Hasta La Ideas

Veloce guida illustrata da Stephen Maurice Graham per classificare i nostri amici nerds.

Colossal Media’s Sky High crew at work on the corner of Metropolitan & Driggs in Brooklyn NY (August 2013)

Sam Harris of the Ghostsigns project informs us that tickets for the London screening of the Sign Painters film are selling fast…

Set to screen at The Roxy Bar and Screen on Borough High Street on February 5, Sign Painters is a fantastic documentary on what remains of the working sign-writing community in the US.

It will be shown alongside Horn Please, a short documentary about Indian truck painting, and there will also be a Q&A with several contemporary sign painters after the films. Sign Painters has previously screened in Birmingham, Leeds and Falmouth, but this marks its first time in the capital. The trailer is here.

Since 2010, Faythe Levine and Sam Macon’s project has been to document the work of artists who have put brush and paint to storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs across America, but who have seen their skilled trade “overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper,” say the filmmakers.

“The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our landscape,” they continue. “Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade.”

Sign Painters is, say Levine and Macon, the first anecdotal history of the craft and features interview with two dozen sign painters working throughout the US, from the new vanguard working solo to the collaborative shops New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco and Colossal Media’s Sky High Murals in New York.

Sign Painters is at The Roxy Bar and Screen, 128-132 Borough High Street, London SE1 1LB on February 5 2014, nearest stations are London Bridge and Borough. The film is showing at 7.30pm for an 8pm start, running time 80 minutes. Tickets are £12.50 standard / £25.00 with copy of the Sign Painters book by directors Faythe Levine and Sam Macon. Tickets can be bought online via the Ghostsigns page, here. More details on the film at signpaintermovie.blogspot.co.uk.

Image taken from page 582 of ‘The United States of America. A study of the American Commonwealth, its natural resources, people, industries, manufactures, commerce, and its work in literature, science, education and self-government’. By various authors [1894]

In what could well become one of the most interesting image collections on the web, the British Library has announced it has uploaded over one million images to Flickr from 65,000 books spanning from the 17th to the 19th century…

Covering a huge range of subjects, the collection includes images of book illustrations, diagrams and maps as well thousands of decorative elements such as borders and illuminated letters. Each image is tagged by year of publication, its unique library book code – indicating the source of where it came from – and the author of the publication (where relevant).

By way of an introduction to this selection of often strange and wonderful imagery, the library’s digital research team has curated a small number of images in a Flickr set from which some of the images included here are taken.

Image taken from page 93 of ‘On the Domesticated Animals of the British Islands: comprehending the natural and economical history of species and varieties; the description of the properties of external form, and observations on the principles and practice’

Image taken from page 78 of ‘Songs for Little People’. With illustrations by H. Stratton

The images have been uploaded to Flickr Commons “for anyone to use, remix and repurpose,” wrote Ben O’Steen on the library’s Digital Scholarship blog on Friday.

O’Steen also explained the additional part to the project, which will rely on the input of users. This follows on from the launch of the British Library Labs’ Mechanical Curator tumblr blog, where “randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations, posted on the hour”.

Image taken from page 298 of ‘On English Lagoons’. Being an account of the voyage of two amateur wherrymen on the Norfolk and Suffolk rivers and broads. With an appendix, the log of the wherry “Maid of the Mist”. Illustrated, etc

“We are looking for new, inventive ways to navigate, find and display these ‘unseen illustrations’,” he says. “The images were plucked from the pages as part of the ‘Mechanical Curator‘, a creation of the British Library Labs project. Each image is individually addressible, online, and Flickr provies an API to access it and the image’s associated description.

Image taken from page 295 of ‘The Works of G. J. Whyte-Melville’. Edited by Sir H. Maxwell. With illustrations by J. B. Partridge, Hugh Thomson, and others

“We may know which book, volume and page an image was drawn from, but we know nothing about a given image. The title of [the] work may suggest the thematic subject matter of any illustrations in the book, but it doesn’t suggest how colourful and arresting these images are.”

Image taken from page 25 of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’. Originally published in “Dramatic Lyrics,” no. 3 in the series “Bells and Pomegranates”

Next year the library plans to unveil a “crowdsourcing application” which will enables users to help describe what the images portray.

“Our intention is to use this data to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole of the content,” says O’Steen. “The data from this will be as openly licensed as is sensible (given the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always, will be under an open licence.

“The manifests of images, with descriptions of the works that they were taken from, are available on github and are also released under a public-domain ‘licence’. This set of metadata being on github should indicate that we fully intend people to work with it, to adapt it, and to push back improvements that should help others work with this release.”

Image taken from page 297 of ‘To the Snows of Tibet through China’, with illustrations and a map

“There are very few datasets of this nature free for any use and by putting it online we hope to stimulate and support research concerning printed illustrations, maps and other material not currently studied. Given that the images are derived from just 65,000 volumes and that the library holds many millions of items.”

The library is welcoming questions about the project, and can be reached via email labs@bl.uk and Twitter twitter.com/bl_labs. O’Steen can be reached on Twitter at @benosteen.

Image taken from page 109 of ‘Saturdays to Mondays’, being jottings from the notebooks of K. F. Bellairs on some phases of country life, yachting, etc

“We want to collaborate with researchers and anyone else with a good idea for how to markup, classify and explore this set with an aim to improve the data and to improve and add to the tagging,” says O’Steen. “We are looking to crowdsource information about what is depicted in the images themselves, as well as using analytical methods to interpret them as a whole.”

The British Library Flickr phtotstream is at flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary.

Image taken from page 124 of ‘Death’s Doings’; consisting of numerous original compositions, in prose and verse, the contributions of various writers; principally intended as illustrations of twenty-four plates designed and etched by R. Dagley

Back for another year, Christmas Gifs is a festive showcase of animated Gifs created by an international group of illustrators, animators and directors

The Christmas Gif project is curated by artist, Ryan Todd who collaborated with digital design studio, Enjoythis to create the online platform to exhibit work from a diverse band of practitioners including Supermundane (Gif above).

The project debuted last year (see our post here) but is now back for another season.

“The aim of the project is twofold: to create a space for professional animators and directors to produce something personal, experimentation or just plain fun and for illustrators and artists who may not have created anything animated before to take their first step into the world of moving image,” Todd says. “The humble gif offers the perfect format in which to create something special.”

Work featured this year includes this golfing Santa by Animade

A rather lovely snowfall Gif from Thomas Danthony

Sinterklaas by Andrew Colin Beck

A bit of Macaulay from Matthew the Horse and Amy Mackay

Way Hoe by Cento Lodigiani

R is for Rudolph by Paul Rayment

The macabre Merry Saturnalia! by Stephen McNally

And two more poignant pieces – Man with Sparrows by Thoka Maer

And Happy Birthday by Ross Phillips

You can see all the submissions (and submit your own) here.

This month sees another fine set of reissues from Penguin – GK Chesterton’s Father Brown series, designed in-house by Matthew Young with a nod to the influential work of Romek Marber…

In 2010, Young was chosen as one of CR’s graduates to watch and since then he has been working away as a book cover designer for Penguin and an animator. His latest project was to produce the covers for a new set of five editions of GK Chesteron’s Father Brown crime novels.

Young says that initially the design approach had two potentially routes: one was to incorporate Magritte paintings into the workl, while the other was a more graphic approach with “a healthy dose of inspiration from Romek Marber’s iconic covers for Penguin in the 1960s”.

“Chesterton’s Father Brown stories have always, in my opinion, been packaged somewhat unfairly,” says Young. “There’s always so much emphasis on the fact that he’s a priest, it’s all dog-collars and bibles – and it makes the books look very old-fashioned, safe, twee, and a bit boring, when in fact they’re full of wit and suspense and character.

“And yes he’s a priest, and yes that’s why he makes such an unlikely (but brilliant) detective, but there’s so much more to these stories that often doesn’t get represented.”

Two Father Brown covers design by Romek Marber

When Young researched the series, he says that two particularly covers jumped out – The Innocence of Father Brown and The Incredulity of Father Brown (above), both designed by Romek Marber for Penguin in the early 60s.

“They’re the only covers I’ve seen that really suggest some of the mystery and the suspense of these stories,” Young says, “and they do so in such a striking way, with a reduced colour palette and bold symbolic illustrations.”

“There’s a great quote from Marber – talking about designing these books – of how Father Brown ‘gets straight to the nub of the case and always gets his man’. And that’s what we wanted to communicate with these new editions.

“There’s always a fine line when taking inspiration from a classic cover design like this – you want to pay a respectful nod to Penguin’s history, and to Romek’s iconic designs, but as a designer you also want to put your own mark on things, and to re-invent these covers for today’s audience.”

Two of the new covers actually re-work original elements from Marber’s designs. The Innocence of Father Brown features the coiling thread from the original cover and The Wisdom of Father Brown makes use of the Marber figure casting a long shadow.

“Taking these two visual elements as my main starting point, I worked all the covers up using the same basic principles,” says Young. “Each cover must only use two colours, feature a figure that represents Father Brown, and use simple, bold, graphic shapes and patterns to symbolise a chase, a journey, a mystery.”

“On each cover Father Brown is deliberately isolated to give the sense that he is an outsider; it’s him against the odds, following an unlikely trail and methodically piecing the clues together. And I didn’t want to dictate exactly what Father Brown looks like – I’d rather this was left open to the reader’s interpretation, so the figures are almost silhouettes, with just enough detail to give him some form, to maybe suggest his build or his shabby robes, but without giving too much away.”

The grid for the typography derives from a by-product of a bigger project to re-design the Penguin Popular Classics, Young explains. “That project never saw the light of day,” he says, “but some small aspects of the designs do live on in these new covers.”

The finished books are each printed in just two colours – one Pantone plus black – on a cream uncoated paper stock. As with the new ‘restored’ edition of A Clockwork Orange, which Barnbrook recently designed, the Chesterton books are in ‘A-format’, the same size as the original Penguin paperbacks.

“Hopefully the books have a certain Penguin charm about them,” Young adds, “whilst also being attractive little objects in their own right.”

Art director: Jim Stoddart. The Father Brown series will be available from Penguin Classics from January 2 next year; £6.99 each. Matthew Young’s book cover work is at mymymy.co.uk.