I’m Business Mouse, Yeah?

Modern Toss‘s latest animated creation is a no nonsense, machine gun-toting MD. And he’s got a few mill to spend on the next big thing…

In the first über-sweary episode, Business of Leisure, BM encounters a budding entrepreneur with a keen nose for an idea.

Business Mouse is one of Channel 4’s latest Comedy Blaps.

Written & Directed by: Jon Link, Mick Bunnage
Producer: Jane Harrison
Voices: Julie Burchill, Emma Fryer, Mark Kempner, Lawry Lewin

Character Design & Backgrounds: Jon Link

Additional Artwork: Steve Campion, Charlie Evans

Animation: Le Singe Media

Supervising Animator: Tom Matuszewski

Animators: Robin Brindle, Jack Bonnington, Scott Weston

Editors: Rob Hill, Tom Matuszewski

Dubbing Mixer: Simon Couzens
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Business Affairs: David Cuff

Mike Holmes

Lui è Mike Holmes.
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Mike Holmes

The Adventures of Tom The Lion

We featured Tom The Lion‘s slip-cased 10 inch vinyl album release the other week (view that post here) but we’ve just clapped eyes on the wooden-boxed CD album (released today) and felt it warranted its own post…

Also created by Daniel Mason of Something Else, the hinged lid of the wooden box is screenprinted with the Tom The Lion illustration by Konstantinos Gargaletsos. Open the brass clasp and inside are two CDs housed in uncoated card CD wallets. One is the 13 track album (tracks from his two double 10″ vinyl EPs), the other contains a number of live recordings. A folded bible paper sheet contains all the lyrics and sleeve notes, and there are also two photographs included. Here are some pictures:

The wooden box is screenprinted with the Tom The Lion logo illustration on the front and the track names on the back. A simple brass clasp keeps the hinged lid shut.

This CD album package is exclusively available from Rough Trade records: roughtraderecords.com

tomthelion.co.uk

Details on Chip Kidd’s Batman: Death By Design

It’s no secret that Chip Kidd is a big Batman fan. In fact, just a couple of years back, we were talking about exactly that, when we wrote about the famous design keeping tabs in his journal of all things Batman-related at that year’s Comic-Con. Now it seems that Kidd is making that love official, with the news coming last month that DC Comics had brought aboard Kidd to pen a full-length graphic novel and artist Dave Taylor to visually bring it to life. Though the news about Batman: Death By Design, which is set to be released sometime next year, has been circulating since mid-October, there have been a number of great interviews with both Kidd and Taylor out there, with new illustrations popping up from the book here and there. We point you first to Newsarama, who recently interviewed Kidd, learning that one of the story’s main villains is a new creation made by the designer himself. Named Exacto, Kidd describes him as “an architectural critic as a Batman villain.” Comic Book Resources also has a great talk with the designer from right after the NYCC event, wherein he talks a bit more about the artistic direction the book will be taking. Here’s a bit about coming up with the name and where it all goes from there:

I actually came up with the title first. I thought, “If it’s me and you know who I am and what I do, then I’m going to come at this whole thing from a design standpoint.” I’ve said for many years that Batman himself and especially the way he’s evolved is brilliant design. It’s problem solving. And we get into that in the story. Beyond that, it became about me going “What if?” What do I want that I haven’t seen? And really, the overall Art Direction for the book is “What if Fritz Lang made a Batman movie in the late 1930s and had a huge budget? Go!” There’s the visual platform.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The epic tale of a man and a whale

Storia illustrata di un uomo e una balena. Editore Grafiche Vecchi per la collana Les Visionnaires. Disegnato da Daniele Margara.

The epic tale of a man and a whale

The epic tale of a man and a whale

The epic tale of a man and a whale

Kiehl’s seasonal holiday campaign

Philadelphia-based illustrator Andy Rementer has created a seasonal instore campaign for cosmetics brand Kiehl’s. The campaign consists of a host of drawn characters and objects – including Kiehl’s products – which appear in shop window displays, on window stickers and even as cutouts placed around Kiehl’s stores…

The campaign rolls out across Kiehl’s stores worldwide though the images shown here were taken in and outside the brand’s flagship store in New York’s East Village.

“The brief from the creative team in-house at Kiehl’s was essentially to bring my world of characters and color to Kiehl’s,” Rementer tells us. “Their roots are in the East Village of New York, which served as a subtle theme throughout the project. There’s a fun mix of urban, holiday and weirdo characters throughout.”

As well as featuring window treatments, in-store displays (including die-cut characters and objects) Rementer’s work also adorns shopping bags, and there are even some short animations which appear in the stores.

Kiehl’s has also produced a fun online app that allows visitors to the site adorn their own photographs with Rementer’s illustrations – to create special emailable seasons greetings cards. Choose to adorn yours or your loved ones’ faces with cartoon moustaches, hats and glasses – and add some of Rementer’s Kiehl’s characters to the scene too!

To create your own Kiehl’s greeting card, visit kiehls.com

See more of Rementer’s work at andyrementer.com

Credits:

Creative director: Maria Gustafson
Art direction: Travis Cain, Yumiko Takagi-Azam
Design/Layout: Takuna Watanabe, and JiYoung Hwang
Copy: Steve Marchione

Biological curiosities

Currently running at The Dead Dolls Club in London until November 27, Specimen is an exhibition by Jennie Webber, Polly Alizarin Harvey and Rebecca Hiscocks which looks to explore the freakier side of biology through prints, collage, illustrations, installations and even specially designed wallpaper…

The three exhibitors, who are all currently studying for an MA in Illustration at London’s Camberwell College of Arts, are members of the Curio collective, and this is their second group show. “Our work sits together well as our combined interests span science, medical history, anatomy, and nature’s errors,” explains Webber, whose own work is inspired by genetic mutations, rare conditions, deformities and biological experiments. “The imagery [in the show] is bizarre, weird, freaky, and some verges on macabre,” she adds.


Basin, by Jennie Webber


Bouquet, also by Webber


Outbreak by Polly Alizarin Harvey


Above and below – Rebecca Hiscocks’ works in the show are based on the anatomical etchings of William Cheselden (1788-1752), a member of the London Company of Barber-Surgeons, and stories relating to London’s St Barts and St Thomas’ hospitals from that period

Specimen runs until November 27 at The Dead Dolls Club, 145 Well Street, London, E9 7LJ

thedeaddollsclub.com

 

 

CR in Print

Not getting Creative Review in print too? You’re missing out.

In print, Creative Review carries far richer, more in-depth articles than we run here on the blog. This month, for example, we have nine pages on Saul Bass, plus pieces on advertising art buyers, Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who ensured that Coke will forever be linked with Santa Claus, Postmodernism, Brighton’s new football ground and much more. Plus, it’s our Photography Annual, which means an additional 85 pages of great images, making our November issue almost 200-pages long, the biggest issue of CR for 5 years.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Hellraisers, the graphic novel

Forget Frankie Cocozza and his ITV-sanctioned revelry, new graphic novel Hellraisers follows the adventures of “four of the greatest boozers of all time”, Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed…

Written by Robert Sellers and drawn by JAKe, Hellraisers (published by SelfMadeHero) is effectively a joint biography of the four British actors, known perhaps as much for their drink-related antics as their cinematic performances. (Reed sadly managed to combine the two in the end, consuming a fatal amount of rum whilst on location for Gladiator; his final scenes completed with the aid of CGI.)

The story itself concerns a lone pub drinker called Martin who is visited by the actors, each taking him on a tour of their lives, loves and various descents into boozy chaos. The point being that while this generation of hellraisers sought to shake up the acting establishment – and had a good time doing so – this did not come without its problems, and JAKe’s art is perfectly suited to portraying these handsome, dishevelled, and ultimately tragic characters.

Without spoiling the ending, Martin’s time with the Hellraisers is enough to make him think about his own boozing. The episode recalling Reed’s time on Michael Aspel’s talk show, for example, is something no-one would ever want to recreate:

Here’s Richard Harris telling of his casting in a stage production of Camelot:

And here’s another of Oliver Reed antics, appearing to eat koi from a hotel fishpond while filming The Three Musketeers in Madrid in 1973. The ‘fish’ were in fact fish-shaped pieces of carrot that Reed had fashioned the night before and added to the pool. More on that story, here.

Hellraisers is published by SelfMadeHero on November 19; £14.99

Opinion: the 2012 Olympics artists posters

‘My three year-old could’ve done that’: Pierre Soulages’ poster for Munich 1972 (left) and Howard Hodgkin’s poster for the London 2012 Olympics (right)

The 2012 Olympics artists’ posters come from a fine tradition of involving the visual arts in the Games, but they have left designers and illustrators feeling further frustrated and excluded

First, some context. For the 1972 Games (for many designers the ultimate Olympics for visual expression) the organising committee decided to produce a series of posters to “represent the intertwining of sports and art worldwide”. This Artists series was to be in addition to the more functional Sports and Culture poster series produced under the direction of Otl Aicher’s team. In collaboration with a publisher, 28 artists produced images for the series which were turned into posters for sale. The series was successful, generating over 2m Deutschmarks for the Organising Committee (more here).

Munich poster by Horst Antes

The London 2012 posters are attempting to revive this “artistic tradition”, a decision for which LOCOG should be applauded, but this context hasn’t been made very clear. Commenter simondk summarised the issue on our post announcing the posters “Perhaps the problem here is the description of these as ‘Posters’. If they had been titled as ‘Prints’ taken from works of art inspired by the Olympics and Paralympics, then I suspect they could be seen for what they are – a series of individual creative responses to the events with no purpose other than to communicate that artist’s emotional response, and perhaps then be criticised on the basis of their artistic merit.
 By calling them Posters, the Olympic Organising Committee puts them into a more commercial arena in my mind, where some of those parameters we are all familiar with come into play – communication objectives, visual messaging and an understanding of the audience to name but a few – and to my mind, it is here where these fail. I can admire and respect them as works of art, but I cannot see how they work as posters for the Olympics.”

The artists were given a brief which “encouraged them to celebrate the Games coming to London and to look at the values of the Olympic or Paralympic Games”. The responses are just as varied and at times obtuse as those of the Munich artists. What, for example, would today’s blog commenters have made of Hans Hartung’s 1972 response (above)?

Or that of Serge Poliakoff?

Max Bill?

Josef Albers?

Do they represent Munich? Do they directly depict Olympic events? No, because they weren’t asked to. There were other posters for that purpose.

 

 

And it wasn’t just for the Munich games that artists were encouraged to produce imagery. Over the past three years the Century of Olympic Posters exhibition has been touring the UK providing further examples of the sometime controversial intersection of art and sport. Here, for example, is Per Arnoldi’s poster for the 1996 Paralympics – anyone else find the misshapen rings a clumsily offensive metaphor for the disabled athletes?

 

And what about this poster for the Montreal games? Does it say ‘Montreal’ to you? Or Yong Seung-Choon’s spectacular Seoul poster?

(Have a look here for a complete list of the posters featured in the exhibition)

 

In commissioning contemporary artists to respond to the upcoming games, LOCOG has continued a tradition of longstanding: the eclectic nature of the responses and their varied quality are an inevitable part of that tradition. It’s just the way projects of this nature work: there will be good work, bad work and indiffererent work.

Amongst the design community there has been the suggestion that, had designers and illustrators been invited to respond to the same brief, the resulting images would have been a significant improvement on the artists’ efforts. I’m not sure there is much evidence of that. And I’m sure that had, say Peter Saville or Neville Brody been invited to design a poster commenters on here would have been queueing up to tear their work apart.

In my experience, designers and illustrators work best when responding to a tight brief or solving a visual problem. Give them as open a brief as the 2012 artists had and the results will be just as mixed. Don’t believe me? Have a look at the response to the Designers for Japan effort or LDF’s London Posters show.

Looking at the 2012 posters I can see some direct parallels with design poster projects I have been involved in. You have the works that virtually ignore the brief and just quote from existing practice (you might say Bridget Riley falls into this trap in the Olympics series).

 

The works that are more about the artist/designer themselves than the project theme (Tracey Emin).

 

And those that cause you to think, ‘no, sorry, I have no idea where this is coming from’ (Gary Hume?)

Out of every dozen or so, there will perhaps be two or three standouts – no more. In terms of the Olympics posters, those standouts for me would be Sarah Morris’s re-imagining of Big Ben,

Martin Creed’s riff on the winner’s podium

and Howard Hodgkin’s joyous Swimming.

 

But that’s an entirely subjective choice, as any response to this project will surely be.

Where I think the frustration for our readership comes in is that this is a high profile visual Olympics-related project from which they have been excluded. And one to which they feel eminently suited.

This comes on top of widespread disappointment (outrage even) over the logo, typeface and mascots, followed by the incredibly dreary ticketing advertising campaign. Our readership is itching to get involved in producing work for the Olympics that, in their eyes, will show off the best of what UK visual communications has to offer. Will they get the chance?

There is a whole raft of 2012 visual material to come but LOCOG has so far inspired little confidence that it possesses the ability to buy work that will blow us all away (the single ray of hope having been provided by Von’s Paralympic posters for McCann). It’s not been for a lack of trying from those involved. Sources close to 2012 have told CR about numerous projects involving leading designers and illustrators that were kyboshed by the client in favour of banal alternatives. Perhaps the problem dates back to the logo: LOCOG was brave to buy that piece of work, whatever you think of it aesthetically. And look where it got them. The fear is that, following the outcry over these artists’ posters, on top of that surrounding the logo, a mixture of fear of adverse public reaction and a lack of clear creative direction will result in an already timorous LOCOG shying away from anything the least bit adventurous in future.

Instead of providing a vehicle to celebrate our creative industries, there is a very real danger that the 2012 Games will forever be remembered by the visual communications community as a missed opportunity of truly Olympian proportions.

Related content
See our original post on the Olympics posters here

 

CR in Print

Not getting Creative Review in print too? You’re missing out.

In print, Creative Review carries far richer, more in-depth articles than we run here on the blog. This month, for example, we have nine pages on Saul Bass, plus pieces on advertising art buyers, Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who ensured that Coke will forever be linked with Santa Claus, Postmodernism, Brighton’s new football ground and much more. Plus, it’s our Photography Annual, which means an additional 85 pages of great images, making our November issue almost 200-pages long, the biggest issue of CR for 5 years.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Exhibition: Ghost of Gone Birds

London’s Rochelle School in Shoreditch is currently hosting an exhibition of images of 300 extinct birds created by artists including Jamie Hewlett, Ben Newman, Sir Peter Blake, Ralph Steadman, Margaret Atwood, Rob Ryan, Kai & Sunny, Le Gun (The Tragic Death of the White Gallinule, shown above) and Billy Childish…

The show, entitled Ghosts of Gone Birds, runs until November 23 and has been created in aid of BirdLife International‘s Preventing Extinctions programme. Over 100 artists were invited to choose an extinct bird and produce a piece of art inspired by that particular bird and celebrating its glory days. Birds celebrated in the show include the Dodo, the Matinique Amazon Parrot, the Black Mamo and the Great Auk. Here is a selection of some of our favourite works in the show:


Jamie Hewlett’s illustration of a Hawaiian Crow


This Bishop’s ‘O’O is by Ben Newman


Sculptor Harriet Mead created this King Island Emu


The Great Auk – as imagined by Bruce Pearson


Dead As A Dodo, by Sir Peter Blake


Jack Teagle‘s painting of a Black Mamo


Billy Childish created this image of a Reunion Owl


This is one of three pieces by Kai & Sunny designed to be shown as a triptych

This is the Pallas’s Cormorant by Ralph Steadman who, rather than simply pick one bird, has illustrated 100 birds specially for the exhibition

Ghosts of Gone Birds runs until November 23 at the Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, London E2 7ES

ghostsofgonebirds.com

CR in Print

Not getting Creative Review in print too? You’re missing out.

In print, Creative Review carries far richer, more in-depth articles than we run here on the blog. This month, for example, we have nine pages on Saul Bass, plus pieces on advertising art buyers, Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who ensured that Coke will forever be linked with Santa Claus, Postmodernism, Brighton’s new football ground and much more. Plus, it’s our Photography Annual, which means an additional 85 pages of great images, making our November issue almost 200-pages long, the biggest issue of CR for 5 years.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.