Promotional sign for the Penguin Crime series, designed by Romek Marber, on the floor of the Minories Gallery space. Image courtesy The Minories Galleries
Colchester School of Art’s Minories Galleries has launched a new exhibition on the work of graphic designer Romek Marber. Best known for his innovative Penguin Crime Series, the show also provides a chance to see his work for The Economist, the Observer Magazine and a range of other clients…
Born in Poland in 1925, as a teenager Marber was deported to the Bochnia ghetto in 1939. Three year’s later, he was saved from being transported to the Belzec death camp by the actions of a sergeant Kurzbach, the commander of the forced-labour workshop in the town.
Various Penguin-related material designed by Marber
Marber arrived in the UK in 1946, reuniting with his father and brother, and studied at St Martins in the early 1950s, before attending the Royal College of Art in 1953.
Having worked on covers for The Economist, in 1961 Penguin’s Germano Facetti commissioned the young designer to design two book covers for the author Simeon Potter before giving Marber the chance to work across an entire sequence of titles for Penguin Crime.
“To launch the new Crime series I was asked to do twenty titles,” the designer recalled in a talk given to the Penguin Collectors Society in 2007 (later published in the book, Penguin By Illustrators). “The month was June and the books had to be on display in October. The ‘grid’ and the rather dark visual images, suggestive of crime, had an immediate impact.”
Penguin Crime covers
The design approach – the ‘Marber grid’ – which evolved from his work was so successful that, as Rick Poynor suggests, “Facetti applied it, effectively unchanged, to the blue Pelicans and to the orange covers of Penguin fiction. Before long its spirit pervaded the entire list.”
Some examples of Marber’s covers for The Economist from 1960-67. Image courtesy The Minories Galleries
While Marber’s Crime series has become a classic of modern book design (though at the time his role in its development was underplayed), the Minories Gallery covers his wider graphic output, and includes images of his earlier covers for The Economist (which had led Facetti to invite him to Penguin), New Society, Robert Nicholson’s London Guides, Town, Queen and the Observer, where he worked as the Magazine’s first art director in 1964.
From 1964-65 Marber was appointed as art director launching the Observer Magazine and continued until 1966 as design consultant. Image courtesy The Minories Galleries
Curated by Kaavous Clayton, Graphics also has displays of Marber’s lesser known logo and identity work (below, left), including a series of panels of designs for the wire fencing company, Norvic (second image, below) in which a familiar shade of green pops up once again.
Now in his 88th year, Marber has rightly assumed his position as one of the most interesting and important graphic designers to have worked in Britain – his efforts in book publishing alone are worthy of an entire exhibition. This new show looks to widen his appeal to those interested in the history of book design and also in the development of mid-century graphics.
Romek Marber: Graphics is at the Minories Galleries, Colchester School of Art, 74 High Street, Colchester CO1 1UE. until October 26. More details at colchester.ac.uk/art/minories.
Illustrator Chris Dent has drawn a cityscape mural featuring iconic landmarks from eight locations for AOL’s London office.
Dent’s mural represents the eight cities AOL is based in and features 15 landmarks from London, New York, Paris, Toronto, Madrid, Stockholm, Berlin and Copenhagen, including the CN Tower, the Empire State Building, the Shard and the Eiffel Tower.
“It was important to have a variation of architecture within the piece to provide balance but also to make it visually stimulating for the people seeing it every day,” says Dent.
“The process for the AOL piece was very much similar to my normal working process, just on a much larger scale: I collage together a landscape on the computer, then work it into a sketch which forms the base of my final drawing.
“All of my work is hand drawn with rapidograph pens, which are extremely delicate but for this piece, I had to use posca pens, which are obviously thicker and more durable,” he adds.
Dent has specialised in architectural and cityscape illustrations since graduating from Camberwell College of Arts in 2006. “Ever since visiting New York as a child, I have been fascinated by the workings of cities and how they adapt to the world we live in. As much as I find cityscapes beautiful to look at, it’s the construction of buildings and their context which gives me such a passion for this subject,” he says.
He has previously worked with AOL on smaller-scale canvases and was commissioned by the AOL Artists programme, an initiative that funds original art, exhibitions and installations. The programme recruits a different guest curator each month and now has a collection of 150 artworks – you can see more of them on the AOL Artists website.
Inside Outside. From left, ready-to-color versions of “Oath of the Pond” by Koichiro Takagi and “Pizza Face” by Ohara Hale. (Photo: UnBeige)
It’s that time of year again, when even those who haven’t stepped inside a classroom for decades feel the unbearable urge to stock up on school supplies. Break out that fresh box of Crayolas—or Prismacolors or Copics—for Outside the Lines, out today from Perigee. This “artists’ coloring book for giant imaginations” is the brainchild of Souris Hong-Porretta, who gathered line drawings (most commissioned especially for this book) by the likes of Shepard Fairey, Exene Cervenka, Gary Baseman, Ryan McGinness, Jen Corace, and 100 other creative masterminds ranging from animators to video game artists. We asked Hong-Porretta, a self-desciribed “art enthusiast, idea enabler, and yay-maker” to tell us more about the colorful project.
What led you to create Outside the Lines? My daughter, Lulu! She has lots and lots of coloring books and I noticed that she had a preference for coloring books with illustrations by established artists such as Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. After watching her scribble outside the lines of a Moebius coloring book, I thought it’d be cool if she could color artwork by our creative cabal so I wrote a list of folks I knew and one by one asked them if they would contribute work for a coloring book. I had several dozen yeses in a short amount of time—enough to motivate me to write a book proposal. The rest came together rather quickly.
How did you select the artists whose work you wanted to include? Nearly all the artists included in the book are personal friends. Some very old, some newer. A few are friends of friends. But nearly every artist in the book has a relationship with me by way of previous projects or a social tie. Also, because I had once worked for a lifestyle magazine called, Tokion, I was able to call upon friends I had made from the ’90s, before they were rockstar photographers, illustrators, fine artists, graffiti artists, musicians, and much more. continued…
The London office of ad agency JWT is staging an exhibition of animated GIFs by some of the leading artists in the field who will be talking about their work at an event on September 11
The show, called Loop, will feature work from an international selection of artists (including Paolo Ceric, work shown top, and Robin Davey, work shown above), all of whom exploit the limitations of the animated GIFs to great effect. Their work will be presented as framed still images which visitors can bring to life using the Blippar augmented reality smartphone app. In fact, Blippar will work on the images on this blog post – just download it here and point your phone’s camera at the images on screen.
The show was put together by JWT creative Yoni Alter. “There’s some amazing talents creating GIFs on Tumblr and I thought that work deserves to be seen by everyone, besides it’ll be cool to get the GIFs out of the web into the real world,” he says. “But how do you exhibit GIFs in a gallery if you don’t have many screens? We worked on some projects with Blippar before and thought it would be good for that.”
“What I like about these GIFs is how they get the most out of the limiting format,” he says of the selection. “The repeating sequence in each GIF lasts for around one second but you can watch it for hours: One constant and hypnotising action.”
CR readers can attend an evening event at JWT in London on September 11 when several of the artists will be talking about their work. All you have to do is Blipp this invitation and follow the instructions to RSVP
A new book of illustrator Jan Van Der Veken’s work is a welcome examination of a contemporary artist who manages to bridge the past and present…
It’s refereshing when an illustrator’s work first comes to you through print alone. Considering the ease with which one can look through a collection of work online, Van Der Veken has remained a relatively hard-to-find artist.
He prefers a simple though well-stocked Tumblr to show off his new work, as British writer James Cartwright noted last year in a small feature on Van Der Veken’s on It’s Nice That.
Since that article, Cartwright has gotten closer to the artist and has written the introduction to Van Der Veken’s first book, Fabrica Grafica. It’s published by Gestalten next month, and situates the Belgian artist’s work within contemporary illustration and comics art.
And a vital introduction it is – as Van Der Veken’s work is often difficult to place in time if the reader is unaware of the context. His work certainly has a classic ‘clear-line’ look, but it’s one reworked with new energy and new concerns. In the UK he has been particuarly championed by NoBrow press.
Influenced by both Hergé and the later ‘atoomstijl’ (atomic style) of Joost Swarte, Van Der Veken’s aesthetic will be familiar to fans of those artists, but his work is not strictly a part of a comics lineage.
He admits to having never wanted to write a comic strip or book – instead, he is more at home in the world of spot and feature illustrations and magazine covers, exemplified by his work for The New Yorker.
The clever thing is that Van Der Veken’s single panel pieces still manage to tell stories; there is less ‘sequential’ art here than one might expect, but plenty of character and story within the frames.
In fact, Van Der Veken has a background in graphic design – and his sense of spatial awareness comes through his drawn work. It has a precision to it not unlike the work of Chris Ware, who, having seen Van Der Veken’s first exhibition in 2001 actually became an early champion of his work.
And like Ware, Van Der Veken’s art can be very funny, too. “Without looking at the work,” suggests Cartwright in his text, “all this talk of structure and rigidity comes across as overly serious for an illustrator, but alongside his geometric precision is an undeniable humour. Jan’s images exude a playfulness that’s tangible and infectious.” (Interestingly, Van Der Veken also cites Jacques Tati as another influence on his art.)
Perhaps his Tumblr does gives more away than it seems at first glance. “Floating between design and illustration, present and past,” reads the text above his pictures. This great new book has successfully managed to pin down his timeless work on the page.
The September 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.
In Super Graphic, Tim Leong presents an infographic guide to the comic book universe. It maps, charts and Venn diagrams its way through facts and figures about characters and storylines – and is utterly charming with it…
The Batman theme, on left, made up of “Batman!” and “Da”; The Joker’s Favourite Question for Batman, on right, is “Why so serious?”
There isn’t a single image of a superhero or supervillain in Leong’s book, but the skill and humour with which he deconstructs their worlds ensures some of the most famous characters, from Batman and Spiderman, through to Magneto and Juggernaut, leap off the page.
People dressed as The Hulk at Comic-Con: just bare (green) skin and padded costume
Stan Lee has author credits on many very famous comics – and some others that you’ve probably never heard of
And it’s not just the superhero landscape that falls under Leong’s analysis: everything from Tintin and Sin City, to Charles Schultz and Cosplay is examined in some way. (There’s even an infographic introduction page which reveals that around a third of the charts and diagrams concern ‘non-superheroes’.)
Detailed guide to the Watchmen, above; and chart showing Changes in Costume Colour
There are graphics revealing Changes in Costume Colour (The Hulk went from grey to green, but Iron Man started out iron-coloured, too?); How Long Characters Stayed Dead; a Chris Ware Sadness Scale, and even a comparison of the respecitve ‘utility belts’ belonging to The Joker and Robin.
The good guys are all about primary colours
Leong clearly loves his subject – and his knowledge of comic books comes across almost as strongly as his unabashed devotion to the medium.
Super Graphic is published by Chronicle (£11.99). Tim Leong is the founder of Comic Foundry magazine and the design director of Fortune magazine, having previously been director of digital design at Wired. More details on the book at Abram and Chronicle’s Facebook page.
The September 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.
A blissful August weekend brought an attentively curated line-up of sights and sounds, to a glorious northern location, for the arty, musical haven of Beacons festival. With an atmosphere bursting with positive vibes and creative passion, it soon became clear that Beacons was the type of place where you are just as likely to have a chat with a stranger about the who’s who of 2013 need-to-know bands as you are about the what’s what of the latest and greatest design studios.
With the rise of the independent festival scene, and boutique festivals evolving and diversifying to incorporate an increasingly varied bill of creative acts, more festivals are also beginning to place emphasis on a sharper arts programme running alongside the music. Just three years in, with a washout first attempt after severe flooding, Beacons is already starting to establish itself as a frontrunner on the small festival circuit, with an impressive, eclectic bill of art and music, curated with several fingers to the pulse of local, national and international talent.
The compact site on Heslaker Farm, near Skipton in the beautiful rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales, attracted local creative folk and hipster city types alike. And for four predominantly sunny days, Beacons offered a dreamy, arty alternative festival experience to the mainstream branded big guns on offer the same weekend.
With an arts programme that combined artists and organisations from Yorkshire and beyond, The Space Between was home to a variety of projects and creatives, with films, performance, exhibition space, workshops, demos, talks, and design focused stands, along with other attractions and installations around the festival site.
A enticing selection of handmade products from Yorkshire based artists – including screenprinted posters and cards, bespoke t-shirts and illustrated badges – were on offer at The Pop Up Box (below), a retail project developed by Leeds based creative agency Temp Studio. The project stems from an earlier venture, Retail Ready People, a pop-up creative retail space in Leeds city centre, offering volunteers a chance to ‘redesign their high street’, with a training programme helping develop skills in marketing, retail design and visual merchandising.
The project, a partnership with charities vInspired, Retail Trust and The Empty Shops Network, mixed work from young designers and artists based in Yorkshire with more established local designers, acting both as a shop and social space, with a café and performances from local bands.
The Pop Up Box built on this idea, with a giant handmade wooden box housing projects from young local designers, providing access for emerging brands to sell in a physical space, rather than just online. Beacons was the first stop for the box, and all the profits – after designers have their cut on a sale or return basis – will go into the next space.
As we see a growth in similar projects in Leeds and other cities, despite the need to engage creatives and communities outside of a city’s cultural quarters and in more rural regions, supporting independent retailers and actively encouraging regeneration through creative partnerships in inner city areas still remains integral to projects such as these.
‘We’re still fighting against too much empty space, sky-high rents and the dominance of the usual big retail players,’ says Isla Brown, director of Temp Studio. ‘We just want to help both young people and young designers not to have to knock doors down to get their products noticed and into customers hands.’ Through this portable project, work can be trialled with new audiences and reach a wider market, whilst hopefully sparking some discussion over the temporal nature of many creative spaces.
New for this year, Dawson’s Arthash House, was a space for festival goers to kick back and enjoy independent films, digital art and animation, along with work from local designers and crafts people such as Tony Wright (above), from Oldfield Press, a letterpress workhop based at Altered Egos gallery in Haworth. The stand offered a chance to press your own Beacons poster from a set of woodcut blocks, including a pointing finger dating back more than one hundred years, alongside letterpress prints from local artists.
Wright, (incidentally also Terrorvision’s frontman), had turned his hand from painting to printing, aiming to create work that was still individual and handmade, but ‘easier to let go of’, creating posters and other commissions from greetings cards to labels for chilli sauce. He has also experimented with less conventional letterpress techniques, including creating prints by etching designs onto vinyl records and running them through a mangle.
Having also been involved in a pop-up creative space in Skipton – Derdlab Press, a traditional Victorian printshop and exhibition – the work stands testament to a growing popularity in ‘hands-on art’, as Wright calls it, as despite a demand for cheap, fast, mass-produced print, networks of craft-led design is finding support from local communities, councils and charities.
From woodcut printing to wood carved portaiture with Kyle Bean (below) in the Things to Make and Do Tent, with a drop-in workshop using reclaimed wood to create portraits of icons linking to the festival theme, ‘Visions of the Future’. Bean’s imaginative work as an artist and designer, with clients including Selfridges and the Design Museum, often reappropriates everyday materials and rethinks handcrafted techniques. The portraits were originally a commission for Wallpaper*, when Bean was approached by the magazine and asked to illustrate the contributors for the Handmade issue.
To create the portraits, a black and white contrast image of the face is printed onto carbon paper and traced onto reclaimed wood, and highlights are then carved out with varying sizes of chisels and knives. Carving into the dark weathered surface to reveal light fresh wood underneath creates a stencilled, contrast effect from a distance, with lots of interesting twists and scratches close up. Inviting festival goers to ‘take a tactile approach to making the portraits’, Bean’s alternative illustration workshop gave participants a taster of his inventive handcrafted techniques.
A collective of zine makers from Yorkshire, Loosely Bound, brought zine making workshops to Beacons, sharing techniques on how to create various styles of the self-published books/pamphlets, and recording memories of the festival. The collective are supported by Fabric, a charitable organisation for artistic development in Bradford and the surrounding areas, where the group originally met at an artist networking dinner event. Coming together to share, swap and learn from each other, the group both create new collaborative zines and organise events and workshops to engage a wider audience of people in zine making.
Their name highlights the diversity of zines that members produce, from perzines (personal zines), to photography led, graphic art inspired, written or drawn, with both lo-fi and handmade methods and digital online zines, and covering a huge range of subjects. Take a look at the video below of the workshop in action …
Other attractions and creative activities included DIY t-shirt screen-printing in the tearoom, a series of films including shorts from Aesthetica magazine’s short film festival, and projection bombing across the site with animation and videos from local, national and international artists. Featured in several locations, 12 Months of Neon Love by Victoria Lucas and Richard William Wheater, a sequence of lyrical statements from well-known songs recreated in red neon signage, accented the festival with a nod towards amalgamating the artistic and musical elements.
The support for small arts organisations and emerging businesses, from festivals such as Beacons, is acknowledged by those involved as a significant opportunity to engage people in projects that they may not otherwise have contact with, and build sustainable networks, whilst providing exposure for creative projects in environments that test the boundaries of products and practices beyond online shops and traditional workshops and studios.
Although the arts field may be in its infancy aesthetically, and could perhaps do with a rethink in terms of location – currently situated away from the main arena, to one end of the campsite – Beacons is off to an impressive start when it comes to programming a more progressive and design-focused bill of creative projects and arts attractions, with unfamiliar forms of visual communication, process-led work and digital arts, rather than simply falling back on more traditional festival crafts.
The interest in the arts side of the festival was strong, and with the incredibly friendly vibe, chatting with various festival goers, amongst the indie-electro buzz band fans, underground music lovers and beatheads, there was a substantial rep from arty types, designers, directors and other creative professionals. In the temporary environment of a festival such as Beacons, those attending are often looking for an experience of escapism that is more than just a party, and the demand for a different type of arts programme like this is growing. The arts bill no longer acts merely as a sideshow to the main musical event, but with considered arts partnerships and well curated work, festivals such as Beacons will continue to flourish into cultural hotbeds of creative energy.
Graphic novelist and writer Neil Gaiman has collaborated with his fans to create a book of illustrated short stories, as part of a campaign for BlackBerry by AMV BBDO.
The Keep Moving campaign invited the public to collaborate with artists Gaiman, Robert Rodriguez and Alicia Keys, and Gaiman decided to involve his considerable global fan base on social media to co-create A Calendar of Tales.
In February, he tweeted the question ‘Why is January so dangerous?’ to his fans, following with a further question every hour about each month of the year. He then sifted through thousands of responses and chose the 12 best to base his short stories on.
Having written the stories in four days, he then released them to his fans again, inviting them to submit illustrations inspired by the texts, again choosing his favourites to feature in the book. The resulting book is a beautifully bound limited-edition, designed by Sebastien Delahaye and art directed by Sonny Adorjan.
Wrapped in wax paper sealed with a specially designed crest, the stories inside are printed on translucent paper overlaying the chosen illustrations.
January illustration: Down! by Niam
May illustration: A Correspondence with Unwitting Participants by Kit Seaton
October illustration: The Wish by Maria Surducanh
Delahaye also created additional calendar illustrations for each month, which are screen-printed onto the left-hand sides of the spreads.
The campaign also included a series of films charting Gaiman’s progress in putting together the calendar.
Unfortunately the printed book is only available to a select few, but fans can explore the project in more detail on its dedicated website, here.
Want to learn a new skill? Hone your craft? Or just switch off that Mac and do something a little less boring instead for a while? Then our August issue is for you with details on workshops, short courses and a host of ideas to reinvigorate the creative mind. You can buy the August issue of Creative Review 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.
Earlier this month, the mayor of Paris handed over 1,000 of the city’s municipal signs to Japanese illustrator Kanako Kuno in order to display 50 different images of Les Parisien’s at play…
Impressed by a new illustrated book on the city’s inhabitants published by the popular My Little Paris website, the city hall asked the book’s creators to create a series of images for an outdoor exhibition which would make use of signage in the Champs-Elysées, Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Barbès areas of the city.
My Little Paris is a phenomenally popular site that reveals the hippest boutiques, bars, restaurants and special events in Paris to its subscribers. The idea started in 2008 as an email from Fany Péchiodat to her friends, commenting on her finds, and illustrated by Tama-Art graduate Kuno.
Today My Little Paris has over one million subscribers, 50 full-time employees, and has published three books, the most recent being Les Parisiens – Ce qu’ils disent, ce qu’ils font, ce qu’ils pensent (Parisians – what they say, what they do, what they think), by site co-founder and copywriter Amandine Péchiodat and illustrated by Kuno.
On seeing the book, the Mairie de Paris (Paris City Hall) contacted the website with the idea of staging an outdoor exhibition which warmly celebrated and poked a little fun at Parisian life.
My Little Paris also opened the project up to its subscribers, asking them to suggest moments that illustrated the typical Parisian. They received 500 emails.
There was no fee for the project; instead, the Mairie provided access to unique sites in Paris – with Les Dîners Volants (Flying Dinners) offered up as prizes for My Little Paris subscribers.
Says Amandine: “In Paris, we live on top of each other, so naturally we start to resemble each other. Our illustrations aren’t intended to be cruel or cynical, instead, they give Parisians the chance to do what we do best – to laugh at ourselves.
“I see people pause in front of our posters, read the caption, maybe explain it to their kids, and walk away smiling. That’s what we wanted, to bring joy back to the street.”
By popular demand, the exhibition will be extended from September 12 to October 3 around the Hôtel de Ville. There’s no question of a Parisian missing out just because s/he’s on holiday for the whole of August.
Illustrator Kanako Kuno and My Little Paris’ Amandine Pechiodat
The September 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.
In 1971, a little question led to a big idea. When Roger Hargreaves’ six-year-old son asked him what a tickle looked like, Hargreaves was inspired to create a yellow Mr. Tickle character with long arms, a…
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.
It’s that time of year again, when even those who haven’t stepped inside a classroom for decades feel the unbearable urge to stock up on school supplies. Break out that fresh box of Crayolas—or Prismacolors or Copics—for 
