With a pertinent quote by Michaelangelo chosen to adorn the posters, Music worked with the printer and artists to create a process whereby the marbling print would resist the poster’s lettering.
The actual process of creating the marbling effect is time consuming and rather wonderful to behold. Here’s a glimpse of Lewis working on the prints:
“We encouraged Jemma to explore different marbling techniques, and the results have been astonishing,” says Music’s Craig Oldham of the project. ” Each pattern is totally unique due to each poster requiring a completely new setup.”
Here are some of the posters created:
For more information and details on LPF and to find out how to get hold of a limited edition poster, visit leedsprintfestival.com. Music’s charity of choice for all proceeds of poster sales is The Christie Hospital in Manchester.
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.
London-based music fans would be wise to head over to the Peckham Space, where artist Barby Asante has curated The South London Black Music Archive, a celebration of the music history of the region…
The gallery space has been transformed into an ‘open archive’, exploring the objects and personal stories central to the evolution of black music in South London. On show are record sleeves, posters, concert tickets and a lovely display of audio equipment through the ages:
Asante is also inviting members of the public to share their own music ephemera, which will be added to the show. Her aim is to raise awareness of how influential the music scene of South London has been. “The influence of black music on the development of popular music is often overlooked,” he says. “Black music has also played a significant role in the development of British culture from the 1950s and this is a great opportunity to provide a platform for people to consider the significance of this cultural activity on their lives.”
In addition to the archival work on show, the design collective Åbäke has designed a limited edition record sleeve for the exhibition, which is shown above (top image). The exhibition also features a map of key music venues in the area (above), that people can add to.
The exhibition will be on show at Peckham Space until March 24. Tate Modern is hosting a panel discussion with Barby Asante about the exhibition on February 3, which will be chaired by Paul Goodwin, independent curator on Black Urbanism. More info on the exhibition and the talk is at peckhamspace.com.
When was the last time you wrote a letter? I don’t mean typed one—wrote one. Like on actual paper. If you’re answer falls somewhere between it’s been awhile and what’s a letter?, don’t worry—you’re not alone. And there’s help. UK-based graphic designer Craig Oldham has taken it upon himself to get you back on the right track and put you in touch with ye olde pen and paper again with the Hand.Written.Letter.Project. He took up the cause in 2007 when he asked his fellow designers to write their thoughts on the demise of the handwritten letter on their own letterhead.
“But the project offers much more than that voyeuristic insight into the creative minds of those we revere,” Oldham says. “More that it represents a visual narrative on the cultural transition in which we find ourselves. A transition on which your thoughts you are welcome to share, where all you have to do is to pick up that pen.”
As an ardent letter writer myself, I find the book not only charming but visually compelling. And quite a few others do too. So many, in fact, that Oldham has released a Second Edition of the book that’s double the length of the original. Some of the letters are straight forward, some are straight up cop-outs (at least I think so) and others are adorned with drawings and flights of typographic whimsy. You can see the list of contributors on the site and scroll through a few scanned entries, though I do believe the most authentic way to experience this book is to hold all its 128 pages and 8-page double gatefold cover in your own two hands.
As part of Marvel Comic’s Avengers Art Appreciation variant cover series set for release in April, artist Mike del Mundo created this beautiful homage to graphic designer Saul Bass for Amazing Spiderman #683. The cover definitely captures Bass’s color pallet as well as his striking imagery, yet includes a clever integration of all of the Avengers’ symbology. Now all we need is Paul Rand to solve DC Comics’ peeling logo issues!
Rendering of the exterior of the new Design Museum
The Design Museum in London today revealed the plans for its new space, which will open in 2014 and be sited at the former Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington, in the west of the city.
The move comes as a result of the museum outgrowing its current venue, on London’s Shad Thames. “It’s full to the brim and bursting at the seams,” said the Design Museum’s founder, Sir Terence Conran, at the launch event. The new space will give the Design Museum three times more room to showcase its collection, and the museum hopes to double its visitor numbers to 500,000 a year as well as expand its education and events programmes. The film below further describes the project.
Entrance foyer rendering
Second floor rendering
The move sees the Design Museum join Kensington’s ‘cultural corner’, where it will sit alongside the V&A, Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Royal College of Art and the Serpentine Gallery. Conran hopes the expanded space will help raise the profile of design in the UK. “If you go to the Scandinavian countries, design is part of their DNA,” he said at the launch. “We’ve not achieved that in this country, but we ought to. I hope the new Design Museum will help persuade governments that housing, public buildings, transport etc are vitally important and can improve the quality of life of the people who live in this country.” Conran said that if he were a graduating student today he would team up with an engineering graduate to “make things of quality and originality”. “That’s what people expect of this country,” he continued, “but we don’t ever seem to recognise this.” He sees the museum as a champion of British design. “The Design Museum will be the showcase for these projects and it will educate.”
Second floor, showing the permanent exhibition. All renderings from John Pawson Ltd, with images by Alex Morris Visualisation
The second floor of the Commonwealth Institute today
The £80 million project will see the Commonwealth Institute, which has lain dormant for a decade, given a new lease of life. Designs for the site have been produced by John Pawson, who has redesigned the interior of the Grade 2* listed building, and OMA, who has planned the surrounding residential development consisting of three buildings. Pawson described the main challenge of the project being that of “working inside the skin of an existing building”.
“The Commonwealth Institute is iconic,” he continued, “it opened in 1962 but still to me seems very daring.” Pawson’s intention is to work with the existing space, and in particular to retain the impact of the building’s original hyperbolic paraboloid roof structure. The space will be opened up to allow sightlines to the roof; from the entrance foyer a visitor will see the entire route through the building, winding up from the central platform around the opening at first floor level to the permanent exhibition space on the top floor and the sweeping curve of the roof. As one might expect from Pawson, the material palette is purposefully restricted, and he intends to “retain and enhance all the qualities of the existing building, and retain the atmosphere”.
The space is split over five floors in total, providing approximately 10,000 square metres of space. It will feature rolling exhibition spaces and an exhibition of the museum’s permanent collection, designed by Studio Myerscough, as well as a café, restaurant, members’ room, bookshop and design store. Also included is the new Sackler Library, funded by the Dr Mortimer & Theresa Sackler Foundation, which will focus on design and architecture.
The exterior of the Commonwealth Insitute today
The interior of the Commonwealth Institute today. All photos by Luke Hayes
The new museum will be the third iteration of the Design Museum in London. The first was the Conran Foundation’s Boilerhouse Project, which opened in 1981 in the basement area of the V&A. While the Boilerhouse, and its director, Stephen Bayley, brought many significant exhibitions of design to the city, including exhibitions on Issey Miyake, Sony, Dieter Rams, and Coca-Cola, it proved challenging to the V&A curators at the time and in 1987 metamorphosed into the Design Museum and relocated to Shad Thames. The new museum opened in 1989, and its current director, Deyan Sudjic, joined in 2006. Sir Terence Conran today expressed some satisfaction at the museum’s return to the “V&A’s territory”, and seemed keen to stoke up a little good-natured rivalry between the two spaces, as well as to emphasise the Design Museum’s devotion to contemporary design and design solutions. “The V&A’s a wonderful place and always an inspiration to designers, but it’s a museum of decorative arts and we are a museum of industrial arts,” he said. “We are a museum of industry.”
More info on the new Design Museum (and the present museum) is online at designmuseum.org.
CR in Print
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.
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
Last week the Editorial Design Organisation played host to Arem Duplessis, design director of The New York Times Magazine and one of the most respected magazine designers working today. I went along to hear him talk through his body of work…
Duplessis is best known for his work at the NYT Magazine, which he covers regularly on the newspaper’s excellent 6th Floor Blog. But during this hour-long lecture he also found time to mention some of his early work, too.
For example, the following pages, spreads and covers are from Spin magazine, which Duplessis worked on from 2002-2004.
At a time when overseas magazines were hard to obtain in the UK, especially outside of London, Spin was a prized import which, along with Raygun, Emigré and a handful of other titles, were swapped eagerly among young design students hungry for new ideas.
Looking back now, I can see a distinct affinity with The Face, which also assimilated David Carson’s experimentalism within a tighter framework during this period. And here’s some more bold typography from GQ, where Duplessis worked briefly during 1999-2001.
It was while at Spin that he got the call from creative director Janet Froelich to join her at The New York Times and take over the design direction of its magazine. Froelich is, of course, a tough act to follow, but since Duplessis’ arrival the magazine has been consistently strong.
It’s the sheer range of subjects covered, he says, which makes the magazine the perfect fit for him. It means he can be working on a heavyweight news story one week and a comic photoshoot the next.
And it does look like a labour of love. Week in, week out, Duplessis and his team produce a magazine that is both playful and authoritative – a rare mix in the editorial design world.
For the recent redesign of the magazine, Duplessis enlisted the help of Studio8‘s Matt Willey, and together they looked back to the Times’ archives for inspiration.
A new font, NYTE Condensed, based on an old byline face from the paper, was commissioned from Dino dos Santos (used in the headlines, shown below, and in the Danny Meyer spread, top), and the result is a classic and powerful piece of editorial design with shades of Willy Fleckhaus’ seminal German title, Twen.
Duplessis ended his talk with a few words about the role of the editorial designer in different media. Most magazines and newspapers exist on multiple platforms now, and the New York Times has long been at the forefront of developing a strong presence on the web.
The magazine also regularly produces short films to promote special issues and Duplessis has used both web and film to document interesting cover shoots and instigate creative projects which compliment the issue content. One film by Karim Charlebois-Zariffa covers the shoot of the 10th Annual Year In Ideas issue, in which a workable QR code was built from a grid of balloons (watch it here).
And for another set of films, which you can view here, director Alex Prager and cinematographer Ross Richardson invited Hollywood A-listers to reinvent themselves as the villain of their choice. I particularly like Brad Pitt as Eraserhead.
Paul Pensom is the art director of Creative Review. More information about the EDO at editorialdesign.org.
Joy Division and Disney aren’t the most obvious combination, but as it turns out, it looks like Mickey might be a fan of the band too. Listed on the Disney online store as a ‘Waves Mickey Mouse tee for Adults’, Disney appear to have referenced the artwork for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album, and turned it into a set of mouse ears.
The T-shirt, which has now sold out, is described by Disney as incorporating “Mickey’s image within the graphic of the pulse of a star. That’s appropriate given few stars have made bigger waves than Mickey.”
Whilst Disney is half right here – the graphic depicts pulses from the first pulsar to have been discovered – there is no mention of Joy Division. The original listing details appear to have been amended however – when Pitchfork reported the story, they described the listing as including the line “inspired by the iconic sleeve of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album”.
Since this post, the listing appears to have been changed, removing all mention of the band.
The Unknown Pleasures artwork was designed by Peter Saville, who himself, of course, borrowed the image from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy (indeed Saville has a history of referencing existing works in his music sleeve design).
Saville came across the image via Joy Division’s drummer Stephen Morris. The image originally used black lines on a white background, but Saville reversed this to create the final artwork.
There’s a post over here that delves further into the more detailed background of the image, and the issue of copyright.
Pitchfork have reacted to this with horror, commenting, “Does Disney know that the singer of this band hanged himself?!” and “Do they know where the name Joy Division comes from?”
We’d like to know what other iconic covers Disney plans to mouse-ify.
Digital channel More4 launched a new identity yesterday created by ManvsMachine and Channel 4’s in-house agency, 4Creative. The graphic device is also carried across a range of idents featuring installations made up of 400 mechanical ‘flippers’…
The redesign replaces the inaugural identity created by Spin for the channel’s launch in 2005 and will be used in idents and across marketing material. Spin’s design employed a graphic number “4” housing the word ‘MORE’ and (to my mind at least) resembled a stylised hand with one finger pressing a remote control. (More images of the previous identity are on Spin’s website, here.)
“The original branding of More4 was very bold and uncompromising,” says Chris Wood, 4Creative‘s head of on-air promotions for More4. “The colourways and graphic look gave the channel a unique ‘grown up’ look that worked perfectly with the original content and ambitions. However, over the years the content of the channel has shifted and with the plans to launch the upcoming ‘scrapbook’ service, it was felt it was time to redress the gap between the channel branding and channel content.”
More4’s original identity design by Spin
ManvsMachine‘s new identity moves away from the minimal approach of the previous design and incorporates 15 differently coloured triangular shapes, which also animate, again making up the numeral with the text similarly placed.
“We still wanted to create an identity that had a singular strong design feel, but one that had more flexibility and a lot more warmth and tactility,” adds Wood. “In addition, in the back of your mind you have to ensure any new look can sit comfortably and hold it’s own along side the other Channel 4 brands.”
Here’s how the new identity works on-air:
While the new graphic device is clearly an attempt to use something that has a bit more activity to it, the sense of movement is translated in a series of live action idents designed and directed by ManvsMachine in collaboration with art installation designers, Jason Bruges Studio, and students from Middlesex University.
Each one is made up of hundreds of mechanical ‘flipper’ units that, when set in motion, reveal a range of colours and patterns. These structures are placed within a series of different environments, such as a cafe, a staircase, on a tree, and on an abandoned boat on a beach in Dungeness.
“The new idents are definitely born from the new mark,” says Wood. “We knew we want to create live action idents, initially ideas were too convoluted or grandiose, but as ManvsMachine developed how the logo would animate it inspired them to think about taking elements and breaking them out into the real world. After that, creatively, things pretty quickly came to the point at where the idents are now.
“However, the realities of designing, manufacturing, installing and transporting 400 flipper units was a challenge, but all those variables, the extra input and expertise we gained along the way, means we’ve ended up with something that is incredibly visually satisfying, is unpretentious, and has warmth and charm.”
According to ManvsMachine’s James Greenfield the flexible logo “morphs through a series of flips, folds and reveals [and so] the colour palette reflects the vibrant nature of interiors, food culture, fashion and other contemporary lifestyle programming.” The typeface used is More4 Omne, a version of Darden Studio‘s Omnes Pro.
“A lot of More4’s programming is about making things,” Wood adds, “so we in turn wanted to physically build these idents, construct them and film them in real locations, rather than computer generating all the magic in post-production. I think the installations we eventually came up with subtly reinforce the new look but offer a satisfying spontaneity which, I hope, will make them continually watchable .”
Here’s ManvsMachine’s making of film for the idents work:
Creative Director: Tom Tagholm Head of On air, More4: Chris Wood Design & Creative: ManvsMachine/4Creative Director: Mike Alderson/Tim Swift/Chris Wood Producer: Louise Oliver DOP: Daniel Trapp Production Design: Jason Bruges Studio Design Co-ordinator: James Greenfield Editor: Jamie Foord Post producer: Pete Winslett & Sarah Antrobus (Envy Post) VFX: Marcus D. Dryden Composer: Guy Connelly Music: commissioned by Alice Godfrey at Channel 4, Pete Beck at Warner Chappell Sound Design: Rich Martin (Envy Post)
Having just moved to a new studio last year, London-based No Days Off needed to get new stationery printed. Being designers, they naturally saw an opportunity to refresh their own identity. But what to do with all the redundant old business cards and letterheads? Recycle them, of course…
“We wondered whether we might be able to do something a bit more interesting than just sticking [the old stationery] in the recycle bin and buying in a load of new paper,” explains Patrick Duffy of No Days Off. “In our minds, the simplest thing to do was to just pulp all this old paper and make it into new paper, and then print our new stationery on that,” Duffy continues. “Direct recycling, cutting out the middle-man. Easy, we thought…
“After a series of fairly negative responses from paper suppliers (of the ‘can’t be done’ variety), we were eventually led to Jim Patterson of Two Rivers Paper. Jim proved to be extremely helpful, and said that he could do the job, no problem. So we bundled everything together and sent it off to Frogmore Mil in Hemel Hempstead.”
“We ended up with just under 200 sheets of 320gsm SRA2 paper, which was more than enough for our new stationery requirements,” says Duffy. “So we decided to make a new print too. By a happy coincidence, we discovered that a young printer, James Boughen, had set up a studio right next door to the Two Rivers paper mill, so we asked him to produce this new print for us:
“We exhibited the letterpress print in a recent show at ad agency AMV BBDO, and we have a limited number for sale (at £35 each) in our Shop,” adds Duffy.
The stationery was all hand typeset and letterpress printed by Adams of Rye.
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.
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 latest commission for design and illustration duo Craig Redman and Karl Maier of Craig & Karl was to apply a bold graphic approach not to an editorial piece or gallery project, but to an underground car park in Sydney…
“The objective of the project was to breathe new life into the space (the underground car park of an award-winning residence in Sydney’s Darling Point by architect Marsh Cashman Koolloos) which, having been rendered in concrete with little inlet of natural light, felt quite dark and heavy,” explains Maier. “Working closely with the owners, who possess a keen design sensibility, it was decided that the mural would cover all surfaces in a blanket of bright colour. There was also a request that the larger wall surfaces be left blank with an eye towards potentially introducing additional, individually commissioned works at a future date.”
“The resulting design is a dynamic mix of overlapping geometric forms that mirror and respond to the angularity of the architecture,” Maier continues. “The whole piece is tied together by a winding, ribbon-style device which, acting as a central axis, leads in from the driveway, through the space and out to the garden beyond.”
If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.
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.
