Hasta La Ideas

Taking soundwaves as a graphic cue, Studio Output has designed a set of colourful postcards to promote a series of upcoming BBC Concert Orchestra events at London’s Southbank Centre…

Forming part of The Rest is Noise season, the concerts set out to capture the spirit of the 20th century and how music reflected its discords, wars and revolutions.

Each of the A6 postcards – which were created to send out to the BBC Concert Orchestra’s mailing list and distributed at at relevant events – features a graphic that represents a tiny segment of soundwave from a particular piece of music that will be performed at the event it promotes.

“We traced the sine waveforms of segments of each of the pieces being performed to create a series of images,” Studio Output tell us. “By using this visual interpretation of the music we show the pieces in a new light. By varying the colour palettes used and carefully selecting waveforms, the images still evoke the subject matter of the music.”

Here’s the full set:

Of course using waveforms as graphics isn’t a new idea, but thanks to great use of colours and a Polaroid-reminscent format, this series of postcards do look rather lovely.

See more of Studio Output’s work at studio-output.com.

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile digital art and generative design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

A new identity for the Harvard University Press by Chermayeff & Geismar ditches the imprint’s old seal device in favour of a mark in which six rectangles create a capital H

The rebrand is the work of Chermayeff & Geismar partner Sagi Haviv. According to the New York-based consultancy, the seal which has been used by the Harvard University Press throughout its 100-year existence was deemed “too complicated to work effectively in the digital realm”. Therefore, the HUP asked C&G to “create an identity designed for the digital age” for them.

The new mark retains the crimson colour of the seal but features a capital H formed from the negative space created by six rectangles that can be seen either as books on a shelf, windows or a tablet computer, C&G say. The HUP name is rendered in Palatino. “While it is not an uncommon typeface, we found it to be perfectly suited for Harvard University Press, as it is traditional in appearance, thus providing an appropriate counterpoint to the modern symbol,” Haviv says. “It is bold and distinctive, with a hand-lettered quality.”

An abbreviated version of the mark, as is customary in publishing, will be used on book spines. “The new identity puts emphasis on the Harvard name which was previously obscured by the seal,” Haviv points out, “underscoring the Press’s historic relationship with the University.”

C&G say that the new mark will also be more effective when used in digital media such as app icons, browser icons and ebooks.

Comparisons will inevitably be drawn with the University of California furore where, it was assumed (wrongly, it turned out) that a university seal was going to be replaced by a modern mark. There are some important differences in this case however, the most obvious being that this is a mark for the Harvard University Press and not the University as a whole.

As such, it works very well. There are obvious problems with the old seal mark when it comes to such things as app icons and favicons (see above). The abstracted H will be much better in those, increasingly important, environments. And its ingenious construction harks back to some of C&G’s illustrious back catalogue. While the use of Palatino, while, as Haviv admits, hardly a rare typeface, adds that sense of history and link with the past.

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile digital art and generative design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

Graphic designer Craig Oldham reports for CR from Curated by, a one-day creative conference in Sheffield which, this year, took as its theme the idea of Narrative

Sheffield. City of steel, the world’s first football club, and Curated by, a one-day conference started in 2010 by two of Sheffield Hallam’s graphic design lecturers, Pam Bowman and Matt Edgar. Centered around a different theme with each year, this year’s subject matter was Narrative, with the intent, as described by the organisers, to explore “how stories are structured, built and crafted to communicate messages through a range of formats and media”.

With a line-up consisting of Morag Myerscough (Studio Myerscough), Jack Schulze (Berg), Johnny Kelly (Nexus Productions) and Erik Kessels (KesselsKramer) this year’s thread was woven through the entire creative industry with graphic design, typography, architecture, interaction and product design, film-making, animation, photography, and advertising all ticked-off in polymathic style. The diversity of their respective backgrounds and interests, inspiration and methods, made each speaker’s talk in itself engaging enough to avoid the attention-plummet that’s sometimes a pitfall of such events (although some speakers were inevitably more comfortable on the stage than others).

Studio Myerscough’s Movement Café in Greenwich, which we posted about here

Each speaker had an enviable body of work behind them. Morag Myerscough kicked things off with a slide-show of her work and her years growing up in North London. She jumped through her distinctive ‘supergraphics’, starting with ‘Familiarity’, the hoarding which began her relationship with architects. Using bright colour at a large scale (which the local councils, initially, disapproved of) has always been central to her work, evolving into the bright and bold typographic aesthetic that she is known for today.

Next was Schulze, the entertaining principal at Berg, the studio responsible for (alongside much more envy-inducing work) the much-loved Little Printer. But Schulze’s lecture was far less concerned with work and dealt more with Berg’s approach to it, and their understanding of the world, something Schulze talked about with great passion and humour. Highlights included the analogy he made between examining something and “seeing the whole” with a strip from a Warren Ellis Iron Man comic (below), and his prediction for there being “no more U in UI [as in User]” which was illustrated by a video of kittens riding a Roomba (the latter, he exclaimed, was “How to win at conferences.”).

Kelly (see CR profile on him here) walked a more frequently trodden path, talking through examples of his directing and animation work (including his Procrastination graduation film, below), peppered with the animations and films of others for no obvious reason than he just seemed to like them (which, admittedly, was something you had to agree with him on).

Which left a snow-delayed Kessels to wrap-up. His trademark charismatic and insightful lecture, delivered with his usual humour and honesty, covered the beginnings of the inimitable KesselsKramer and his personal endeavors and evaluations in photography and graphic design.

Kessels talking about Fred and Valerie, the latest in his In Almost Very PIcture series of books of found photography. See our post about the project here

The Curated By… Narratives one-day-er should be applauded for its assembly of a diverse cast (though the absence of a writer-in some capacity-was felt). The perseverance needed to pull off an event in the North of Nowhere^TM* in snow that would usually bring the entire country to a grinding holt, was admirable.

That said, shortly into the first lecture it became quite apparent that the crux of the conference, narrative, is in itself is a pretty complex thing to talk about. Couldn’t everything be considered narrative, especially when working in a creative industry where arguably all work concerns communication?

It felt to me that the real ‘narrative’ isn’t the process of the realisation of a piece of work, but where the ideas for these outcomes come from in the first place. Whether your personal history filters into the process, your empathy and unique experience of the world provides the source, or whether it’s about striving for simplification or a commitment to a standard of thinking that governs seemingly everything thereafter. The real narrative is that personal story we all have of constantly creating, regardless of our structure, our audience, our format, sequence, or our message.

In the end, the narrative is really in the strength of the ideas. And the ideas of these speakers at Curated by… were as strong as the steel of the city which hosted them.

*Nod to tDR and Ian Anderson.

Craig Oldham is a Manchester-based graphic designer whose previous project include the design family tree and the hand.written.letter.project.

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile digital art and generative design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

Kingston student Lucy Sansom has made her own contribution to the current debate around the Ebacc and creative education, hand-delivering a handlettered message to Education Secretary Michael Gove

Sansom was inspired by the various efforts to persuade Gove to include design and arts subjects as a ‘sixth pillar’ in the upcoming Ebacc secondary education reforms (such as #includedesign and CR editor Patrick Burgoyne’s open letter to Gove).

While otheres have expressed their anger and frustration about his plans, she decided to try a different tack.”I felt that Gove might be feeling quite low due to all the hate he’s been getting,” she says.”My response was to send him this by way of ‘thanks’. Hopefully he will appreciate the back to basics chalk and slate approach that that he seems to be advocating.”

Sansom went to the department of education to hand-deliver her tongue-in-cheek message. “I was escorted into the rather grand reception by a very surly security guard where I was met by a second who wanted to know who what where why and how,” she says. “They weren’t really up for having their photographs taken but they took the parcel (along with my details that I gave rather reluctantly after trying to play the ‘art student’ card) before promptly escorting me back out of the revolving doors.”

She awaits a response from Mr Gove. More on the project and Sansom here

Go here to read Patrick Burgoyne’s open letter to Gove.

Details of how to get involved with #includedesign here

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile digital art and generative design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and team have redesigned the US music industry magazine Billboard, giving it a new identity and issuing a complete overhaul of its pages…

The new layout launches in this week’s issue (January 26). Fans of the magazine’s lists and charts, including the famous Hot 100 Singles and Top 200 Albums, will immediately notice a restructuring of these dense and detailed pages (more on which below), while the up-front and feature pages have been designed to give the text and images more room to breathe.

Billboard launched in 1894 and began publishing music charts in the 1930s. It first ran its signature “Hot 100” in 1958 and by the 1960s was exclusively covering music, Pentagram explains on its blog. The magazine’s main readership is label executives, music retailers, artists and DJs. “Billboard has a more central role in pop culture than any mere trade magazine,” says Bierut. “It’s an American icon, like the Coke bottle.”

In the past decade, say the studio, “the publication has transitioned from looking like a trade newspaper – text-filled covers in black and white – to a mainstream music magazine, with colour portraits of artists and cover lines”.

Indeed, in 1966, it looked like this:

While more recent editions of the title have featured a range of contemporary artists and musicians (and One Direction) on the cover – from Katy Perry and Rihanna, to Adele and Taylor Swift.

Prior to Pentagram’s involvement, the covers looked something like this (Adele, December 2011 issue):

And this (December 2012) – bright, with some interesting type, but perhaps a little too breezy for some:

And also, er, this – a “duel” cover issue from March last year – a pastiche of teen magazines the world over:

The latest issue (top of post), in comparison, is clearly a much more serious affair. OK, so it’s a great picture of Prince – evocative, mysterious, and quite unlike most of the previous year’s covers – but might it be indicative of a new direction in terms of the kinds of portraits used on the covers?

A major part of the redesign is the reworked masthead – but this also incorporates elements of the previous iteration in a version for use online and in marketing materials. Pentagram has described the changes to the identity on its blog:

“Since 1966, the magazine’s familiar masthead identity has featured lettering with strong circular forms that suggested records (and later CDs) and kicky ‘mod’ colors. As part of the refresh the logo has been completely redrawn to emphasise the basic geometry of the name, creating a typeface that echoes the circles of the original and still looks ‘pop’.”

The previous masthead (top); followed by the new version (middle); and a tweaked version (bottom):

The name is now entirely in lowercase (with tightened spacing) and the colours have been removed from the letters’ counters. “This makes the print version look immediately more grown-up and serious,” say Pentagram, “and a lot easier to design with full-bleed color photographs. The colour version of the logo will be retained on the new website (designed by Area 17) as well as in retail uses and event marketing.”

According to Pentagram, Bierut and his team worked under the direction of Billboard creative director Andrew Horton, editorial director Bill Werde, and editor Joe Levy.

The redesign incorpates new sections, while some of the older ones have been renamed. “Headers are paired with graphic bars inspired by the charts,” say the studio. “Page layouts are opened up, with graphs, pull quotes and other data appearing in the margins. The design employs a carefully coordinated suite of typefaces, including LL Brown, Lyon Display and Atlas Grotesk for headers, and Lyon Text for body copy. Ziggurat is used for special features and advertorials.”

Here’s what the inside looks like:

“For me, helping to redesign the Billboard charts was the ultimate information design challenge,” says Bierut. As part of this, the Hot 100 (the top 100 singles chart) has expanded from one page to a full spread (shown below, and with detail).

“Positions on the charts are also easier to scan,” say Pentagram of the changes. “These were formerly organised so ‘This Week’ appeared first, followed by its ranking in previous weeks. The redesign moves the earlier rankings to the left, in lighter shades of grey, leading up to ‘This Week’ in black, so readers can easily follow the record’s progression on the chart.

“The ‘bullets’ indicating rising hits are knocked out in white around the chart numbers, and weekly awards like ‘Greatest Gainer’ and ‘Sales Gainer’ are marked by red banner icons. The record’s peak position and weeks on the chart appear to the right of the title. The chart data is set in Amplitude, changed from the longstanding Univers, and chart names appear in LL Brown.”

Top 100 page detail

A colourful information graphic, developed by creative director Andrew Horton and based on chart movements and other trends, will also feature on the magazine’s back page.

The website billboard.com has also been refreshed accordingly by Area 17, and an iPad app version of the magazine, designed by an in-house team headed by Horton.

Project Team: Michael Bierut, partner-in-charge and designer; Laitsz Ho, Lisa Maione, Deva Pardue and Michael Deal, designers. More images of pages at new.pentagram.com and Billboard’s introduction to the new design is at billboard.com/news.

CR in Print
The February issue of CR magazine features a major interview with graphic designer Ken Garland. Plus, we delve into the Heineken advertising archive, profile interactive design studio Field, talk to APFEL and Linder about their collaboration on a major exhibition in Paris for the punk artist, and debate the merits of stock images versus commissioned photography. Plus, a major new book on women in graphic design, the University of California logo row and what it means for design, Paul Belford on a classic Chivas Regal ad and Jeremy Leslie on the latest trends in app design for magazines and more. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.