Hasta La Ideas

An annual report whose content is only revealed under sunlight has won Best in Show at the One Show Design awards in New York.

The annual report was created by Munich-based agency Serviceplan for solar energy supplier Austria Solar. The pages were printed in light sensitive ink so that the content becomes visible under sunlight.

Other One Show Design winners included Beautiful’s For Browsing Only from Singapore (also featured in the CR Annual), in which designers and artists were asked to create works using the tatty unloved ‘browsing’ copies in bookshops. The results wwere compiled in a publication featuring a layered, torn cover.

And an identity for the Committee of Organ Donation in Lebanon by DDB Dubai.

TBWA India also won gold for the branding of Elephant Combs

Another gold went to Leo Burnett Ontario for its We Make Voting Easy campaign for Elections Ontario which attempted to encourage voter registration and increase election turnout rates.

There was a gold in the packaging category for Berlin-based Scholz & Friends’ Fresh and Friends work in which fresh fruit was arranged in animal shapes in order, supposedly, to tempt children into eating their five a day

And to US/Japanese agency Party for its packaging of Magic contact lenses

Also in Japan, I&S BBDO won for its packaging for Umino Seaweed Store in which the seaweed used to make Nori rolls was laser etched to create a range of patterns

Last but, by no means least in our pick of One Show gold winners, is Creative Juice Bangkok for The Assembled Calendar created for model brand Tamiya. This special promotional gift was made in the same way that Tamiya make its model kits. The dates in each month could be re-assembled to make a series of different models

This is just a selection fo the gold winners – to see them all, as well as all the silvers and bronzes, visit the One Show site here

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. Try a free sample issue here

CR in Print
The May issue of Creative Review is the biggest in our 32-year history, with over 200 pages of great content. This speial double issue contains all the selected work for this year’s Annual, our juried showcase of the finest work of the past 12 months. In addition, the May issue contains features on the enduring appeal of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a fantastic interview with the irrepressible George Lois, Rick Poynor on the V&A’s British Design show, a preview of the controversial new Stedelijk Museum identity and a report from Flatstock, the US gig poster festival. Plus, in Monograph this month, TwoPoints.net show our subcribers around the pick of Barcelona’s creative scene.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, which opened at MoMA this Sunday, is a survey of text-based art over the last sixty years. The exhibition is divided into two parts, beginning with the Modernists in te 50s and concluding with twelve contemporary artists, including Tauba Auerbach, Kay Rosen and Paul Elliman. The new crop of artists that use type in sculpture, photography, video and installation are a fine testament to the enduring legacy of typography, but the earlier group of Dadaists and Futurists address letterforms in what strikes me as a purer way—in their raw form. Both groups are playful, but the Modernist work still seems more experimental, even today.

Exhibited chronologically, as they are, it’s difficult not to compare the two. I appreciated Tauba Auerbach’s tongue-in-cheek “All the Punctuation” (2005)—a piece of paper with every punctuation mark typed one on top of the other until they become a muddled splotch—as well as her piece “How to Spell the Alphabet” (2005), which spells out the letters of the alphabet phonetically and gets you to consider the sounds of single letters in a whole new way (above). But I’m an unabashed sucker for letterforms printed on plain paper, and the Modernists, with their strikingly bold, nonsensical typographic compositions, may do it better than anyone, with exceptional examples by Raoul Hausmann, Christopher Knowles, Liliane Lijn, El Lissitzky, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Henri Chopin.

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When Chanmi Grace handed me her business card I almost asked her to design mine right there on the spot. Her cards are slightly wider than average and they’re thick enough to be used as a weapon. Seriously, these corners could take an eye out. Moreover, the eye-catching visual identity she designed for herself looks like a chemistry formula with the letters in her name standing in for elements. Coincidentally, her name includes some of the main elements for basic life: C (carbon), N (nitrogen) and H (hydrogen). I love how she plays with letterforms, stretching out the C in Grace to the length of two letters so both names take up the same amount of space even though they have a different number of letters.

Her typeface Dodu Curbe is a sophisticated serif that’s also readable. The slightly elongated lines gives it an elegant, swan-like appearance.

Chanmi describes it as “a modern typeface, but more formal in appearance…[with] slightly higher visibility by giving more weight to serif. The font is a modern, neoclassic typeface in reaction to experimentation with proportions. The descender is slightly shorter and extended compared to other modern typefaces like Didot and Bodoni.”

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Visual Editions has just released its fourth book, Kapow! by Adam Thirlwell. Dealing with the events of the Arab Spring, the novel plays with the notion of ‘digression’ and, as the book progresses, these textual asides make up more and more of the story. Designer Frith Kerr was asked to thread it all together…

Kapow! features in Neil Ayres’ piece on the future of the book in the current issue of CR (you can read it here). In it Ayres looks at how mainstream and independent publishers are turning to other formats to present new titles. While paid-for apps don’t necessarily offer quick salvation, the iPad, for one, has enabled publishers like Faber & Faber to really push how fiction can be presented.

In Visual Editions‘ case, the company works with a format like the iPad when it suits the project (see VE’s iPad version of Marc Saporta’s Composition No.1), not because its the latest thing. In fact, the experimentation going on in the printed pages of their first four books goes to show how radical a reading experience the printed book can still provide.

Interestingly, as Ayres reveals, designer Frith Kerr met with Adam Thirlwell early on in the process of making Kapow! to show him how text digressions could be treated within the printed page, and how these fragments might sit within the body of the story. Then Thirlwell went away and wrote the book.

“We had all sorts of crazy ideas, and what’s made it into the final book is really exciting,” says VE’s Britt Iversen in Ayres’ piece. “As the book progresses and gets increasingly more noisy … the visual treatment of the digressions also gets crazier and crazier, acting very much as a reflection of the narrative.”

The narrator of Kapow! is a London-based writer who is watching the Arab Spring unfold on television and via the internet. As other throughts and observations begin to footnote the story, it becomes apparent that perhaps these tangents are beginning to take over the tale (each digression is flagged by a symbol in the main body text).

It makes for a challenging read at times, but is much easier to digest than first appears, and the technique cleverly infers the state of the narrator’s mind. It’s experimental, sure, but it’s highly readable, too.

Kapow! is available to pre-order online at visual-editions.com. Neil Ayres’ piece, The Further Adventures of the Book, is in the May issue of Creative Review, out now. All photos in this post by David Sykes.

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. Try a free sample issue here

CR in Print
The May issue of Creative Review is the biggest in our 32-year history, with over 200 pages of great content. This speial double issue contains all the selected work for this year’s Annual, our juried showcase of the finest work of the past 12 months. In addition, the May issue contains features on the enduring appeal of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a fantastic interview with the irrepressible George Lois, Rick Poynor on the V&A’s British Design show, a preview of the controversial new Stedelijk Museum identity and a report from Flatstock, the US gig poster festival. Plus, in Monograph this month, TwoPoints.net show our subcribers around the pick of Barcelona’s creative scene.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

This month on the CR iPad edition, we’ve got an iPad exclusive profile on Sebastian Edge, the photographer who builds his own cameras, a peek inside Gestalten’s new book Iron Curtain Graphics, some vintage London transport maps, a look at Mark Jenkins’ surreal urban sculptures, and Brooklyn street artist FAILE’s latest project, using over a thousand handmade tiles. We also take a closer look at some of the pioneers of the modern gig poster scene, and illustrator Hattie Stewart’s ongoing Megazines project.

The Barbican is hosting the first major UK show devoted to Bauhaus for over 40 years. The exhibition opens in mid-May at the Barbican Art Gallery, and will celebrate the school’s turbulent history, as well as the subjects at its heart. There are 400 works on show at the exhibition, and we’ve got a preview of a few of them, including work from Herbert Bayer, Josef Albers and Paul Klee.

We also have a look at Diver & Aguilar’s beautiful new photography project, which draws its inspiration from the black and white photos of 30s America.

Mind The Map at the London Transport Museum explores the inspiration, history and creativity of London’s transport maps, and we’ve got a gallery of great vintage design, inclulding maps, posters and other ephemera.

Gestalten’s new publication Iron Curtain Graphics features examples of socialist graphic design, illustration and typography from the 1950s to the 1970s. Featured in May’s iPad edition is a gallery of posters from the book.

Also included in Hi Res is illustrator Hattie Stewart’s ongoing Megazines project, which sees her artfully deface the covers of well-known fashion magazines.

Included in our Features section is Neil Ayres’ piece on the digital future of the book, and the way publishers have been making use of the iPad.

Gordon Comstock examines the return of intelligent design to the tube network, with Tom Lancaster’s recent series of posters.

Bonnie Abbot looks at the rebirth of the modern gig poster, and how small studios are using digital processes to recreate a ‘vintage’ look.

The May iPad edition also includes work from the design studios mentioned in Bonnie’s piece, including Landland, a small studio creating beautifully illustrated posters, record sleeves and art prints.

Over on CRTV, we’re showing a profile of Sebastian Edge, who builds his own cameras, and produces his negatives on pieces of silvered glass. We accompanied him on a shoot in the woods to talk about his time-consuming process of image creation.

Also for your viewing pleasure is this charming animation, created by Woof Wan-Bau, which sees a Penguin discovering a surreal world inside his garden.

There’s also a profile on street artist Mark Jenkins, and his strange, hyperrealistic pieces of urban sculpture.

The May edition will be updated throughout the month and there’s still plenty to come, including balloon-themed art (yes, including balloon animals), more work from the small design studios that are at the forefront of contemporary gig posters, an animation explaining the universe, and a closer look at This Is Real Art’s first publication, documenting Tokyo’s Shibuya station. Download the iPad app here.