Hasta La Ideas

This morning I took the tube to Anne Smith‘s studio on the South side of the Thames. Anne did the perfect pigeon illustration on the cover of issue #12, so I couldn’t come all this way and not meet her!

We had some tea and a nice chat about books, the realms of online and offline community, the creative drive and inspiration… so nice. Her studio had lots of books—I saw many that are common to my shelves at home. With nice light diffusing in from windows on two sides, it was a really fresh and inspiring studio.

See a few more images in the flickr set. Thanks, Anne!

We’ve got something of a bumper edition of our regular Nice Publications post today… we’ve got NINE things to show you including the latest issue of Wrap, a new magazine from The President in South Africa, a beautifully drawn French language comic from Nobrow, a new art-focused newspaper called Symbol, and more!

I think the only way to tackle this bumper crop of publications is to start at the top of the stack and work through them. First up, then, is The Collection, a new 64 page type specimen from foundry Emigre…

Mostly type specimens tend to be full of nonsensical phrases designed not to be informative or entertaining but to simply showcase the type in question. The Collection, however, well and truly bucks the trend and takes Emigre’s Rudy Vanderlans record collection as the focus of its content, analysing all sorts of information about the various albums on Vanderlans shelves, and displaying said info in a selection of Emigre’s typefaces.

As Vanderlans explains in the introduction to The Collection, “type specimens need not be limited to stacked and justified compositions of arbitary words and phrases. Although the text is necessarily subservient in the typographic exercise, there’s no reason to neglect the content.” Here are some spreads:

emigre.com

Nike iD store in Boxpark in East London recently worked with design studio Intercity on its Free Run iD project which saw a number of top track and field athletes each design their own Nike Free trainers using Nike iD.

“Athletes customised this latest style to reflect not only their performance preferences, but also their inspirations and aspirations for the year ahead,” explain Nike. The Nike Free Run iD shoes then became the starting point for eleven East London-based image makers to create works of art, each one based on one of the trainer designs.

As well as an exhibition of the shoes and artworks the gallery space on the top level of Boxpark in Shoreditch, this A5 book (cover shown above, spreads below) was produced to commemorate the project:

Matthew Bromley created an illustration based on Perri Shakes-Drayton’s iD design

Fran Marchesi worked with 400m runner Martyn Rooney to create this You Don’t Train For 2nd Place illustration

Rob Flower‘s created this floating wizard-like character to compliment pole vaulter Holly Bleasdale’s purple, green and white shoe design

And James Dawe created a comic-book inspired photo-collage to sit alongside long jumper Greg Rutherford’s Superman themed red blue and yellow Free iD design

One of several beautiful new books from Nobrow, Le Royaume Quo by Jérémie Fischer is a beautifully drawn comic with a coloured pencil aesthetic:

Issue 10 of Parisian store Colette‘s self published magazine caught our eye this week too. It’s designed by Ill-Studio (which recently exhibited at London’s KK Outlet gallery). Here are some spreads:

Paris: Fading Like A Childhood Memory (cover shown above – the back cover wraps around the front and the masthead appears on a sticker) is the latest magazine to arrive from Peet Pienaar’s The President design studio in South Africa. Its focus is on lifestyle trends and ideas in the Southern hemisphere, primarily South Africa, Argentina and Brazil – and it’s wonderful.

It’s content isn’t organised in as linear a fashion as you’d expect from a magazine, which demands closer inspection of images and captions in order to understand what’s what. Photos by Filipa Domingues relating to a story about her film about dance culture in Sowetto run throughout the magazine with simple caption on each image referring readers back to page 8 where the text explaining the project is situated.

There are photos of faces in masks by Paul Ward juxtaposed to photos of Antarctica from the United States Antarctica Program on double page spreads – and there’s even a story on how tell if someone is about to die, which is followed immediately by a series of images of ‘telos or ‘transitorios’, special bedrooms hired by lovers in Buenos Aires, shot by Joe Bonomo. It’s tricky to put Paris down until you’ve explored every spread…

thepresident.co.za

Gratuitous Type is, in the words of its designer and publisher Elana Schlenker an infrequently published “pamphlet of typographic smut.” Issue two contains  interviews with – among others – Visual Editions founders Britt Iversen and Anna Gerber, LA artist Wayne White, UK-illustraor/designer/art director Rob Lowe (aka Supermundane), and also Barcelona-based Astrid Stavro.

elanaschlenker.com/Gratuitous-Type-No-2

Coggles, an independent fashion boutique in York that now does the lion’s share of its business through its website, has just published a rather nice look book for Autumn Winter 2012.

Although it has been put together by the brand’s in-house designer Tom Matthews, the guys at Coggles are keen to point out that the art direction of it is based on its previous look book which was created in collaboration with Patrick Duffy of No Days Off .

As well as showcasing some of next season’s  looks and products, the booklet also has introductions to some of the key designers and even a carefully curated selection of books the brand thinks will appeal to its customers.

“Symbol is a free, independently published paper that focuses on a new generation of experimental artists,” says it’s editor Amy Knight. “Whilst drawing on the historical mode of artists’ self-published magazines, Symbol acknowledges the changing relevance of print and attempts to occupy the space between online interaction and physical object through its design concept.”

Printed on newsprint, it features two typefaces, one for titling, and one for all body copy. NeuSymbol (titling) is Symbol’s designer David Rudnick’s tweaked version of Neuhengen by Philp Bouwsma, and Futura Symbol (body text) is Rudnick’s amended version of Futura EF Book by Paul Renner. Here are some shots:

Symbol is set to be published quarterly and issue one (shown above) includes interviews with various young artists from around the world including Daniel Swan, Kitty Clark and Jon Rafman. It is available from various colleges including Camberwell College of Arts, Central Saint Martins and Chelsea College of Art, as well as from Donlon Books, Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes, The IC, Kemistry Gallery, KK Outlet, and the Wapping Project Bookshop.

symbolpaper.com

Issue four of large format magazine Wrap features usable wrapping papers by ten different illustrators from around the world: Leah Duncan, Jessica Fortner, Yeji Yun, Isabel Greenberg, Josh Evans, Kim Sielbeck, Jesse Tise, Andy Gilmore, Primative Press and Sam Brewster. It also features interviews with each artist and various other features and interviews with other image makers too.

thewrappaper.com

The story of one vegetable’s survival in an interactive children’s book

As a cross between illustration, philosophy and paper engineering, Sara Fanelli‘s most recent children’s book “The Onion’s Great Escape” challenges the limitations of reading as an interactive experience. Following the quest of an onion as it attempts to escape its apparent fate of death by frying, the book’s perforated core is removed page-by-page until, at the end, the onion is literally freed from the book. The innovative fusion of tactile activity and illustration is taken a step further by a call-and-response method of asking children difficult questions with room for a written answer.

Throughout the die-cut, 68-page work, questions range from the categorical “What is your name?” to the metaphysical “What is the longest minute you can remember?” Rather than dumbing down the experience, each page challenges young minds to come up with a creative response. Fanelli’s illustrations show an impressive range, and she is able to freeze moments of delight and despair as the onion flies through obstacles on its journey to save himself.

Each page of “The Onion’s Great Escape” offers a new look and experience, and the diversity of styles is enhanced by the perforated core, which can be mixed and matched with different pages in the book. As the onion gradually breaks free from the pages, it emerges to stand alone as a 3D entity—the remainder of the book’s content staying intact.

“The Onion’s Great Escape” is available for pre-order from Phaidon and on Amazon. See more images of the book in our slideshow and check out this video of the book in action.

Images by James Thorne

by The Krafty Fox

“The only valuable class I took in art school was from a guy who taught display lettering which was literally like sign painting,” says cartoonist (and screenwriter) Daniel Clowes of his formative years at Pratt Intstitute. “Everybody else was like, ‘Aww man, I can’t believe I have to take this cornball class,’ where I was front and center every week. Still to this day I use everything I learned in that class.” Clowes’s irresistible handlettering, groundbreaking graphic novels, beloved New Yorker covers, and much more are the subject of a retrospective that opens next Saturday at the Oakland Museum of California. “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” is accompanied by a splendid monograph out this month from Abrams ComicArts. Designed by Jonathan Bennett, the book includes essays by the likes Chris Ware and Chip Kidd. And feast your eyes on a test sample animation by Nicholas de Monchaux, who is masterminding the design of the exhibition:

The imminent museum survey earned the cartoonist a Clowes-up—”Humanity’s Discomfort, Punctured with a Pen“—in Sunday’s New York Times, where he shared the front page of the Arts & Leisure section with a Smurfily dressed Nicki Minaj. Among the diverse Clowes admirers that writer Carol Kino rounded up for the profile: Alexander Payne, who is directing the film adaptation of Wilson; Art Spiegelman; and (would you believe?) Neo Rauch. “Dan’s work stands out because of its precision,” Rauch told Kino. The artist was also “fascinated by its underground, slightly creepy aspect,” and added, “Plus, he has a very dark humor that appeals to me immediately.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.