Hasta La Ideas

Illustrator Malika Favre and design agency Irving & Co have created some lovely festive packaging for Italian food chain Carluccio’s, inspired by Bolognan architecture.

The design for Carluccio’s Christmas range is based on a different Italian city each year. Favre was asked to visit Bologna with Irving & Co designer Ana Rachel and has designed a series of bold geometric patterns featuring hidden characters and narratives. Her work will also appear in Carluccio’s store windows, where boxes will be stacked to create ‘an abstract city’.

Favre was approached by the brand and Irving & Co after staging a solo exhibition, Hide and Seek, at London’s Kemistry Gallery (more info here). “They felt that my minimalist yet narrative approach to architectural patterns was in line with their vision for this year’s Christmas array,” she explains.

“The challenge for me was to extract the core of the architecture around me without being too literal. What really struck me in Bologna was the light and contrast it created, so I decided to focus on the shadows that the architecture was casting rather than the elements themselves. I then added little narrative elements in order to create some depth and tell a story on each box. The characters and objects were carefully placed somewhere around the boxes to bring depth,” she says.

Lettering on this year’s Christmas range was inspired by signage, menus and typography in Bologna, which Rachel sketched and photographed during the trip. It works well alongside Favre’s illustrations. “The typographic heritage in Bologna was so rich and diverse that it felt a shame not to keep that diversity for the Christmas range,” Rachel says.

To contrast Carluccio’s red and gold colour palette, Favre also used aubergine, cream and orange. “These three colours were inspired by real buildings. We based them on a painting swatch Ana and I found in a small shop while in Bologna. I felt it was important to have bold and sophisticated colours in the palette, in order to create contrast and reflect the incredible light and sharp shadows that are so characteristic of the city,” she explains.

It’s a little early to think about Christmas shopping – although retailers would certainly disagree – but Favre’s packaging has left us feeling quite festive, despite the fact it’s only October. If only all gifts came in such pretty packages…

Hatch Show Print, the legendary Nashville letterpress print shop, is to have its first UK exhibition at the Chelsea Space in London

Originally established in 1879, the history of Hatch Show Print is the history of much of popular American culture, embracing the rise of travelling entertainment, advertising, rock n roll and country music.

But Hatch is not just a museum, it is also a working design and print shop, turning out 600 jobs a year for bands such as the White Stripes and Coldplay as well as commercial and private commissions. Curator and manager Jim Sherraden calls this approach “preservation through production” ensuring that the blocks and letters that the shop has accumulated over the last 134 years form a living archive. Contemporary posters may well feature some of the same letters and decorative elements that also featured on posters for Elvis, Hank Williams or Bessie Smith.

Sherraden will be coming over for the show and speaking on November 12 at 5pm (details here). There will be a major feature on Hatch Show Print in the December issue if Creative Review

Hatch Show Print: Nashville Calling is at Chelsea Space, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1, from November 13 to December 14. Details here

The inaugural Book Cover Design Awards were launched this month by two of the UK’s leading book designers, Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan. Aiming to celebrate book cover design from a wide range of genres, it is now open for nominations from 2013…

The intriguingly-named Academy of British Cover Designers was initially set up by Gray and Keenan with the intention of promoting a broader range of cover design than currently features in awards schemes, magazines and blogs. Its associated Book Cover Design Awards aims to cement this further with a new competition to find the best work created in ten publishing categories:

Children’s, Young Adult, SciFi/Fantasy, Mass Market, Literary Fiction, Crime/Thriller, Non-fiction, Series Design, Classic/Reissue and Women’s Fiction.

Gray says that book cover design is quite a different beast to the bulk of graphic design – employing “unwritten rules of genre and hierarchy” – and an awards scheme dedicated to the discipline would have a better appreciation of the demands made upon individual books.

“We have to use quotes and make them large; we have to mention prizes, shortlists, author’s previous books,” he says. “There is a lot of information to be conveyed in a small space. Managing that and still creating something new is difficult. Getting that through a publishing house, an author, an agent and a supermarket, all of whom have their own ideas is even harder.

“It means that when it comes to design awards the work often just doesn’t fit. If it’s judged using the same criteria as an art book with two lines of carefully spaced, minute Helvetica, then it doesn’t really stand a chance.”

The first BCDA competition will be open to any cover produced by a British designer for a book published between January 1 and December 31 2013.

Book covers will be voted for only by fellow cover designers – “the people who know the restrictions that the work is created under,” adds Gray. “They appreciate the sometimes tiny details that make one thriller cover better than another, or a children’s cover that tries to break out of its genre. Work that generally goes unnoticed but we think deserves recognition.”

And the awards itself? “It won’t be a glitzy thing,” says Gray, “just a few designers in a pub with a projector. Which we think sort of sums up book designers nicely.”

Further details on entering work will be announced via the @abcoverD twitter and Gray’s blog at gray318.com/blog. Designers will be able to enter their own work or the work of other designers. Entry is free.

A new book from Phaidon explores America’s relationship with some of its most famous foodstuffs. Half of the entries are illustrated by Joël Penkman who created 125 individual paintings in, appropriately enough, egg tempura…

Food writer and critic Colman Andrews’ book, The Taste of America, details 250 food products that are manufactured in the country and are currently on sale.

Penkman, who is represented by the Handsome Frank agency, was commissioned to depict them in paint, a process which took six months to complete. Preferring to work from real life, this involved dispatching numerous food hampers to her studio in Liverpool.

“When a food parcel arrived and we got to try the foods – chocolate mice, Junior Mints, Moon Pie, chocolate truffles, Goo Goo clusters, cashew butter, cheese crackers – it felt like Christmas!” says Penkman.

“And [I recall] how disappointing it was when an empty jar or package arrived – birch beer, apple cider, carolina gold rice, schnecken, liverwurst, flour. Usually the empty ones were liquids, meats, cheeses or something heavy.”

Originally from New Zealand, Penkman now lives and works in the UK. An avid painter of both foodstuffs and packaging, on her blog she writes that “food triggers memories and emotion, I like that people can bring something of themselves to the artworks.”

“My favourite medium is egg tempera,” she say. “It is very time consuming as I make the gesso to prepare my boards and grind my own paint to mix, but the results are worth it.”

For this project, Penkman also made her own hot dogs and grew the sun gold tomatoes in her greenhouse.

The full series of paintings can be seen on Penkman’s website, joelpenkman.com; originals will apparently be available to purchase soon.

Penkman is represented by agency, Handsome Frank. Phaidon; £24.95. Available from phaidon.com.

More than fifty creatives from the Central Illustration Agency have produced illustrations for the V&A Museum of Childhood based on children’s visions of the future.

CIA teamed up with AMV BBDO to create the campaign, Mind of a child – eye of an artist, which ties in with the theme of this year’s Big Draw project, Draw Tomorrow. The illustrations were created in response to briefs submitted by children aged between three and twelve. Some were made at artists’ studios, and others at a Big Draw event at the museum on October 12.

Ahoy There! (above) worked with Nikakare, aged five, who believes there will be no McDonalds in the future, only Burger King. “I’ll live in Jamaica, because there will be a beach. Dolphins will swim with me in the sea. Which will be blue. There will be sea turtles, purple jelly fish and purple seals. There will be 101 dalmations because I love them, they will be purple spotted dogs,” she says.

David Holmes (above) was given a brief by three-year-old Summer, who thinks that in years to come, everyone will live on one big boat except animals who will have one boat each. We will keep fit by jumping up and down and people will eat chips and tomatoes, while animals will eat grass.

Six-year-old Cal’s somewhat dystopic vision of the future was brought to life by Matt Taylor. Cal imagines we will wear glow in the dark clothes and live in “weird underground tunnel buildings”. Cars will have propellers so they can fly and we will spend most of our time digging for diamonds to give to the owner of the world. “You can’t see him because he is invisible,” he says.

Paul Wearing illustrated five-year-old Agata’s vision of the future, in which everyone is a butterfly except from teachers, who are caterpillars. There will also be lots of spaceships “and tiny little iPads”:

Tobatron worked with Rohan, aged four, who believes that in the future, he will deliver milk on a lorry with five wheels while wearing a magic cloak. There are no cows, except invisible ones, so the milk will appear as if by magic:

And Kham, aged four, told Telegramme (top and below) that in ‘Tomorrowland’, we will live on another planet with chickens and yellow dinosaurs and two sharks that can walk. “It will be sunny with snow,” he says.

Sir Peter Blake illustrated a rather poetic vision of the future dreamt up by an eight year old Evie, in which the colour of the sky reflects our mood – yellow for happy, purple for angry. Trees will sing when we’re happy – oh, and everyone will wear spacesuit onesies and bounce along paths made of jelly.

Eight-year-old Mae’s future world, illustrated by Jakob Hinrichs, features a big house with a swimming pool and pink water. “Everyone has a little bit of curly hair…animals are the same but some can fly … dogs can swim underwater like a fish with snorkels on. Everyone eats chocolate because chocolate is healthy. Everything that’s healthy is unhealthy and vice versa. There’s no school, the sun always shines and ‘everyone wears long dark dresses that are blue,” she says:

And in four year old Hamish’s future world, illustrated by Richard Wilkinson, aliens have three eyes and ten fingers on each hand. They will also like to eat Cheerios.

CIA approached AMV BBDO about the concept when looking for a way to celebrate their 30th birthday.  “We wanted a birthday party and that means kids! We wanted to do something with our new neighbours at the Museum – an event to inspire small children by getting them to work alongside us and do something positive in the local area,” says director Ben Cox.

The full set of illustrations will be displayed at the Museum of Childhood. AMV BBDO creative partners Mark Fairbanks and Thiago De Moraes helped CIA develop the idea, and says they are now in talks over how the posters will be displayed outside of the museum.

“As anyone who sees the finished pieces will testify, this work needs to be seen by as many people as possible. Not just as evidence of the artistic talents of CIA but also the proof of the incredible ideas that come from the unfettered minds of children – and that after all, is what we set out to accomplish in the first place,” says Fairbanks.