Hasta La Ideas

When The Diving Bell and the Butterfly began its rounds in American theaters, one of the final directorial details attended to by Julian Schnabel was selecting—and then fine-tuning—the typeface and hue of the English subtitles (the film is in French). Hearing Schnabel thoughtfully discuss the merits of pale yellow text versus the usual white left us wishing that more visual artists and designers were at the helm of feature films. It also made us acutely aware of subtitles wherever they appeared. In this month’s issue of Opera News, writer Matthew Gurewitsch takes on opera captions, which usually appear as supertitles projected on a screen above the performance or (as at New York’s Metropolitan Opera) on tiny LED consoles embedded into the back of each patron’s seat.

Despite their drawbacks (drawing the eye away from the stage, undermining the illusion that the actors are real people acting on their own impulses, in real time), titles “have become as integral to an opera production as sets and costumes, wigs and makeup,” writes Gurewitsch. “Yet most designers and directors give them scant attention, taking the titling systems of the houses they work in pretty much as they find them.” [Translation: graphic design opportunity alert!] He goes on to offer examples of creative titling, including performances that have experimented with non-standard typefaces and excerpted longer stretches of text at a time, allowing the viewer to refer back to previous lines. Then there are the times when titles go beyond translation:

…Titles have been known to mutate into commentary, marginalia, or even hypertext, as in a rare revival of André Grétry‘s Zémire et Azor at Houston Grand Opera in the early 1990s. In particular, I remember an aria di bravura in which the heroine had a great many more runs and roulades to toss of than thoughts to pin them on. “Neat, hunh?” one title read, when the steeplechase was at its dizziest.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

London-based design studio (and previous CR One To Watch) Accept & Proceed has created a new mark for Nike Football Training…

The new mark, known as the Nike HyperCube, will be applied to all football training-related products and materials from now on. While the mark will mostly appear printed on product in just two dimensions, it was conceived as a four-dimensional tetrahedron, A&P say.

Why? According to Accept & Proceed’s David Johnston, “Arsene Wenger describes the four factors making up a great football player as being Technical, Physical, Tactical and Mental.” Hence the decision to try to produce a mark in four dimensions. (If you’d like an explanation of four-dimensional Euclidian space, and we know you would, click here).

This animation shows the mark in motion:

Credits:
Client: Phil Dickinson, global creative director, Nike Football
Design agency: Accept & Proceed
Design/concept: David Johnston, Matthew Jones, Kasper Lahti

StudioThomson is marking its fifth birthday this year with an exhibition of its work at central London’s über-cool b Store on Savile Row…

The exhibition, which opened this week, runs until Saturday December 12 and features work done by the design studio for a range of clients including Aquascutum, Preen, Pringle Golf, Major Players, Liberty, Duffer and Wrangler.

“The left hand window display features our StudioThomson notebooks which are on sale within the store (see below images below),” explains Mark. “The right hand side of the shop features a selection of our work in display cabinets, and also in frames on the wall.”
StudioThomson notebooks – available at £10 a pop. There are 40 different colour covers to choose from. Exhibition photography by Peter Guenzel

One of a series of neon icons designed for karaoke bar Lucky Voice

Invite created for Preen

Press preview invitation created for Liberty

Invite for Aquascutum

5 Years of Design & Art Direction by StudioThomson runs until December 12 at:

b Store,
24a Savile Row,
London,
W1

studiothomson.com

“Beautiful things often happen when you don’t know anymore” (top) and “Don’t forget to dream” (bottom)

Art director Christian Borstlap has designed a new series of stamps in collaboration with a Dutch children’s welfare charity…

The Children’s Stamp is a charity focused on the promotion of children’s education. Working with the Dutch postal service TNT Post, the organisation has previously commissioned stamp sets that have helped to fund projects that support vulnerable children – the last of which raised more than 9.5m Euros for educational projects.

This year they approached Borstlap to create a set of stamps on the theme of “Let Children Learn.”

Borstlap took “the things you don’t learn from a book” as inspiration for his stamps, which each offer a visual piece of advice for young minds, “things that are perhaps more important than learning your four times table,” he says.

The advice includes: “Together is better”, “Trying is the same as learning” and, our favourite, “Something boring can be beautiful, if you look at it upside down.” Borstlap has also included the advice as a written list in the stamps’ sheet margin, so that people can match up the text with the graphics (which also appear in a book of postcards).

“The more you look, the more you understand” (half shown, top) and “Together is better” (bottom)

Additionally, the new stamps have also been brought to life in a sweet two minute animation by director, Paul Postma. 

Animation: Paul Postma Motion Design; Sound: Jasper Boeke; Music: Brother John by Clutchy Hopkins and Lord Kenjamin (Ubiquity Records, 2009)

Borstlap is a self-taught art director, designer and illustrator whose work has appeared in Wallpaper*, Nylon, Elle, and been used in campaigns for adidas, Albert Heijn and Selfridges. See more of his work at christianborstlap.com.

Issue 5, June 1943

Continued production of an independent publication is an achievement in itself, let alone in the time and places which played home to The B-Line office. This month’s Monograph features images from Olie Kay’s collection of his grandfather’s magazine, created for the 48th Royal Tank Regiment B Squadron during WWII…

A few months ago, Kay came into the CR office with his precious collection of magazines; each one a little battered and faded, with staples showing signs of rust, but genreally in good condition considering they were all over sixty years old. Kay explained how The B-Line was the creation of his grandfather who used a duplicating machine to produce runs of 120 copies a month during active service in Tunisia, Algeria and Italy.

“In 1942 my grandfather, Geoff Thomason, created and edited The B-Line for the men of the 48th Royal Tank Regiment B Squadron,” explains Kay, a graphic designer and junior fellow of graphic design at UWE in Bristol. “In this endeavour he was assisted by his tank commander, Capt Henry D Palmer and Alan Gilmore, who had been a Press Association reporter before the war.”

Issue 9, October 1943

“Content was principally created by submissions of poetry, interviews, stories and articles from the men in the squadron,” says Kay. “The monthly magazine would follow the men of B Squadron through to the end of the war for 30 issues and one ‘souvenir number’.

“As the B-Line Souvenir edition makes clear, ‘B-Lines have been produced in houses, in army huts, in tents, in tank bivouacs and in the open air; in the grounds of a Scottish castle, in a Tunisian orchard, in the arid wastelands of Algeria, in the ubiquitous vineyards of Italy, and in the Senio front line, less than a mile from the enemy.’

“The 120 monthly copies of The B-Line were printed by hand on a duplicating machine with all equipment and paper stock scrounged from wherever it could be found. Indeed the majority of the issues were produced on a portable French typewriter – a ‘present’ from the Afrika Korps.”

Issue 11, December 1943 – the “Christmas number”, each was individually hand-coloured

“Of the 30 issues produced,” Kay continues, “I hold 28. Unfortunately it is unlikely that I will ever manage to track down the missing two. Sixty-four years have passed since the last pages rolled out of a battered duplicating machine in Italy, and time moves on each day, eroding links with the past.”

Geoffrey Guy Thomason (1916 – 2001) co-edited The B-Line with Alan Gilmore from 1943 – 1945. He returned from the war to become the editor of the family run newspaper, The Middlesex Chronicle, printed at the Cedar Press in Hounslow, until it was sold in 1972.

14 covers and one spread from Kay’s collection of The B-Line feature in this month’s Monograph, free with subscriber copies of CR November. Many thanks to Olie for contacting us about the collection. His own work is available to view at oliekay.com.

Issue 18, July 1944

Issue 19, August 1944

Issue 20, September 1944

Issue 21, October 1944

Issue 30, August 1945