Design Indaba names starry line-up

David Adjaye, Matthew Carter, Jessica Hische, Sir John Hegarty and musician Spoek Mathambo are amongst an impressive line-up of speakers for this year’s Design Indaba conference in Cape Town

Few conferences around the world can bring in the big names quite like Design Indaba. This year, Sir John Hegarty, Paula Scher, Seymour Chwast, David Adjaye Christoph Niemann, Matthew Carter and Marian Bantjes will all appear on the three-day bill, with Mathambo topping the bill.

But one of the best things about Indaba has always been that, alongside those crowd-pullers, the organisers also bring speakers with whom the audience may be less familiar but who they often go away talking about. This year, from the UK, Ben Terrett will talk about his work on the government web services. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg will explain how synthetic biology and design can help engineer a better future amd Brazilian chef Alex Atala will talk about combining the natural ingredients of his homeland in traditional cuisine.

Plus, there is Steven Heller, John Maeda, Martí Guixé, visual artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and many more. Fiull speaker programme here.

Design Indaba runs from February 27-29. CR will be reporting from the conference throughout.

 

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile digital art and generative design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

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 will also update with new content throughout each month.

Playtime at The Royal London’s Children Hospital

Artist Chris O’Shea has collaborated with digital production company Nexus Interactive Arts to create Woodland Wiggle – an interactive game for children displayed on an enormous telly in a new indoor play area at The Royal London Hospital’s dedicated Children’s Hospital…

Officially called The Ann Riches Healing Space, the new indoor play area has been designed by architects Cottrell & Vermeulen and graphic designer Morag Myerscough and takes the form of an oversized living room filled with Alice In Wonderland-scale objects for children to explore and interact with.

“The architects [Cottrell & Vermeulen] had won a RIBA competition to design the space and had the concept of the large living room,” explains Myerscough of the project. “I was then brought in by Vital Arts [who commissioned the project] to introduce another layer of narrative in the space,” she continues.

“The living room was to appear as a familiar calm space but super sized and I introduced the playful disorder with giant characters, stories, puzzle seating, wooden tops and a wallpaper patterned with a menagerie of animals.”

 

“Once we we struck on the idea of the animals who better to ask than my Mum, Betty Fraser Myerscough, a textile artist, who went to work creating various animals and we took [toy-size versions, shown below] to the hospital to see how the patients would react and they loved them,” Myerscough continues.

“The main characters in the space are Eddie the Tiger and Twoo the Wise Owl. We did not stop there – Luke Morgan has written a story about all the friends who live in Cozy Wood and can hear it narrated under the story telling chair in the space.”

It is Betty Fraser Myerscough’s animal character creations which have been brought to life in the interactive game devised by O’Shea that plays out on the huge TV in the space. Myerscough’s characters were illustrated and animated by Felix Massie and can be interacted with onscreen by moving around in front of the screen.

Entitled Wiggle Wood, the installation allows children to enter into a storybook-style illustrated world, enabling them to paint, play music (with sound design and music by Brains & Hunch), and trigger sun, rain, snow and rainbows with animated animal characters across a number of woodland scenes.

“Working in close consultation with clinical teams at the hospital, and following a series of workshops with physiotherapists and occupational therapists, I was able to determine a range of movements that would give children the best health benefits which strongly influenced the format and design of the games created,” explains artist Chirs O’Shea of the project.

“The installation had to work with a wide range of abilities, from wheelchair users, visually impaired, to bed bound children, so simple movement filtering allows for triggering of music and paint with just a wave of the hands,” he continues. Here’s a look at the installation being put to good use:

Woodland Wiggle credits:

Artist Chris O’Shea

Producer
Beccy McCray
Executive producer
Luke Ritchie
Development producer Claire Spencer Cook

Production assistant Carmen de Wit
Illustrator and animator Felix Massie
Composer and sound designer Brains and Hunch

Documentation editor Dave Slade
Production Company
Nexus Interactive Arts

Other features in the space include huge colourful spinning tops (they don’t spin, for obvious safety reasons) designed by Morag Myerscough, an interactive patterned projection underneath a huge lampshade, and two enormous animal characters designed by Myerscough senior – here’s Twoo awaiting departure from the factory it was made in:

Architects Cottrell & Vermeulen have also designed a garden area in the hospital but photos aren’t available at the time of posting this story – we’ll add images as soon as we have them.

Both the indoor and outdoor play areas were ommissioned by Vital Arts, the arts organisation for Barts Health NHS Trust. Funded entirely by charitable donations from underwriters OdysseyRe, construction group Skanska, and Barts and The London Charity.

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile digital art and generative design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

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 will also update with new content throughout each month.

Monsterising Facebook

Turn your Facebook profile into a personalised monster, with The Creators Project’s new series of online 3D-printing apps. Plus our round-up of more data-to-3D-printing ideas

The Creators Project, in association with Vice, have launched a series of web apps that allow you to turn your Facebook user data into a 3D printed sculpture. The three different apps offer different final sculptures, and you can use your data to created a personalised monster, a rock crystal, or an astrological horoscope. After you’ve gone through the various online stages, your sculpture is printed by Shapeways, and sent to you.

There are three different experiences to choose from: Monster Me, Crystallized and Astroverb. Monster Me features characters created by the South Korean Sticky Monster Lab, and uses your various Facebook likes to build up a monster caricature. There’s the added option of ‘growing’ your monster by posting to your Facebook timeline, and you can also add buildings that correspond to your various interests.

The Crystallized web app generates a crystal using your Facebook friend data, with each point of the crystal representing a friend, and your relationship with them.

Once your crystal has been generated, there’s the option to add friends to it, as well as change the colours before it’s printed.

 

Astroverb creates a personalised horoscope, which ‘analyses your profile to reveal your destiny’.

This isn’t the first time 3D printing has been used to transform data into a physical product. Design agency Sapient Nitro send out personalised 3D-printed Christmas stars last year, using the receiver’s Facebook data to determine the sizes and lengths of each of the points of the star.

3D production company, Inition, also used data to create a 3D printed sculpture, in a project for Manor House Development Trust. The final result used data taken from an online questionnaire, and featured a forest made up of more than 400 3D-printed trees, with each tree corresponding to an individual answer.

‘People Wood?’ 3D Printed Info-sculpture Forest from Inition on Vimeo.

Product design studio Shapes in Play have also been using 3D-printing to turn infographics into sculptures that demonstrate the energy content and CO2 equivalent of different dishes of food.

And last year, Realitat used 3D-printing to create microsonic landscapes – sculptural forms created using data from albums by various artists. Shown below are representations of Portishhead and Nick Drake albums.

You may also remember the 3D photobooth, set up in Omote in Tokyo by Japanese agency Party, which turned full-body scans of people into miniature printed versions.

And last year we also wrote about designer Matthew Plummer-Fernandez’s 3D-printed glitch tea set, which took scans of non-matching tea cups and saucers, and recreated a glitchy printed version of the originals.

Meridian Explorer: Convert digital files to analog sound with this nifty device

Meridian Explorer

When it comes to process, few audio companies can match Meridian’s attention to detail and craftsmanship. Their latest release is Explorer, a DAC (Digital to Audio Converter) that refigures your digital audio files and outputs them as analog sound. Essentially, the device replaces your computer’s sound card to pump…

Continue Reading…

The best fashion film ever

Matthew Frost has directed a satirical new short for fashion brand Viva Vena, that borrows from the clichéd subject matter of every single generic fashion film ever made.

Matthew Frost’s new film for label Viva Vena makes heavy mockery of the stock themes that consistently crop up in fashion films.  Starring Lizzy Caplan (previously of Mean Girls and New Girl), the film follows the actress as she delivers a breathy monologue on the benefits of living life as if in a movie. As she says, “When I am alone, I like to pretend I’m in a movie. A kind of movie I don’t quite understand”. Caplan delivers a great performance as the overly self-aware fashion heroine, and the short covers all the other requisite fashion film themes, including:

Retro technology:

Predictable cultural references:

Communion with nature:

And spontaneous performances with obscure musical instruments:

Viva Vena, “Fashion Film” from Somesuch & Co. on Vimeo.

somesuchandco.com

Frost’s parody also calls to mind Hunger’s A Very Successful Guide of Fashion, which sees fashion advice delivered from unlikely sources.

150 years of tube passengers

As part of the celebrations of the tube’s 150th anniversary, TfL is using the moving image poster sites on its escalators to put today’s travellers face to face with their forebears through the ages

We’re currently working on a special issue of CR all about the London Underground and the visual communications work it has engendered over the past 150 years. One of our pieces will look at how Transport for London and its ad agency M&C Saatchi promote the network today.

As part of the 150th celebrations, TfL is running a campaign on escalators featuring a selection of tube travellers from years gone by.

 

 

We’re not big fans of these moving image poster sites by and large – mostly the campaigns which have run on them so far have been gimmicky and annoying. But this has to be the best use of the medium we have seen. Maybe the punk should be sticking two fingers up though?

 

Agency: M&C Saatchi. Photography: David Stewart

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile digital art and generative design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

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 will also update with new content throughout each month.

EBacc threat to design removed in Gove U-turn

Campaigners for the creative industries have claimed victory as the Government abandons plans which may have sidelined art and design in secondary education, and confirms it is reforming the GCSE system to include design

Under the original proposals for the reform of secondary education it was feared that arts and design subjects would be sidelined by not being included in the core ‘pillars’ of the new new Ebacc qualification. Today Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove has announced that the Government will introduce a ‘new eight-subject measure of GCSEs, including English and maths, three subjects out of sciences, languages, history and geography and three other subjects, such as art, music or RE’. The latter could include DT and other creative subjects. (More detail at Design Week, here).

Joe Macleod, global design director at ustwo and coordinator of the #IncludeDesign campaign said: “This is fantastic news for the whole of the design industry and creative economy. That Michael Gove is now listening to the 100 creative industry and education leaders who handed in a letter to Number 10 last week raising their serious concerns is a great step forwards. As an industry this gives us an opportunity to work with education leaders and the government to help support the shared vision of a world-class syllabus that offers students a fully rounded education. Without these changes to the EBacc, we would have lost the designers, architects and creativies of the future, as their talents would have been constricted by schools being pushed to prioritise an unnecessarily narrow range of subjects that reflected the past and not the future. The creative industries are worth more than £60 billion a year to the UK economy and it would have been a catastrophe if creative subjects such as design & technology had been lost from schools at Key Stage 4. Now we need to see the same breadth included at A Level too.”

Deborah Annetts, chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians and coordinator of the Bacc for the Future campaign has welcomed the anouncement as “good news for children and good news for education. We must learn from the last six months of consultation and ensure we work together to create high quality and rigorous GCSEs and A Levels with appropriate assessment fit for the 21st Century. Creative subjects such as art, music and design and technology need to stay at the heart of education so that we can develop talented youngsters to feed our creative industries and generate growth.

“The voices of the creative industries and education sectors have been listened to, and we welcome this. We will now be looking closely at the new proposed National Curriculum for music and work with the Government to ensure that we have a National Curriculum, GCSEs and A-levels fit for the future.”

The changes were also hailed by Liz Wilkins, senior marketing manager at Adobe Education UK: “We have always maintained that the omission of design and the wider arts in the Government’s planned GCSE reforms was a fundamental flaw in the Ebacc proposals,” she says. “The u-turn is a huge victory on the part of the creative industries, who have campaigned through initiatives such as #IncludeDesign and #baccforthefuture, for a revision of the plans, and will prevent future generations of students leaving school with a gaping hole in their secondary education.

“Our own research tells us that 77% of UK employers and university lecturers place a high value on creativity in school leavers, with 78% of people in the UK in agreement that creativity is key to driving economic growth. The UK is renowned for its creativity thanks to its successes in fashion, art, design, film, food and music, so providing all students with access to creative subjects is essential to our future economic success.

“A programme of study devoid of any arts tuition at all would threaten to stifle creativity further. And whilst there is still work to be done in ensuring young people leave school with the necessary skills that will make them an attractive hire for an employer, we’re in a much better position to achieve that today than we were yesterday.”

As part of the campaign to include design and creative subjects at the heart of secondary education, both Design Week editor Angus Montgomery and CR editor Patrick Burgoyne wrote open letters to Michael Gove. Many other leading figures in the creative community also made representations to Government. Both Joe Macleod and Deborah Annetts are to be particularly congratulated for their efforts in both formalising and organising opposition to the plans.

The Guardian offers a free view from The Shard

The Guardian has launched an online app on its site that allows users to scroll around a highly detailed 360 degree photo taken from the viewing platform of London’s tallest building, The Shard, which opens to paying visitors today…

Created in-house and making use of two super-detailed 360 degree photographs (one taken during the day, one taken at dusk) created by panoramic photographer Will Pearson, the app launches with a short filmed intro (still shown above) that takes the user into the lift of The Shard, up to the 68th floor and out on to the viewing platform. It’s worth putting your headphones on to hear the wind in your ears as you arrive virtually at the viewing platform.

Simple instructions appear handwritten on the screen  although the app is pretty intuitive – you can scroll around and zoom in and choose whether to admire the view with or without the dozens of sound, story and landmark tags on screen.

Click on a tag to find out info about landmarks or to read stories by various Londoners about places of significance to them.

There are also sounds of the city to sample as well, sourced from the London Sound Survey – so you can listen, for example, to birds chirping on Walthamstow Marshes, or the sound of Big Ben’s tuneful bells chiming the hour…

The 360 degree photograph is pretty spectacular, although it’s a little hazy when you zoom in to distant parts of the scene, and it’s great to make the tags disappear to find your own way around the incredible view.

There’s also an option to change the image to dusk:

Find the app on The Guardian’s site here. Be warned, it’s very easy to spend a lot of time admiring the view.

To book tickets to check out the view in person at The Shard, visit theviewfromtheshard.com.

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile digital art and generative design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

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 will also update with new content throughout each month.

 

Made in Sheffield

Graphic designer Craig Oldham reports for CR from Curated by, a one-day creative conference in Sheffield which, this year, took as its theme the idea of Narrative

Sheffield. City of steel, the world’s first football club, and Curated by, a one-day conference started in 2010 by two of Sheffield Hallam’s graphic design lecturers, Pam Bowman and Matt Edgar. Centered around a different theme with each year, this year’s subject matter was Narrative, with the intent, as described by the organisers, to explore “how stories are structured, built and crafted to communicate messages through a range of formats and media”.

With a line-up consisting of Morag Myerscough (Studio Myerscough), Jack Schulze (Berg), Johnny Kelly (Nexus Productions) and Erik Kessels (KesselsKramer) this year’s thread was woven through the entire creative industry with graphic design, typography, architecture, interaction and product design, film-making, animation, photography, and advertising all ticked-off in polymathic style. The diversity of their respective backgrounds and interests, inspiration and methods, made each speaker’s talk in itself engaging enough to avoid the attention-plummet that’s sometimes a pitfall of such events (although some speakers were inevitably more comfortable on the stage than others).

 

Studio Myerscough’s Movement Café in Greenwich, which we posted about here

Each speaker had an enviable body of work behind them. Morag Myerscough kicked things off with a slide-show of her work and her years growing up in North London. She jumped through her distinctive ‘supergraphics’, starting with ‘Familiarity’, the hoarding which began her relationship with architects. Using bright colour at a large scale (which the local councils, initially, disapproved of) has always been central to her work, evolving into the bright and bold typographic aesthetic that she is known for today.

 

 

Next was Schulze, the entertaining principal at Berg, the studio responsible for (alongside much more envy-inducing work) the much-loved Little Printer. But Schulze’s lecture was far less concerned with work and dealt more with Berg’s approach to it, and their understanding of the world, something Schulze talked about with great passion and humour. Highlights included the analogy he made between examining something and “seeing the whole” with a strip from a Warren Ellis Iron Man comic (below), and his prediction for there being “no more U in UI [as in User]” which was illustrated by a video of kittens riding a Roomba (the latter, he exclaimed, was “How to win at conferences.”).

 

 

Kelly (see CR profile on him here) walked a more frequently trodden path, talking through examples of his directing and animation work (including his Procrastination graduation film, below), peppered with the animations and films of others for no obvious reason than he just seemed to like them (which, admittedly, was something you had to agree with him on).

 

 

 

Which left a snow-delayed Kessels to wrap-up. His trademark charismatic and insightful lecture, delivered with his usual humour and honesty, covered the beginnings of the inimitable KesselsKramer and his personal endeavors and evaluations in photography and graphic design.

 

Kessels talking about Fred and Valerie, the latest in his In Almost Very PIcture series of books of found photography. See our post about the project here

 

The Curated By… Narratives one-day-er should be applauded for its assembly of a diverse cast (though the absence of a writer-in some capacity-was felt). The perseverance needed to pull off an event in the North of NowhereTM* in snow that would usually bring the entire country to a grinding holt, was admirable.

That said, shortly into the first lecture it became quite apparent that the crux of the conference, narrative, is in itself is a pretty complex thing to talk about. Couldn’t everything be considered narrative, especially when working in a creative industry where arguably all work concerns communication?

It felt to me that the real ‘narrative’ isn’t the process of the realisation of a piece of work, but where the ideas for these outcomes come from in the first place. Whether your personal history filters into the process, your empathy and unique experience of the world provides the source, or whether it’s about striving for simplification or a commitment to a standard of thinking that governs seemingly everything thereafter. The real narrative is that personal story we all have of constantly creating, regardless of our structure, our audience, our format, sequence, or our message.

In the end, the narrative is really in the strength of the ideas. And the ideas of these speakers at Curated by… were as strong as the steel of the city which hosted them.

 

*Nod to tDR and Ian Anderson.

 

Craig Oldham is a Manchester-based graphic designer whose previous project include the design family tree and the hand.written.letter.project.

 

 

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile digital art and generative design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

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 will also update with new content throughout each month.

FL@33 work to date

Much more than just an updated online portfolio, design studio FL@33’s new website is a complete archive of the work Tomi Vollauschek and Agathe Jacquillat have been doing since they founded the practice in 2001…

According to Vollauschek the new flat33.com contains over 200 new, previously unreleased and “classic” FL@33 projects, details of which have been updated with a search function and extra background information. The site balances random image displays with tightly focussed search options to find particular projects.

But the studio has been meticulous in its gathering up of all FL@33 mentions in the press and details of exhibitions and lectures it has been involved with. CR has been following the duo’s progress since 2001, for example, and users can even see the issue they first appeared which covered their Royal College of Art graduate show (below).

To delve into FL@33’s portfolio, users can search by type of project or by sector. The ‘Illustration’ page is shown above; roll over an image and the site offers more detail on the project. Individual project pages look like this:

The new responsive site is also optimised to be displayed across different browser sizes, tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices.

All in all it’s one of the strongest studio sites we’ve seen for a while, and evidence that when you care about the work you do this much, it pays to show it off well. As well as highlighting new work, they’ve also managed to put everything they’ve done into a wider context, too, so the story of the studio is told right from the start. See flat33.com.

flat33.com is designed by FL@33 and programmed by Huck und Fresow.

 

CR in Print
The January issue of Creative Review is all about the Money – well, almost. What do you earn? Is everyone else getting more? Do you charge enough for your work? How much would it cost to set up on your own? Is there a better way of getting paid? These and many more questions are addressed in January’s CR.

But if money’s not your thing, there’s plenty more in the issue: interviews with photographer Alexander James, designer Mirko Borsche and Professor Neville Brody. Plus, Rick Poynor on Anarchy magazine, the influence of the atomic age on comic books, Paul Belford’s art direction column, Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s This Designer’s Life column and Gordon Comstock on the collected memos, letters and assorted writings of legendary adman David Ogilvy.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

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 will also update with new content throughout each month.