Hasta La Ideas

A Practice For Everyday Life has created the identity for The Hepworth Wakefield – the largest purpose built gallery to be built in the UK since 1968, which will provide a permanent public legacy for sculptor Barbara Hepworth in her home city.

At the heart of the graphic identity is a bespoke font, created especially by APFEL, along with a select palette of colours which reference the effect of weather on Hepworth’s large outdoor sculptures – a blue-green colour reminscent of bronze oxidation, greys and neutral tones and a bright red.

A distinctive feature of the Hepworth typeface the studio developed is the angled ends of all the stems of the capital letter forms. The angles are, apparently, derived from the roofs of the Hepworth Wakefield and surrounding buildings. Here’s a look at a sampler:

“Our approach to the design of the signage was one of integration,” says APFEL’s Emma Thomas. “We have applied a process directly to the surfaces of the building, interior and doors, and have avoided the object-sign,” she continues. “By developing this fully integrated scheme, the Hepworth Wakefield was able to evolve as a total environment which is sculptural and minimal, and can present both the Collection display and contemporary artworks in a powerful and elegant way.”

For more infio about the gallery, visit hepworthwakefield.org

All photography shown is by Killian O’Sullivan.

A new comic, a handy guide for print designers, a book documenting paper making, and a new zine… Yup, it’s time to share some of the smaller, independently printed publications to land on my desk recently. First up is the latest in Nobrow‘s 17×23 series of narrative illustration books, The New Ghost, by Robert Hunter, a kind of first-day-in-the-new-office story of a ghost, new to the world of ghostly duties…

The New Ghost (£6.50) is available from nobrow.net

Art Workers: The Making of New Munken Design Range is a promotional book from Arctic Paper showing how its Munken range is created. There’s been a bit of a trend of this kind of book from manufacturers of late which reveal photographs of factories and manufacturing environments alongside portraits of the people that work there and explanations of how they all conspire, usually with industrial machinery, to create the product in question. Regular readers may recall we blogged about a similar project by UK clothes brand Albam back in November last year (read that post here). While not as ultimately collectible as Album’s clothbound, hardback book, this oversize A4 book is full of great photography of the countryside around the Munken paper mill in Sweden, along with portraits of some of the key folk who work there and, yes, some of the machinery they use in the creation of the product.

Art Workers is, unsurprisingly, printed on various Munken stock to show off the product, which is ultimately its purpose. Design: Grow in Stockholm. Photography: Daniel Blom at b-martin.se

Sporting screenprinted and hand-finished covers, A Year In The Droposphere is a new zine from French-born street artist and illustrator Florence Blanchard, aka Ema. The 48 page A5 zine, printed in an edition of 100, contains a colleciton of photos of Ema’s mostly moustachioed droplet-shaped pieces (she calls them Dropmen) which she’s installed on the streets of Paris, London, Miami and Sheffield in the form of drawings, paintings and wheatpastes during the course of the last year.

A Year In The Droposphere (€10) is available from Ema’s Big Cartel site here.

UK design agency, The Media Collective, sent in this handy little 16 page tome (approx 12 x 17.5 cm), designed as a handy reference tool for print designers. It contains examples of overprinting, explains the golden ratio, has a list of standard paper sizes detailed in millimetres, inches and picas, shows examples of how colours sit on coated and uncoated stock, shows a range of blacks created in various ways, shows various types of paper folds, and a wealth of other basic info all designers about to do a print job should know about. One thing I can’t find though is info about types of binding. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty handy booklet to have around.

It’s available for purchase for £4 from printhandbook.com

New to this year’s D&AD Awards will be two physical awards for both In Book and Nominated work: slices of a coveted Yellow Pencil…

The new trophies have been designed by Turner Duckworth and will sit alongside the Yellow, Black and recently unveiled White Pencils. “The slices of pencil are relative in relation to the size and material of the Yellow Pencil award,” explains TD’s Bruce Duckworth. “They are also exactly the same shape and proportion of the D&AD hexagonal logo. Of course they are made of wood, to be quirky like the Pencil itself.”

D&AD President Simon Sankarayya added “For many years we have endeavoured to communicate more effectively the value of winning at any level in the D&AD Awards and the slices will undoubtably help to build awareness of the great level of creativity that it takes to be recognised by our juries.”

Following the recent confusion over work that was “shortlisted” for D&AD (work that survived the first round of judging but was not awarded – see our blog post and D&AD’s response, here), the new physical awards certainly go some way to further celebrate the achievement of having work in the D&AD Annual and nominated for one of the top Pencils.

The new slices will be launched at the forthcoming D&AD Awards evening, which takes place on June 16 at London’s HAC, Artillery Gardens.

As part of its 125th anniversary, Coca-Cola will be taking over the Design Museum’s outdoor Tank space from Friday in a show featuring archive material such as specially developed Coke cans for astronauts

In July 1985, astronauts tested the specially adapted ‘Coca-Cola Space Can’ (above) aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger along with cans of its rival, Pepsi (you can see theirs here). The results weren’t succesful though. According to a Los Angeles Times article, “Mission Commander Gordon Fullerton, in the first news conference since the astronauts returned earlier this month from their eight-day mission, said neither the Coke nor the Pepsi they sampled in space was very enjoyable.” There was no refrigeration available so, apparently, the drinks were warm and very frothy. (There’s an interesting Nasa piece about the problems of eating and drinking in space here).

The Design Museum exhibition will concentrate on Coke packaging and its logo and will feature a number of items from the company’s archive including the first glass Coke bottle and an original soda fountain from 1896.

The show will run for six weeks.

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you are not getting Creative Review in print too, we think you are missing out. Our current 196-page double May issue includes the Creative Review Annual, featuring the best work of the year in advertising and graphic design. We also have an interview with David Byrne, a fascinating story on the making of the Penguin Great Food series of book covers and much more.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

London-based design studio Hyperkit designed the identity (logo shown above), signage, graphics and interior of recently opened Soho barber shop, Joe and Co. owned and run by Joe Mills of The Lounge Soho…

Shop front design

“The graphic and geometric nature of the Joe and Co logo and printed material was conceived as a contemporary substitute to the traditional barbershop patterns such as the stripy red and white pole and the black and white checked lino floors,” say Hyperkit. Here’s a look at some of the various elements of the project:

Promotional postcards with opening times and contact details

Letterhead

Gift vouchers and rubber stamps

Comp slips

Appointment cards

Interior complete with bespoke fittings and wall graphics

For more info, and to book your first appointment for a beard trim and a short-back-and-sides, visit joeandco.net

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you are not getting Creative Review in print too, we think you are missing out. Our current 196-page double May issue includes the Creative Review Annual, featuring the best work of the year in advertising and graphic design. We also have an interview with David Byrne, a fascinating story on the making of the Penguin Great Food series of book covers and much more.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.