Hasta La Ideas

The new issue of Elle Collections, the British fashion magazine’s bi-annual title dedicated to the catwalk, is out now. CR spoke to editor-in-chief Lorraine Candy and acting creative director Tom Meredith about how the 10th edition continues to bring a distinctly left-field editorial design approach to mainstream publishing…

Elle Collections is now in its 10th edition and offers its readers the chance to pore over the latest seasonal trends on the catwalk, covering a host of runway shows. It has a print run of 65,000 but its design and art direction perhaps suggest it’s the work of a much smaller, independent stable. For the four-strong design team at Elle, it’s a reaffirmation of what print does best, but this time the new issue will also have an iPad app to support it, scheduled to appear in a couple of weeks.

Photography by Anthea Simms (top) and Nick Knight

The relaunch of Elle magazine itself was a catalyst in driving the direction behind Collections, explains editor-in-chief Lorraine Candy. While retaining a wealth of imagery, she also decided to include written features within the catwalk magazine (the new edition includes a piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Robin Givhan, for example) alongside a host of ideas and visual concepts that weren’t necessarily suited for the main issue.

“We just felt this was a place to be really creative,” she says of Collections, “to see how we can use paper and be a bit experimental. Magazines can get a little bit boring and turning out the same thing again and again is a bit of a crime in an industry like fashion, which is so unbelievably creative.”

Product and street-style shots get plenty of space. Photography by Hedi Slimane (top) and Tommy Ton

For Tom Meredith, Elle’s acting creative director (while Marissa Bourke is on maternity leave), it’s important that Collections behaves differently to its parent magazine. “It’s a celebration of print as well as fashion,” he says, “so we purposefully go from using glossy stock, to uncoated, back to glossy again. Sometimes, as with the Autumn/Winter 2010 issue we’ll have something special like Rob Ryan’s tribute to Alexander McQueen which we ran on a card stock.”

Fabric prints were photocopied to achieve these striking pages of colour. Art by Lisa Rahman

There are a range of other interesting visual devices in the magazine, most notably the images of various fabric prints that were made on a photocopier in the Elle office. After ten issues, some of these elements have become signature hooks of the Collections series. “The catwalk photography already exists,” says Candy, looking over the photomontages of blended colours from runway shows that appear in the latest issue, “but we take a thousand pictures and make something more abstract out of that. It’s indulgent, but it’s useful too.”

These blended photomontages have become a staple of the Collections issue

There’s also the sense that Elle Collections continues to wear its more esoteric influences on its sleeve, if you’ll pardon the pun. Meredith is quick to acknowledge the work being done at magazines like Fantastic Man, Lost + Found, New York – with a nod to their Look catwalk edition – Acne Paper and Apartamento. But what Elle does so successfully, as magCulture’s Jeremy Leslie has remarked upon in both his blog and CR column, is bring that sense of experimentation to a mainstream title. “Ideas bounce around in magazine-land,” he remarked, “it’s what you make of them that counts.”

Candy admits that the “entry points are different with the Collections reader, they don’t navigate the magazine in the same way as they do with Elle.” Built within the design choices, however, there’s some hard commercial thinking behind what goes in an issue and what doesn’t. “Yes, some things I wouldn’t allow in the main issue,” she continues. “For instance, there’s a rule that we have no print on pictures, because it slows the reader down. When she picks up a copy she’ll move through it quickly and if there are elements that are too hard to read, she won’t buy it.”

Indeed, in Collections, there’s also a sparing use of typography (Meredith has only worked with Caslon and Courier in Collections to date) but the type always makes its presence felt, often appearing over the images, or in tightly cut-out caption boxes.

“We’ve had a very successful commerical year, despite a recession, and it’s because of what we’ve done with the design, ” says Candy. “We didn’t do it to become more niche or edgy, we did it from a business point of view. I look at Collections as the thirteenth issue of the magazine, really. It’s the one we would do at the end of the year, but it’s much better doing it each season. It puts a real glow around the brand.”

Elle Collections Spring Summer 2011 is available to buy from newstands now. You can also get hold of it here. Elle Collections – The Preview iPad app will be available from February 15.

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.

When graphic and type designer Andrew Byrom decided it was time for a new desk, he thought of a rather novel way to recycle the old one…

“The [veneered chip board top of the] old desk (shown above) was cut into 3.5 x 2 inch blocks,” explains Byrom, “then the text, set in my newest typeface Byrom Sans, was silk-screened onto each block in white ink.”

OK, so these business “cards” won’t fit in your wallet, but the chances are they’ll sit on recipients’ desks more prominently than any other contact cards.

andrewbyrom.com

In 1982, amidst a politicised and combative period of bombs and impending apocalypse, Disney offered audiences an escape into a new internalised world in the form of the emotionally autistic film Tron (original trailer below). In so doing, Tron captured the cold hearts and predominately introspective male minds of embryonic designers everywhere, thereby predefining the visual language of technology and modernity for a generation.

Tron’s impact on the visual code for all things ‘digital’ cannot be underestimated. Here was a global blockbusting film about technology that existed because technology had facilitated it. For perhaps the first time technology had blatantly made a film about itself, invoking an aesthetic in retrospect successfully determined as much by its own technological limitations as by the expert styling of the incredible hired talents in Moebius and Syd Mead. Tron light-cycled its way into design and the creative imaginations of millions, and in so doing forever co-opted the vector, the pixel and the grid, indelibly stamping its presence upon almost every visual manifestation of technology since.

THE LEGACY LIVES ON
Importantly, in a pre-internet age Tron originally captured for the first time the dream of living virtually and in so doing spawned motion graphics’ own totemic aesthetic and sense of modernity (the term as naive and dated as the film itself). The film’s legacy can be identified throughout the slew of dated ‘modern’ visions outputted during the 1990s and 2000s by a generation of early adopters, who had formatively been exposed to the film as children and who – in the creation of digital worlds – could now themselves wield pro-sumer variants of Tron’s own custom designed animation software.

Given access to this previously inconceivably powerful software, what did Tron’s pre-pubescent audience now seek to create as adult designers? Unsurprisingly they sought to recreate Tron. Within the creative output of the last 20 years, adulatory Tron references abound. The legacy, it seems, lives on.

So, when Disney returns to this film nearly 30 years later with its sequel, Tron: Legacy, one wonders just what impact the sequel will have on designers of the future? Techno­logy and the world has changed enormously, so what has happened within Tron’s parallel universe? How now does the future look?

Somewhat dispiritingly, Tron: Legacy looks and feels almost exactly like Tron, but channeled through a three year-old Audi commercial. The great crime here is that nearly 30 years later Disney has invoked almost exactly the same aesthetic. Whilst the sequel could never have ignored its predecessor’s visual legacy, one would have expected Tron: Legacy to have radically reinvented it. Not so.

If modern technology has shown anything, it has shown that it can be warm, human and relevant. Instead we are presented with a charmless bombastic anachronism. Plot was never Tron’s strength, but here we are treated to a suspect and clumsily fascist storyline that together with its visual styling, composition and soundtrack would surely solicit the approval of Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer. These fascist allusions are actively amplified by its score. Though marketed as one of Tron: Legacy’s strengths, not for us the original film’s inventive electronic Bach of Wendy Carlos. Instead imagine Triumph of the Will sound-tracked by an industrialised Wagnerian marching band.

STEALING FROM THE PAST
Had this ‘visual prog rock’ been made over ten years ago at the birth of the then imminent 80s revival and conceived primarily as a vehicle for a Daft Punk then at the height of their powers, this would have been an infinitely more agreeable and significant experience. Instead Disney has missed the boat and through a blue-screened cinematic equivalent of ‘dad dancing’ cried out in ‘digital oompah’ to a generation too sniffy, too emotionally challenged and too busy wallowing amidst the emotional landfill of their own referential introspection to care about this film.

But it is particularly ironic, given this film’s subject matter, that the greatest missed opportunity within this cinematic experience lies in the film’s inability to harness modern technology. If there is one recent film that is best placed to harness 3D, then it is Tron: Legacy. A stylised virtual world within which anything can happen is simply screaming for deep, rich and immersive 3D. It should be a showcase, a pivotal moment for all that is genuinely fantastic about 3D. Indeed, here is a film begging to be interactive. Instead we are mostly fed shallow seemingly faux 3D and fail to transcend the digital baroque of surface and gimmickry.

Perhaps the fate of film in post-post-modern times is that it must steal back from its past (in this case not least The Matrix), but it strikes me that one of graphic design’s most exciting frontiers is its intersection with production design in film. On paper Tron: Legacy was a truly wonderful opportunity for incredible and original art direction to improve upon and sustain a never- before-seen technological aesthetic. On paper Tron: Legacy was an open goal built solidly upon a foundation of great originality. The problem, I suspect, is that in design terms it never was ‘on paper’, at least not in a contemporary Moebius or Syd Mead’s sketchbook. Where we craved the shock of the new we have instead found Tron’s legacy to be at best ‘conceptual mo-cap’, and at worst a generational vacuum.

Johnny Hardstaff is a director and designer, represented by RSA and Unit9 in the UK. See www.johnnyhardstaff.com

Manchester-based Design by Day have produced the identity and marketing materials for a new show on the subject of fame at the city’s Cornerhouse arts centre; The People You’re Not

The show features work by Mancunian artist Edward Barton and ‘infamous balladeer’ Norman Clayture as well as comedian Harry Hill’s proposal To recreate George Cruikshank’s the worship of Bacchus using known alcoholics, as realised by six illustrators (which sounds intriguing to say the least).

Design by Day say their work for the show features “a sinister mix of fame caricatures and freakish body parts … We took inspiration from the artists and work to develop the identity for the exhibition, and produced a typographic side-show exposing the austere dark reality of getting caught up in the carousel journey of fame.”

As well as the posters, there is a trailer for the show which will run on the Cornerhouse’s cinema screens and online

Design by Day also worked on the Cornerhouse’s previous show on Artists & Cinema, Unspooling.

See more of their work here

Our bumper February issue features the selected work in our first ever Type Annual plus Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Nexus Interactive Arts and more

Our cover this month (which is printed on the rather marvellous Conqueror Iridescent Silica Blue) was created by Jonathan Puckey using the Scriptographer drawing tool. He also created the back cover which introduces the Type Annual.

We’ll be posting more about the how the cover was created soon.

Inside the Type Annual, our Best in Book winners include Park House, a bespoke typeface by NB and Jeremy Tankard

Plus Jean Francois Porchez’s Retiro for Madriz magazine

and Rubal by Atelier Télescopique for a French secondary school

Selected work is split into four categories: Display, Bespoke, Non-Latin and Text

In the issue, our Case Study feature looks at Havas City’s packaging for French supermarket Monoprix

Adrian Shaughnessy, in an extract from Unit Editions’ Supergraphics book, interviews supergraphics pioneer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

And Eliza Williams reports on Nexus Interactive Arts, a new offshoot of the production company that aims to smooth the path between media artists and ad agencies

In Crit this month, Rick Poynor recommends The Book of Symbols

Director Johnny Hardstaff compares perennial designer favourite Tron with its recent sequel

Jeremy Leslie looks at the latest crop of independent magazines

Gavin Lucas has a rant about ‘collectors’ edition’ record re-issues

And Gordon Comstock deconstructs VCCP’s Morethan Freeman campaign

In Monograph this month (our free subscriber-only booklet), we take a closer look at the possibilities of Scriptographer with the work produced by students from the ECAL University of Design in Switzerland during a workshop led by our cover designer Jonathan Puckey and artist Jürg Lehni, the inventor of Scriptographer

The February issue of CR is on sale from January 27