Jemmy Button: Separated by land, sea and language, illustrators Jennifer Uman and Valerio Vidali collaborate on the historical tale

Jemmy Button

As the incredible true story goes, in the mid-1800s the HMS Beagle, captained by Robert FitzRoy, landed in Tierra del Fuego on the coast of Patagonia. After one of his boats was stolen Fitzroy reportedly took a group of hostages including a boy he paid for with a mother…

Continue Reading…

For Tom, Dick or Harry

Soulful Creative graffiti artists 45rpm, Koze and Richt painted three billboards on London’s Old Street last night as part of a campaign for charity CALM to raise awareness of the scale of male suicide in the UK…

According to the Campaign Against Living Miserably, three young men take their own lives every day in the UK, making suicide the biggest killer of men under 35. (There are sobering figures for both sexes at the Office of National Statistics’ page for 2011: in that year alone there were 4,552 male and 1,493 female suicides.)

“Suicide is something that every Tom Dick & Harry may well think about, regardless of how successful, talented or popular they are,” say CALM. “This is a toxic legacy, which impacts all communities.”

Painted on site the three pieces (‘Tom’ by 45rpm, ‘Dick’ by Koze, and ‘Harry’ by Richt) will be on show for 36 hours before being auctioned in aid of CALM tomorrow morning. At the Old Street site, a fourth billboard introduces the project and links to thecalmzone.et/stopsuicide.

Soulful worked on the project with agency BMB (Beattie McGuinness Bungay), with support from JCDecaux. BMB chose to use graffiti as a way to raise awareness around the issues because of its notions of self-expression. “[This is] something that inspires graffiti artists to carry out their work, but something that unfortunately holds people back from speaking about their problems,” say Soulful.

The work will be auctioned by CALM on the morning of Tuesday March 26. CALM offers a free, seven evenings a week confidential helpline and texting service, and campaigns to raise awareness of suicide and improve policy and practice in suicide prevention. See thecalmzone.net. More images of the billboards being painted, here.

The April print issue of CR presents the work of three young animators and animation teams to watch. Plus, we go in search of illustrator John Hanna, test out the claims of a new app to have uncovered the secrets of viral ad success and see how visual communications can both help keep us safe and help us recover in hospital

Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

Stebuklai restaurant identity

Lithuanian design studio New! has created the name and visual identity for a new restaurant in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital…

The design studio wanted the identity to represent the playful and exciting nature of the modern Baltic cuisine that the restaurant will serve so settled on the name Stabuklai, which means “wonders”.

“It will take years for Vilnius to become the new Copenhagen,” says New!’s creative director Tomas Ramanauskas, “but we wanted to build on the ambition of the chef and his team. We created a shape-shifting logo and a menu full of stories and wondrous visuals  – all around a central concept of small bits of magic in every step, or, should I say, bite.”

Here’s a look at the work which includes wall murals, menus, and bottle labels:

As well as on some of the pages in the menu, illustration features throughout the identity. The following illustrations by by Goda Gontyé appear on the restaurant’s walls:

And New! also created pattern-based illustrations to appear on other elements of the restaurant’s printed collateral:

Above and below, these labels are designed to be applied to bottles of the restaurant’s homemade lemonade

And here is a set of four promotional postcards that make further use of the imagery:

And a printed flyer also doubles up as an unusually shaped coaster:

These reservation forms for staff pick up on the pastel tones of the letterhead paper and of the promo postcards:

Business cards (above and below) feature just the monogram “S” logo on one side and there are three different reverse prints, as shown. We’re not too sure if every plate of Oysters served will come with a business card!


Photography by Robertas Daškevičius

See more work by New! at newisnew.lt.

The April print issue of CR presents the work of three young animators and animation teams to watch. Plus, we go in search of illustrator John Hanna, test out the claims of a new app to have uncovered the secrets of viral ad success and see how visual communications can both help keep us safe and help us recover in hospital

Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

Mitch Tonks’ Little Black Book of Seafood

Rather than producing a set of press or poster adverts to promote the various destinations in the South West of the UK reachable by First Great Western, the train operating company has commissioned something a little more engaging: a culinary guidebook by restauranteur and chef Mitch Tonks

“The book [entitled My Little Black Book of Seafood] was put together so people could pick it up on the train and work out how to go and eat some of the best seafood on the planet,” says Tonks (who owns seafood restaurants in Dartmouth and Bristol) of the project which he conceived together with First Great Western. The train company then approached The Leith Agency to develop the concept.

As well as designing and producing the book, Leith commissioned CIA illustrator Jill Calder to inject the project with no small amount of charm through a host of illustrations and hand drawn type which appear throughout the handy tome.

Calder also designed the hand-lettered cover:

My Little Black Book of Seafood by Mitch Tonks costs a mere £1.50 and is available from the Express Café onboard any First Great Western train. In a rather nice touch, all proceeds go to The Fisherman’s Mission, a charity which provides support and care to fishermen and their families.

You can also view the book digitally online here.

leith.co.uk

The April print issue of CR presents the work of three young animators and animation teams to watch. Plus, we go in search of illustrator John Hanna, test out the claims of a new app to have uncovered the secrets of viral ad success and see how visual communications can both help keep us safe and help us recover in hospital

Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

Chelsea Children’s Hospital’s healing space

Commissioned by the Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity, design studio Thomas.Matthews has designed the look and feel of seven new wards with an overarching space theme at the Chelsea Children’s Hospital (CCH) in London…

Thomas.Matthews created a My Universe concept born out of research into patient experience in each of the wards – and also out of their own learnings from working on projects for the Jodrell Bank Visitor Centre (home to the Lovell Telescope) and also for the Weller Astronomy galleries at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

The design group then commissioned illustrators Gilles Jourdan and Cecilie Barstad of Giles & Cecilie Studio and also Malika Favre to collaborate and bring the concept to life. The first three wards have now been completed, so here’s a look at them:

At the heart of the creative idea is that each ward is the home to a particular family of illustrated characters who have unique character traits, behaviours and expressions that compliment the role of the ward itself. So the Mars family live in the Burns ward and are, Favre tells us, “super adventurous and want to fly no matter what and end up with bumps and scratches all the time but nothing would stop them from trying.”

Visit the High Dependency Unit to find the Apollo family, which Favre describes as “a bit more eccentric, they are all circus people who have adopted all the animals that have been sent into space throughout history.”

Meanwhile, the Mercury family (which consists of wise and curious trees who read a lot) can be found in the Surgical ward:

“Our wish was to make the hospital a more welcoming, friendly and colourful space,” say Gilles & Cecilie of the project. “The illustrated characters within the wards are designed to interact with the visitors of the hospital to give them comfort, assurance and advice. We hope the designs will be a tool to help the patients feel better and more relaxed.”

In terms of how the illustrators worked together, Favre told CR that she spent a lot of time in Gilles & Cecilie’s Shoreditch studio over the last six months in order to come up with all the characters and the narrative for each ward. “It was quite a freeform project,” she says, “but also a very challenging one. All three of us are illustrators with fairly distinctive styles, so we had to find a graphic solution we were all happy with, a shared vision.”

Once the trio had found a collaborative middle ground (and a charming one at that) they then worked on a host of narratives based around the idea that the various characters would display a range of emotions, both positive and negative, to make the characters more human and more easy to identify with for the hospital’s patients.

“Most characters are a reference to a real person from the history of space mapping and exploration,” says Favre, “and some of the narrative scenarios reference historical space experiments,” she continues, “with others inspired by some of our own adventures and memories,” she continues.

“The most important thing for all of us was to avoid the kiddy type clichés and give the children something they could relate to without partronising them.”

Chelsea Children’s Hospital is the latest London hospital to act on the findings of research into the positive effects of art in healthcare environments and the clinical effects of colour.

We recently posted about a new interactive design environment the New Royal London Hospital created by architects Cottrell & Vermeulen and graphic designer Morag Myerscough which was commissioned by Vital Arts (read that post here).

Vital Arts also commissioned illustrators Andrew Rae and Chrissie Macdonald last year to create a fun illustrated narrative to run on the walls of the corridors linking the children’s ward to the operating theatre in the Royal London Hospital (read our post about it here).

Also, in the new April issue of CR, Mark Sinclair’s Healing Spaces feature (opening spread, shown above) investigates the transformative power of art and design when used in hospital environments.

See more of Thomas.Matthews work at thomasmatthews.com.

The April print issue of CR presents the work of three young animators and animation teams to watch. Plus, we go in search of illustrator John Hanna, test out the claims of a new app to have uncovered the secrets of viral ad success and see how visual communications can both help keep us safe and help us recover in hospital

Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

Quick! It’s the CR April issue

April cover featuring a character drawn by Jim Stoten in The Layzell Brothers’ Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight video for Adam Buxton

Our April issue presents the work of three young animators and animation teams to watch. Plus, we go in search of illustrator John Hanna, test out the claims of a new app to have uncovered the secrets of viral ad success and see how visual communications can both help keep us safe and help us recover in hospital

In the new issue we pick out three animators and animation teams to watch: the Layzell Brothers, who regular readers might remember are the (warped) minds behind Adam Buxton’s Livin in the Moonlight video. With characters by illustrator Jim Stoten.

Becky & Joe, creators of Tame Impala promo Feels Like We Only Go Backwards

 

And Julia Pott,whose disturbing tale Belly has been a hit on the festival circuit


 

Elsewhere in the issue, NIck Asbury goes in search of the elusive Australian commercial artist John Hanna, illustrator of a series of beautiful covers for Country Fair magazine

Mark Sinclair looks at the transformative power of art and design when used in hospital environments.

Anna Richardson Taylor explores the claims of a new app to have discovered a formula that guarantees viral advertising success.

 

And Paul Rennie delves into the archives of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, and discovers a rich design history

In Crit, James Pallister reviews Anna Saccani’s new tome on typographic installations, Letterscapes

In his regular column This Designer’s Life, Daniel Benneworth-Gray writes on the perils of working with academics and Gordon Comstock discusses the perils of creating YouTube-friendly advertising

Jeremy Leslie asks what makes a superior – and successful – independent magazine?

And Paul Belford argues strongly that the craft of writing and art directing long copy advertising must be preserved while Patrick Burgoyne reports from the Design Indaba conference, where the scope for designers to make a difference to society was vividly illustrated

 

Plus, in our subscriber-only Monograph supplement, we celebrate the work of art director and designer Gerald Cinamon

 

You can buy Creative Review direct from us here Better yet, subscribe, receive Monograph and save up to 30%.

Tom Gauld at Typo Circle

Illustrator and cartoonist Tom Gauld will be giving the next Typographic Circle Typo Talk on March 27. Not only is this the chance to hear Gauld discuss his brilliant work, but you get a free A1 poster (shown above) too

As usual, the talk will be at ad agency JWT in Knightsbridge, London. Tickets (on sale here) are £10 for members (student members £4), £16 for non-members (£8 for students).

Gauld’s latest book You’re All Just Jealous of my Jetpack, a collection of his weekly cartoons for the Guardian, will be out soon.

 

 

CR in print
The March issue of CR magazine celebrates 150 years of the London Underground. In it we introduce a new book by Mark Ovenden, which is the first study of all aspects of the tube’s design evolution; we ask Harry Beck authority, Ken Garland, what he makes of a new tube map concept by Mark Noad; we investigate the enduring appeal of Edward Johnston’s eponymous typeface; Michael Evamy reports on the design story of world-famous roundel; we look at the London Transport Museum’s new exhibition of 150 key posters from its archive; we explore the rich history of platform art, and also the Underground’s communications and advertising, past and present. Plus, we talk to London Transport Museum’s head of trading about TfL’s approach to brand licensing and merchandising. In Crit, Rick Poynor reviews Branding Terror, a book about terrorist logos, while Paul Belford looks at how a 1980 ad managed to do away with everything bar a product demo. Finally, Daniel Benneworth-Grey reflects on the merits on working home alone. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

Oreo asks the important questions

Wieden + Kennedy Portland, Oregon, has wrapped up its Cookie vs Creme campaign for Oreo cookies with a seemingly endlessly entertaining website, SuperImportantTest.com.

The site asks visitors to choose the best part of an Oreo, rewarding them with a slew of quirky videos for the ‘right answer’. The collection of videos, created by animators and artists including director and designer Carl Burgess, graphic designer and animator Max Erdenberger and Jimmy Marble, ranges from the endearingly amusing to the downright bizarre – from a painfully slow sloth to graffiti grannies and robo-cats. Viewers are bound to keep on clicking. We got through 30 or so, and counting.

The website caps the W+K campaign, which kicked off with the Super Bowl ad Whisper Fight, which saw two Oreo fans kick off in the library over the Cookie vs Creme debate. It also included a series of four Oreo Separator videos that challenged various machines to separate the cookies from creme, featuring a physicist, toy scientists, conceptual artist collective Dentaku and Carnegie Mellon University’s robot, HERB.

CREDITS:
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Oregon
Creative Directors: Jason Bagley, Craig Allen
Digital Director: Matt O’Rourke
Copywriter, Digital Creative: Jarrod Higgins
Art Director: Ruth Bellotti
Video Creators: Carl Burgess, Cat Solen, Tony Foster, Fatal Farm, McRorie, Jimmy Marble, Max Erdenberger, Power House, Agile BrandTelligence, Visual Arts and internal W+K resources, including W+K Motion Department and Don’t Act Big Productions
Development Partner: Hook LLC

 

CR in print
The March issue of CR magazine celebrates 150 years of the London Underground. In it we introduce a new book by Mark Ovenden, which is the first study of all aspects of the tube’s design evolution; we ask Harry Beck authority, Ken Garland, what he makes of a new tube map concept by Mark Noad; we investigate the enduring appeal of Edward Johnston’s eponymous typeface; Michael Evamy reports on the design story of world-famous roundel; we look at the London Transport Museum’s new exhibition of 150 key posters from its archive; we explore the rich history of platform art, and also the Underground’s communications and advertising, past and present. Plus, we talk to London Transport Museum’s head of trading about TfL’s approach to brand licensing and merchandising. In Crit, Rick Poynor reviews Branding Terror, a book about terrorist logos, while Paul Belford looks at how a 1980 ad managed to do away with everything bar a product demo. Finally, Daniel Benneworth-Grey reflects on the merits on working home alone. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.

 

Copenhagen: The Good Life: Herb Lester Associates’ creative guide to one of the world’s most livable cities

Copenhagen: The Good Life

Copenhagen may be one of the world’s most livable cities, but navigating the surplus of reasons why it is indeed a crowd favorite—from shops to restaurants to monuments—can feel like a heavy task for even the savviest of tourists. We experienced this firsthand on a recent trip to the…

Continue Reading…

Get your CR/Uniqlo T-shirt here

Creative Review has teamed up with Uniqlo and 12 more magazines and journals around the world in the UT Creative Journal Direction project. Each magazine has commissioned a local designer or artist to create a T-shirt for the range which is on sale in Uniqlo worldwide

Each year Uniqlo commissions limited edition T-shirts from designers, artists and brands under its UT Project for sale in its 1300 shops globally and online at uniqlo.com. The UT Creative Journal Direction project was organised by +81 magazine in Japan.

Each participating magazine (including Étapes in France, Surface in New York, Design in Korea and Look At Me in Moscow) was asked to submit half a dozen proposed designs. They were not allowed to be overtly self-promotional (ie no logos) and should feature the work of a local designer. We submitted various ideas, but +81 and Uniqlo chose Anthony Burrill’s reworked version of the image which he created for our April 2010 redesign issue.The final shirt is shown above

 

You can buy the CR T-shirt direct from us here

 

Other T-shirts in the range include this by Superscript from Etapes

 

This by Masayoshi Kodaira for +81

And this by Workroom for Design magazine in Korea

See the full range of shirts here

 

CR in print
The March issue of CR magazine celebrates 150 years of the London Underground. In it we introduce a new book by Mark Ovenden, which is the first study of all aspects of the tube’s design evolution; we ask Harry Beck authority, Ken Garland, what he makes of a new tube map concept by Mark Noad; we investigate the enduring appeal of Edward Johnston’s eponymous typeface; Michael Evamy reports on the design story of world-famous roundel; we look at the London Transport Museum’s new exhibition of 150 key posters from its archive; we explore the rich history of platform art, and also the Underground’s communications and advertising, past and present. Plus, we talk to London Transport Museum’s head of trading about TfL’s approach to brand licensing and merchandising. In Crit, Rick Poynor reviews Branding Terror, a book about terrorist logos, while Paul Belford looks at how a 1980 ad managed to do away with everything bar a product demo. Finally, Daniel Benneworth-Grey reflects on the merits on working home alone. Buy your copy here.

Please note, CR now has a limited presence on the newsstand at WH Smith high street stores (although it can still be found in WH Smith travel branches at train stations and airports). If you cannot find a copy of CR in your town, your WH Smith store or a local independent newsagent can order it for you. You can search for your nearest stockist here. Alternatively, call us on 020 7970 4878, or buy a copy direct from us. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 970 4878 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.