Hasta La Ideas

With the World Cup just around the corner, it’s not surprising to find that various brands with strong connections to the glorious game are producing spanky new products for us to buy. Both Umbro and Nike have commissioned illustrators to devise emblems and badges to be embroidered on to alternative versions of national team shirts…

Anomaly has been working with Umbro on a project about to launch which sees illustrators from seven countries create unique and original badge designs to be embroidered on special versions of their national football team. The countries involved – England, France, Germany, Italy, Brasil, Argentina and Uruguay – are the only footballing nations to have victoriously lifted the Jules Rimet trophy since the inaugural World Cup in 1930.

Above is Hastings-based UK artist Eine‘s illustrated England crest, embroidered in red on a white shirt. Below are the badges created for the other teams:

France’s badge, designed by André

ZZK‘s badge for Argentina

Fernando Chamarelli, an illustrator, visual artist and tattoo designer from Sao Paolo created Brazil’s badge

Marok created this industrial emblem for Germany. Note the sausage…

Tanino Liberatore devised this gladiatorial badge for Italy

Martin Albornoz, a mixed media artist from Montevideo, created this badge for Uruguay

The project is great – and the shirts (which are in-store from May 15) are infinitely more wearable than official team merchandise offerings – although it does remind me of Nike Sportswear’s Six Collaborations project (now called True Colors) which launched several weeks ago and which saw various international artists creating a badge to be embroidered on an alternative national team kit. Actually, there was more to the Nike project – each of the six artists involved were asked to contribute a badge, mascot, print and an alphabet in their handwriting style. Each collaboration pack includes N98 Track Jacket, AW 77 hoodie, kit tee, polo shirt and short for both men and women; then tee for men and tank for women – not to mention a selection of Nike Sportswear footwear coordinated with the apparel.

James Jarvis was selected to create the graphics for an England selection of goods:

Umbro and Nike are all part of the same company these days, so we’re sure there’s no problem with both these distinct brands running slightly similar promotional projects. While the True Colors project was picked up by many-a-blog when it launched several weeks ago, none of the pieces we read about it gave much attention to the emblems and graphics designed by Jarvis and his various international counterparts. So we thought we’d showcase some of the project’s graphics right here and now:

As well as the badge to be embroidered on the chest of shirts, each artist was asked to render his country’s name, and the numeral 10 in a bespoke font of their creation. Above is Jarvis’ 10 and England.

Above is Sao Paulo street artist Nunca’s graphics for the project

So Me, perhaps best known as the art director of Ed Banger records represented France in the project

The same graphic elements, as produced by Delta for his country’s True Colors kit

Cape Town-based artist Kronk represented South Africa

And this is LA-based artist Mister Cartoon‘s graphics for the USA kit

To find out more about the True Colors project, visit nike.com/nikeos/p/sportswear/en_US/true_colors

To keep up to date with the release of the Umbro Crest Collaboration football shirt collection, visit umbro.com

Pick Me Up, the exhibition of illustration and graphic art at London’s Somerset House, opened tonight. Beware, a visit could prove expensive

Pick Me Up is part exhibition, part craft fair, part workshop. Alongside displays of work from a selection of established and up-and-coming illustrators such as Hellovon

Siggi Eggertsson

Andy Gilmore

Chrissie Macdonald and Peep Show

James Joyce

and Lorenzo Petrantoni

are stalls from collectives and studios selling all kinds of graphic produce.

In addition, Rob Ryan has transplanted his studio to the venue for the duration of the show

While Print Club is producing posters on-site

Downstairs, prints from 24 illustrators are available to buy in the Take Me Home gallery

Note the signage design using modular plastic fixed onto pin board – Anthony Burrill and No Days Off did all the graphics for the show

A host of activities are planned for the duration of the show including an Anorak magazine workshop in which kids can have a go at becoming a magazine art director or editor, Publish and be Damned is running a special edition of its magazine fair and networking event Glug is hosting an evening of talks by illustrators.

At The Print Club workshop, various designers and illustrators will be making prints – including Scott King, Frith Kerr, Marion Deuchars and Angus Hyland, and Morag Myerscough.

Pick Me Up promises to be a fresh, fun attempt to bring graphic art to new audiences as well as catering to those already familair with many of the people showing work. There’s loads to do, and loads to buy.We’ll be posting again over the coming days with more on what’s going on at the show.

Pick Me Up is at Somerset House, Embankment Galleries, London WC2 until May 3. Details here

The cover image for our May Annual issue was literally grown in an immunology lab, using pollen cells. Here’s how it was done

Each year for The Annual we ask a different person to come up with a cover image based on a capital A (see our back issues page for previous ones)

In recent years, this has resulted in imagery on an increasingly grand scale. This time, however, Craig Ward of Words are Pictures decided to buck this trend by going much, much smaller and creating some “cell-level typography”.

Ward approached  a couple of UK universities with his idea and discovered that making letterforms from cells was do-able, if a little costly (he was quoted anything up to £250,000). But he persevered and was eventually put in touch with Frank Conrad, “a friend of a friend,” he says, “who happened to be an immunologist at the University of Colorado in Denver” (lab shown below).

So for the last few months the pair of them have been busily shaping cells and growing them into an A shape here in the lab.

“The first hurdle was creating an ‘A’ small enough yet still legible,” Ward explains. “We settled on melting plastic, putting it under a high pressure into a mould – in this case the ‘A’ from a ‘Made in the USA’ stamp on an aluminium pen – and then applying the cells.”

Here you can see the cells growing within the A mould created by the letters on the pen.

“Our original choice was to use Chinese Hamster ovary cells,” Ward says, “but the techniques we were using proved too much for them and they died, en masse, every time we went to check them. The solution was to use pollen as the cells themselves are graphic and cool-looking. But we had trouble getting enough on the slide while being able to achieve an image at a high enough resolution for the CR cover.”

Above are sample slides on which the cells are growing

“My favourite of the ‘A’s were at 200× resolution, but my favourite pollen cells were at 400× so we had to settle in between,” Ward says. “The images are weird, a little sinister even. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot along the way. A successful brief by any measure.”

Here are the final two images that we chose to use on the two sides of the Annual issue

And here is how they look on the cover of the May issue, which is out on April 22. The covers were printed using a metallic base ink to bring out the details

Photography and cell manipulation: Frank Conrad. Lab assistant: Bastion Ridley.

Our thanks to Craig and to Frank

On Wednesday afternoon, graphic artist Marian Bantjes gave a small lecture at the Royal College of Art, showing some images from her forthcoming book, I Wonder. CR were lucky enough to make it along…

Henrik Kubel’s poster for the talk. Each drawing represents an aspect of Bantjes’ life: her house number, a scribe pen, Vancouver wildlife

The talk, organised by Henrik Kubel of A2/SW/HK, who also lectures at the RCA, was a great opportunity to see some highlights from Bantjes‘ career and hear her talk about working with clients, the reaction her work can provoke (both good and bad), and how, thanks to her love of making things and sending them out en masse to friends, Valentines day has become a very busy period in her year.

There’s often a distinct materiality to Bantjes’ work and, while an advocate of using Illustrator as a tool in her often highly complex designs, she clearly relishes the more tactile of her projects: from making letterforms out of poured sugar, to drawing on tin foil, as she did for New York magazine’s end-of-the-decade issue. 

The 00s piece for New York magazine

Commissioned to illustrate the words “the 00s”, this piece proved particularly successful as it changed with the light reflected on it but, sadly, didn’t end up running in the actual feature, only online.

Bantjes also showed some of her work for Saks, a huge project commissioned by Michael Bierut at Pentagram. One of the most satisfying aspects of this job seemed to the various directions that the work she created went next: from Bantjes’ beautiful line drawings aping the structure of the garment or object they illustrated, to the ambitious installations that the Saks design team then created in-store. 

Saks work in-store. More from the project can be seen, here

The big project on the horizon at the moment is the completion of her book, I Wonder, which will be published by Thames & Hudson in October this year. Unlike a regular monograph, each page of I Wonder includes work made specifically for the book and, as with much of her emotionally-charged personal pieces, there will be plenty of text to read as well.

Proof pages from Marian Bantjes’ forthcoming book, I Wonder

When asked if she referred to herself as an artist, graphic designer, or neither, Bantjes replied with “graphic artist”. It’s a term which, she added, went out of fashion in a similar way to how “graphic design” is almost being lost to “communications” but still it neatly implies a combination of fine artist and designer. Bantjes is also a skilled writer and has an ability to combine all three forms in her work. 

So we’re looking forward to picking up, looking at, reading through her new book when it comes out later in the year. 

More of Bantjes work is at bantjes.com. You can pre-order I Wonder, here.

Cover of I Wonder

We’ve launched a new digital subscription to CR which means that you can now access all the magazine content, going all the way back to 2006, at a much-reduced price, anywhere in the world

If you only read the blog posts here at creativereview.co.uk, you are missing out on an enormous amount of content. Each month we also post up the stories, features and reviews from each issue of the magazine online (check out this month’s issue here), but this, as well as some CRTV and Feed content, is restricted to subscribers only. Now you can access all that content via our new digital subscription.

It’s aimed primarily at overseas readers, who make up two thirds of our online audience. Shipping physical magazines around the world has always been a problem – they can arrive late and sometimes in bad condition. And it’s costly.

So we are now making the content of each magazine available through the website to anyone, anywhere in the world for a special offer price of £40 a year. This is a 60% saving on the cost of a rest of the world print subscription, and half the price of a one-year US or European sub. You’ll have to hurry though, because this offer applies for a limited period only.

For £40 a year, you get access to all the content of each current issue of the magazine. The magazine pieces online frequently have additional content not found in the printed version, including extra images and, of course, video. And you will get to see all the content selected for our Annual, Illustration Annual and Photography Annnual, which will not be available on the blog.

Digital subscribers also get full access to the archive of every issue going back to July 2006. Many of these issues are now sold out and so their contents is unavailable elsewhere.

You also get access to all the online issues of Monograph. And you will also qualify for discounts in the CR Shop and on extras such as awards entries.

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