Hasta La Ideas

Not everyone in the UK is looking forward to the upcoming nuptials of Wills and Kate (apart from the days off, of course). For republicans everywhere, illustrator Lydia Leith has an essential Royal Wedding accessory

Leith’s screenprinted souvenir sick bags (under the punning brand name Throne Up) are available from her website at £3 each. As they say on the front, non-Royalists may want to keep them handy on April 29.

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If you like the sound of Throne Up, you might also like our post on KK Outlet’s take on Royal Wedding souvenir plates, here or, from Feed, Dhub’s souvenir plates here

CR in print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog, but if you’re not reading us in print too, you’re missing out on a richer, deeper view of your world. Our Type Annual issue has 100 pages of great content, featuring the best typefaces of the year and great writing from Rick Poynor, Jeremy Leslie, Eliza Williams and Gavin Lucas. It’s printed on four different, beautiful heavyweight paper stocks and offers a totally different experience to the Blog. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)207 292 3703 or go here to buy online. Better yet, subscribe to CR, save yourself almost a third and get Monograph for free plus a host of special deals from the CR Shop. Go on, treat yourself.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon pioneered the use of Supergraphics (her work for The Sea Ranch, California, 1966 is shown above). A student of Armin Hoffmann, she later became disillusioned with graphic design. To those worried about the lack of women at the top of the profession, her story may prove illuminating.

The current (February) print issue of Creative Review (which you can buy here) includes a wonderful interview with Stauffacher Solomon by Adrian Shaughnessy. In it, she highlights some of the issues that came to restrict her professional practice. At one point she describes her attempts to balance her working life in 1960s San Francisco with her home life and the limitations that imposed. While her male peers had the luxury of obsessing long into the night over every last detail and type choice, she had other demands on her time:

“Now that I happily live alone with my dog I have time to think, and I realise that I was always so frantically busy making money to live, taking care of my daughters and worrying about men, that I never had time to think, least of all about my work. At my office I just drew up the first design I visualised so that I could leave to pick up Chloe or Nellie from school, shop for dinner, cook and clean, play wife and do all the stuff that working mothers do.”

In the 1970s, tiring of battles over receiving credit for her work and admitting to a distaste for the kind of self-promotion others used to advance their careers, she became disillusioned with graphic design and her role in it:

“Clever verbal architects used my skills to promote their projects; mostly real estate developments. I designed good design covers for many questionable commodities. I worked fast and well and my projects came in at or below the budget. I flattered the men, got paid and then went home to cook dinner.”

And then in 1977, having closed her office, she went back to college, this time to the University of California, “to study what I hadn’t learned in Basel; the myths and misinterpretations behind the messages of the Modern Movement. I read mostly French philosophers cleverly discrediting the superficial visual covers I was so skilled at designing; the deceits I’d wrought on the world by camouflaging guileful land developments with good design covers and learned that to design is to do the work of the Devil.“

And so one of the most talented designers of her generation was lost to the profession, preferring to pursue a career as an artist instead.

This all happened 30-odd years ago, but do Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s experiences and concerns, I wonder, still ring true with female designers today?

Here’s what Ruth Ansel, the pioneering art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine had to say on the subject when we profiled her in last May’s issue of CR (subscribers can read the piece here):

“In part, women today are facing a storm of conflicting expectations. Women feel that they have to achieve in the workplace, they have to look fabulous, preferably thin as a model, and probably go under the knife for their first nip and tuck before they’re 30. Oh, and besides this they’re supposed to be perfect mothers and wives. They’re obliged to pull all this off simul­taneously. What craziness is that?

So I think that many women, who recognise after 10 years or more that their wonderful jobs are not so fulfilling, are opting out. They are marrying later, having babies later, and divorcing earlier. If they’re lucky they’ll find that their biological clock hasn’t run out on them like their man has who is probably on to his next trophy wife. Many are not so lucky. Often they feel stranded and deceived by a system with diminished opportunities.”

The February issue of Creative Review magazine in which the article discussed appears is available to buy direct from us today by calling +44(0)207 292 3703 or go here to buy online. Better yet, subscribe to CR, save yourself almost a third and get Monograph for free plus a host of special deals from the CR Shop. This issue also includes all the winning work from our first Type Annual.

The full version of Adrian Shaughnessy’s interview with Barbara Stauffacher Solomon appears in Supergraphics – Transforming Space: Graphic Design for Walls, Buildings & Spaces, published by Unit Editions. It is exclusively available here.

Typefaces for schools, tattooists, magazines and museums all feature in our first Type Annual, with winning designs from as far afield as Chile, New Zealand, Argentina and Israel. Congratulations to all

The current issue of CR features the winning work in our Type Annual in a special section all printed on beautiful 160gsm Conqueror paper, with full details on each typeface, links to the designers’ sites and so on.

The work is split into four categories: Display, Bespoke, Non-Latin and Text while the best of the best feature in our Best in Book section.

Highlights in Best in Book include Kris Sowersby’s geometric sans serif Karbon, and Park House, a typeface designed by NB with Jeremy Tankard for a London property development

Plus we have the beautiful Retiro from Jean-François Prochez for Madriz magazine, “an imaginary Castilian and Andalusian vernacular Didot”

and Rubal Stencil, by Atelier Télescopique for a secondary school in Lille, France

Display features two faces by Alexander McCracken  – Aperture and Estrella (shown top) plus Stempel Elan from Frank Grießhammer (below) and Alejandro Paul’s Piel Script for tattooists

Non-Latin features Armenian, Hebrew (by Oded Ezer) and Arabic faces

While in Bespoke we have faces for magazines, exhibitions and the iPad

And in Text we have House Industries’ tribute to the Eames and more

If you can’t track down a copy at your local newsagent, simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to buy direct from us. Or fill out the form here. Issues cost £5.90 including P&P for the UK.

Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine. Online only subs are also available, for just £40.

Current online subscribers can see all the winners here.

In design terms, it’s probably the most neglected area of a book’s cover, but new website Fixabook claims to offer a few pointers on how to get your spine in shape, amidst critique dedicated to creating eye-catching jackets…

Take the above collection, grabbed from Fixabook: some spines stand out, while others are largely illegible; some have clearly had some time spent on them (the Donna Tartt novel and that interesting-looking Marisha Peshl one); while others might make you want to hurl the book at the floor in a rage and stamp on it (no prizes).

The point is that while book design is largely celebrated in terms of what front covers and jackets look like, the spine can be an oft-neglected dead zone. And this is crazy, because in a bookshop it’s what customers are presented with in their hundreds, aside from those copies fortunate enough to be displayed facing outwards, of course. Perhaps the rise of browsing online has removed the need to treat the spine as a significant part of the design? In any case, it’s the reader who has to put up with any potential design horrors once it’s up on the bookshelf.

Fixabook describe themselves as a consultancy “that analyses book design and gives strategic and creative guidance on jackets, blurbs and spines.” While they offer a range of paid-for services, they also have plenty of analysis that functions as the blog of the website, focusing on covers, spines, and even how to write the best blurb for the back of your book.

For example, here’s ‘Winston’ on the spine of Pushpesh Pant’s India cook book:

Gorgeous. Of course we expect that from Phaidon and this book is another packaging triumph. The overall design concept was to make the book look and feel like a cooking ingredient. Simple and somewhat obvious but it has been carried off with panache – particularly in those versions that arrive in a soft cotton bag. The spine plays its part in the conceit quite beautifully. What makes it so charming is the addition of the weight (“1.5kg”). In itself, not a big thing but it it is amusing and it attracts comment – and for a spine that is quite an achievement.

And here’s ‘Jones’ acknowledging a contemporary classic of spine design, Vintage’s editions of Irvine Welsh:

Reheated Cabbage blew me away last year – Joss McKinley’s still life was really innovative. The subsequent backlist repackage followed suit, but I never noticed how good the spines were until recently. Wow. Some of what we do isn’t rocket science, but so many times we see space unused on a spine. ‘No here, Pal’ as Begbie would say. The typography hits you in the face with the Welsh brand, and the titles fit nicely in there. The logotype is complimentary too; extending the crossbar of the ‘H’ works really well. Check out the spine of an older edition on the right of this shot. What a difference. Nice one, Vintage.

Go to fixabook.com for more book cover analysis.

CR in print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog, but if you’re not reading us in print too, you’re missing out on a richer, deeper view of your world. Our Type Annual issue has 100 pages of great content, featuring the best typefaces of the year and great writing from Rick Poynor, Jeremy Leslie, Eliza Williams and Gavin Lucas. It’s printed on four different, beautiful heavyweight paper stocks and offers a totally different experience to the Blog. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)207 292 3703 or go here to buy online. Better yet, subscribe to CR, save yourself almost a third and get Monograph for free plus a host of special deals from the CR Shop. Go on, treat yourself.

I don’t know what’s more horrifying to me – that Primal Scream’s seminal Screamadelica album is 20 years old this year, or that it’s being remastered, repackaged and re-issued by Sony Commercial Music Group (Sony CMG) in what looks to be a round biscuit tin of a ‘collectors edition’ that costs £100.

There is, of course, a website, screamadelica20.com, dedicated to the anniversary of Screamadelica – or rather, dedicated to selling the re-issued version. I can’t help but wonder, who buys this stuff?

I’ve got the album at home, and I don’t feel I need a remastered version of it. It was made in the 1990s, not the 1920s. I’d never listen to the live CD, I don’t need a DJ slip mat (and I do DJ on occasion), nor do I see the relevance of its inclusion. And I certainly don’t want to watch a DVD that will inevitably have the likes of that bloke from Kasabian or one of the Gallagher brothers banging on about how much they rate an album I already know is brilliant. So, it’s looking like £100 will get me some remixes that may or may not be music to my ears, plus a load of stuff in a box that I don’t give two shits about.

Maybe the box itself is special (another ambiguous digital mock up from the site, shown above). Perhaps it’s made out of an interesting material or injection moulded using some beautifully tactile material. Maybe it’s round and indented to remind buyers of the ecstasy tablets they took when they were listening to it first time around. But how can I possibly know? There’s no indication on the website screamadelica20.com as to the reasoning behind the box’s unusual (and surely highly impractical) shape, or any indication as to what it is made from. Instead the site is full of words such as ‘deluxe’, ‘remastered’, ‘bonus’ and ‘exciting’. And it boasts an impressively unrealistic digital mock up of how the box set and its contents might look. Am I the only Screamadelica fan that wants to know more about the package before actually committing to buying one? Maybe I am. There’s a white box version, limited to just 500 copies which has sold out on pre-orders already….

I’m frustrated. I’m exactly who Sony are aiming this re-issued album at: I’m a big fan of the album from its original release, I’m in my 30s with more disposable income than I’ve ever had and I’m a bone fide collector and hoarder of music with a record collection that threatens the structural integrity of my flat. And yet I feel totally turned off by the proposition – very probably because of other recent reissued music packages that have failed to impress.

The Plus Minus box of recently re-issued Joy Division seven inch singles, released by Rhino Records to mark the 30th anniversary of the band’s vocalist Ian Curtis’s death, was nicely conceived. A clam-shell cardboard box housed artwork by Peter Saville and ten singles – each sporting a photograph of the original single on its cover. But the cover images have been printed too dark – a particular problem when you look at the sleeve of the Closer single. There’s also a bizarre textured varnish on the front of the box that sadly transforms the negative image of a star cluster into what could be a splatter of black paint. Oops. The digital mock up for the set is also terrible thanks to the upscaling of the orange artwork and the box. In reality the singles are the same size as the orange artwork and all fit snugly in the similarly proportioned box.

Sony CMG created several different packages of re-issued Stone Roses music in 2009 (to celebrate the band’s eponymously titled debut album’s 20th anniversary) but a friend bought the Collectors’ Edition version and the box housing the various discs and books and art prints etc has fallen apart. Another friend bought the enormous (575 × 295 × 80mm) Minotaur box set of re-issued Pixies albums but was disappointed to find the book he thought would have a fur cover (on account of the digital mock up he’d seen when ordering it online) was, in reality, clad in roofing felt.

Actually, the Pixies box set, produced by repackaging specialist Artist in Residence, is interesting. Its designer, Vaughan Oliver, considers it his best work to date. Minotaur comprises all of The Pixies’ studio albums in one set, but Oliver (who art directed the sleeves of all the original releases) has created brand new artwork for each one. As a collector, a Pixies fan, and a Vaughan Oliver fan, I find this project far more interesting than what’s promised on the Screamadelica20 site. But where the heck would I store it? What would I do with it?

Music packages have to be practical and should, at the very least, stand up to being opened and closed a few times. So-called collectors’ editions should also really be of exceptional quality and be thoughtfully conceived to genuinely engage the intended audience. Otherwise they’re just landfill waiting to happen.

By making a pig’s ear of some of these editions, and by confusing potential buyers with half-baked marketing twaddle and misleading imagery, the labels that produce them are committing a music packaging crime potentially more sinful and damaging to the concept of the physical music release than the introduction of the dreaded jewel case. If record labels don’t invest appropriately in the packages they proclaim to be extra special, then they run the risk of totally killing the concept of the physical release.

As it is, there’s a huge risk that the term ‘special edition’ becomes synonymous with ill-conceived, cheaply made boxes of needless crap. Keep on like this and people will avoid reissued albums and, instead, do their shopping for 20 year old classics on eBay.

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Has anyone been really impressed (or really disappointed) with a repackaged, re-issued album in recent years? Let us know in the comment box below and I’ll endeavour to post up images of the stuff that’s impressed you most. To kick things off – here’s a image of a re-issued musical package that I was actually impressed with…

About three years ago I couldn’t resist buying a freshly repackaged and re-issued Rolling Stones compilation, Rolled Gold, re-titled Rolled Gold + (shown above). I had the original compilation on double LP but the new package sported a beautiful new illustrated sleeve by Alex Trochut – and the compilation had been repressed on four, rather than two, slabs of heavy weight vinyl. Gold innersleeves and vinyl labels too made the package irresistable to me as a collector of vinyl. Really nice job – by Zip Design.

CR in print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog, but if you’re not reading us in print too, you’re missing out on a richer, deeper view of your world. Our Type Annual issue has 100 pages of great content, featuring the best typefaces of the year and great writing from Rick Poynor, Jeremy Leslie, Eliza Williams and Gavin Lucas. It’s printed on four different, beautiful heavyweight paper stocks and offers a totally different experience to the Blog. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)207 292 3703 or go here to buy online. Better yet, subscribe to CR, save yourself almost a third and get Monograph for free plus a host of special deals from the CR Shop. Go on, treat yourself.