Apr 12
Lineposters: Urban Transit Line Art
Posted in: Uncategorized
If you travel a lot for work, you’re bound to recognize the images presented here.
If you don’t, hit the jump.
Apr 11
Two new fonts from FiZZZ BZZZZ
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Paris-based studio FiZZZ BZZZZ obviously has fun when it comes to naming things, like their own practice or, in this case, their two newest fonts Antique De Profundis and Animal Grotesk. Google translates Antique De Profundis as “Antique of the Depths,” which is perhaps why they showcase the typeface over an image of a graveyard (depth, as in six feet deep, get it?), but I honestly think they needed a nice word with both a Q and an E to show off their curled descenders and bars. This rounded motif is evident in the leg of the R and the overly plump S as well. It has personality. I know I’m reaching here, but doesn’t the F remind you of Sam the Eagle?
FiZZZ BZZZZ describes their second typeface, Animal Grotesk, as simply “childish,” but they clearly left out “totally adorable.” I’m not sure how functional it is, but who cares?
Apr 10
The DO’s and DON’TS of Graphic Design with Studio Lin
Posted in: Uncategorized
Reporting by Christina Beard
Designers typically don’t reveal their mistakes or share how they stumbled into a solution. But Alex Lin of Studio Lin did last week at his AIGANY talk hosted at the Museum of Art and Design. Through a series of Do’s and Don’ts, Lin revealed some of his successes and failures in design, production and fabrication. Some of his most beautiful work was created when he had no idea what he was doing or through collaborations.
After graduating from the Yale MFA graphic design program Lin worked at 2×4 for 6 years before co-founding DEFAULT. A few years later he parted ways and created Studio Lin—a studio founded on a desire to explore new territory through challenging collaborations with creative visionaries in the fields of architecture, industrial design, art and fashion. In just a few years Studio Lin has created a body of work that provokes and inspires the design community.
Lin challenged the audience to get in over your head and take on more than you can handle. While at 2×4, he took on way more than he could handle, by totally jumping into projects and working long hours and weekends. Lin was unsure how to start a project designing environmental graphics for the student campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Feeling overwhelmed, he started to create simple pictograms of ‘things students do.’ Hundreds of pictograms he created were later transformed into 20-foot tall, vinyl portraits of Mies van der Rohe, welcoming the students as they entered the building. He confessed that he had no idea where he was headed.
Apr 06
Designer Profile: Craig & Karl
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Craig Redman and Karl Maier run Craig & Karl, a multi-disciplinary design studio that operates in New York, where Craig lives, and London, where Karl lives. The duo says they collaborate daily on a wide array of projects, like murals, typography, sculpture, identity design, housewares, iPhone apps, web design, fabric patterns, iconography, posters and maps, though they specialize in illustration and installation. They’ve worked with brands like LVMH, Google, Nike, Apple, Vogue, Microsoft, Converse, MTV and The New York Times, and Craig also runs Darcel Disappoints, a cheeky blog where he posts a stream of illustrations of his adventures as giant, walking eyeball wearing one half of a pair of glasses.
The work they do together is colorful, bold and playful. Their vision has been described as “a rainbow-eating marshmallow [where] every face has five colors.” That last bit refers to their portraits, like the series they recently made for Fashion Week (see Anna Piaggi looking crazier than normal, above). You can see a retro influence in their work that’s not just confined to one decade, but spans the circular, grouped iconography that was popular, mainly in housewares, in the ’50s, to the ’60s/’70s psychedelic portraits and the late ’80s neon color palette in the mural, shown below. All their designs, even the more ‘serious’ projects, have a distinctively upbeat feel.
Apr 05
Innovative. Refreshing. Full of ideas. Three ways to describe both TED and Chip Kidd. The charismatic graphic designer, author, editor, Batman expert, and rock star made his TED debut at the recent Full Spectrum conference in Long Beach, California, thanks to “guest curators” Chee Pearlman and David Rockwell, who organized a smashing session entitled “The Design Studio” that featured creative superstars including architect Liz Diller, Metropolitan Museum of Art director Tom Campbell, and IDEO’s David Kelley, bracketed by the whimsy of Maira Kalman‘s tapestry-cum-stage set and the wisdom of John Hodgman, who provided interstitial interrogations on design classics such as Philippe Starck‘s Juicy Salif citrus squeezer (“When you fall asleep it comes alive,” warned Hodgman. “Mr. Starck, I have revealed your terrible secret.”) In the leadoff spot was Kidd, who managed to bring the tech-heavy crowd to its feet by talking about the wonders of books: the analog kind, with dustjackets, odors, and, according to Kidd, “tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness—a little bit of humanity.” Treat yourself to his freshly posted TED talk:
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Apr 05
DKW&R bring Spectator to Life
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Members of the team behind men’s magazine Port have created a new lifestyle supplement to The Spectator with an eye on a very advertiser-friendly demographic
Kuchar Swara (Port co-creative director), editor Dan Crowe and two of the title’s associate publishers, Calum Richardson and Stephen White, formed creative agency DKW&R a year ago to work on editorial and advertising projects.
They were invited to work on Spectator Life by Andrew Neil, who chairs the company which owns the 180-year-old right-wing weekly. At first sight, such a move may seem at odds with a magazine whose readers might be expected to be disdainful of a concept as frivolous as ‘lifestyle’. However, Monocle and, perhaps more importantly the Economist’s Intelligent Life spin-off have demonstrated that affluent, educated readers such as those of The Spectator remain extremely attractive to advertisers and that, in The Economist’s case, even ‘serious’ titles can make brand extensions targeted at watch, car and fashion advertisers work.
“I think it’s quite interesting that this market is appealing more and more to publishers,” says Swara. “The sector is obviously so easy to sell to advertisers. The demographic – mid 20s to 50s, educated, professional, with disposable income, interested in nice things and loves to read – what more could a publisher ask for?”
According to the magazine’s media pack, the average net worth of a Spectator reader is £1million, as a group they have spent more than £11.5 million on art or antique collections in the past year and four out of five are champagne drinkers (remember, we’re all in this together folks).
“In terms of brief it was left quite open,” Swara says. “They wanted guidance from us in terms of structure etc. and asked for us to push as much as possible, but reminded us that they may say no, as money was always an issue. They were, for example, not willing to pay for the logo to be drawn properly, so I paid [Commercial Type’s] Christian Schwartz myself to do it at a friend’s rate. But on the other hand, they were up 15k on ad sales as soon as potential advertisers were told that they would be investing in a still life shoot [below] – for the first time in their history.”
“Because of the sensitivity of the spectator audience, the design needed to appear timeless and established,” Swara says. Typefaces used are Modern and Times Ten. “I think Modern is one of the best Scotch Romans around and it felt like a good fit with where we wanted to go.”
“My favourite thing about it is the cover [shown top],” Swara says. “The photograph [of Tory MP Zac Goldsmith] is by Phil Poynter. Picture a group of right wing journalists being shown a photo of a young, rich, achingly handsome, Conservative politician, looking cool – I think it went down well…. except the price was £1200. They tried for weeks to find better pictures but it was looking increasingly unlikely that we’d find another, cheaper image of a young, rich, achingly handsome, conservative politician, looking cool…”
The cover is certainly interesting. The shot of Goldsmith (complete with cigarette) has a 60s feel to it, redolent of a young Michael Caine or Alain Delon. In fact the whole cover concept harks back to that Golden Age of British magazines – Town, London Life etc – that so many have recently been inspired by. It also seems to play (again thanks to that cigarette) to a certain libertarian conservatism common among the Spectator readership which sees itself as defiantly in opposition to Political Correctness and Nanny Statism in all its nitpicking manifestations.
Elsewhere, the design carries through that ‘traditional with a twist’ concept in page furniture and some quirky headline spacing.
Neil, apparently, has big plans for title. Initially it will be a quarterly but the idea is eventually to take it monthly and to make it a standalone newsstand title, as Intelligent Life has done.
Apr 05
The missing Modern Masters
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Jamie Shovlin, Mann by Lionel Trilling (Variation 1A)
For his forthcoming show at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London, artist Jamie Shovlin has reimagined 17 covers for titles from the Fontana Modern Masters series (1970-84) which were scheduled to appear but never did…
Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides on writers, philosophers and cultural theorists whose ideas had helped to form the intellectual landscape of the 20th century. The first five titles came out in 1970, published by Fontana Books, the paperback imprint of William Collins & Co. The series editor was the academic and critic, Frank Kermode.
Jamie Shovlin, Arendt by David Watson (Variation 1)
For a thorough examination of the design of this striking collection, there’s no better place than James Pardey’s mini-site dedicated to the work at fontanamodernmasters.org. As Pardey reveals, the Modern Masters collection was published in six separate sets, each with its own distinctive cover design template. These covers, he writes, “did not just catch the eye, they hijacked it.”
Jamie Shovlin, Matisse by David Sylvester (Variation 1A)
On his site, Pardey charts the influence of artist Victor Vaserely‘s Op Art work on the geometric art of Oliver Bevan, who in turn was commissioned to create the paintings used on the initial run of Fontana covers. The publisher’s art director, John Constable, had been struck by an interactive tabletop piece shown by Bevan at the Grabowski gallery in 1969, where tiles could be arranged in different combinations.
Bevan produced his Cascade patterning device for the first ten FMM covers; a second set of nine in 1971-73; and a third set of eight in 1973-74. Under Mike Dempsey’s art direction from the mid-70s (and Patrick Mortimer’s into the 1980s), artist James Lowe created three series of cover designs based on various iterations of triangles, square and circles.
Jamie Shovlin, Foucault by J.G. Merquior (Variation 1B)
Jamie Shovlin, Berlin by John Gray (Variation 1)
Since 2003 Shovlin has been using the Fontana series in his art, which also acknowledges his own interest in graphic design and typography. For his new series of paintings he devised a system set out in the form of a colour wheel (shown below), which enabled him to generate the colours and patterns for each of these unpublished FMM books, and suggest how they might have looked.
Jamie Shovlin, Benjamin by Samuel Weber (Variation 3)
According to the gallery, he used a points system to score the ‘Modern Master’ of each book. “Criteria such as the number of pages in their book, the number of other Modern Master texts cited in the book bibliography, whether they were a Nobel Prize winner and so on were counted by Shovlin and recorded in the colour wheel,” says HoV. “The total score could be interpreted to indicate the success, popularity or intellectual weight of each Modern Master but also, working from the covers of existing books, the colour and composition of the new cover designs.”
Jamie Shovlin, Colour wheel
The outcome of this system created many potential designs for each cover; but only one was selected by Shovlin as the primary design. “The failed designs were incorporated into the paintings as each canvas was painted and repainted, burying the variations under the selected design that sits at the front of the picture,” say the gallery. “A trace of each preceding layer is retained through the various spills, drips, lines and overlaps evident in the final surface of each painting, hinting at the intrinsic flaws in the artist’s self-devised system and the value of classificatory systems in everyday life.”
Shovlin’s paintings will be showing at the Haunch of Venison gallery, 103 New Bond Street, London W1K 5ES from April 18 until May 26. More details at the gallery’s site, haunchofvenison.com. Pardey’s site on the design history of the Fontana Modern Masters series is at fontanamodernmasters.org.
Apr 04
Butcher’s Hook make their mark
Posted in: Uncategorized
Three graduates sought to introduce their new studio to locals via a neat bit of window dressing, providing passers-by with unique prints – and a business card
Butcher’s Hook is (or perhaps that should be wil be) a three-member design studio and gallery based in an old butcher’s shop in London’s Portobello. The studio has been formed by Benio Urbanowicz, James Coltman, Josh Blanchett and Dan Jones, students from Kingston and LLC, all of whom graduate this summer.
The threesome have vowed to spend 10 per cent of their time working on local community projects and to this end plan to operate a ‘walk-in studio’ once a week, where anyone can walk in with any sized brief, “which we’ll be over the moon to work on”, they say. “We would like to become a design studio for people. All shapes and sizes of different people.”
In order to introduce themselves to the local populace, Butcher’s Hook set up a digital display using an old Nintendo Wii remote, custom made Infa-Red yellow pencils, a wireless doorbell, a printer and a few extra ingredients.
“We gave away free art made by the user themselves, with the option to receive a digital copy sent to them,” they say. “We had a great weekend, where over 150 people got involved, through their own choice… and every single one went home to find our business cards printed on the back of their own masterpiece.”
As well as launching their studio, Butcher’s Hook has also entered the project into the D&AD Student Awards in response to the brief Make Your Mark.
Regular readers may recall that Urbanowicz also won our recent BFI competition to design a book cover.
CR in Print
Thanks for visiting the CR website, but if you are not also reading CR in print you’re missing out. Our April issue has a cover by Neville Brody and a fantastic ten-page feature on Fuse, Brody’s publication that did so much to foster typographic experimentation in the 90s and beyond. We also have features on charity advertising and new Pentagram partner Marina Willer. Rick Poynor reviews the Electric Information Age and Adrian Shaughnessy meets the CEO of controversial crowdsourcing site 99designs. All this plus the most beautiful train tickets you ever saw and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Thunderbirds in our Monograph supplement
The best way to make sure you receive CR in print every month is to subscribe – you will also save money and receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month. You can do so here.
Apr 03
Live from the studio of Damien Hirst
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On the eve of Damien Hirst’s first major retrospective in the UK, his extensive body of work has been re-catalogued online courtesy of a new website from Bureau for Visual Affairs. It also features a live studio feed, part of an attempt to “communicate the artist a little better” say the studio…
Hirst of course needs little introduction and prior to his Tate show, which opens tomorrow, appraisals of his current standing in the art world have hardly been out of the media. Following Julian Spalding’s anti-conceptual art tirade in The Independent and Hari Kunzru’s more analytical piece in The Guardian on the current state of the art market (and Hirst’s place in it), the artist has appeared on Newsnight and in a Channel 4 programme dedicated to the Tate show. There’s now even an online Private View tour of the exhibition with Noel Fielding.
So hitting the new Hirst website at damienhirst.com, the first thing you see is a kind of riposte to one of the accusations often levelled at the way he works – that he depends upon a series of assistants to make his art. Hence the live, two camera feed direct from his studio where, at the moment, two Hirst staffers are working on a piece made of hundreds of scalpels. ‘Look – here’s how it’s done,’ it seems to say.
“The live feed is about being transparent, so you can see how the art is created,” says BfVA’s Simon Piehl. “Maybe within the art world, the fact that he doesn’t create everything himself has been levelled at him, but this feed is not a statement. In most cases when you see art, you see the result not the process, people only interact with the finished products in a rarefied environment. I think seeing the art come alive is quite novel, in that sense. It’s part of what makes Hirst ‘Hirst’.”
The feed will follow particular pieces as they are created, with the plan to make these sequences available as time-lapse videos which can then be linked up with information on the finished artworks. BfVA were keen to move away from using a well known piece by Hirst as a starting point for the site and instead, says Piehl, “begin with something mildly outrageous, which sets the tone for the experience.”
With their minimalist and pared back approach to design, BfVA’s work also fits well with Hirst’s. “In terms of artists, I think it’s Hirst whose work comes nearest to graphic design,” says Piehl. “The spot paintings are clearly quite graphic [and] … a lot of the art has a clinical, medical subject matter. This is why Bureau and Hirst are well suited; we are also interested in modularity, classifying like with like. We like a structural approach to things as well, and much of his work is like that. So we have some affinity with his work.”
The only design reference to the art itself, says Piehl, is the colour of the buttons which are taken from various spots from Hirst’s spot paintings. “The design you see now is a direct ancestor of what we first presented: it’s quite modular and utilitarian, but it is rooted in Hirst’s work,” says Piehl. Jason Beard [art director at Hirst’s company, Science] oversaw the visuals and the project was led by Andry Moustras.”
With each of Hirst’s works (250 of them will eventually be catalogued on the website) users can also zoom in to see the finer details, something that BfVA were keen to bring to the ‘vitrine’ works in particular. All of the pieces can be examined close-up, in preference to flicking between differently angled shots of a given piece, “which isn’t very explorative,” says Piehl. “We used this zoom technique with our work for the National Gallery, where there’s a lot of very fine craftsmanship at brushstroke-level. In the case of the Hirst site, you can decipher the art better.”
Three main images of the The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living can each be examined close up in fine detail.
The website also includes news, events and exhibitions pages, with a section dedicated to films, interviews and animations of some of Hirst’s pieces. His show at Tate Modern opens tomorrow and runs until September 9. See tate.org.uk.
More of BfVA’s work at bureau-va.com.
Apr 02
Acousmatic Sorcery by Willis Earl Beal
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We start the week with some more great new music packaging, this time for the debut album of Willis Earl Beal, who recently signed to Hot Charity/XL Recordings after recording this album at home under his own steam.
The CD comes in DVD format packaging (cover shown above), and features a booklet written and illustrated by Beal, titled Principles of a Protagonist (A novel actually about something).
Beal’s musical style is lo-fi and personal: he confesses on the back of the CD pack that the record “was recorded on bad equipment”, which turns out to have been a cassette karaoke machine. This rough-and-ready approach extends to his visual style too: all the images in the book are drawn by Beal himself, and the text – which is idiosyncratic to say the least – clearly comes from his own imagination. On the back of the CD pack Beal explains its personal nature, saying that it was “conceived, typed and printed in the summer after my girlfriend separated herself from me…. I had no job and again, no reasonable plateau for hope. It was ridiculous. All I had was a well of degenerate thoughts to write down in prose form.”
The inside cover of the CD contains a more conventional shot of Beal, who appears shirtless and moody, holding a guitar.
Beal’s artistic talents have also been put to use in the video for his debut single from the album, Evening’s Kiss, which features animated versions of his drawings. We featured the promo in a recent video round-up on the blog, but in case you missed it, here it is again:
On Beal’s website (willisearlbeal.com), he is encouraging fans to interact with him directly by offering to send a drawing to anyone who writes to him (he also offers to sing you a song down the phone if you call). We at CR did write to him and received the following pic. Technically, it is a photo of a drawing… but maybe Beal is too busy to do individual ones at the moment with the album release and everything, and it’s still very nice.
Acousmatic Sorcery is out on Hot Charity/XL Recordings today, more info is here: willisearlbeal.com.
CR in Print
Thanks for visiting the CR website, but if you are not also reading CR in print you’re missing out. Our April issue has a cover by Neville Brody and a fantastic ten-page feature on Fuse, Brody’s publication that did so much to foster typographic experimentation in the 90s and beyond. We also have features on charity advertising and new Pentagram partner Marina Willer. Rick Poynor reviews the Electric Information Age and Adrian Shaughnessy meets the CEO of controversial crowdsourcing site 99designs. All this plus the most beautiful train tickets you ever saw and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Thunderbirds in our Monograph supplement
The best way to make sure you receive CR in print every month is to subscribe – you will also save money and receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month. You can do so here.
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