Hasta La Ideas

The tenth annual St Bride Library conference will take place this November; its theme the notion of ‘tension’ in creative practice…

Design is fuelled by relationships integral to the discipline: colour and form, form and function; client and designer, analogue and digital. And a resulting piece of work is quite often the product of a unique tension between two elements.

For Critical Tensions, curators John Walters and Becky Chilcott have invited speakers to discuss how they balance and manage opposition in their work and in their pursuit of ‘perfect tension’.

The theme also taps into another prevalent issue: that times of economic constraint can engender creativity. Moreoever, how has the creative industry responded to the societal changes we’ve witnessed in the last few years?

Speakers set to discuss these issues and more include Phil Baines, Jonathan Barnbrook, Zoë Bather, Tom Farrand, Amelia Gregory, Matt Jones, Alan Kitching, Gerry Leonidas, Vaughan Oliver, Paul Rennie, Lucienne Roberts, Jack Schulze, Steve Watson, Matt Webb, Rebecca Wright and Derek Yates.

The moderators for the event will be Phil Baines and Emily King and there will also be demonstrations by Paul Antonio (calligraphy), Douglas Bevans (bookbinding), Mark Frith (stonecutting), Helen Ingham and Richard Lawrence (typesetting, linocutting).

The two-day event takes place between November 10-11 and tickets are available, here. They cost £120 at full price; £90 for Friends of St Brides Library; and £50 (£35 Friends of St Brides Library) for full time students. The money that St Brides raises from its talks and conferences directly supports the Library. More details on St Brides and its activities at stbride.org/library.

For Beijing Design Week, London studio johnson banks created a series of banners championing the collaborative efforts of British and Chinese design practices…

The enormous posters, collectively titled What Design Can Do (shown in all their glory at the bottom of this post), celebrate the 10th anniversary of the MA Curating Contemporary Design course at Kingston University. The program specialises in developing projects between UK and Chinese curators, museums and universities.

The six banners are on display in 751 D-Park’s Power Square, on the towers of an old power station. The area, now regarded as the city’s design hub, is close to Beijing’s well known 798 Art District.

The studio worked with animators Realise to create the imagery for the posters, rendered using 3D software. “A series of slogans headlining international design ideas and theories were developed by the UK and Chinese project teams, designed to echo the passion for sloganeering which has formed a distinctive role in Chinese culture and society,” explain johnson banks.

Details from two of the banners

The headlines include ‘New from Old’, ‘Shared Design History’, ‘Collaborative Practice’ and the ‘Power of Making’. Two final themes focus on ‘Design Process’ and the ‘Next Generation’.

What Design Can Do is curated by Professor Catherine McDermott Kingston University and Tingting Xu, a Beijing curator and graduate of MA Curating Contemporary Design Kingston University in partnership with the Design Museum in London. More details about Beijing Design Week at bjdw.org.

Shane Walter, the co-founder of the onedotzero digital festival and production company joins illustrator Quentin Blake and Dinah Casson among this year’s shortlist for the Prince Philip Designers Prize

Walter (shown top) co-founded onedotzero with in 1996. Its annual festival documenting ‘adventures in motion’ has since gone global while Walter has expanded the organisation’s activities to embrace production and curation, on the way giving a break to many emerging directors and artists as well as acting as a catalyst to the development of interactive and digital work in various media.

Dinah Casson (above) is co-founder of Casson Mann and one of the world’s most respected environmental and exhibition designers (whose work includes the Imperial War Museum’s Crimes Against Humantiy exhibition below).

The Prince Philip Prize, first awarded in 1959, recognises an outstanding contribution to UK business and society through design. Previous winners include Kenneth Grange, James Dyson and Terence Conran.

Illustrator Quentin Blake has also been nominated for this year’s prize.

The full list of nominees this year is: structural engineer Cecil Balmond; Quentin Blake; IDEO chief Tim Brown; exhibition designer Dinah Casson; architect Sir David Chipperfield; milliner Stephen Jones; Sir Paul Smith;, Shane Walter; Chris Wilkinson and Jim Eyre of Wilkinson Eyre architects and Saheed Zahedi, one of the leading designers of medical prosthetics.

The winner will be announced by The Duke of Edinburgh at a ceremony at the Design Council on Tuesday November 29.

More details here

With the impending release of Walter Isaacson‘s authorized Steve Jobs biography and the recent publication of former, lesser-known Apple co-founder Ronald Wayne‘s autobiography, you have more than enough reading material about this one specific technology company and the people behind it to last you through the whole autumn. However, now there’s one more to add to the pile. Forbes has released four new pages from the upcoming graphic novel, “The Zen of Steve Jobs,” written by the magazine’s own writers and illustrated and designed by the firm JESS3. Largely set in 1986 after Jobs had been removed from Apple by the company’s board and was starting to launch his own computer company NeXT, the novel “re-imagines Steve’s relationship with his friend and mentor, Kobun Chino Otogawa, a Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist priest.” The magazine released the first four pages at the very start of September, with plans to print all eight in its upcoming Forbes 400 issue. The full book itself, set to be roughly 60-pages in length, doesn’t have a set release date, but the magazine reports that it will appear as a “digital release late this fall.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Joining the ranks of ‘logo as image receptacle’ identities is a new scheme for Barcelona’s Marina Port Vell created by Aesop, the London-based consultancy that was formed earlier this year

Marina Port Vell sits at the end of La Rambla in Barcelona’s city centre making it a prime landing point for the yachts of the super rich. The Marina was bought by the Salamanca Group last July which is developing it into a superyacht marina to open next autumn.

Apparently, superyachts can remain in marinas for months at a time while their owners are busy running the world. This leads to problems in retaining crews who rapidly tire of sitting around waiting for the next sailing. Marina Port Vell has a distinct advantage as is it is situated in the centre of Barcelona, providing plenty for crews to do and thus making them much more likely to stay on board. Thus Aesop decided to focus on the attractions of the city in its visual identity rather than traidtional marina fare of waves and wildlife.

The mark is a capital M made from a square with boat shapes cut into it. Images of the city are then applied to the mark, featuring some of the city’s famous landmarks as well as other specially commissioned shots of city life.

That approachis also carried through to stationery and even an umbrella which looks plain on the outside but has an image from the Sagrada Familia printed on the inside.

For reference, the old logo looked like this

Related content

Check out our story on the whole logo-as-image-receptacle trend here
Story on the Aol. rebrand here
And our post on the MTV rebrand here

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you’re not also reading the magazinein print, you’re really missing out. Our October issue includes the story of Blackpool’s Comedy Carpet, a profile of Jake Barton whose studio is currently working on the 9/11 Memorial Museum, plus pieces on branding and the art world, guerilla advertising coming of age, Google’s Android logo, Ars Electronica, adland and the riots, and loads more.

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