Hasta La Ideas



This brutally funny take on a rather familiar scenario has been doing the rounds recently (thanks Gary Cook for the tip). Given the subject matter and its suggestion of a lack of value being placed on design skills, perhaps it’s a little ironic that it was made using xtranormal, a ‘text-to-movie’ service that turns users’ scripts into mini-films using its predesigned characters and backgrounds.

It’s a lot of fun and has potentially exciting uses in education as well as in the “dicking about at work making funny stuff to send your mates” sector, but here’s what the makers have to say: “Xtranormal’s mission is to bring movie-making to the people. Everyone watches movies and we believe everyone can make movies.”

Hmmmm, just like everyone can design a logo, right?

Wallpaper* has collaborated with Victorinox – makers of the world-famous Swiss Army pocket knives – to produce three limited edition knives that feature designs by artists James Joyce, Jamie Cullen (the Brighton-based artist, as opposed to Jamie Cullum the Jazz musician) and by Wallpaper*. The knives, limited to just 100 of each design, look jolly nice so we thought we’d share some images here…

All three boxes

All three knives

Above: Wallpaper’s knife

This is artist Jamie Cullen’s knife

And James Joyce’s knife…

The knives, which launched last week during The London Design Festival, cost £70 and are available from Victorinox‘s Bond Street store in London. More details can be found here

Regular CR blog readers may recall our post last year showing design duo Crispin Finn‘s wonderful 2009 year planner. Well, they’ve done it again for 2010 and our freshly screenprinted, folded and bagged copy arrived in the post this morning. Here are some photos of the planner and of the screenprinted bag it arrived in…

To buy your own year planner (£10 + postage and packaging) and to see more of their work, visit crispinfinn.com

Julie Verhoeven – Eight of Diamonds

Leo Burnett ad agency has commissioned a set of cards featuring artworks by leading artists and designers that will be sold on behalf of UK homeless charity Shelter. To launch the set, the original artworks for the cards will be on show at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London until Monday.

Alexander McQueen – King of Spades

Gillian Wearing – Five of Hearts

The set of playing cards follows Leo Burnett’s House of Cards campaign for Shelter, and the artists and designers involved in the project include Alexander McQueen, Neville Brody, Kyle Cooper, and Gillian Wearing. A selection of our favourite card designs are shown here. The full deck is on display at the gallery until Monday, and members of the public can make silent bids on the artworks over the course of the exhibition, with a final auction taking place on the closing night.

Kyle Cooper – Seven of Spades

Miles Aldridge – Nine of Hearts

To help promote the exhibition, Leo Burnett also commissioned four artists to perform live art events – each were given blank canvases and created their own cards in various locations across London. Shown below is Rude hard at work on the Ace of Spades.

Rude working on the Ace of Spades

M/M – Four of Hearts

Marc Quinn – The Joker

Neville Brody – Four of Clubs

D*Face – Queen of Clubs

And from Nick Finney at NB: Studio

More info on the Shelter exhibition is here.

The new D&AD Annual launched yesterday at the London Design Festival. The members’ edition, art directed by Peter Saville and designed by recent graduate Luke Sanders, is to be followed by a version that will go on general sale next year, published by Taschen…

The design of the new members’ edition highlights D&AD’s work in education via a series of graphic statistics, as Saville explains.

“Garrick Hamm created the opportunity for me to guide Luke through the design of this year’s Annual, as a way for us to express D&AD’s educational program through practice,” he says. “The aesthetic of the design has been inspired and informed by the statistics of D&AD’s many activities and achievements.”

For Sanders, a recent design graduate, it was the navigation of D&AD Annuals past that inspired him to look at how this year’s Annual should take shape.

The latest edition sees the sections Advertising, Design, Crafts and Digital each separated by their own fold-over cover (see teal coloured Design section cover folded out, above). It gives the appearance of four separate book spines making up the Annual. On the main hardback spine itself, the work that D&AD does is divided up in a set of statistics that relate to the hexagonal cover graphic: Awards 30%; Online Content & Community 27%; Student Education 17%; Annual 5%; Professional Development 13%; Exhibitions & Lectures 8%.

“The design of this Annual explores a relationship between visual aesthetic and distilled functionality and how the two can begin to amalgamate,” says Sanders. “It documents the ‘metrics’ of the design industry, in particular, D&AD’s many achievements this year.”

Sanders also believes that choosing him to design this year’s member’s edition is indicative of D&AD’s commitment to education.

“I’m extremely thankful to D&AD who believe so wholeheartedly in their message of education that they would risk innumerable problems and potential disaster by nurturing an unknown to design their Annual,” he adds.

“Working with Peter has been a real privilege – as working for a person whom you genuinely admire often is. I have learnt from him that I do not need to be apologetic about evaluating everything from the minutest detail to the broadest concept, and that design is at it’s most interesting when integrity is at the core of its foundation.”

Next year, in a new partnership with Taschen, D&AD will publish a hardback version of the Annual, designed by Jeremy Leslie and distributed worldwide.