Set to bring joy to even the most hardened of graphic designers, a new book from Gestalten provides an illustrated history of graphic design, complete with cut-out-and-keep designers (Messrs Rand, Tschichold, Bass and Carson, shown above)…
With an all-star cast, Graphic Design History for Rainy Days, takes the reader on a gentle tour of the subject, courtesy of a time-travelling grandfather and his enquiring grandson. The book is designed by Studio 3, the in-school design agency at the Graphic Design Department of Westerdals School of Communication in Oslo.
As the pair journey from the time of the industrial revolution, right up to Jessica Helfand’s mid-90s design studio (above), they meet everyone from Max Bill and Wim Crouwel, to Neville Brody (below, doing the talking) and Paula Scher in between.
Graphic Design History for Rainy Days is a charming take on the medium and, as is the current vogue (see our own paper toys posts and the figure that comes free with the current issue of CR), the book even contains a selection of cut-out designers, your own Bauhaus diploma, and a miniature Apple Macintosh that can be assembled in about 10 minutes, shown above.
If you enjoy reading the Creative Review website, we think you’ll enjoy reading the magazine even more. The December issue of CR includes a profile piece on the independent creative scene in Liverpool, a major interview with Dutch book designer Irma Boom and a great piece on ‘Poster King’ Edward McKnight Kauffer. You’ll also find articles on Dentsu London, a review of the Walker Art Center’s Graphic Design: Now in Production show and a fascinating debate on the clash between design and advertising betwen Wally Olins and CHI’s Dan Beckett.
And if that wasn’t enough, the issue also includes a FREE paper toy for readers to cut out and customise.
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 little fellow comes free with every issue of this month’s CR. We’d like readers to cut him out, stick him together and give him some personality. The best effort wins a free subscription
In the December issue of CR, Gavin Lucas has written about the paper toy movement – the origami-style paper sculptures that make for a low cost, easily distributable alternative to vinyl.
To tie in with the issue, We have teamed up with Arjowiggins Creative Papers and French designer Tougui who has created a special CR toy (shown top). Between pages 26 and 27 of the issue, you will find a blank template for the toy (shown below) printed on 170g Pop Set paper.
We’d like readers to customise the toy with their own design and email a picture of the result to emma.tucker@centaur.co.uk
You can submit as many as you like. We’ll post our favourites online and choose one lucky toy designer who will win a free one-year subscription to CR (if you are already a subscriber we will extend your current deal) plus a copy of the book Papertoy Monsters (Workman, US$16.95) by Brian Castleforte donated by PlayLounge. Please send your submissions by Friday, December 9.
To give you an idea of the possibilities, here are some by Tougui himself
We’ve spotlighted comic book cover artists before, but now it’s time to list seven graphic novels every designer should know. When you’re at the next design firm holiday party and your co-workers are rambling on about the “complex psychological profiles” of the characters in Watchmen, you can speak up about the hottest graphic novel you just read (as recommended by the Core77 clogger team). Without further ado:
I usually won’t go near manga with a ten-foot pole, but Akira is too mind-blowing to ignore. Otomo’s epic opus is about many things, from telekinesis to love to motorcycles, but most importantly it’s about the relationship between city and self. The setting of Neo-Tokyo constantly reflects the progress of the story, starting off as a dark city full of mystery and ending as a wasteland where only the strong of heart and mind can survive. Neo-Tokyo also survives a series of explosions, nuclear and otherwise, scarily fitting given recent history. The entire series is contained in six telephone book-sized volumes, enough to give your arms a decent work out while reading them.
Brian Wood, now known for his NY Times-critically acclaimed work DMZ, started off with this series about technology, journalism, and an oppressive government. Wait! That also sounds oddly familiar… Either way, Channel Zero is jam-packed full of street art details and is definitely worth a look.
3. Casanova – Matt Fraction, Gabriel Ba, & Fabio Moon
You could sum up Casanova as a James Bond-like tale of interdimensional espionage, double-agents and giant robots, but, well, that wouldn’t even really scratch the surface. The original printings were drawn in B&W with one other color that changed based on the mood of the issue/chapter, making for graphically and visually engaging art.
During the second world war, a young Alan Fletcher began life as a boarder at Sussex school Christ’s Hospital. There he made a lifelong friend in John Wood who has paid tribute to Fletcher with an exhibition of his work at the school, much of which has never been seen before
Wood orgainsed the exhibition in order to inspire the school’s current students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds. One of the centrepieces of the show is a portrait by Fletcher of a Christ’s Hospital pupil wearing the school’s distinctive uniform of blue coat and yellow socks (above).
The show concentrates on Fletcher’s personal work, such as these portraits doodled in meetings and at airports and restaurants, rather than client commissions.
There are many Wood family mementoes in the show: Fletcher wood typically present John and his wife Frankie with paintings or artworks as a thank you when he stayed with them
The inscription on the collage above reads “A Taurus for Frankie from Alan and Paola [Fletcher’s wife]”
John Wood founded the sign company Wood & Wood for whom Fletcher designed this ‘flexible identity’ some decades before the current trend for such things
A letter from Fletcher to Paul Deller, head of art at Christ’s, accepting an invitation.
The show is, unfortunately, not open to the public. Wood hopes that, as well as inspiring current pupils, the show may be the first step toward setting up a scholarship in Fletcher’s name at the school.
CR in Print
If you enjoy reading the Creative Review website, we think you’ll enjoy reading the magazine even more. The December issue of CR includes a profile piece on the independent creative scene in Liverpool, a major interview with Dutch book designer Irma Boom and a great piece on ‘Poster King’ Edward McKnight Kauffer. You’ll also find articles on Dentsu London, a review of the Walker Art Center’s Graphic Design: Now in Production show and a fascinating debate on the clash between design and advertising betwen Wally Olins and CHI’s Dan Beckett.
And if that wasn’t enough, the issue also includes a FREE paper toy for readers to cut out and customise.
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.
Earlier this month, 12 posters by leading artists for the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics were unveiled to a largely skeptical public. Given the same brief, Kingston University students have come up with their own versions
Over the current term, I have been doing some lecturing with the third year students on Kingston University’s graphic design and photography courses. A couple of weeks ago, following the release of the 2012 Olympics artists posters, course director Rebecca Wright and I asked the students if they would like to respond to the same briefy given the artists. We asked them for a personal response to the idea of the London Olympics and the intersection between art and sport. Here are their responses.
Leanne Bentley and Ben West came up with this cheeky and somewhat damning response to the artists involved with the official series: DNF stands for Did Not Finish, the ultimate Olympic fail.
For her poster, Ran Park overlayed images of athletes performing various sports to create this beautiful composition
A lot of the student responses were quite critical or dubious about the supposed benefits of the Games coming to London. Here Libby Wimble compares LOCOG’s ambitions to those of a Stalinist Five Year Plan: presumably she feels they have as little basis in reality as each other. The background to the poster is made up of 250,000 tiny tractors
Rosie Palmer and Helen Ferguson were also dubious, focusing on the terrorism threat
Tamara Elmallah was concerned about all the overcrowding the games will bring to the Tube, overlaying an image of spectators rendered in all the Olympic colours until it becomes a brown sludge of humanity
And Alice Tosey wants us all to ‘mind the gap’
And Paul Chanthapanya points to the insidious nature of sponsorship at the Games
While Stephen Messham points out that suffering in the world will not go away just because the Games are in town
Others, though, chose a more positive view. Benji Roebuck and Clara Goodger created their poster from the word for ‘hello’ in the languages of competing nations, allowing the ink from one word to run into another suggesting the coming together of different nations at the Games.
Coming together is also the theme of Jo Hawkes’ poster
And this cut paper piece by Fred North
Hannah Parker had a neat idea for a digital display in which segments would gradually appear over a period of time running up the opening of the Games until the image was completed
Maddy Whitty’s rather beautiful image of the madding crowd of spectators was created using jelly beans
Sam Carroll plays with those famous rings
While Signe Emma created this image from tape which she then photographed
Sophie Burt reminds us of the different races taking part in the games
While Felix Heyes, Josh King, Paul Nelson and Ben West cleverly capture the excitement of the starting block
The same team (minus Paul Nelson) also came up with this wonderfully witty idea. ‘Who’s there? The Olympics!’
Thanks to all the students who took part. They only had just over a week to come up with these, alongside all their other work. Set alongside the efforts of our illustrious artists, I think there are some worthy contenders here.
Read our opinion piece on the official 2012 Olympics posters here
Did you ever wonder what the “Command” symbol on a Mac keyboard actually symbolizes? Read on.
In the early 1980s computers were low resolution and icons were actually icons, as opposed to the miniature photographs they’ve become now. You had a small number of pixels with which to draw something representational, and it became an exercise in minimalist expression: How could you arrange a small series of dots to indicate concepts like cut-and-paste or a paintbrush fill?
One of the pioneers in this field was Susan Kare, a graphic artist tasked with designing some of the Mac’s very first icons and laying out some of the first fonts. Her story is the subject of this fascinating NeuroTribes article by writer Steve Silberman. (The article is also the source of the sketches shown here.)
Last time we spoke to the nomadic Boat magazine, they were off to Detroit to write, edit and design their latest issue. Now back in the UK, creative director Davey Spens told us how it all went…
In September Spens described the thinking behind Boat and how the team (Spens, his wife Erin – the editor – and a host of assembled creatives including designer Luke Tonge) managed to make a magazine about Sarajevo, while stationed in the city for several weeks. I caught up with Spens on email to ask him about their recent experience of the second place the magazine has called home: Detroit.
How did you find Detroit and its creative community? Was it what you’d expected?
“It’s difficult to talk about Detroit without sounding like I’m sugar-coating it. Detroit has some obvious challenges that can make things you might take for granted in other cities more difficult, but I can’t remember ever visiting a place where there is such a spirit of ‘do’, and where everybody is up to something. Detroit is not a city with a partying culture (and thank God, with the way the place is laid out all the residents would be done for DUI) it’s a city with a work ethic, steeped in entrepreneurism. We didn’t expect to fall for the city quite as hard as we did. There’s a feeling in the air that something is changing, and we got the sense it will be unrecognisable in another ten years. Word is spreading and people are moving in from New York, San Francisco, Berlin. One guy I was talking to at a Food Truck told me, ‘Come here while it’s still Mad Max and before it gets all Jetsons again.’ He wasn’t joking.”
Can you tell us about how you worked in the house you rented? Did your contributors drop by with work each day?
“Issue two carries our new byline: An Antidote for Lazy Journalism. It’s not a dig at journalists; as print circulations tumble, old ways of working become harder and harder and research, more often than not, is done at a desk. Google has become a substitute for finding out things with your own two feet. The way our magazine works is that we rent a house and contributors come and stay, and the magazine is blank canvas for them to tell a story. It’s more a base-camp than a house, we have breakfast together and then encourage our contributors to get out there and freewheel.
In some cities finding a house is a lot harder in practice than it sounds. Detroit doesn’t have a huge vacation home rental scene, but it is a city that rewards the people who come to spend time in it. I can’t tell you how many times we would meet someone in a bar, and the next day an email would pop into our inbox with a itinerary for a tour of the city they wanted to take us on. We rented a house from someone who saw our post on Craigslist. Along with the rental came another pair of tour guides.”
When we spoke before, we talked about the idea of Boat as going to places that had fallen off the media map, if you like. How did your experience of Detroit compare to Sarajevo?
“Detroit is the opposite of Sarajevo in that sense. Whilst Sarajevo is a forgotten city, mothballed by the media, Detroit is over-run with camera crews, even the bums have had media-training. The thing is, the media don’t stay in the city for more than a few hours, and they only ever tell part of the story. There’s a plethora of articles and news programs out there about Detroit’s decline usually accompanied by photos of the ‘modern ruins’ that are sprinkled around the city. It’s hard to see it as anything other than lazy journalism; spew some devastating stats and put a huge photo of a burnt out building on the front page for people to gawk at. But that’s not all there is, it just takes a bit more digging.
We had this rule with our Sarajevo Issue: No bullet Holes. With Detroit it was No Ruins and No Urban Farming. We broke the rules this time, because against a backdrop of media saturation it felt important to engage with the issues they touch upon, but understand them as issues in a wider context. One of my favourite pieces in the magazine is Howie Kahn’s article Kaletown, which tackles the question of what the city does with its 138 square miles of land.”
So contributors must have been excited to be part of something celebrating the positives of the city?
“Absolutely. We are constantly blown away by the generosity and energy of our contributors. As an independent publication, regrettably, one thing we cannot afford to do is pay our contributors. This has never been an issue in attracting seriously heavyweight talent – Jeffrey Eugenides wrote a piece to open this issue, and that’s just how it starts. It probably just filters out those people that don’t fit. There’s a quote on the wall of our studio, “Don’t be encumbered by history, Go off and do something wonderful.” I heard it on the plane home in an in-flight documentary about the founders of Silicon Valley. It sums up both the spirit of the people who made this magazine, and the people who call Detroit home.”
In the same email conversation, Spens also quoted a line from Patti Smith, which would equally be at home on a wall in the Boat HQ: “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: find a new city.”
So where next for the magazine with itchy feet? Once Spens and family have recovered, we’ll be sure to let you know.
More information on the Detroit issue of Boat is available at boat-mag.com and you can purchase a copy, here.
Below, you can also watch director Jonathan Cherry’s film for the launch of issue two which is set it to a poem written by Edgar Albert Guest (1881-1959), born (like Cherry) in Birmingham, England but who moved to Detroit. Coincidentally, Wieden and Kennedy has also launched its new campaign for the Chrysler 300 this week, using a narration of the same poem.
Airside is to close its doors in March 2012 after 14 years in business. The studio, which made its name originally for website design and animation, says the decision is a ‘voluntary’ one reached jointly by the founders Alex Maclean, Nat Hunter and Fred Deakin
Airside opened in 1998. In a joint statement issued today, Maclean, Hunter and Deakin say “For the record, we aren’t going bust, in fact we’re currently thriving. We haven’t fallen out with each other, in fact we’re as close as we ever were. What has happened is that after 14 years of working together, we have grown into different people with different goals. Despite all of our best efforts we can’t see a way for Airside to move forward and accommodate all of our individual ambitions. You could put it down to musical differences if you like!”
Airside founders (from left) Deakin, Maclean and Hunter when they started in 1998 (left) and now
Lemon Jelly Nice Weather for Ducks video, 2003
The statement goes on to say that “We feel that it is completely true to the unique spirit of Airside to end the company as friends and to end it on a high. We’ll be making an announcement as to our individual future plans nearer to March 2012 when we close, and there will of course be a party to mark our closing. Between now and then we’ll be focused as always creating amazing work for our clients and ourselves – this is the last chance for us to work together as Airside. Although we definitely plan to collaborate in future.”
During Airside’s 14 years it has won many awards, including a Cannes Grand Prix and two Best in Books in the CR Annual. It was one of the first significant digital studios to emerge following the dot com crash of the late 90s and quickly gained a reputation for creative excellence. The company currently has nine staff. Its Tokyo branch, Airside Nippon, “will continue to trade as normal,” the company says.
From Airside by Airside, a book celebrating the studio’s tenth anniversary
Read our feature on the company’s tenth anniversary here
Our sister title Design Week has more on the story here
UPDATE: Airside has just released this film commemorating their work over the years. Be warned: the soundtrack will probably be with you for the rest of the day.
In our December issue, CR takes a tour around Liverpool’s independent creative scene, meets the remarkable Dutch book designer Irma Boom and has a free gift for all our readers – a paper toy to cut out, keep and customise
It all began with an angry comment on a blog post (this blog post). CR was challenged to “take their heads from their pretentious London backsides and take a trip up to Liverpool” to discover what we were promised was a vibrant independent creative scene. So we did: you can read CR editor Patrick Burgoyne’s report on Liverpool in the new issue. And Liverpool-based designer Russell Reid designed this month’s cover using elements from various artists featured in the article
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.
Our Monograph this month (for subscribers only) is also Liverpool-related: it features work produced for the Screenadelica gig poster project run by graphic designer Horse, who lives and works in the city
Following their work on the new British Gas logo, CHI&Partners’ Dan Beckett discusses ad agencies’ moves into brand identity with Wally Olins
We have reports on the Semi-Permanent conference in Australia and a piece on Berthold Wolpe’s wonderful typographic covers for Faber
And Michael Evamy’s regular logo column looks at the Helvetica-with-a-twist identity of US homeware chain Crate and Barrell
And Gordon Comstock rails against the iniquities of the advertising pitch process
Last, but by no means least, we have something special for readers this month. Gavin Lucas writes on the new trend for paper toys
To tie in with this piece, we have bound a template for a blank paper toy, specially designed for us by Tougui, into every issue.
In association with Arjowiggins, we have a challenge for you. We’d like readers to cut it out and make up the toy, which should look like this
Then we’d like you to customise your toy and send us a picture of your design (email them to emma.tucker@centaur.co.uk). There will be a prize for our favourite. Enjoy.
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.
Chicago-based streetwear label Nøthing Major is a side project from Chris Kaskie and Mike Renaud, President and Art Director, respectively, at Pitchfork—yes, that Pitchfork—who launched the label earlier this year with the help of Stüssy’s David Rush in San Francisco and Object Design League‘s Caroline Linder.
Kaskie and Renaud launched the brand as a straightforward proposition to highlight the work of artists and graphic designers through accessible lifestyle products.
The idea of Nøthing Major is exactly what it sounds like. Not a big deal.
We believe you can’t achieve real happiness through buying things, but that some amount of peace is found in knowing you’re sporting something made with care for quality and aesthetic integrity. At NøMa, we are collectors and advocates who celebrate emerging culture. We believe that collaboration with artists whose creative outlook both inspires and surprises is something worthy of being shared. We one day aim to fulfill all of your urban sprezzatura fever dreams, matching sartorial tastefulness with rakish irreverence.
Aurelien Arnaud has abstracted familiar objects are abstracted in this limited edition shirt commissioned for the Nothing Major pop-up shop at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Paris this past October.
More of the goods and a special holiday discount after the jump…
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.
Aurelien Arnaud has abstracted familiar objects are abstracted in this limited edition shirt commissioned for the Nothing Major pop-up shop at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Paris this past October.