Hasta La Ideas

New York magazine. Art director: Chris Dixon

Last week, CR attended the first birthday party of the Editorial Design Organisation (first covered here on the blog) writes CR art director, Paul Pensom. The EDO is a group formed to champion editorial design and provide support for students wishing to enter the industry. MagCulture’s Jeremy Leslie is chairman for 2009 and he used the party to introduce the EDO DIY exhibition: a selection of tear-sheets from some of the most notable editorial design from the last year, as chosen by EDO members.

We were pleased to see the variety of work on show – big publishing houses and indie titles alike were represented.

Pentagram’s Luke Hayman had a number of pieces exhibited, as did Wink projects’ Monocle and Case Da Abitare, though perhaps the most popular choice was Scott Dadich’s infographic-heavy work for Wired magazine.

L-R: Esquire UK subscriber-only edition (art director: David McKendrick); Camouflage (art director: Jon Butterworth); Guardian G2 (art director: Richard Turley); New York Times magazine (art director: Janet Froelich)

L-R: Guardian G2 (art director: Richard Turley); New York Times magazine (art director: Janet Froelich)

Spreads and pages from FUTU, the Polish magazine that teams up with a different design team for each issue. Art director: Matt Willey

L-R: Spread from Monocle (art director: Ken Leung); cover of Case Da Abitare (art director: Kuchar Swara)

More on the ENO, can be found at the website, editorialdesign.org

“It’s awkward to criticize another member of your discipline,” says Milton Glaser, but that didn’t stop the graphic design legend from weighing in on the work of Shepard Fairey, who missed the Friday opening of an exhibition of his work at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (“The first museum survey of one of the most influential street artists of our time”) when he was detained by the cops on graffiti-related charges. “For myself—this is subjective—I find the relationship between Fairey’s work and his sources discomforting,” Glaser told Print magazine. “Nothing substantial has been added.”

In my own case, when I did the Dylan poster, I acknowledged using Duchamp‘s profile as an influence. I think unless you’re modifying it and making it your own, you’re on very tenuous ground. It’s a dangerous example for students, if they see that appropriating people’s work is the path to success. Simply reproducing the work of others robs you of your imagination and form-making abilities. You’re not developing the muscularity you need to invent your own ideas.

Recently on UnBeige:

In artist and designer Chris O’Shea’s latest project, an array of emergency beacon lights interacts with visitors, tracking their movements through a Dublin gallery

Beacon, which O’Shea produced with Cinimod Studio is currently on show at Dublin’s Science Gallery as part of its Lightwave exhibition.

Beacon at Lightwave 2009 from Cinimod Studio & Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

O’Shea explains how it works: “As soon as someone enters the space, all the lights point at that person. When more than one person enters the space, the lights share their interest. Only the lights nearest to you will look at you, with the brightness based on proximity.”

The installation uses industrial beacon lights that have been completely modified with new circuits. The position, rotation speed and light brightness of each beacon can be individually controlled.

Also, says O’Shea, “There are four thermal cameras in the ceiling that track where people are
walking: these cameras are normally used for people counting in supermarkets.”

The Lightwave show features a host of other interactive installations, including Balint Bolygó’s laser theramin,

Ursula Lavrencic and Auke Touwslager’s Cell Phone Disco, a surface that visualises the electromagnetic field of a mobile phone,

and AVIO! by Andrew Bucksbarg, in which users pick up small spheres which change light and sound as they are held.

Lightwave is on until February 20. At the end of February, Beacon will be coming to London for the Kinetica Art Fair.

Le portfolio de l’artiste portugais Joao Oliveira sobrement intitulé On Repeat. Des magnifiques illustrations et compositions, pour la plupart en noir et blanc. Des oeuvres à découvrir dans la suite et sur son site web.

Amid all the doom and gloom in the magazine world (apart from at CR of course) many seem to be clinging onto the impending launch of Condé Nast’s bi-annual style title, Love, as the sole light in the darkness. And we have an exclusive first visual of the magazine’s logo

Love, which launches on February 19 will be put together by the same creative team behind Pop, who have defected to the new title en masse. While still feverishly finishing the layouts for the first issue, creative directors Lee Swillingham and Stuart Spalding (of design studio Suburbia) gave us first sight of Love’s logo which, says Swillingham, embodies the differences between the new magazine and the one to which it is sure to be compared.

“Love will be like the older sister of Pop,” Swillingham says. “It’s an evolution of the concept of a high fashion and style maga­zine. It’ll be a bit more grown-up, with better budgets and more possibilities creatively.” Condé Nast’s involvement, he thinks, will give them more clout, allowing them to attract photographers that they had not been able to work with at Pop, while also showcasing new talent.

For the logo “we didn’t want anything that looked like Pop, which is a little bit plastic and very much a product of its time. We wanted to ignore any notion of being hip or trendy and do something classic.”

The logo uses Cimiez, originally designed by Gert Wiescher and based on a 19th century French engravers’ typeface. The reason? To hark back to the early days of maga­zine publishing as well as Condé Nast’s heritage. “We re-drew it and tweaked it to make it more suitable for a ‘headline’ setting,” Swillingham says. Other versions will be used in later issues, including a flat graphic variant.