Hasta La Ideas

Our February issue is an illustration special including our pick of this year’s Pick Me Up artists (the work of one of whom, Carine Brancowitz, features on our cover), BBH’s Mark Reddy on illustration in advertising plus what an agent can do for you. And: designing sounds for cars, the future of news and what we can all learn from the marvellous Mr Paul Smith

The February issue of Creative Review is available to buy direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money, too. Details here.

February’s focus on illustration kicks off with a discussion with four leading illustrators’ agents on the state of the industry, how illustrators can develop their career and what agents look for in new talent

Then we profile four up-and-coming illustrators from those selected to exhibit at this year’s Pick Me Up graphic art fair

And BBH head of art Mark Reddy reveals why illustration can sometimes be a hard sell to advertising clients and the advantages it can bring when done well

Too busy to keep up with everything online? Our new Month in Review section brings together all the main creative talking points and our pick of work from the previous four weeks along with your favourite columnists

Plus, amazing ‘pareidolic’ (look it up!) imagery from Graham Fink’s show at the Riflemaker gallery

Five things our columnist Gordon Comstock learned from his former employer Paul Smith, a master of branding

What should an electric car sound like and what effect will that have on our cities? We report on the efforts of a group of designers to re-engineer the sounds of our streets

France is to have its first ever festival of graphic design – will it help improve the standing of the industry?

US adman Gerry Graf (creator of the genius Skittles campaign) shares his tips on creative success

How much do we need to know about designers’ personal lives? Rick Poynor argues that an exhaustve new study of the ‘multi-active’ Dutch master Jurriaan Schrofer takes the design monograph to a whole new level of biographical detail

While Andy Cowles reviews Francesco Franchi’s timely examination of the future of editorial design, Designing News

And our Monograph this month documents the extraordinary graffiti-covered Magasins Généraux building in Paris, soon to become the new home of ad agency BETC

The February issue of Creative Review is available to buy direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money, too. Details here.

Anthony Burrill is the latest artist to contribute to Manchester’s Print and Paste billboard project with a poster made up of individually printed giant woodblock letters

Back in September 2012 we posted about the launch of Print and Paste, a collaborative project which took over a disused poster site in Manchester and invited artists and designers to use it as an exhibition space.

The latest piece of work at the site is North & South – a collaboration between Anthony Burrill, Liam Hopkins of ‘creative services studio’ Lost Heritage and Dave Sedgwick of Print and Paste. “I contacted Anthony as I have always admired his approach to work. Around the same time I was working with Liam at Lost Heritage and he suggested it could be possible to make oversized wood type blocks for the project. We started to talk and it seemed a great idea for Anthony to take on,” says Sedgwick, (who is also the organiser of the BCN MCR exhibition in which designers from Barcelona collaborate with their peers from Manchester).

North & South is a reference to the way in which the project was produced (and also to Burrill who grew up in the north but now lives and works in the south). Burrill designed the letters which were then manufactured by Hopkins using his workshop’s CNC router.

Each letter was printed on the Heidelberg Cylinder press at Adams of Rye in East Sussex, Burrill’s regular printing partner. The prints were then pasted on to the billboard to complete the final piece, as can be seen in this film.

“As soon as Dave contacted me I was keen to be part of it,” Burrill says. “The idea of using wood block type at billboard size was exciting, something I hadn’t seen done before. And of course I was keen to produce a piece of public art for my home town.”

The individual letter prints are now available to buy from Burrill’s website while the original artwork can be seen at Lower Ormond Street just off Oxford Road in Manchester for the rest of January and February 2014.

To submit ideas for consideration for the Print and Paste poster site, send examples of work, with an outline of the intended project, to info@printandpaste.com with the subject line “Proposal – [name]”.

Print and Paste is a collaboration between designers Micah Purnell, Dave Sedgwick, Nick Chaffe and director of The Big Art People, Jim Ralley, and is facilitated by Daniel Jones of MOne Studios.

BCN MCR will be back for 2014 on March 27. Details here

The BBC has launched a series of interactive guides about World War One using its new digital learning platform, iwonder.

iwonder is a responsive platform that combines archive footage and original content to create immersive online learning resources. Eight guides were launched yesterday to coincide with the start of the BBC’s World War One programming season, another 17 will be released this month and 100 by the end of this year. The platform will also be used to provide guides covering art, food, science, history and religion.

At bbc.co.uk/ww1, users can explore subjects such as poetry’s impact on our understanding of the war, censorship of the press during conflict and how World War One affected women’s rights.

Each guide is a separate web page divided into seven or eight key points and includes original editorial, video and audio content as well as imagery sourced from various archives including the Mary Evans Picture Library, infographics and a ‘where next’ section linking to external sites for further reading.

The BBC says the guides are designed to provide audiences with a deeper understanding of the war and challenge common misconceptions about the conflict. Each features commentary from a different broadcaster or expert, from composer Gareth Malone to journalist Katie Adie and historians Dan Snow and Neil Oliver.

The mix of content is fascinating and includes a timeline plotting the daily routine of soldiers in the trenches, excerpts from a BBC 4 documentary on wartime plastic surgery techniques and journalist Stephen Gibbs reading extracts from his great grandfather’s account of working as a war correspondent at the British Army Headquarters. There are also interactive quizzes and multiple choice questions.

Andy Pipes, executive product manager of knowledge and learning at the BBC, says the iwonder service will provide a new way of presenting content compared to publishing traditional editorial or broadcasting TV shows and podcasts online.

“More and more of our audiences are accessing our content via mobile and tablet devices…for the first time this past Christmas, the proportion of people visiting the BBC Food website from a tablet or smartphone was larger than those visiting from a PC. This trend is set to continue. With the look and feel of native mobile applications getting ever more immersive, our audience’s expectations of accessing content on their phones and tablets is high. Expecting our users to struggle to navigate a full “desktop” website on a tiny screen isn’t acceptable any longer,” he says.

When designing the service, Pipes says staff were inspired by immersive editorial offerings such as the New York Times’ Snowfall story – but needed a more responsive platform that could be easily updated and adapted.

“We noticed that most [engaging web experiences] seemed to be one-offs and didn’t work well on mobile devices. We were adamant we wanted our new format to have all the qualities of this class of highly immersive story – but tailored for every device – whilst being straightforward for editorial teams to reproduce quickly and repeatedly,” he explains.

To meet these requirements, production staff created a system that’s designed to work seamlessly on tablets, smartphones and computers. Rather than creating bespoke code for each guide, the iwonder platform uses a single framework that editorial staff can update to provide new guides in just a few hours or days.

To make sure pages load quickly on any device, Pipes says the team have developed a system “that loads just the essential components of the page at the right times. Mobile-sized images download first, then when the page’s Javascript detects the browser’s capabilities, higher resolution images get ‘loaded in dynamically’,” he says.

“For pictures with a dense amount of information on them, such as infographics, it’s important not just to resize a smaller version of a big image, but to load in a completely different image that’s best for that screen,” he adds.

The system is also programmed to load the correct media player on any device – so Apple users won’t be offered Flash player – and Pipes says it’s designed to work with older web browswers or those that don’t use Javascript.

This attention to detail is also evident in the guide’s design: icons, headers and linear layouts make pages easy to navigate and browse in small chunks. “It was important for the whole effect to feel manageable, digestible in a single sitting,” a spokesperson told CR.

“The use of circular icons to denote progress also had a subtle effect of moving from dark tones to lighter ones – illuminating new steps of the journey. In terms of response times, especially on mobile devices, care has been taken to eliminate any large graphics that don’t serve the content’s purpose.”

In designing iwonder, the BBC has produced a compelling online platform that’s both a valuable learning resource and a great marketing tool, showcasing the broadcaster’s breadth of content and promoting programmes past and present. Its intuitive design means even those who rarely browse the web should feel comfortable using the service, and the flexible coding framework provides a simpler, more cost effective alternative to bespoke, one-off experiences.

The Gallery of Russian Art and Design’s latest exhibition includes rarely seen posters promoting silent films from the 1920s. Open until March, it offers a fascinating look at early film advertising and the use of cinematic techniques in print communications.

Kino/Film: Soviet Posters of the Silent Screen was curated by GRAD director Elena Sudakova and art historian Lutz Becker. While the 30 posters on show were mass produced, few copies of them exist today and several have never been exhibited in the UK until now.

The Russian Government invested heavily in silent film in the 1920s – a state controlled organisation, Sovkino, was appointed to oversee the distribution of foreign films and revenue generated from ticket sales was used to fund domestic propaganda productions such as Sergei Eisentein’s October and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg, which celebrate the October Revolution of 1917.

Posters promoting domestic and foreign titles were produced by a subsidiary department, Reklam Films, led by designer Yakov Ruklevsky, who appointed a number of young creatives including Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg, Izrail Bograd, Grigorii Borisov, Nikolai Prusakov, Mikhail Dlugach, Aleksandr Naumov and Semen Semenov Menes. Some went on to design adverts for consumer goods while others specialised in set design and political posters, but all used the same vivid colours, experimental typography and avante garde techniques.

As the films were produced in black and white, designers were free to experiment with vivid blocks of colour, such as in the Stenberg’s print promoting 1926 film The Three Million Case (above). Propaganda art of the time was mostly limited to one or two colours but Reklam’s film posters used three.

Many of the works shown in the exhibition also feature large floating heads, acting in the same way as close-up stills in film posters today. As Alexandra Chiriac explains in an accompanying book, stills could not be directly transferred onto posters, so artists drew scenes and characters by hand from projections. Their layouts were later transferred by craftsmen onto stone or zinc plates using litho crayon or ink.

As well as employing vivid colours and close-ups, Reklam’s designers used a range of cinematic techniques that were pioneered in the films they promoted – such as repetition, asymmetric viewpoints and dramatic foreshortenings. These distorted proportions were often created by toying with the angle or size of projections, creating dramatic and often eerie or unsettling artwork.

These techniques were employed with the sole intention of startling passers by – according to Chiriac, the Stenbergs once declared: “We produce a poster that is noticeable…designed to shock, to hold attention…To reach this aim, we treat the source material with total freedom, which is also spurred on by the size of the poster. We do not preserve proportionality between several objects and are turning figures upside down – in short, we employ everything that could stop even a hurrying passer by in his tracks”.

While the works on display are rarely seen today, they were exhibited in Russia in 1925 and 1926, and samples were filed at the Lenin Library at the insistence of art critic and politician Lunacharski. The GRAD show is a rare chance to see these iconic works up close in the size and format their designers intended.

Posters also featured in Sudakov and Becker’s book (priced at £25) and GRAD is hosting a series of accompanying events including film screenings and a panel discussion on January 22. See grad-london.com for details.

Kino/Film: Soviet Posters of the Silent Screen is open at the Grad Gallery, 3-4a Little Portland Street, London W1W 7JB until March 29 2014.

Communication Arts, a trade journal for visual communications, covers everything from graphic designers to photographers to advertising agencies. The subscription-only mag features in-depth profiles, tips on design trends, book reviews and more.

CA is approximately 80 percent freelance written, and it’s on the lookout for fresh new writers. So what are the editors looking for? Someone who will inspire:

“We want to improve the way our readers work and think, whether that means introducing a revolutionary technique with dozens of potential applications, challenging disparate disciplines to work together in new ways or refuting common wisdom about, say, what it means to be creative or successful,” said managing editor Robin Doyle. “If your article can do that, we want to see it.” CA editors are always on the lookout for stimulating content for “Columns,” “Profiles” and “Book Reviews.”

To hear more details about CA, including editors’ contact info, read: How To Pitch: Communication Arts.

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