Hasta La Ideas

Who said they should sell Detroit for scrap, when they got some gold in Ferndale. Pow!

There’s still time to enter the Creative Review Illustration Annual: we’ve extended the deadline to April 16

We’ve had a fantastic response so far but this is absolutely your last chance to enter.

Following on from our highly acclaimed Annual, and Photography Annual we are launching a version just for Illustration. The very best work will be showcased in a special July issue of CR.

The categories are:

Personal/non-published
Self-initiated, personal or experimental work, which has not been commissioned or published.

Advertising
Work commissioned by advert ising agencies including posters and
press ads.

Editorial
Illustration for magazines and news papers including news, fashion and advertorial. Includes commis sioned as well as non-commissioned work.

Design
Work commissioned exclusively by design agencies.

We have deliberatley kept entry fees as low as possible – just £40 for a single entry, which is less than half the cost of comparable awards schemes. And, unlike other schemes, there are no extra costs for reproduction.

Please enter here

While we’re yet to see a site that makes use of the @font-face CSS rule (which allows web designers to design sites using any font they want – providing they get the right licence), we’ve just seen an identity for a Miami art gallery that embraces three of the very typefaces that soon web designers won’t have to rely on…

Bellamy Studio was asked by Dorsch Gallery to work with its exisiting logo (consisting of five blocks) and devise a new graphic identity system. The studio thus created a brand guidelines document for the gallery explaining how to (and how not to) use a set of three typefaces and logotype in the production of various documents such as letters, posters, promotional postcards and magazine ads. The gallery itself will apply these as it sees fit to its website in the coming weeks. The posters shown here are the first to be created by the gallery using its new brand guidelines…

The typefaces used in the identity are all web-safe system fonts that perhaps get overlooked by designers because of their ubiquity: Arial (regular and bold), Times (regular and italic), and Courier New (regular and bold). The identity also utilises a circular graphic device, lending posters for the gallery a clean, modernist look.

“The point is that this new identity is totally versatile and recognisable in its simplicity,” explains Bellamy Studio’s Andrew Bellamy. “The gallery had no consistency at all to their previous designs, each one was different so there was no brand recognition. With this new identity, an image can be in the circle, the circle can be an overlay solid on a full bleed image, the circle itself can be a photograph of a circle etc – it doesn’t matter because the format and circle are consistent enough to keep the identity clear without becoming boring.”

bellamystudio.com

New York studio Triboro’s Subway map evokes the rigid grid of the city’s layout, but also its chaotic nature at the same time: it’s printed only in fluorescent red…

Triboro, the studio of David Heasty and Stefanie Weigler, stripped away all of the familiar colour-coded subway routes to create a map – if map is still the right word – that subverts its own function. It’s designed to a tight grid, but any legibility is foregone because of the use of one single colour.

“All lines of the map are forced to conform to an underlying grid of 45 and 90 degree angles, yet surprisingly, the landmass contours here are more true-to-life than on the MTA map,” Heasty explained to Steven Heller recently. “The fluorescent red colour becomes an unpredictable variable, as legibility can change completely under different lighting conditions. The neon effect can be intense and retina-burning under certain lamps, washed out and unreadable in other environments, or glow otherworldly under black-lights.”

 
The map apparently offers “practical and aesthetic improvements to the existing subway map while simultaneously subverting these improvements through the absurd adherence to a single colour. In this way the map reflects the often contradictory experience of New York City, the rigid systems and grids constantly interrupted by the unpredictable realities of a metropolis, the intermingling forces of order and chaos, and the city’s visual communications frequent inability to make sense of it all.”

The offset lithographic map is printed in a limited edition run of 300 pieces. At 45×58″ the poster is the same size as the large MTA Subway maps that are located at entrances to New York Subway stations. 

For more information on the map or to obtain copies, email: hi@triborodesign.com.

More of Tiroboro’s work is at triborodesign.com and their Leftovers page. The Subway map can also be purchased from The Future Perfect site.

UPDATE: David at Triboro just emailed us the picture below. Apparently it’s what the poster looks when shot using “black lights”. No retouching…

CR’s April cover. Illustration: Anthony Burrill

Creative Review has been redesigned with a new size, new paper, new typography and, yes, a new logo

Last month we celebrated our 30th birthday. It seemed the perfect moment to reinvent the magazine if we wanted to ensure its continued success over the next three decades.

There are two specific aims for the redesign: to create a better physical product and to get across the repositioning of our editorial stance that has been developing over the past two years.

Our website has been a fantastic success, bringing us hundreds of thousands of new readers from all over the world. But, inevitably, it raises questions over the printed magazine.

Print as filter: the new Grid spread brings together a month in images, from galleries, books and the web, as researched by the CR team

We knew that we needed to make the printed magazine even more distinct from the website. It had to be more tactile, more of a joy to handle, better quality. But finding the resources to do that is not easy in the face of a recession that has affected advertising, and therefore paginations and revenues, so badly.

We discovered that changes to the Royal Mail’s pricing structure meant that, by reducing the size of the magazine slightly to 250mm square we could save money. Which is all fine but not worth doing if the smaller format doesn’t feel right. So we had some old copies of the magazine cut down to the new size and found that it really worked. It felt good in the hand.

Then, we thought, what if we took the money that we would save from the size reduction and put it (and more) into the paper stocks. So instead of 90 gsm, the text pages are now on 135 gsm with Crit on 115 gsm uncoated. Instead of 250gsm, the coverstoack is now 300gsm. The thickest, best paper CR has never been on. Despite the mail cost saving, we are now spending more money per month on the production of the magazine, but we believe that our readers will appreciate the result – the pictures here don’t do it justice. You have to pick up a copy to really appreciate what a difference the new paper makes..

What’s On page from the front section

So we felt happy that new format and paper stock could deliver on our first requirement. The second involved some design changes.

Over the last two years, in response both to our readers’ wishes and the impact of the internet, the magazine has become less about simply displaying work and more about discussing that work. More than a year and a half ago, we dropped the 12-page Work section that displayed new projects with short captions and replaced it with an expanded Crit section of discussion and reviews. We wanted the design to reflect that CR is not simply a showcase magazine. We will show you great work, but we will also have something to say.

The new logo gives us more of a personality and much more of a presence on the newsstand (where up to half of our sales come from). Yes, the old logo worked well but it didn’t articulate what we wanted to get across about CR. It’s about recognising that the magazine is not just a blank canvas but the home of varied and strong opinions, whether from regular CR columnists, from those in the industry or from our Readers’ Panel.

Great images. Big: the new Hi-Res section

But that doesn’t mean we won’t be displaying great images. Our new sections The Grid and Hi-Res aim to deliver the visual hit that only print can bring. (Yes, we know The Guardian does something similar but it really should be a feature of CR too).

Features maintain a neutral stance, presenting the work without the design getting in the way (as we have always believed is right) and using Theinhardt, a new grotesk from Optimo, as the main display face. Each month we will present a case study of a new project which talks through the process and then asks a selection of industry figures to comment on the result (this month’s looks at Research Studios’ work for the BBC).

And a profile piece will showcase the career of a major figure, in this case, David James.

Other features this month include this extract from Eliza Williams’ new book This Is Advertising

The more opinionated stance of Crit is suggested by uncoated paper stock and the use of the more expressive typeface, Dala Floda, designed by Paul Barnes, which is also used in the logo. Dala Floda has its roots in tradition but feels contemporary and a little quirky – which seemd like a pretty neat fit with what we are trying to achieve for the magazine.

The redesign was done by our art director, Paul Pensom, but Paul Barnes worked with us a consultant on the typography, advising us on typeface choices, page furniture and the logo. For drop caps and other ornaments, we have used characters from a new project of his involving the revival and digitisation of the St Bride type archive (more on this in a later post). We’ve just used Caslon Shaded but there will be a lot more faces available in the future.

We hope that you enjoy the new-look Creative Review. It’s out on March 24.

Paper
Cover: Claro 300gsm
Text pages: Galerie Art Matt 135gsm
Crit: Festival Offset 115gsm.
Supplied by James McNaughton

Type
Text: Lyon, designed by Kai Bernau, available from Commercial Type.
Logo, small headlines: Dala Floda, designed by Paul Barnes.
Display: Theinhardt, designed by François Rappo, available from Optimo.
Ornaments, drop caps etc: Caslon Shaded, revived by Paul Barnes for the St Bride Type Foundry.