New Graphic Design: The 100 Best Contemporary Graphic Designers has been compiled as a guide to the latest work by upcoming and influential designers.
It encompasses visual communication designs for websites, apps, packaging, exhibitions and branding campaigns.
Images of recent projects are displayed next to text about the work written by their creators, with a short designer bio. Interviews with a selection of designers also feature.
The compendium is written by Charlotte and Peter Fiell with a foreword by writer and critic Steven Heller, and published by Goodman Fiell.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “New Graphic Design” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
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Competition closes 7 November 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
Amsterdam designer Monique Goossens has made a typeface with strands of human hair.
Goossens’ Hair Typography is crafted by arranging bunches of hairs into the shapes of single letters. Each character has a dense centre and becomes increasingly sparse towards the edges.
“The shapes of the letters are created by forming the hairs into a legible character,” said Goossens. “The ends of the hairs create an organised chaos – an energetic play of lines, which form a haze around the shape.”
The script letters have fluid strokes and the designer compares the individual filaments to fine pen lines. Each letter has interwoven curling lines and can be made in a variety of weights.
Once the letters are formed, Goossens photographs the characters for reproduction. The designer told Dezeen that she hopes the font will be used for magazine or book covers, and individual commissions can be made directly from the designer.
Goossens studied interior design at Academie Artemis in Amsterdam, and photography and design at Design Academy Eindhoven. She currently teaches Interior Design and Visual Communication at Academie Artemis.
The hair letters consist of hundreds of hairs and give the impression of being fine pen drawings. The basic shape of the letters are created by forming the hairs into a legible character, during which I follow the natural characteristics of the hairs: curly, rounded corners, springiness.
To a great extent, it is the dynamic of the hairs which determines the shape of the letters. The ends of the hairs create an organized chaos, an energetic play of lines which forms a haze around the letter’s basic shape.
About Monique Goossens
Designer Monique Goossens studied at Academie Artemis in Amsterdam, graduating cum laude in Interior Design Styling in 2006. During her studies, she developed an interest in the relationship between design and photography which she went on to explore in depth during further study at the Design Academy in Eindhoven.
Monique Goossens’ work includes elements of both design and autonomous art. It often takes the form of staged images in which she challenges established concepts of function and material. In consequence, shifts occur at elementary level and result in a degree of estrangement. A refined appreciation of materials enhances this process, leading to beautiful and unexpected discoveries. Photographs of these scenes become the definitive works.
Monique’s work is playful, humorous, surprising. Her graphic work follows a similar process as she collates photographs into books and develops letter types using a range of materials.
Monique currently teaches Interior Prognoses at Academie Artemis.
News: internet giant Google has unveiled a simplified logo that flattens its colours and ditches the drop shadow.
Following days of speculation, Google revealed the news in a blog post yesterday. The new logo will appear within a redesigned version of the search engine’s homepage – the most visited website in the world.
Existing logo
“As part of this design, we’ve also refined the colour palette and letter shapes of the Google logo,” wrote Eddie Kessler.
The new homepage will be rolled out to users in upcoming weeks and will feature a revised menu bar that groups links into an “app launcher” on the right-hand side of the page, rather than within the existing black menu bar.
The new logo is more in line with the cleaner graphics and uncluttered interfaces of Apple’s iOS 7 operating system, which was launched worldwide this week.
Peter Saville‘s career kicked off after designing posters for The Haçienda nightclub in Manchester, run by the Factory Records label.
Joy Divison: Closer, 1980
Saville went on to create the artwork for musicians represented by Factory Records, including rock bands Joy Division and Roxy Music.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark LP, 1980
His most iconic cover is widely regarded as Joy Division’s 1979 album Unknown Pleasures (main image), a diagram of pulses taken from an astrology encyclopedia. Disney added Mickey Mouse ears to the graphic for a T-shirt design last year.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Architecture and Morality, 1981
Saville’s design for Joy Division’s second and final 1980 record Closer shows a photograph of a tomb, which proved controversial due to the suicide of the band’s singer Ian Curtis two months before the album’s release.
New Order: Blue Monday, 1983
Saville continued to design covers for the band after they reformed as New Order, taking images from historical artwork out of context and adding modern typography with geometric graphics.
After designing for new wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark since 1980, the band asked Saville to create imagery for its latest album Electric English released earlier this year. It references the stripy hazard signs of his original Factory Records posters.
Saville also designed covers for English bands Pulp and Suede. He set up fashion film website SHOWstudio with his friend Nick Knight in 2000 and was made creative director for the City of Manchester in 2004.
“We’re looking at ways of writing ‘Kanye West’,” Saville told Dezeen after the talk, held at the V&A museum as part of the London Design Festival. “What does ‘Kanye’ and ‘Kanye West’ look like written down?”
The designer added the collaboration was open-ended, rather than a commission to design a logo or a specific artwork. “It’s very casual,” he said.
During the talk Saville, who is best-known for his 1980s record covers for bands including New Order and Joy Division, explained how he had discussed the project earlier that day with West, who is in London rehearsing for a performance.
The two talked about Adolphe Mouron Cassandre’s iconic 1961 logo for Yves Saint Laurent, featuring the overlapping letters YSL, Saville said. “He said to me: ‘You’re Cassandre’,” he told Dezeen. “He wants a YSL”.
Saville is the recipient of this year’s London Design Medal. He will receive the award at a ceremony on Wednesday. Read our earlier story for more about the award, and for more details of the conversation with Morley.
Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with creative website It’s Nice That to offer readers the chance to win one of five copies of its Printed Pages magazine.
It’s Nice That‘s latest issue of Printed Pages contains interviews with high-profile and up-and-coming creatives, accompanied by their graphics, illustrations and photographs.
Graphic designer Seymour Chwast talks about his industry experience and Belgian illustrator Jan Van Der Veken discusses his career over the past decade.
The quarterly arts and design magazine also includes features about Brazil’s creative scene and an in-depth interview with Taschen‘s sexy books editor Dian Hanson about her life in porn publishing.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Printed Pages” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
You need to subscribe to our newsletter to have a chance of winning.Sign up here.
Competition closes 14 October 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
News: today’s Google doodle in Japan celebrates what would have been the 100th birthday of Japanese architect Kenzo Tange.
Kenzo Tange, who passed away in 2005, was a twentieth-century Modernist and the designer of the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, which hosted gymnastic and swimming events during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. This building is pictured alongside Tange in the Google Japan doodle.
Yoyogi National Gymnasium
The architect founded his studio in 1946 and his best-known buildings include the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Kagawa Prefectural Government Hall. He also gained recognition for the design of his own home. Tange Associates continues in his legacy.
Other prolific architects to have featured in Google’s changing logo illustrations include Antoni Gaudí, who would have celebrated his 161st birthday this June, and Mies van der Rohe, whose doodle featured the Crown Hall campus in Chicago. Graphic designer Saul Bass was also recently highlighted.
Architects including Zaha Hadid, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier are depicted like vintage video game characters in these images by graphic designer Federico Babina (+ slideshow).
Jean Nouvel with his Torre Agbar
Federico Babina illustrated a series of well-known architects as pixellated graphics with white or black outlines, as if they feature in an 8-bit video game from the 80s.
Zaha Hadid with her Vitra Fire Station
Each is paired with one of their famous projects in the background, coloured with a limited palette.
Rem Koolhaas with his CCTV Headquarters
Babina intended the pixellated portraits and backdrops to display the essence of each architect and their buildings.
Frank Gehry with his Disney Concert Hall
“The idea of this project is to represent the complexity of the forms and personalities through the simplicity of the pixel,” he told Dezeen.
Frank Lloyd Wright with his Guggenheim Museum
Frank Lloyd Wright stands next to his spiralling Guggenheim Museum in New York, Louis Kahn is positioned in front of the concrete Salk Institute campus in California and Le Corbusier is shown beside his Ronchamp chapel in France.
Tadao Ando with his Church of the Light
Along with buildings, architects Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto are also pictured with iconic chairs they designed.
Japanese architects Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito, Arata Isozaki and Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA are all represented too.
Norman Foster with his “Gherkin” tower
Curved towers by Jean Nouvel and Norman Foster in Barcelona and London respectively are featured, as well as Richard Meier with his Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art.
Renzo Piano with his Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre
Current “starchitects” Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas complete the line-up.
Kazuyo Sejima with her Zollverein School of Management and Design
Babina described the style as a kind of “digital pointillism”, with the mouse replacing the brush: “The pixel reappears and emphasises the importance that has the single dot, seen as something essential that in combination with other points form a more complex picture.”
Toyo Ito with his Porta Fira Towers
“It’s a metaphor of architecture where every little detail is a key component of the whole mosaic,” he said.
News: a map that illustrates global forest densities using wood textures has won a competition to reinvent the tessellated world map designed 70 years ago by American architect and visionary designer R. Buckminster Fuller.
First presented in 1943, Fuller’s Dymaxion Map projects the world map onto the surface of a three-dimensional icosahedron that can be unfolded and flattened to two dimensions. It is said to be the first two-dimensional map of the entire surface of Earth that reveals our planet as one, without inaccurately distorting or splitting up the land.
A team comprising designer Nicole Santucci and San Francisco firm Woodcut Maps was selected as the winner of the Dymax Redux competition to redesign the seminal map, which was launched in April by the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) in New York to coincide with the map’s 70th anniversary.
The winning design, called Dymaxion Woodocean World, illustrates forest densities across the world through the use of different coloured wood textures. Darker wood refers to a higher ratio of trees to land space.
Dymaxion Woodocan World by Nicole Santucci and Woodcut Maps
“Nicole Santucci and team created a wonderful display of global forest densities, an ever-increasing important issue with the continued abuses of deforestation,” said the BFI. “What’s more an actual woodcut version of the map was made in the process, allowing the 2D version to transform into an icosahedral globe,” the institute added.
Will Elkins, manager at the Buckminster Fuller Institute said: “They went above and beyond our call by creating a powerful display of relevant information using the subject matter itself as a medium. The idea, craftsmanship and end result are stunning.”
A hand-drawn map of clouds swirling over the earth by French designer Anne-Gaelle Amiot has been selected as the runner-up. Other finalists include a map that illustrates 75,000 years of ancestral migration and another that shows the availability of safe drinking water around the world. Three of the 11 finalists also received acknowledgments from graphic designer Nicholas Felton, artist Mary Mattingly and architect and close friend of Fuller, Shoji Sadao.
R. Buckminster Fuller holding his folded Dymaxion Map. Image: Life magazine, 1943
The article illustrated different uses for the map and included a full-colour printable version with instructions for how it can be easily transformed from a 2D map to a 3D globe.
Image: Life magazine, 1943
“Fuller’s Dymaxion World embodies his effort to resolve the dilemma of cartography: how to depict as a flat surface this spherical world, with true scale, true direction and correct configuration at one and the same time,” wrote Life Magazine in 1943.
Sections of a printable Dymaxion Map, as featured in Life magazine, 1943
Fuller designed the map as a way to visualise the whole planet with greater accuracy and to in turn better equip humans to address global challenges.
Article in Life magazine, 1943
The winners and nine finalists of the Dymax Redux contest will be exhibited at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York later this year. The Dymaxion Woodocean Map will be available to buy from the BFI soon.
Here’s the press release from BFI, including full details of the winning designs:
DYMAX REDUX Winner Selected
The Buckminster Fuller Institute is happy to announce the winner of DYMAX REDUX, an open call to create a new and inspiring interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map. Dymaxion Wood Ocean World by Nicole Santucci of Woodcut Maps (San Francisco, CA) has been selected as the winner out of a pool of over 300 entrants from 42 countries. Clouds Dymaxion Map by Anne-Gaelle Amiot of France was selected as the runner up.
“This was the first contest of its kind organised by BFI, and the response and interest has been amazing. We are thrilled to have such a high level of submissions and look forward to doing more similar initiatives in the future” says BFI Executive Director Elizabeth Thompson, noting the great press coverage to-date.
The Buckminster Fuller Institute will produce the winning entry as a poster and include it in with the BFI online educational resource store. In addition, we have highlighted three entries that were chosen by our guest critics – Nicholas Felton, Mary Mattingly and Shoji Sadao – as their favourite individual picks. The winner and runner-up along with the other nine finalists will be featured at an in-person exhibition at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, scheduled for later this fall.
The Winner: Dymaxion Woodocean World by Nicole Santucci + Woodcut Maps, United States
Nicole Santucci and team created a wonderful display of global forest densities, an ever-increasing important issue with the continued abuses of deforestation. What’s more an actual woodcut version of the map was made in the process, allowing the 2-D version to transform into an icosahedral globe. As BFI Store Coordinator Will Elkins put it “They went above and beyond our call by creating a powerful display of relevant information using the subject matter itself as a medium. The idea, craftsmanship and end result are stunning.”
The Runner-Up: Clouds Dymaxion Map by Anne-Gaelle Amiot, France
Anne-Gaelle Amiot used NASA satellite imagery to create this absolutely beautiful hand-drawn depiction of a reality that is almost always edited from our maps: cloud patterns circling above Earth. Anne-Gaelle describes the idea and process “One of the particularism of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projection is to give the vision of an unified world. From the space, the Earth appears to us covered, englobed by the cloud masses which circulate around it. By drawing a static image, capture of clouds position in one particular moment, the sensation of a whole is created. The result have the aspect of an abstract pattern, a huge melt where it is impossible to dissociate lands, seas, oceans.”
Nicholas Felton Pick: Map of My Family by Geoff Christou, Canada
“This map makes the best use of the Dymaxion projection, by highlighting information that is primarily land-based and allowing for the paths to extend in an unbroken fashion throughout the world.” – Nicholas Felton
Mary Mattingly Pick: Spaceship Earth: Climatic Regions by Ray Simpson, United States
“Eliminates human-made borders and focuses on mapping the shifting yet distinct climactic planes. This utopian projection relies only on geographic and geologic borders, truly a project Buckminster Fuller would appreciate.” – Mary Mattingly
Shoji Sadao Pick: In Deep Water by Amanda R. Johnson, United States
“A dramatic graphic take off on the map and gives important information about one of the basic problems that needs to be solved.” – Shoji Sadao
About DYMAX REDUX:
70 years ago Life magazine published Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map. With an undistorted projection of the Earth’s surface, ability to be easily reconfigured and transform from a 2-D map to a 3-D globe, the Dymaxion Map (patented in 1946) was a cartographic breakthrough and its iconic design has inspired generations since.
In celebration of the map’s publication anniversary, the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) is calling on today’s graphic designers, visual artists, and citizen cartographers to create a new and inspiring interpretation of the Dymaxion Map. BFI will publish notable entries within an online gallery, feature the selected finalists in a gallery exhibition in New York City and select one winning entry to be produced as a 36″ x 24″ poster and offered for sale within our online store.
BFI is seeking submissions across the creative spectrum and will be selecting the winner based on originality, aesthetic beauty and informative qualities. The contest is open to all and will provide entrants with a high-res image to use as ‘canvas’. Submissions must employ or contain obvious reference to the map’s foundational grid and adhere to specific size and resolution requirements.
About the Buckminster Fuller Institute
The Buckminster Fuller Institute is dedicated to accelerating the development and deployment of solutions which radically advance human well being and the health of our planet’s ecosystems. We aim to deeply influence the ascendance of a new generation of design-science pioneers who are leading the creation of an abundant and restorative world economy that benefits all humanity.
Our programs combine unique insight into global trends and local needs with a comprehensive approach to design. We encourage participants to conceive and apply transformative strategies based on a crucial synthesis of whole systems thinking, Nature’s fundamental principles, and an ethically driven worldview.
By facilitating convergence across the disciplines of art, science, design and technology, our work extends the profoundly relevant legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller. In this way, we strive to catalyse the collective intelligence required to fully address the unprecedented challenges before us.
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.
