Hasta La Ideas

Bristol’s PAN Studio, winners of the first Playable City Award, are set to awaken the city’s urban landscape by enabling its residents to interact with a variety of public objects and street furniture…

The aim of the Playable City Award is to commission art projects based on the brief of turning cities into playable spaces.

The inaugural £30,000 award was given to Ben Barker and Sam Hill from PAN Studio who, in collaboration with Gyorgyi Galik and Tom Armitage, have been developing the Hello Lamp Post project at the Watershed arts venue in Bristol.

Launching on July 15, participants will need to visit hellolamppost.co.uk to access a special local phone number. They can then explore the city to find codes on any item of street furniture – lamp posts, post boxes, bins, bus stops, bollards and phone boxes (these are normally used to identity the objects when they are in need of repair).

Every post box, for example, has a unique 6-7 digit code written underneath the collection time.

These unique codes will then enable players to spark up a text message conversation with the particular object. The more people the objects interact with, the more they will have to say – adding to what the organisers call “the city’s conversation”.

Users must send their first text to the number provided in the format “Hello” + name of object + #codeofobject (for example “Hello lamp post #123456”) and wait for a reply.

Hello Lamp Post begins on July 15 in Bristol. More details at hellolamppost.co.uk.

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue, along with an interview with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late, great Storm Thorgerson. Elsewhere in the issue we take a first look at The Purple Book: Symbolism and Sensuality in Contemporary Illustration, hear from the curators of a fascinating new V&A show conceived as a ‘walk-in book’ plus we have all the regular debate and analysis on the world of visual communications.

You can buy Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe, save money and have CR delivered direct to your door every month.

CR for the iPad

Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app updates with new content throughout each month. Get it here.

Opinion: in the first of two columns about the impact of digital culture on design, Sam Jacob asks what America’s Prism surveillance program tells us about design thinking.

As details of the American National Security Aacency’s Prism programme emerge, alongside concerns about democracy, freedom, state surveillance and the complicity of corporations, something also seems to be revealed about the ways in which digital technologies are fundamentally reformulating the ways in which design – a new kind of design born out of digital culture – now organises and impacts the way we live.

Back in 1995, Richard Barbrook and the late Andy Cameron wrote an essay called The Californian Ideology. In it, they argued that digital culture – at least the digital culture of Silicon Valley – had become a fusion of the “free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”.

They said that the emerging information technologies provided the space in which this amalgamation of opposites could occur and they called this cocktail of libertarian values and entrepreneurship The Californian Ideology. They also said, even back then, that “the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete”.

That, of course, was long before Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook et al. had risen to become such gigantic corporations, way before they had became the supra-national entities embedded so completely in our everyday lives. Before even some of them were founded.

The designs of the hardware, software and services these companies offer are often described as ecosystems. Ecosystems, in this meaning of the word, are the virtual worlds that we find ourselves enmeshed in: places that we can’t get out of, like Apple’s Mac OS, iOS, iTunes, iPhone and so on, or Google’s services that link activities like search, calendar, documents, email, chat and so on. These environments have grown up around us like the Wild Things forest in Max’s bedroom. They’ve grown so high and wide that there is no longer a way out of them.

The term ecosystem was originally coined in 1935 to describe the physical and biological components of an environment considered in relation to each other, all as one totality. It’s all the living and non-living organisms and the interactions between them within a given space. The conflation of this concept of ecology and the digital is, as we shall later see, significant.

And it’s perhaps no accident that these digital worlds are described in terms of the natural given the half-hippy roots of its culture. Note for example the title of the 1967 techno-pastorolist poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace that imagined a world where advanced cybernetics allowed humankind to return to a bucolic paradise lost.

It’s also telling that in citing the natural, these private digital realms attempt to naturalise themselves. What else could there be in naming the infrastructure of the wireless internet – all those cables and power plants, those server farms and data stores in concrete bunkers, signal masts and satellites – as something as simple as a cloud? And that’s not even to mention the suggestions of weightlessness or cherub-strewn holiness that clouds also contain.

Adam Curtis used the title All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace for his documentary describing how digital technology failed to liberate humanity and instead “distorted and simplified our view of the world around us” as it twisted from hippy to zippy to yuppie. But wether you buy his argument or not, it’s clear that the digital has distorted the world. Perhaps the greatest digital distortion of the world around us is spatial and I’m not talking about the Apple Maps fiasco.

Digital space gives us access to anything, anywhere. It gives us endless proximity to our emails, photos and any other data that we’ve handed over to the various corporate clouds that surround us. It means we can be in constant contact with other places regardless of physical coordinates. That, in essence, is the beautiful liberation that digital culture has given us.

It’s these same properties of digital space that allow corporate ecosystems to be simultaneously at one’s elbow when it suits them and somewhere else (or nowhere else) when it comes to issues of taxation. Digital space – which is also the space through which global finance flows – does not necessarily recognise other definitions of space. Until, that is, it runs into something like the Great Firewall of China that acts as a digital manifestation of national territory.

These spatial slippages re-order traditional definitions of public and private, something most shockingly demonstrated in the phone hacking scandal where individuals’ voicemails stored on the servers of mobile phone companies were remotely accessed by newspapers – most disturbingly the voicemails of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. The cloud means that even the most intimate details of one’s personal life are everywhere, all the time. The cloud transforms the nature of space. It alters what we understand to be inside and outside, what is public and private.

The revelations about the US-run Prism program over the last week suggest that it’s not just the newsworthy who are effected. It’s all of us. Through Prism, the US National Security Agency apparently has access on a massive scale to individuals chat logs, stored data, voice traffic, file transfers and social networking data. According to reports, Prism can access this data though a “back door” in the servers of major technology companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Prism seems to be an extension to these digital ecosystems, the dark cloud.

These organisations have all denied the existence of this “back door”. Perhaps they’re telling the truth: what, after all, is this old fashioned, physical, architectural metaphor even doing in this debate? A back door suggests a spatial, architectural hierarchy of progression from public to private that simply does not exist in digital space. So why use this linguistic image at all? Perhaps it’s there to suggest that digital culture is not so radically different after all. That is does, or at least could, obey the kinds of spatial separations that physical space contains in its very nature.

Prism tells us something about design in the twenty-first century. And it’s certainly not its logo – or that of the apparently conspiracy-theorist-baiting Information Awareness Office – that recalls that Mitchell and Webb sketch featuring two SS officers wondering if the skull logo on their caps might suggest that they are actually the baddies. It tells us that design is increasingly about systems, increasingly about processes and they way these interface with the real world.

Prism is part, I would suggest, of the realm of design thinking. This is a problem-solving methodology born out of similarly strange bedfellows as The Californian Ideology. In this case it’s art school creativity hijacked by management theory. Design thinking suggests the synthetic way in which designers are (supposed to be) thinking can be applied to almost any subject. Its power is its ability to transform anything into a design problem: the way organisations work, profitability, market share, information, the gathering and processing of intelligence and, it seems, national security.

Design thinking is marked by the scale and scope of its operations. Rather than isolating particular problems, it attempts to survey the whole scenario. It conceives the field of operation as the system rather than the object. And in this, it transforms the designed world into an ecosystem. Design thinking treats this synthetic ecosystem as its project, attempting to redesign it according to particular goals, to achieve its desired outcomes.

By seeing the world through the lens of this conceptual design ecosystem, design thinking abstracts the world into a series of interactions with outputs and it remains poised to provide a solution for anything. Never mind the fact that there are many who would argue with the idea of design as a solution-focused activity, that this conception of design is pure ideological cant.

Of course, like digital culture and like late capitalism, design thinking prefers to appear a non-ideological matter of common sense. Apparently de-politicised and post-ideological, design thinking appears free of its own innate desires and tendencies in order to open-mindedly and radically reinvent the world.

I would argue that design thinking is a product of digital culture. It shares the values of innovation and entrepreneurship bound up in the digital world and follows the same open-necked babyboom commune to boardroom trajectory. It’s also a product of how digital culture shows us the world: of networks and accumulations of big data. It’s a product, in part perhaps, of the converging digital tools we use across disciplinary boundaries. But more than this, it’s a product of the the fact that the digital is both where we design and what we design, both subject and object of contemporary design activity.

Design thinking annexes the perceived power of design and folds it into the development of systems rather than things. It’s a design ideology that is now pervasive, seeping into the design of government and legislation (for example, the UK Government’s Nudge Unit which works on behavioral design) and the interfaces of democracy (see the Design of the Year award-winning .gov.uk). If these are examples of ways in which design can help develop an open-access, digital democracy, Prism is its inverted image. The black mirror of democratic design, the dark side of design thinking. Prism is, legal or illegal as it may turn out to be, a design-thinking solution to national security.

If design thinking is part of the triumph of The Californian Ideology, part of the way that digital culture is remaking the world, is Prism its Waterloo? Perhaps it is the moment Californian digital culture turned inside out, the point when these apparently pro-libertarian entities melded to become one with the state, a strange new version of the military-digital-industrial complex cooked up out of acid-soaked West Coast radicalism and frictionless global capitalism.

In next week’s column we will explore how the idea of the digital ecosystem and the tools of design thinking project out from the screen into the world, reforming ideas of landscape, nature and space.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night Schoolat the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editingwww.strangeharvest.com.

The post “Prism is the dark side
of design thinking” appeared first on Dezeen.

McCann Erickson Melbourne’s Dumb Ways to Die and 4Creative’s Meet the Superhumans were the big winners at this year’s D&AD Awards, with Black Pencils also going to Gov.uk and Thomas Heatherwick’s Olympics Cauldron

Heatherwick’s magical Olympic Cauldron (above) won a Black Pencil in the Spatial Design: Installations category.

The 4Creative Meet The Superhumans spot, directed by Tom Tagholm, won Black in TV & Cinema Communications: TV Promotions & Programme Junctions. Meet the Superhumans also picked up three Yellows, in Film Advertising Crafts: Editing for Film Advertising, Film Advertising Crafts:Direction for Film Advertising and Film Advertising Crafts: Use of  Music for Film Advertising.

The other two Black Pencils this year are for public service or at least public information projects: Gov.uk and McCann Erickson Melbourne’s Dumb Ways to Die for Metro Trains.

Gov.uk won its award in the Writing for Design: Writing for Websites & Digital Design category, curiously missing out on any Pencils in the digital design area.

Dumb Ways to Die, the charming animation promoting safety on Melbourne’s railways, won Black in Integrated & Earned Media:Earned Media Campaigns (where those 46m+ YouTube views must have swayed any doubters) plus four Yellows in other categories: Outdoor Advertising: Poster Advertising Campaigns, Digital Advertising:Web Films, TV & Cinema Advertising: TV Commercials 120–240 seconds
and Writing for Advertising: Writing for Film Advertising

Adding to this spirit of creativity in a good cause is the first White Pencil winner since the category (launched last year) was merged into the main awards. Congratulations to Droga5 for a project that offers a practical solution to a huge problem. Help I Want To Save a Life marks the fruition of a ten-year project begun by Droga5 creative Graham Douglas. Donor registration kits are included with packs of Help Remedies plasters. The kits require a small sample of blood, though as the donor is likely to be bleeding anyway – hence reaching for the plasters – this is a simple action. The samples are then sent to DKMS, the donor centre affiliated with the project, which will follow up upon receipt.

In the Yellow Pencils, McCann Worldgroup won in Writing For Design: Writing for Brands for its LOCOG Gamesmaker project for the 2012 Olympics volunteer programme

R/GA won in Crafts for Advertising: Sound Design & Use of Music for Digital Advertising for One Copy Song. Adam Tensta is Sweden’s biggest hip-hop artist. To promote his song Pass It On, R/GA created a Facebook app that allows only one person to listen at a time before passing it to the next person in line.

Mars Petcare: Donation Glasses from Colenso BBDO, Proximity New Zealand and FINCH won in Direct: Direct Response/TV & Cinema Advertising. NZ cinemagoers were given a choice – donate to help rescue abused dogs and receive a pair of yellow glasses, or pay nothing for the red pair. In the ad which followed, those who watched through yellow saw a happy ending

In Graphic Design: Annual Reports, Brighten the Corners won for its Zumtobel Annual Report. For the Austrian lighting company’s 2011/12 annual report, Brighten the Corners worked with artist Anish Kapoor to create a two-volume publication: one book contained the facts and figures for the year, the other was a printed version of a 1998 video piece by the artist, Wounds and Absent Objects

And there was a Yellow in Branding: Brand Expression in Print for Leo Burnett London’s Pantone Queen, a Diamond Jubilee tie-in documents the colours that the Queen wore on 60 different occasions during her 60-year reign, including the Primrose Yellow she wore at William and Kate’s wedding and the Canal Blue she chose for Ascot in 2008

The much-garlanded #CokeHands from Ogilvy & Mather Shanghai picjed up yet another award, this time a Yellow in Crafts for Advertising: Illustration for Advertising

While there was another win for Droga5 came in Film Advertising Crafts: Production Design for Film Advertising for the Kraft Moreing campaign. To advertise the Boost chocolate bar, Droga5 came up with the Boosted Inspiration Series of mock-documentaires. In this first film we meet the artist behind ‘M0reing’, a new trend/art project involving doing everything in multiples: wearing four hats, watching three TVs, walking three dogs. Scarily plausible

PARTY took a Yellow in Graphic Design: Moving Image (Graphic Design) for its Kanji City film. The City of Kyoto is represented as a series of 16 Kanji animations, each of which symbolises a tree, river, temple, gate and so on found in the city itself

In Outdoor Advertising: Poster Advertising Campaigns there was a Yellow for the Parkinson’s: Everyday campaign by The Assembly in which everyday images, such as a cup of tea or a pair of shoes, are mixed up to represent how Parkinson’s can affect messages the brain gives to the body

In Branding: Branding Schemes/Medium Business, 6D-K won Yellow for its charming icon-based identity scheme for Japanese agricultural co-operative, Minds

And Singapore-based WORK won in Branding: Brand Expression in Print for its Louis Vuitton: Yayoi Kusama Fine Book 2012, a limited edition book for Dover Street Market Ginza formed part of a wider collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The book features images and works drawn from the last 50 years of Kusama’s career.

There was also a Yellow for Sagmeister & Walsh’s Now is Better film in Craft for Design: Typography for Design (of which more later, as the work’s inclusion was the subject of some debate)

The Guardian’s modern-day retelling of the Three Little Pigs, which re-imagined the tale as a contemporary news story illustrating the multiple platforms for news-gathering and reporting utilised by the paper, won in TV & Cinema Advertising:TV Commercials 61–120 seconds. Director: Ringan Ledwidge
.

In Film Advertising Crafts: Cinematography for Film Advertising, F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi in Brazil won for Leica Store São Paulo: Soul, teling the story of the Leica M camera and its role in 20th century history. The film also won Yellow in Film Advertising Crafts: Direction for Film Advertising

There were three Yellows for R/GA and its work on Nike+ FuelBand, in Integrated & Earned Media, Integrated Digital Advertising: Digital Solutions and Mobile Marketing: Mobile Interaction & Experience

Wieden+Kennedy New York’s Southern Comfort: Beach won in TV & Cinema Advertising: TV Commercials 41–60 seconds

While another Brazilian agency, Leo Burnett Tailor Made, won in Integrated & Earned Media: Earned Media Campaigns for My Blood is Red and Black. To combat a shortage of blood donations in Bahia, Brazil, local football club Esporte Clube Vitoria changed its red and black striped kit to white, pledging to change it back stripe by stripe until donations reached the target amount.

Film Advertising Crafts: Special Effects for Film Advertising saw a Yellow for 4Creative for the 4Seven idents it created with ManvsMachine

In Snickers’ You’re Not You When You’re Hungry Twitter campaign, five celebrities were asked to tweet out of character. Katie Price tweeted about economics and Rio Ferdinand confused his followers by talking about his new hobby of knitting before eventually revealing the gag. It won Yellow in Integrated & Earned Media: Earned Media Campaigns forAMV BBDO/AMV Pulse

Radio produced two Yellows this year. In Radio Advertising: Radio Advertising over 30 seconds, Y&R New York won for Campbell’s Soup: Poetry in which the opposing characters in a passive-aggressive mother-daughter row describe the action as it happens, with much door slamming and storming off. Listen here

And in the same category, DraftFCB New Zealand won for Prime Television: Call Girl. For a new season of TV show Secret Diary of a Call Girl, DraftFCB hired an actress to engage in ‘call girl-like’ behaviour across the road from a radio station. The watching DJs soon started commenting on what they saw

In Packaging Design: Packaging Design there was a win for Family Business for Absolut Unique. Some four million unique bottles of Absolut vodka were created by converting machines on the bottling line to spray paint randomly onto them. Each one was numbered

Film Advertising Crafts: Direction for Film Advertising saw a win for We Are Pi and director Körner Union for Human Arabesque. Introducing the TEDX Summit event, this film combined dancers and kaleidoscopic effects to create beautiful patterns from the letter x.

ONLY Jeans: The Liberation won for Uncle Grey Copenhagen in Crafts for Design: Sound Design & Use of Music for Websites & Digital Design. A combined movie, catalogue and game, produced by North Kingdom, click at any time and the film would freeze and load a still via which users could like, share or buy clothes

Volkswagen: The Bark Side, by Deutsch LA and directed by Keith Schofield won in Film Advertising Crafts: Use of Music for Film Advertising

And these Long-Tongued Animal Shoehorns for Closed by gürtlerbachmann won in Packaging Design: Packaging Design

And Johnny Hardstaff’s eerie David viral for Prometheus picked up Yellows in Film Advertising Crafts: Production Design for Film Advertising and Film Advertising Crafts: Direction for Film Advertising

In Digital Design: Websites there was a Yellow for The Martin Agency and its JFK Presidential Library & Museum: Clouds Over Cuba project. In this interactive documentary experience about the Cuban Missile Crisis, extra background material in various forms was made available at key points of the narrative.

Let’s Make Some Great Fingerprint Art by Mrion Deuchars and art directed by Angus Hyland won in Crafts for Design: Illustration for Design

R/GA picked up another Yellow Pencil, this time in Branding: Digital Brand Expression for OneNike which nified more than 70 Nike brands, plus commerce and social media functions

And Apple (it wouldn’t be D&AD without an award for Apple, would it?) won in Product Design: Consumer Product Design for the 27-inch iMac

In Film Advertising Crafts: Animation for Film Advertising, Good Books: Metamorphosis, animated by Buck for ad agency String Theory won Yellow. A Hunter S Thompson-style character goes in search of a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in this film promoting Good Books, the online bookseller in aid of Oxfam

In Digital Advertising: Web Films, AlmapBBDO’s From Love to Bingo for Getty Images, a love story told in 873 stock images, won Yellow

And in Digital Design: Digital Design, Local Projects won for Cleveland Museum of Art: Gallery One. Interactive installations, including a 40-foot multi-touch Collection Wall, allow visitors to explore the permament collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art

In Art Direction: Art Direction for Poster Advertising The Monkeys/MAUD won for their Diageo: Mixionary campaign where series of cocktails are broken down graphically into their constituent parts

And the final Olympic-related project to win was Barber Osgerby’s torch, which won in Product Design: Industrial Product Design

A supplement listing all the winning work, plus details of the President’s Award, will be published with the July issue of CR, out June 19

It’s goodbye to faux wood, felt and metal as Apple unveils a sleek new UI design for iOS7, the first major UI project released under the direction of Sir Jonathan Ive

The new-look iOS7 was unveiled at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco after months of speculation that, under Ive’s direction, the company was about to ditch its increasingly outmoded attachment to skeuomorphism.

Apple claims that “as we reconsidered iOS, our purpose was to create an experience that was simpler, more useful, and more enjoyable” in a press statement that seems keen to stress the idea that the new look is not simply an exercise in styling. “Redesigning the way it works led us to redesign the way it looks. Because good design is design that’s in service of the experience,” Apple say.

iOS7 is simpler, cleaner, flatter. It makes extensive use of what looks to be Helvetica Neue Ultra Light creating a much lighter feel.

To compare before and after, take a look at the previous design for the compass

Compared to the new compass in iOS7 (below and below right)

Also, take a look at Newsstand (far left) – no more hideous fake wooden shelving

Here’s the new-look calendar

and weather where, Apple says “Hail bounces off text, and fog passes in front of it. Storm clouds come into view with a flash of lightning. And suddenly, checking the weather is like looking out a window.”

Apple claims that the redesign provides “a new structure, applied across the whole system, that brings clarity to the entire experience. The interface is purposely unobtrusive. Conspicuous ornamentation has been stripped away. Unnecessary bars and buttons have been removed. And in taking away design elements that don’t add value, suddenly there’s greater focus on what matters most: your content.”

We’ve only got screen grabs to go on so far (the new iOS won’t be publicly available until the autumn) so we’re unable to vouch for the UI experience or any of the little touches that Apple is claiming will make iOS7 a delight to use but it certainly looks a vast improvement on the previous design.

But … it’s an improvement on an existing model. A much-needed, very well produced upgrade. But it’s not a paradigm shift. It’s not a new approach or a reimagination of the way in which we interact with our screens. It doesn’t change our thinking or revolutionise an industry in the way that Apple has done so many times before. In that regard, it could be argued that Microsoft with Windows Phone 8 has been more innovative, more daring.

For that “Oh my God moment” it’s necessary to turn to another innovation announced at Apple’s WWDC, the new, 9.9-inch tall Mac Pro desktop computer, which looks like this. Wow

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue, along with an interview with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late, great Storm Thorgerson. Elsewhere in the issue we take a first look at The Purple Book: Symbolism and Sensuality in Contemporary Illustration, hear from the curators of a fascinating new V&A show conceived as a ‘walk-in book’ plus we have all the regular debate and analysis on the world of visual communications.

You can buy Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe, save money and have CR delivered direct to your door every month.

CR for the iPad

Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app updates with new content throughout each month. Get it here

BETC London is defying jaded customers not to be won over by a collection of what must be the cutest bunnies in the world in a new campaign for hotel chain Ibis.

Filmed over two days at the Ibis London Blackfriars, the online video follows 40 bunnies let loose in one of the hotel’s rooms as they take in the amenities and eventually settle on the chain’s proprietory ‘Sweet Bed’.

Directed by Ornette Spenceley of Independent Films, the video is set to a contemporary remake of Hushabye Mountain by Richard Hawley from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

“In some ways the bunnies were in control on this shoot,” says BETC executive creative director Neil Dawson. “At only six weeks old the bunnies were untrained and naturally curious. We were just there to capture the magic as they instinctively gravitated towards the comfort of the bed.”

If anyone is wondering how BETC and Independent fared going against the old mantra of ‘never work with kids or animals’, they can look at the behind-the-scenes film below – although it probably doesn’t paint the whole picture.

Credits:
Agency: BETC London
Executive Creative Director: Neil Dawson
Copywriter: Clive Pickering
Art Director: Ciara O’Meara
Production Company: Independent
Director: Ornette Spenceley
Director of Photography: Niels Reedtz Johansen

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue, along with an interview with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late, great Storm Thorgerson. Elsewhere in the issue we take a first look at The Purple Book: Symbolism and Sensuality in Contemporary Illustration, hear from the curators of a fascinating new V&A show conceived as a ‘walk-in book’ plus we have all the regular debate and analysis on the world of visual communications.

You can buy Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe, save money and have CR delivered direct to your door every month.

CR for the iPad

Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app updates with new content throughout each month. Get it here