Hasta La Ideas

WWF, Do the Green Thing and Pentagram have launched a competition inviting young creatives to design a poster promoting sustainable living.

Winning submissions will feature in a campaign celebrating Earth Hour on March 29 2014, alongside work from 26 leading creatives. Last year’s contributors included Google creative director Tom Uglow, photographer Dean Chalkey, 2012 Olympic logo designer Patrick Cox and seven Pentagram partners.

The competition is open to all UK residents aged between 16 and 25. Posters can be about anything that promotes sustainability – from walking more to eating less meat – and can use any medium, from graphic design to photography, illustration, advertising and product design.

The deadline for entries is January 13 and finalists will be invited to a creative mentoring session at Pentagram on January 22 to refine their designs. The top three submissions will be decided by a public vote in February.

Entries can be submitted online or through the post – click here for details, or here to see last year’s posters.

Posters (from top): Dean Chalkley, Marina Willer, Karin Rubing and Andrew Rae.

Some consider puns to be the lowest form of wit, but Falmouth University graduate Tom Dunn has launched a magazine in celebration of the subject.

Kids with Puns is an A5 publication showcasing visual wordplays from designers and illustrators. The project was launched in April this year, while Dunn (now a designer at 400 Communications) was in his final year at Falmouth. Issue two was published last week and features yet more silly but humorous submissions.

“It started out as a blog where I would doodle the occasional illustrated pun,” says Dunn. “This proved popular, so I decided to expand it into a printed publication and ask people to submit their own. Contributions for issue one were mainly friends and students from Falmouth University [including Harry Morris, who recently sent CR a portfolio in the style of our monthly Monograph, aptly titled The Morrigraph]. Issue two, however, has a much more diverse range of contributors from London, Birmingham and even South Africa,” he adds.

Dunn hopes his publication will lead to a new found appreciation for the pun, which is often seen as tiresome. “As an illustration, the pun is given a burst of energy and is a much more interesting piece of communication. They’ll probably still make your eyes roll though,” he admits.

The second issue features interviews with contributors including George McCallum, who has designed a range of pun-based furniture including a ‘chest of drawers’ (below) and appeared in CR’s graduates to watch issue in September:

Submissions will undoubtedly illicit some groans but Dunn’s magazine is an amusing read and a novel way for students and graduates to showcase their work. Dunn is now looking for submissions for issue three and has launched a Kids with Puns website, where you can purchase a two-faced tote bag for £8 or an issue of Kids with Puns for £3.

Late in 1966 NYC television station WPIX-TV gave the city’s eight million residents a roaring log fire for Christmas. The seven-minute looping Yule Log video instantly became a holiday tradition around the world. Now, nearly a half century later, Brooklyn-based animation director and…

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The December issue of Creative Review shares a spine with our Photography Annual 2013. In addition to 80 pages of the best photographic work produced in the past year, we have features on the enduring appeal of ad characters, Richard Turley and Bloomberg Businessweek, Hatch Show Print, and profiles of filmmaker Andrew Telling and photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten…

The December issue of Creative Review is available to buy direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money, too. Details here.

At 204 pages, the combined December issue/Photography Annual is one of our biggest to date. And being a special issue, it’s available with three different covers, each featuring an image from one of our Annual Best in Book winners.

Shown above is Amira, shot by Spencer Murphy as part of a campaign for Save the Children; while below are the other versions featuring Ya Yun, photographed by Tim Flach; and Nala from Julia Fullerton-Batten’s Blind project.

Here are a couple of spreads from the Photography Annual side:

Julia Fullerton-Batten’s Best in Book spread

Pip’s series The Freerunner

And Jonas Jungblut’s image, King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine

In the regular issue we take a look at Anthony Burrill’s new pull-out-poster book, I Like It. What Is It?

Eliza Williams gets her head around the hi-jinks that bookmaker Paddy Power and its ad agency have been producing…

… and she also looks at the enduring appealing of ‘characters’ in advertising, from Martians to monkeys.

Mark Sinclair talks to Richard Turley, creative director of Bloomberg Businessweek, about his team’s radical design of the US magazine – and how they regular ‘breaks’ Helvetica in the process.

Cover Lesson looks at some of the theories on creating the perfect mag cover which emerged from The Modern Magazine conference – featuring BBW, The Gentlewoman, Eye, Apartamento and more.

Rachel Steven talks to Andrew Telling, a filmmaker and composer who makes documentaries and writes scores for brands and visual artists.

And Antonia Wilson meets photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten, creator of images that blend fact and fiction to beautiful effect.

In Crit, Rick Poynor looks at a new book on The Art of Collage…

… while Mark Sinclair reports back from The Modern Magazine conference.

Gordon Comstock applauds the work – and portfolio presentation skills – of creative team, Jacob & Jim.

While Paul Belford looks at a surreal – not to mention deadly – campaign for B&H from 1985; and Daniel Benneworth-Gray stresses the importance of designing to music and how the two disciplines share underlying languages of repetition, colour and shape.

Finally, in this month’s subscriber-only Monograph, we feature some of the results of a collaboration between CIA illustrators, agency AMV BBDO and the V&A Museum of Childhood – where illustrators were paired with children, aged between three and 12, to interpret their vision of tomorrow.

The December issue of Creative Review is available to buy direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money too. Details here.

Noma Bar has dusted off his die-cutting machine for a new exhibition exploring conflict between warring nations. We visited the show ahead of Thursday’s opening to ask Bar about the concept.

When Noma Bar asked the public to donate materials for his latest solo project, he didn’t expect such an overwhelming response. The graphic artist put out a call on Facebook a few months ago, asking people from countries engaged in conflict to post items less than a centimetre thick to his home in London.

Bar hoped he would receive some letters, newspapers and stray pages from books and magazines. He did not expect money, children’s books, album covers, carpets and even underwear, some of which had to be smuggled through three countries just to reach him.

Greece/Turkey

The exhibition, which opens this week at London’s Rook & Raven gallery, combines material from two countries at war in a single, unified image. Materials have been cut using his dog-shaped die-cutting machine into shapes symbolising war and peace, such as a dove, a gun and a crouching sniper.

Countries featured include the US and Syria, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Israel and Palestine and Greece and Turkey. In Bar’s trademark style, each artwork uses positive and negative space to create a bold and playful image. But it’s also a provocative statement, comparing the visual culture of enemy states and showcasing collaboration between people who, in their own countries, would perhaps be forbidden from even conversing with each other.

US/Cuba

“The idea came from a conversation I had with someone from Iran,” says Bar. “We were having a great conversation, one that never could have happened if we were in our home countries, and it got me thinking, ‘it’s easy when you’re not there, so why not start a project getting people from these places to collaborate?’”

Bar has been overwhelmed by the support he has received and the lengths people have gone to to take part. In North Korea, for example, it is illegal to send currency abroad, so money was taken to Lebanon and then to Italy to be posted. Other packages sent from the Middle East had to be addressed to Bar’s neighbour, as post to someone with an Israeli name would likely have been intercepted.

“It was like trafficking – the trafficking of materials,” jokes Bar. “It sounds clichéd, but it really has been a global collaboration. People who sent materials knew they would be used alongside someone else’s from a warring country, so in a way, it’s also like a handshake between them,” he says.

What becomes apparent in many of Bar’s couplings – an unsettling suggestion for some, no doubt – are the similarities in visual culture between many nations at war. In one picture, an Israeli newspaper sits alongside one from Lebanon. Taken from the same page on the same day, they look at first glance like they are from the same publication.

Each of the images featured in Cut the Conflict demand a second glance, revealing another picture altogether. In a series of large laser cut artworks on one wall, a question mark also contains the shape of a chicken and an egg: not an immediately obvious connection, but a reference to the wider philosophical questions around wars and how they begin. In other images, the space under a sniper’s arm forms a heart, and a gun from one angle looks like a dove from another.

This duality is central to Bar’s work – his editorial illustrations and commissions often feature visual double entendres and hidden jokes. “I don’t think I could produce anything that doesn’t have duality,” he says. “I have been playing with it since I was eight or nine, when I would draw people with a set of teeth that looked like stairs or noses that looked like bicycles,” he says.

Military iconography is also a recurring theme – unsurprising considering Bar spent three years in the Israeli navy sleeping with an M16 under his pillow. In Cut the Conflict, however, this imagery is used with a more serious and provocative intention.

“Often I use it for comedic effect, as a cynical statement about governments or powers in control, but there is no cynicism in this project. There’s a bigger statement than making a fun or witty print and a slightly different story I guess, as this is dealing with the propaganda of war,” he adds.

Bar has been experimenting with die cutting since 2011, when he launched an exhibition at London’s Design Festival showcasing work cut from rubber, plywood and vinyl, and invited members of the public to create their own artworks using the technique. Cut the Conflict will involve less public interaction but Bar is planning to deliver talks and demonstrations.

US/Iran

Israel/Palestine

Bar has no plans to launch another exhibition of die cut works just yet, but he would like to continue exploring politics. As well as being surprised and delighted by his work, he hopes visitors to Cut the Conflict will be encouraged to think about the issues that the artworks represent. “I want people to discover the story behind each image. Yes, I hope they think they look beautiful and creative, but I hope they will discover something else, too” he adds.

Cut the Conflict opens at Rook & Raven Gallery, London W1T 1HN on November 22 until December 21. For details, see rookandraven.co.uk