London-based Johnson Banks is an identity and branding company that delves into print and even 3D work on occasion. Their latest 3D experiment resulted in Arkitypo, a 3D alphabet that tells the history of typography. “Each letterform is different, each in turn interprets its own alphabet.” For example, “A” is for Aksidenz Grotesk, a forerunner of Helvetica. It was “part of a family of early sans-serifs called ‘grotesques’…for this design a condensed weight is ‘fractalized,’ turning a grotesque into a thing of beauty.”
Each letter is methodically researched and many of the resulting forms are quite beautiful. Take the “B,” an uppercase Bodoni B spiraling out of the form of a Baskerville B like a snail shell. “Baskerville and Bodoni are usually judged as two separate typefaces, but Giambattista Bodoni modeled his famous font on John Baskerville’s…The key difference is that the thicks and thins are in turn thicker, and thinner.”
Takashi Murakami’s new exhibition opens in Doha, Qatar tomorrow. Murakami-Ego features a huge collection of work, most of which will be hard to miss: there’s a 100 metre long painting and a six metre high inflatable self-portrait…
The show at the Al Riwaq Exhibition Hall presents just about everything you’d want to see in a Murakami extravaganza, such as the multi-eyeballed mushrooms, the glossy ‘superflat’ paintings and the cheeky chappies in their bunny suits. A new work, Self-Portrait Balloon (shown above), greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibition.
But Murakami is unveiling a host of new work, including a vast canvas that runs the length of three walls in the main gallery space.
The piece is apparently a response to the recent natural disasters that have occurred in Japan. The overall theme for the show is “a dialogue with one’s own ego,” says Murakami.
And the graphic on the outside of the Al Riwaq Exhibition Hall is also rather nice, featuring a series of self-portraits.
Murakami Ego is on at the Al Riwaq Exhibition Hall, next to the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, until 24 June.
More details at The Qatar Museums Authority’s website, here.
The tough world of the deep sea trawlerman provides the setting for the latest project from Carter Wong Design which features clever illustration and stunning images from a fisherman-turned-photographer
We’ve written about projects for all kinds of clients here at CR but this is the first time we’ve covered work for a deep sea fishing operator. Ocean Trawlers is, we are told, one of the biggest around. Its accountant had worked with Carter Wong at a previous company and invited the studio to help.
“They are one of the world’s largest deep sea fishing companies, and I mean deep sea, fishing mainly in the Barents Sea and deep North Atlantic, predominantly for sustainable cod and haddock to supply restaurants, supermarkets and companies such as Birds Eye globally and a great many chippies in the UK,” says Carter Wong’s Phil Carter. “Their catch is frozen at sea so, along with their sustainable credentials, they are one of if not the best producers/suppliers of fresh frozen fish. As a brand that has had little recognition in the consumer sector their plan has been how to turn this around from being seen as a provider to large companies and distributors to more public facing.”
Carter Wong’s first task was to design and build Ocen Trawler’s website “using stunning photography by Corey Arnold, an American ex-deep sea fisherman himself turned professional lensman. He spends long periods at sea recording life on these huge trawlers for his own personal projects but fortunately was happy to collaborate with us on this one,” Carter says. (More amazing images can be found on Arnold’s website here). “Bold type headings and full-screen images seemed to sum up the masculine dangerous world of deep sea fishing to us for the design.”
Carter Wong then created the identity for Atlantika, Ocean Trawlers’ own premium brand. They were asked to create posters for fish and chip shops but instead suggested creating Atlantika-branded chip forks which could be served in a special dispenser (shown top, Andrew Davidson created the illustration). Thus, customers would have a reminder of the brand to take away with them.
CR in Print
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.
What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.
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.
Graphic designer and artist David Marsh combines two of his interests in a series of prints – Pantone swatch graphics from Adobe Illustrator and classic album covers
“Hip-hop artist Scroobious Pip liked them so much he commissioned me to design his latest album cover and single releases in a similar style,” says Marsh.
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.
What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.
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.
The London Design Museum’s Designs of the Year show opens today with its usual eclectic mix of the useful, the beautiful, the obscure and the obvious
The process of selecting work for the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year show, whereby industry figures are asked for nominations from which a final selection of work to go on show is made, guarantees that its content is far more diverse than that of pay-to-entry awards shows.
Thus, this year, we have major commercial products such as the Kinect for Xbox 360 displayed alongside experimental furniture, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner next to Andrew Slorance’s Carbon Black Wheelchair.
The graphics category shares some of this eclecticism, with Bloomberg Businessweek sharing a publications table with John Morgan Studio’s AA Files, the journal for the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
And Dalton Maag’s Nokia Pure Type project sitting across the way from De Designpolitie’s What Design Can Do! conference identity
Also featured in the graphics section (full list here) are Paul Sahre’s life-size paper monster truck hearse kit and video for They Might Be Giants (which we wrote about here)
And Your Browser Sent A Request That This Server Could Not Understand, an illustrated depiction of the internet by Koen Taselaar
Plus, Gordon Young and Why Not Associates’ Comedy Carpet installation, which is represented by a section of one of the concrete slabs used plus screenprinted section of the layout
There is also a very strong digital section whih includes iPad apps for The Guardian and Letter to Jane magazine, the BBC homepage, UVA’s High Arctic installation, Dentsu’s Suwappu project, Musicity by Nick Luscombe, Simon Jordan and Jump Studios and the Homeplus Tesco Virtual Store from Korea.
I enjoy the variety of this show and the way that it embraces the extremes of the design industry’s output, from worthy projects such as Autolib, the Parisian electric car scheme
to Kate Middleton’s wedding dress and Vivienne Westwood’s Ethical Fashion Africa Collection, a project producing handbags in Kenya and Uganda
But, talking to graphic designers at the show’s opening party, it was clear that most felt unease at the way in which their area of practice compared to the scale and importance of other projects on show. How, for example, can you get too excited by a music video when across the way is Massoud Hassani’s Mine Kafon, an amazing concept for a wind-powered land mine clearing device
Or the Re-design for an Emergency Ambulance from the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and Vehicle Design Department at the RCA
Never mind some of the architecture nominees, which include a hospital in Rwanda and a market in Haiti.
But it’s all design. The purpose of the show is in part to remind us of the enormous scope of design and the many ways in can touch our lives, from the life-saving to the life-enhancing. It does that admirably.
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.
What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.
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.
The Studio8 team, from left: Matt Willey, Zoë Bather, Steve Fenn and Tom Pollard. Photo: Maria Spann
Zoë Bather and Matt Willey, the founders of Studio8 Design, have announced that the London-based design consultancy is to close in May
In a joint statement on the Studio8 website, Bather and Willey say “We’ve had a fantastic 6 years and are very proud of what we have achieved, working with some great people on some wonderful projects. We’d like to say thank you to all our clients; everyone who has worked for us; and all the suppliers who have supported us.” They are, they say “going off to pursue their individual interests in design”.
The pair set the studio up in 2005, having previously worked together for Vince Frost. Studio8 quickly established a reputation for typographically-led design, particularly in print. It was the launch design studio for Elephant magazine (2009) as well as for independent quarterly fashion title Plastique. The studio also worked for titles such as Wired and MAP, while Willey and Bather had previously been part of the team on Zembla magazine.
Last year, Willey assisted New York Times Magazine art director Arem Du Plessis on that title’s redesign (covers shown above) as well as being part of the team that launched men’s magazine Port.
Bather says that the pair will continue to work on Studio8 projects until May. After that, they will go their separate ways. She will “be doing my own thing – focussing on print, editorial and identity projects and potentially some interesting collaborations”.
Typeface for Wired, 2011
Identity for Central School, 2010
Future Industries identity, 2012
CR in Print
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.
What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.
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.
Ryan Atkinson was commissioned by Hype For Type to create a 16 page booklet that would showcase and promote its Exclusive Faces range of commissioned typefaces. Atkinson’s response: to create four typographic posters presented as a call to arms to designers to revolt against dull design…
“Instead of following the convention of a read through booklet, we decided to go down a more conceptual route,” says Atkinson “The end result was a a quick read through A3 magzine (cover shown, above) which also doubled up as a set of four typographic posters.”
Entitled Typographic Revolt, the magazine, created in collaboration with copywriter Stephan de Lange, serves as a call to arms to designers, urging them to arm themselves wtih typographic understanding and wage battle against dull and badly informed design. It’s been litho printed in a limited run on to 90gsm wood-free paper. Here are some spreads:
To buy a copy of Typographic Revolt (£6.99) click here
CR in Print
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.
What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.
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.
Arkitypo is a collaborative research project between Ravensbourne and design studio johnson banks that aims to push the limits of rapid prototyping technology in the creation of a 3D alphabet
Ravensbourne asked johnson banks to come up with an idea to utilise the newly-acquired rapid prototyping machines at the college. Johnson banks’ suggestion was to create a 3D alphabet in which each letter expressed an idea relating to a typeface whose name started with that letter. For example, the F, above, is from Fraktur, a typeface that will forever be associated with Germany. The 3D letterform is extruded from the shape of Germany on a map, which can be seen on the reverse.
The B starts as a Baskerville B which then morphs into the same letter in Bodoni – a reference to the fact that Bodoni was derived from Baskerville.
“For each letter we carried out extensive research, made drawings, built maquettes and did simple 3D visuals on our machines,” say johnson banks. “before handing the ideas over to Ravensbourne’s team. There was a period of ‘virtual proofing’ where we examined the ideas as rendered files, and when all parties were happy, we began the printing.” Some of the letters took up to 90 hours to ‘print’.
The R is set in Retina, a typeface designed to deal with ‘ink-fill’ at tiny sizes: “We reversed the process and drilled an ‘R’ out of huge, oversized ink bubbles,” say johnson banks.
“This slightly mind-boggling design takes intersecting ‘Z’s from Zig-Zag to create a 3D puzzle”
Some of the letterforms are on show at the London HQ of Arup (8 Fitzroy Street W1).
The show opened to coincide with the latest of Arup’s Penguin Pool events in which they ask various designers to speak on a theme – last night’s being data visualisation. The Arkitypo project is on display until February 8.
The entire project is documented in the February edition of Monograph – the A5 publication that all CR subscribers (and only CR subscribers) receive free with each issue of Creative Review. If you’d like to subscribe, all the details you need are here.
There is more about the project on the johnson banks website here
Design: johnson banks 3D imaging and prototyping: Jon Fidler Photography: Drew Morgan Project client: Jill Hogan Project advisor: Ben Caspersz
CR in Print
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.
What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.
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.
Namechecked on butdoesitfloat and boingboing earlier today, this 1961 reel from motion graphics pioneer John Whitney is well worth a look. Whitney’s home-built analogue computer famously made use of parts from an anti-aircraft gun sight…
Collaborating with Saul Bass on the title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1958 possibly brought Whitney’s work its largest audience.
But since the early 1950s he had been using his homemade animation techniques on TV commercials and, prior to those films, his experimental work in the 1940s (notably Five Film Exercises) had already marked him out as a master of progressive animation.
Whitney produced further title sequences using his analogue computer and founded Motion Graphics Incorporated in 1960 – a year later he compiled a record of his visual effects in the short film, Catalog (below).
According to Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, Whitney’s experiments with the mechanism of a second world war M-5 anti-aircraft gun director were integral to his creation of such a range of effects. Whitney later reconfigured the mechanism, apparently creating a machine that was 12ft high in the process.
In 1975, embracing the potential of digital effects, Whitney created the motion graphics for this film, Arabesque.
CR in Print
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.
What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.
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.
As we reported in November last year, Airside is shutting up shop. Now the studio is planning to sell loads of its work, from prints and canvases that have been hanging in the studio, to archived T-shirts designed by the likes of Mode 2, Mr Scruff, Pete Fowler and, of course Fred Deakin…
Yes, the Airside Closing Down Sale will take place in Airside’s studio at 339 Upper Street in London on Saturday February 18 between 2pm and 6pm. At 3pm there will be an auction of rare and collectible items that include no less than 29 framed prints from 14 years of creativity. All are one-off rarities such as screenprints for Lemon Jelly (one shown, above), Impotent Fury, The Face, and It’s Pop It’s Art – as well as personal work by various Airside employees.
Also to be auctioned are the archive copies of 40 T-shirts created for the Airside T-shirt Club.
“Also on general sale will be our archive of Airside-designed T-shirts, CDs, vinyl, books, posters and plastic toys,” says Airside’s Fred Deakin. “We’ll be selling / giving away lots of our technical kit and various books from our reference library as well as show reels and postcards; there will also be tea and cake for all.”
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.
What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.
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 is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
