterday Exhibition A launched its newest extension, BookShop. Comprising one-of-a-kind or limited-edition monographs, the books contain signatures, inscriptions and sometimes even artist-sketched drawings inside their pages.

The membership-based site, founded last December by Half Gallery owner Bill Powers, fashion designer Cynthia Rowley and Laura Martin, introduces one or two new pieces on a weekly basis, allowing them to sell for either a limited-run of four weeks, or, in the case of limited editions, until they sell out. With every piece retailing from $100 to $500 dollars, Exhibition A’s concept not only delivers an antidote to generic landscapes, but also a greater accessibility to prominent artists’ works through such inexpensive pricing. Offerings have included limited-editions by Terence Koh, Olaf Breuning, Hanna Liden, Jules de Balincourt, and David LaChapelle, who created surprising collages—a departure from his typical photography—for it.

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The first batch of titles available include a copy of George Condo’s 2004 “Happy Birthday,” signed by the artist, with a whimsical sketch of a figure about to strangle the artist as he appears on a page spread. Chloe Sevigny’s lookbook for her first capsule collection with Opening Ceremony, signed by photographer Mark Borthwick, also features drawings by Dan Colen and Spencer Sweeney.

While most of the editions land in the $150 to $750 price range, Damien Hirst’s “The Bilotti Paintings” is a major exception. Retailing for $9,000, Hirst inscribed the copy with a drawing of a shark tank, a reference to his iconic sculpture, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

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Like the popular fashion-based site Of of a Kind, which employs a similar model by selling limited-edition designs by up-and-coming indie designers, Exhibition A fluidly combines art and commerce with editorial. Commentary and profiles on its artists, as well as interviews with collectors and influential tastemakers such as Simon de Pury, Paper magazine’s Kim Hastreiter and Vice Media’s Ben Dietz help round out the concept. Call it the Gilt phenomenon 2.0, expect to see more sites like this reflecting the growing consumer demand for products that are unique and accessible at once.


Competition: five copies of Urban Orchard to be won

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Competition: we have teamed up with The Architecture Foundation in London to give away five copies of their book Union Street Urban Orchard, which charts the transformation of a disused London plot into a public garden.

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The project was orchestrated by Heather Ring of the Wayward Plant Registry and The Architecture Foundation, and opened in July 2010 as part of the London Festival of Architecture.

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The book tells the story of the project and contains essays from those who made it happen.

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Read our story about the Union Street Urban Orchard on Dezeen »

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To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Urban Orchard” 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.

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Competition closes 21 June 2011. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

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The following is by the publishers:


Welcome to the The Urban Orchard Book! This book celebrates the Union Street Urban Orchard, a project that ran for four months over the summer of 2010.

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It aims to document the process by which it was conceived, constructed and used and to present the Urban Orchard as a case study to inspire others to think creatively about how empty spaces in the city can be used.

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It looks to provide useful tips and design advice as well as offering pointers on how to recreate some of the elements of the Urban Orchard.

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It presents the project from different points of view, from the landowner to the designer to the volunteers showcasing the people and challenges involved in making a project like this happen.

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Building a community garden and orchard with 85 fruit trees from scratch is no mean feet and in our case would not have been possible without the work and commitment of many hands.

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The Urban Orchard showed the potential of a forgotten part of the city, a disused site that had not been open to the public since it’s previous incarnation as the Southwark Lido in 2008.

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It proved not just that growing your own could be easy but also that a space that was designed on a human scale with flexible uses could provide the perfect ‘place of exchange’ for the local community to mix with visitors to the area.

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With a special series of events curated from June – September 2010 the Orchard managed to attract over 10,000 visitors and became a much-used space by those from the local community and beyond.

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It is hoped that this book will allow others to experience and learn from the project and open up debate and further possibilities of creatively using lost spaces.

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Moira Lascelles
Editor and Curator, The Union Street Urban Orchard

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Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions.

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Buy this book and others at the Dezeenbooks store
(in association with amazon.co.uk)

More competitions »
Back to Dezeen »

Competition: five copies of Clients from Hell to be won

Clients from Hell

We have teamed up with the guys over at Clients from Hell blog to give away five copies of their Clients From Hell book, a collection of horror stories from the design industry.

Clients from Hell

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Clients from Hell” 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.

Clients from Hell

Competition closes 21 June 2011. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions

The following is from the book:


A cult phenomenon among those who work in graphic, print and web design – and those lucky enough to have discovered the namesake blog – Clients from Hell has been bringing readers to tears with its unbelievable and always hilarious anecdotes from the twenty and thirty-somethings on the frontlines of design.

Clients from Hell

In print for the first time, this collection brings together the same kind of original stories that make the blog a hit and exposes the designer’s trade for what it really is: new, misunderstood and often unappriciated. Read the quotes, bizarre requesta and elaborate communication failures that are all part of the daily life of working with clients.

Clients from Hell

Anyone who has ever worked with clients may find these tales frighteningly familiar. New designers may think twice about their chosen profession- or at least find relief in the fact that they’re not alone in absurd client interactions. And non-designers? Well, they’ll just feel grateful – while they laugh and discover the new and unchartered territory of miscommunication..

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Buy this book and others at the Dezeenbooks store
(in association with amazon.co.uk)

More competitions »
Back to Dezeen »

Around the Design World in 180 Words: Book Deals

We like a good book deal almost as much as a good book. Here are a couple of titles to watch for from David Rosenthal’s new Penguin imprint, Blue Rider Press:

  • You loved her novel-as-auction catalog, now put on your reading goggles and prepare to pre-order Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Stories, described by Publishers Lunch as “an illustrated collection of autobiographical stories about Shapton’s life as a swimmer, exploring her training as a teenager for the 1988 and 1992 Olympic trials, the competitive pressures and meditative calm found in the sport and the pastime.” It’s part of a two-book deal for the New York Times contributor, artist, and author. As for Important Artifacts, it’s been optioned by Plan B/Paramount Pictures, with Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman attached to star in the lead roles.
  • For those times when a quiet old lady whispering “hush” just won’t get the job done, we’ll soon have Goodnight iPad by David Milgram (writing under the pseudonym Ann Droyd). The 21st-century parody of Margaret Wise Brown’s classic children’s book is about how to say goodnight to electronics before bedtime.

    New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

  • Sci-fi classics in 3D

    We’ve chosen our winner and added some of our favourite reader suggestions to the bottom of this blogpost. Read on to find out if your suggestion made the cut.

    Vintage has republished a series of five science fiction classics, including titles by HP Lovecraft and Jules Verne, and what’s more they’re in 3D, with specs included in each copy so you can see the illustrated covers in all their glory. (Read on to find out how you can win a complete set.)

    To make the covers, creative director Suzanne Dean and the Random House design team worked with four different illustrators. Jim Tierney created illustrations for both Jules Verne covers (shown above), and Sara Ogilvie and Mick Brownfield contributed artwork for The Lost World and Planet of the Apes respectively (shown below).

    Vladimir Zimakov created the cover for The Call of Cthulhu, the last book in the series.

    If you’ve got a spare pair of 3D glasses nearby, you can see the effect for yourself on the pictures above.

    Competition winner

    Thanks to everyone for sending us your favourite images, we were reminded of a few science fiction classics we’d forgotten about. Honourable mention should go to the following submissions:

    However there can be only one winner, and the set of books will be going to Chris Anderson, for his submission of John Wyndham’s The Outward Urge.

    Please email emma.tucker@centaur.co.uk to collect your prize.

    Explorations in Typography: Mastering the Art of Fine Typesetting

    As someone who works with typography and design every day, I have a few books I turn to when I need to clear my mind of clutter. One of my favorites is Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style”, which includes this rumination on the sanctity of the title page: “Think of the blank page as alpine meadow, or as the purity of undifferentiated being. The typographer enters this space and must change it. The reader will enter it later, to see what the typographer has done.” Lines like this refresh my understanding of the task at hand and clarify my sense of purpose.

    Carolina de Bartolo’s new book “Explorations in Typography” has a similar effect, albeit via entirely different means.

    “Explorations in Typography” is arranged as a series of twenty-four chapters — the “explorations”. Using a short excerpt from Erik Spiekermann’s classic text, “Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works”, as a mantra, the book guides the reader through a kind of typographical meditation.

    In 24 explorations spanning 188 pages, the Spiekermann text is repeatedly typeset, using a variety of techniques to indicate paragraphs and hierarchy. Each exploration shows several examples of a different method of indicating paragraphs in text (and a few later chapters explore different alignments and hierarchies). A new pair of typefaces is used for each example. A colophon and additional side notes about the typesetting and the history of the typefaces are included with each setting.

    The explorations are thorough, covering typesetting techniques from the most basic (using indents, for example) to the unusual (using varying directions of text to indicate paragraphs). Typeface choices also range from classic to cheerfully odd. Throughout, the typesetting and page design remain austere and exemplary. As the author explains, the book is meant to further typographical education through an “extended visual taxonomy”, and the broad palette of techniques and typefaces is true to that spirit.

    The book is primarily a teaching device, which de Bartolo created “specifically for more advanced typographic study”. She is serious about the book’s potential as a textbook, including advice for both teachers and students on how best to use the book. The depth to which the explorations go is beyond the interest of the non-designer and probably most neophyte designers. This is a book for people who care deeply about text design and typesetting — and for those who are required to care about it, in the case of students. For those of us who fit at least one of those descriptions, “Explorations in Typography” is a valuable resource, and a reminder of the extensive possibilities of digital typesetting. It’s also pleasing, and motivating, to page through the book and study the evolving settings of the text.

    The book itself is a lovely thing. At 9.25″ × 12″, it’s large enough to house a letter-size page of typography plus annotations in the margins. The volume is casebound with thin boards and a sewn binding, so it’s sturdy but lightweight. The page design is clean and spare, with a transparent modular grid that provides a flexible canvas for the multitude of typographical settings. The text of the authorial voice is designed to guide the reader through the myriad design samples within. It’s a squeaky-clean, high-contrast treatment that presents a cool yet quirky sophistication.

    My one complaint about “Explorations in Typography” is in its free-wheeling use of typefaces. No less than 171 different typefaces are used in the book — at least two for every setting. The type pairings are often interesting, but too often they distract from the typography itself. This is, after all, a book about fine typesetting, not a font catalog. I appreciate that the author included an appendix with a page of advice about choosing typefaces and a complete list of fonts used. But I often wondered whether the book would be improved by simplifying the type. To go to the opposite extreme, what if the exercises were all set in the same serif text face, with one sans face chosen for the headlines? Or choose five or six pairings. In either case, the particular typefaces chosen would be less important than the restraint itself — a book such as this, which seeks to show a variety of typographical tools through demonstration, would be well served by a solid, unchanging typeface selection. The typesetting would then be seen clearly as typesetting, free of the distractions provided by a new pair of fonts on every page. Additionally, the fonts, nearly all of which are drawn from the FontShop catalog, are mostly of the modern, late-20th-Century variety, a choice that will give the book a dated appearance in short order. Exercising some restraint on typeface usage would not only serve the book’s purpose, it would serve its continuing relevance.

    The book’s companion website is as well designed as the book, in form as well as function. The site provides information and examples from the book, and includes a terrific and easy to use interactive page that allows the casual user to try out some typographical explorations of her own.

    “Explorations in Typography” is a well-conceived, well-designed book that fulfills its goal. It is a unique and valuable catalyst of typographical contemplation. In addition, it’s a solid teaching tool, and a worthy addition to the libraries of design studios, type enthusiasts, and design instructors.

    Patrick Barber is a graphic designer, photographer, style maven, and community food activist living in Portland, Oregon.


    Visual Alphabet with Books

    Sónia Lamêra con Cláudia Borralho ha strutturato questo progetto scolastico dove le era stato chiesto di visualizzare un alfabeto. Il tutto presentato su un liflet pieghevole.
    Così in pochi click si fa il giro del web 😉

    Visual Alphabet with Books