Hasta La Ideas

The Amos Miniature Plastic Workshop opens tomorrow at London’s KK Outlet gallery and store and will showcase a selection of some of Amos‘ classic toys, as well as a slew of recent drawings by James Jarvis, alongside a pop-up store selling a few long sold-out Amos collectibles, rarities and hard-to-find products…

The show will be the first time Amos has showcased its wares in the form of an exhibition in London, and co-founders James Jarvis and Russell Waterman will produce work in-house at the show on Saturday 21 and Saturday 28 May – days on which Amos fans are encouraged to come along to the gallery and chat to the pair about all things Amos. Here’s a look at some of the objects that will be on display:

Visitors to the show can expect to see various iterations of King Ken, King Ken cushions, King Ken mini figures, In Crowd figures and box sets including rare In Crowd Zombies, tote bags, T-shirts, hoodies, the World of Pain Policeman, Martin X, and loads more stuff including a brand new comic created specially for the event called Caleb’s Adventure in Wonderlean (only 200 copies printed), new drawings by James Jarvis AND two life-size Caleb figures created specially for the event in Japan and shipped over. Here’s a sneak peak at them lurking in the gallery, awaiting an admiring throng and doubtless dozens of photo opportunities:

The exhibition opens tomorrow May 6 and runs until May 31 at KK Outlet, 42 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB

As part of the research for our Top 20 logos issue, we asked various designers and writers to nominate their favourites. We thought you’d like to see all of their choices and the reasons behind them. Here is the final batch of choices

Tony Spaeth, Identity Works:

1. CBS by William Golden
“Starkly simple. I think this draws its power from our deepest survival genes, like the ability to react to the eyes of a predator. It may be hard for anyone under 70 to appreciate the excitement this mark conveyed to a generation raised on radio. For us, it endures.

2. IBM by Paul Rand
“The 1960 version with eight bars. Previously it was Rand’s slab serif letterforms, that conveyed importance and aggressive confidence. Adding ‘speed stripes’ lifted it exponentially to a new level, more innovative and daring. And wow, how brilliantly it endures, easily sustaining such ‘pet brand’ modifications (to use Mollerup’s convenient phrase) as the Smart Planet campaign graphics.”

3. Canadian National Railway by Allan Fleming
“Another brilliantly simple conversion of initials into a unique visual mark, one that also conveys the idea of ‘railroad’. It was usually pictured on the business end of a locomotive, and it looked great.”

4. Merrill Lynch by Gene Casey

“I choose the Merrill Lynch bull over various eagles and even pandas, which I consider too easy. This bull was starkly modern yet he kept his animal integrity, lending his aggressive authority to an otherwise faceless crowd of names (“the thundering herd”) and to decades of campaigns. To a remarkable degree, the bull was the brand.”

Michael Bierut, Pentagram:

1-5. Nike, Target, Apple, CBS, Chase

“They are all simple, reductive and non-literal, yet each seems ‘right’ for the thing it symbolizes. As a result, all are amazingly flexible and each has the capacity to both express and transcend trends. I also suspect that any of these, if designed today, would be criticized as being too simple, ‘like something my five-year-old could do’.”

Paula Scher, Pentagram

CBS by William Golden

“Iconic, simple, meaningful and formalistically beautiful.”

Coca-Cola
“Still beautiful, iconic and original and populist (every brand has always wished they had a logo like it).”

Fedex by Lindon Leader/Landor

“The arrow is a gift of god (the applications could use an update).”

MoMA by Matthew Carter
“The simple Franklin Gothic typographic form of the small ‘o’ next to the caps was rendered perfect by Matthew Carter. After I worked with it, I was astounded by its power, beauty, simplicity and recognizability.”

V&A by Alan Fletcher
“Best acronym logo I can think of. Best use of an ampersand I can think of, and the best by our hero Alan Fletcher.”

John Bateson

Deutsche Bank
“Banks were still using type like Palace Script when this was designed in 1974. Based on Constructivist principles it said everything visually you want from a bank – stability, safety, solid equilibrium and growth.

Michelin
You just smile when you see him or even mention his name. All about how to create a big personality for small strips of rubber. Everlasting.

Erco
A simple idea for this German lighting manufacturer. Expressed through pure typography, beautiful.

British Rail
Cliched, clumsy and copied across the globe.  Just tracks and arrows, but I can’t think of a railway system without it,  a true identifier.

NASA
It said to me ‘I’ve seen the future and it works.Science and exploration should always look like this.

Bill Gardner, LogoLounge

1. Red Cross
Arguably one of the most recognized logo/symbols in the world and consider this, which came first, the logo or the name? In 1863 when adopted, this was a symbol for a first aid society concerned with the care for the wounded in wartime. One of the few situations where a description of a logo becomes the name of the organization. It’s also interesting to note that you can park a logo on any color field you wish but not the Red Cross. This mark must be used against white as a symbol of peace and surrender. This mark carries a steamer trunk loaded with symbolic messages and application protocol and the public gets it. What a great teaching tool when explaining the impact of a logo.

2. Apple
Interesting to note that 4 of my 5 picks are literal descriptors of the name of the entity and Apple is certainly that. This is the newest of the logos I’ve selected although it has been 35 years since it was first drafted and packed top to bottom with bright rainbow stripes. Only the last fifteen years has it been knocked back to a monochromatic solution, but the strength of the original shape is so strong that the logo survived this dramatic personality transplant. Truly it is a logo that stands on its own with out a wordmark. You can discuss the iconic nature of the logo or the bite or “byte” of knowledge from the apple but the real strength of the mark has come from bold application. Apple has been willing to maintain relevance with consumers by allowing for variation of logo surface and appearance but never violating the fundamental shape.

3. Target
A perfected symbol that really found its greatest value with brilliant application. I think a universal truth about the best logos is that they have achieved their stature partially through design, but definitely through application. The Target bull’s eye is simple, memorable, distinct, and in the states had become the imprimatur of smart style. Starting in the early part of the last decade this logo became the central visual focus of any Target commercial or marketing effort. Such a panoply of application had never before been attempted but it was all done in a smart contemporary way that turned shopping at Target into a cult event.

4. Mercedes Benz
Gottlieb Daimler created the three pointed star in 1909 to represent the hopeful domination of air, sea, and land by his motors. That three pointed star was a pretty unremarkable logo until some one in the twenties put a ring around it to allow the mark to be used as a hood ornament. Starting with a merger in 1926 and up until relatively recent times, the official Mercedes-Benz logo was the three pointed star surrounded by a circular laurel leaf wreathe and the name as well. All the time this kick ass hood ornament was what the public thought of when they pictured the companies logo. It has taken on a life of it’s own beyond the product or the automotive industry, representing wealth, or lampooned for decadence. Sometimes the beauty of a timeless mark just occurs through osmosis, but not very often.

5. Shell
Raymond Loewy’s 1971 update of the Shell Oil logo was a watershed moment in reductive design. From a design perspective this mark understood line weight, rhythm, color, and set a standard for the petrol industry to respond to. Suddenly the ribs of the shell became rays of light exemplifying a clean burst of energy from a humble mollusk. Not an easy thing to do. Perhaps more importantly, this design accounted for application in an industry with strange considerations. Your customers may be driving at a high rate of speed and need to identify a station at a great distance. Silhouette, color, and pattern trump typography every time under these conditions.

Peter Knapp, Landor

Mexico Olympics

Glorifies the track,the Olympic rings, a country and a moment in graphic design in one integrated,celebratory way.

NASA

The previous nasa logo (aka the worm) promised to keep the star trek flame burning, a crisp, clean future that was imbued with implicit technology and optimism.

BBC

Unequivocal, understated, clear and concise. No embellishment, just an expression of the bare facts.

Fedex

Bold, direct and directional. Simple standout by simple colour and simple typography…and yet there is the ‘Easter egg’ effortlessly within.

Connie Birdsall, Lippincott

Chanel
Simple elegance.  The Chanel logo reminds me of my sitting on my mother’s lap as a child.  She’d allow me just  the smallest dab of her Chanel #5 perfume. To this day it represents my ideal of elegance, simplicity and timeless beauty.”

Mobil
“I love the simple red O in Mobil.  The identity is just really smart and very graphic.  The flying horse is a wonderful, fanciful and memorable icon that has always made me smile.”

Unilever
“The imagery of all of the brands represented in one letter is fantastic.  Modern, fun and an exceptionally beautiful composition.”

Sprint
My favorite Lippincott logo.  I feel it was a remarkable update capturing the pin drop movement and just the right amount of tension in the elements. Beautifully drawn.

IBM (rebus)
Pretty perfect all around.

Sagi Haviv, Chermayeff & Geismar

FedEx
Designing a wordmark that is visually memorable is a serious challenge. Lindon Leader achieved one of the best with the discovery in the negative space between the E and the X, which is never overtly called out.

CBS Eye
With this icon, William Golden not only handed CBS unrivaled ownership of the concept of the “eye” but also set a very high bar for every logo designer since. With the proliferation of graphic identity designs over the last 50 years, it has become increasingly difficult today to create and claim any mark so simple, bold, and basic.

Mobil
In 1964, my partner Tom Geismar was brave enough to do the absolute minimum necessary to make this name distinctive, bold and memorable. The result is a timeless mark that never gets old, and therefore perfectly exemplifies the effectiveness of the modernist approach to identity design.

Bulgari
When it comes to fashion identities, none match Bulgari’s classic, elegant mark. I admire it because its distinctiveness is achieved with a simple letter swap recalling the traditional Latin style.

Santander
This graceful and simple icon strikes the perfect balance between abstract and pictorial, between positive and negative forms. This is an achievement to be envious of.

If you missed out on our April Top 20 Logos issue but would still like a copy, we have a few left. Just call +44(0)207 292 3703 to order one.

CR’s current issue is The Annual, our biggest issue of the year featuring an additional 100 pages of the best work of the past 12 months. 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. If you subscribe before Wednesday April 27 you will receive the May issue/Annual as part of your subscription.

The sixth annual Belgrade Design Week is set to take place in the Serbian capital between May 23-28. This year’s event takes the theme Future and as well as morning conference sessions dedicated to thinking about shaping the future of the Serbian design landscape, afternoon sessions will look to the “greatest minds of the 21st Century” to provide insight and inspiration…

Speakers at the three day conference this year include Spanish designer Javier Mariscal, Finnish furniture designer Harri Koskinen, Neville Brody, Simon Waterfall and Daljit Singh, not to mention turns from Onedotzero, Mother London, and Wieden + Kennedy.

As well as the conference, there will be workshops held by the likes of Gary Hustwit, who will talk about how to make movies about type, graphic design and product design; Lia Ghilardi, director of Noema UK will discuss how to plan cultural and strategic development in a successful city and think about culture-led regeneration; design studio Snask from Stockholm will address how to “craft corporate love-stories”; while Bozana Komljenovic of London-based architecture firm Zaha Hadid will look at how to design in public / private partnerships.

After each day’s conference and workshop schedules, Belgrade Design Week looks to further its reputation for hosting brilliant evening events – with live performances from Matthew Dear and also Lindstrøm lined up for delegates to enjoy.

For more info, a full schedule of events and to book tickets, visit belgradedesignweek.com

Earlier today, Stanley Donwood gave CR a first glimpse of the special ‘newspaper edition’ he has created for Radiohead’s latest album, The King of Limbs.

The artwork is designed in the guise of a Sunday newspaper, complete with plastic packaging printed with the album name and imagery. It contains two 10-inch clear vinyl records in a sleeve, a CD of the album, a perforated blotting-sheet artwork, and a newspaper containing art and texts by Donwood.

The newspaper was printed in the US, and uses a standard US newspaper format, which conveniently folds down to approximately album size. The initial idea behind the artwork was to turn away from the elaborate packaging Donwood used for the band’s last album, In Rainbows. “In Rainbows was a great big, solid cardboard thing, if you were determined you could probably kill somebody with it, it was very heavy, and almost like a definitive statement,” he explains.

By contrast, Donwood and the band wanted the King of Limbs artwork to express something less conclusive. “It’s not like the news stops when a newspaper comes out,” he continues. “It’s just ‘this is what’s happening today’. So this is released into the world on this day, and this is where this band are right now… it is a continuing thing.”

The album artwork is released following the free giveaway by Donwood and Radiohead of the newspaper The Universal Sigh, which was recently conducted all over the world. The King of Limbs paper is a larger and more elaborate offering than The Universal Sigh, though contains some of the same texts and artworks. The newspaper giveaway was inspired by Donwood witnessing the free paper mayhem that often takes place on the London Underground. “It was the biggest art project I’d ever engineered really,” he says. “To persuade a lot of people that doing it was a good idea in the first place, and then following it up and making sure that it happened. I think it happened in 61 cities around the world in roughly the same 24-hour period.”

Donwood is drawn to the throwaway nature of papers. “Newspapers are eminently disposable,” he continues. “Every newspaper is at least 30% a newspaper that’s been before, they’re 30% recycled… They will fall apart very, very quickly, unlike a Kindle or an iPad that’s going to end up on the shores of some subcontinent somewhere. They’re almost harmless things to me. And I love the heritage of them, and what newspapers have done to change the world from being a really class-based, almost feudal system to people being able to get information cheaply.”

Donwood is conscious, however, that fans are likely to cherish the packaging, despite its ephemeral nature, and also enjoys the idea of it being something that might be protected and well looked-after. He was in part inspired to make the works after discovering a box of old copies of Oz and other 60s radical newspapers that was left, unacknowledged, on Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood’s doorstep. “They were printed really cheaply and in a real hurry,” he says of the discovery, “and they were sort of decaying, they’d lost their corners. You had to open them quite carefully… they’d become this archive that doesn’t exist anywhere else, it’s not on the internet. So all of these flyers and newspapers and fanzines had acquired a value. Because they rot and they fall to bits, they’d acquired a value that they wouldn’t have had. And it was really interesting to read something that was meant for the moment, but had been looked after.”

The 60s link continues in the blotting-paper artwork Donwood has created, which could be seen as a large sheet of LSD tabs. “I wouldn’t like to push any of those associations,” Donwood says coyly, before going on to muse on the idea of someone turning the innocent sheet into the drug. “In theory, not that I would propose such an illegal thing, but somebody could…,” he says. “And I don’t think that’s been done as a marketing thing before.”

The humble nature of the artwork for The King of Limbs flies somewhat in the face of the overly elaborate record packaging that has been in fashion of late, particularly for album reissues (this topic was recently covered by Gavin Lucas on the CR blog, here). “It’s gone into this almost King James Bible sort of thing,” says Donwood of the products. “Where the music is elevated by the packaging into something almost spiritual, almost holy… I wanted to get away from that thing where you elevate the music into something it isn’t. Because it’s just something you hear, it’s in your head. [Previously], the technology to record music has driven what the packaging is, but now that’s no longer relevant, you don’t really have to have the music in packaging at all. You could just make a whole bunch of art, and if you buy the music, you might want to buy the art.”

Donwood has a particularly aversion to CDs and CD packaging, which explains why, of the King of Limbs pack, the CD design is a touch underwhelming compared to the rest of the contents. “If it could have been any worse, it would have been,” he says. “There were difficulties with making it any worse. The original idea was to put ‘X Format’ on it and nothing else. Because I’ve hated them ever since I started doing record cover designs.” The vinyl cover sleeve, by contrast, is beautifully designed, featuring details from a series of oil paintings that Donwood worked on while the band was creating the album.

The newspaper element of the packaging was designed by Donwood, alongside “a certain band member”, presumably Thom Yorke. It features fonts scanned from 1930s Depression-era American newspapers, which were compiled by Andrew Leman, of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society of America. “So they’re all old fonts in there from the American Depression, the worldwide Depression – the last one, before the one we’re apparently in, or hovering around, or are about to enter, or have just left, or whatever it is,” says Donwood. “I wanted to make it look old-fashioned rather than like a new graphic-designed, minimal thing.”

The King of Limbs Newspaper Album will be shipped to those who’ve already ordered it on May 9. It costs £30 and can still be purchased online here.

CR’s current issue is The Annual, our biggest issue of the year featuring an additional 100 pages of the best work of the past 12 months. 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. If you subscribe before Wednesday April 27 you will receive the May issue/Annual as part of your subscription.

An exhibition celebrating 25 years of The Designers Republic, has opened at the Parfitt Gallery, in tDR founder Ian Anderson’s childhood home of Croydon.

The exhibition follows the recent tDR 25th anniversary exhibition at GGG in Tokyo. The show is a personal selection by Anderson of some of tDR’s most significant works, alongside more surprising, less well-known projects.

A prominent influence on the exhibition is 28 Zermatt Road, Anderson’s childhood home in Thornton Heath. “I think I’m playing more with the notion of belonging and ownership, and voluntary slavery/allegiance to geographical opinion – expressed through the selfish mythologising of the house that was, by chance, my first home,” he says.

The exhibition will run until June 1 at the Parfitt Gallery, which is located in the Higher Education building of Croydon College. More info on the show can be found at parfittgallery.croydon.ac.uk.

The Annual is CR’s biggest issue of the year featuring an additional 100 pages of the best work of the past 12 months. 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. If you subscribe before Wednesday April 27 you will receive the May issue/Annual as part of your subscription.