Hasta La Ideas

Regular CR blog readers may recall our post last year about Lydia Leith‘s Royal Wedding Sick Bags. Now the Carlisle-based artist has created a batch of new products to coincide with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in June…

Among the new batch of Jubilee-themed products are two sets of temporary tattoos with which to display one’s allegiance to our sovereign. The corgi tattoo is a firm CR favourite:

And yes, if all the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in June become too much, Leith has produced some new sick bags for the occasion:

Leith’s informs us that the Royal Wedding sick bags she produced last year totally changed her life. “I was 24 years old with a part time job at a cinema when I first printed my royal wedding sick bags,” she says. “I didn’t expect to sell any, I just made them to entertain myself because I love designing and printing and it was a fun idea.

“When my sick bags got seen online, they became an overnight hit. Next thing I knew they were in every big newspaper across the world, trending on Twitter and I was selling thousands. I was thrown in the deep end and suddenly I was running a business. For three months solid I was replying to press emails, signing sick bags and taking boxes of orders/envelopes to my local Post Office. I was so busy I couldn’t take one day off. I had to get my parents and next door neighbors to help me too, it was good fun. I sold around 10,000, and I hand signed each one.”

Apparently inspiration for the jelly mould struck at Leith’s parents house. “My parents have an old image of the queen hanging on the wall,” she recalls. “I was staring at it one day whilst thinking about what I could do for the Queen’s Jubilee. It just so happened that earlier that day I’d been served jelly at a friend’s house. All of a sudden I had the idea!”

“Jelly is the ultimate party celebration food,” adds Leith. “I love the idea of everyone taking part making their own jelly queen to create centrepieces for their street parties.”

lydialeith.com

CR in Print

Thanks for visiting the CR website, but if you are not also reading CR in print you’re missing out. Our April issue has a cover by Neville Brody and a fantastic ten-page feature on Fuse, Brody’s publication that did so much to foster typographic experimentation in the 90s and beyond. We also have features on charity advertising and new Pentagram partner Marina Willer. Rick Poynor reviews the Electric Information Age and Adrian Shaughnessy meets the CEO of controversial crowdsourcing site 99designs. All this plus the most beautiful train tickets you ever saw and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Thunderbirds in our Monograph supplement

The best way to make sure you receive CR in print every month is to subscribe – you will also save money and receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month. You can do so here.

Illustrator Jack Hudson has just completed two A0 poster commissions from Channel 4, each designed to show how a particular department functions and which are to be displayed internally in its Channel 4’s London HQ…

“This piece of work is the biggest, most time consuming project I have ever produced,” says Hudson of this particular piece (above) which sees Channel 4’s online team imagined as a busy city with four separate harbours.

“All the harbours are outputting new products and TV shows to the audience which is represented by the surrounding residential area at the top of the composition, ” explains Hudson. “Also there are a number of race cars that represent exactly what departments collaborate with which.”

There’s some great detail in the work, we particularly like the jet skier jumping through a ring of fire:

Hudson also produced the above poster for the Product Management team at Channel 4 which depicts it as one of several cogs within a bigger mechanism, all of which have to work together to do their job. Here are some detail crops:

We guess runners, interns and new recruits will have to study these posters on their first day at Channel 4. And maybe refer to them regularly to help understand how all the departments work together!

The posters were commissioned and art directed by INT Works.

See more of Hudson’s work at jack-hudson.com

CR in Print

Thanks for visiting the CR website, but if you are not also reading CR in print you’re missing out. Our April issue has a cover by Neville Brody and a fantastic ten-page feature on Fuse, Brody’s publication that did so much to foster typographic experimentation in the 90s and beyond. We also have features on charity advertising and new Pentagram partner Marina Willer. Rick Poynor reviews the Electric Information Age and Adrian Shaughnessy meets the CEO of controversial crowdsourcing site 99designs. All this plus the most beautiful train tickets you ever saw and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Thunderbirds in our Monograph supplement

The best way to make sure you receive CR in print every month is to subscribe – you will also save money and receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month. You can do so here.

Eloise Renouf at home in the United Kingdom.

Eloise Renouf is a talented pattern designer and illustrator whom we first got to know through her Etsy shop. Janine purchased a print and collage from Eloise some time ago and with issue #13’s theme about how weather inspires creativity, Eloise was the perfect person to ask to create the cover art.

Eloise just received her copies (thanks to the quick magic of Fedex!) and writes: “Thank you so much for the lovely package of magazines which arrived here this morning! I’m absolutely thrilled with them and I think they look great. I hope you’re pleased with the way they turned out – the foiling was a master stroke! It’s such a beautiful magazine and everything about it is just lovely – it looks and feels really special. Have already enjoyed a quick flip but am going to settle down with a cuppa for a proper read. Happy days!”

There’s a feature written by Vinciane De Pape about Eloise in this issue where you can read more about her process and inspiration.

A flower print available on Etsy.

BFI Publishing and CR are pleased to announce that Benio Urbanowicz, a third year student from Kingston University, is the winner of our competition to design a cover for a 20th anniversary edition of the BFI Film Classic book on Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now

CR and BFI Publishing invited students to create artwork for the special edition cover which will form part of a set of 12 new covers for the BFI Film Classics series’ 20th anniversary, to be published in August. The winning design (below) was chosen by a panel of judges including Rebecca Barden, BFI Publishing, senior publisher; Sophia Contento, BFI Publishing senior production editor; Patrick Burgoyne, editor, Creative Review; Rob Winter, publisher, Sight &Sound and the original book’s author Mark Sanderson.

Speaking aboout his idea for the cover, Urbanowicz says “I managed to find a beige coat I thought looked similar to the coat from the film in Oxfam, then crafted a hood out of cartridge paper and added it to the coat. Then I stuffed the coat with newspaper to make it look as if someone was wearing it. Suspended on string from the ceiling, I poured red gloss over the jacket and let it drip slowly, whilst adjusting my lighting. Shot against a neutral background, I was able to use Photoshop to extract every red tone in my photograph, which I layered onto a charcoal background.”

This clip documents the process

You can see more of Urbanowicz’s work here and here.

As well as seeing his work in print, Urbanowicz also wins a set of all twelve anniversary editions and an invitation to the series launch events.

There were two joint runners-up. Mina Bach of LCC created this artwork which the judges particulalry liked for its imaginative use of the red coat motif that is such a strong part of the film’s iconography and its reference to another major theme from the film, the waterways in Venice:

While John Walker of the University of Huddersfield referenced a still from the film itself to great effect in his entry

The following entries were highly commedend by the judges:

Dan Jones, Kingston University

Frederick Goodchild, LCC

Hannah Myatt, Kingston University

Hannah Rollings, University of Brighton

Jacek Rudzki, Kingston University

Julie Sheridan, Glasgow School of Art

Madeline Whitty, Kingston University

Poppy Panter-Whitlock, University of the West of England

Rafael Farias, RCA

Richard Buffery, Coventry University

Simeng Zhao, Kingston University

Thanks to everyone who entered. Here are the rest of the covers that will form the 20th anniversary set.

CR in Print

Thanks for visiting the CR website, but if you are not also reading CR in print you’re missing out. Our April issue has a cover by Neville Brody and a fantastic ten-page feature on Fuse, Brody’s publication that did so much to foster typographic experimentation in the 90s and beyond. We also have features on charity advertising and new Pentagram partner Marina Willer. Rick Poynor reviews the Electric Information Age and Adrian Shaughnessy meets the CEO of controversial crowdsourcing site 99designs. All this plus the most beautiful train tickets you ever saw and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Thunderbirds in our Monograph supplement

The best way to make sure you receive CR in print every month is to subscribe – you will also save money and receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month. You can do so here.

The Shatner Show, front coverillustration by Doug Fraserillustration by Zina Saundersilllustration by Marc Burckhardtillustration by Karen KlassenLego sculpture by Sean Kenney

He’s 81 years young today. And going strong! In honour of his birthday, I have unearthed The Captain’s Blog, the archive of posts I did in support of The Shatner Show, a book that we published in 2007.

76 illustrations of his life and career by 76 talented illustrators. Buy the book!

Follow Shatner on Twitter. He’s trying to reach 1,000,000 followers for his birthday.