Barbican’s Blaze identity by Red

Red Design has just launched a new visual identity for Blaze, the Barbican’s summer festival of music and dance…

The Barbican’s Blaze festival is “a celebration of the boldest music from across the globe” and includes commissions and new works, open-air concerts, and special shows in venues across east London.

The process of photographing sets and models has enjoyed something of a resurgence of late, and in their take on the technique Red has nicely referenced the architecture of the Barbican towers in coloured paper.

“We want people to feel they could be pulled into this little world rather than just observing a flat image,” they explain. “One of our main challenges was to ensure the visuals targeted a wide audience; some of our initial attempts felt too young and naive and not necessarily suitable for the festivals adult attendees.

“We also had to convey that Blaze is a music festival; the addition of the stage and a few graphic elements such the music notes help to make this clear.” Red were also behind the design of last year’s Blaze identity, which can be seen, here.

Here’s a closer look at the 3D set in the Red studio:

And the finished identity, as used on the cover of the Blaze festival brochure:

Detail:

More details on the Blaze festival at barbican.org.uk/blaze.

Pick Me Up report

CR’s Gavin Lucas takes a tour around the Pick Me Up graphic arts fair and interviews some of the illustrators and designers whose work is on show

Film by Order

Pick Me Up is at Somerset House, London WC2 until March 27. There is a late night opening on Thursday 24th from 6pm-9pm, with music and live drawing from Heavy Pencil (with Jiggery Pokery, Jess Bonham, Chrissie Macdonald, Ben Fry, Andrew Rae, Jim Stoten and more)

 

CR in print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog, but if you’re not reading us in print too, you’re missing out on a richer, deeper view of your world. Our April issue features our Top 20 logos of all time. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)207 292 3703. Better yet, subscribe to CR, save yourself almost a third and get Monograph for free plus a host of special deals from the CR Shop. Go on, treat yourself.

CR for CR: thank you

Over past week we have been running a series of auctions to benefit Comic Relief. The last of those has now finished. Thank you to everyone who donated their money, time or stuff

First up, we sold 10 subscriptions to CR at £35 each (usual price £64) with all the money (after eBay fees) going to Comic Relief.

Then we had a rare James Jarvis World of Pain Policeman who went for £50, here.

Next, illustrator Paul Davis kindly agreed to draw a portrait of the highest bidder at his studio. It went for £310 here.

Then Blanka donated artist’s proofs of its two most popular items: Build’s Night and Day Moon prints. Night, here went for £205 and day, here for £122.

Blanka also donated an artist’s proof of its lovingly produced 2008 reprint of the classic Wim Crouwel Vormgevers poster, signed by Wim himself. It went (to Gary Hustwit of Helvetica the movie fame) for £330 here.

Our friends over at Monocle contributed a lovely A2, 4 colour poster with gold-foil detailing of an ecologically sustainable urban district, envisioned by Alejandro Gutierrez and illustrated by Satoshi Hashimoto. It went for £73 here.

The biggest winning bid, however, went on Tom Gauld‘s artist’s proof of his popular Characters for an Epic Tale print. It went for a whopping £670 here.

Moving away from posters and prints, director Dougal Wilson donated an original puppet from his Grammy-nominated promo film for Coldplay’s Life in Technicolour II. It made £360 here.

Nintendo sent us a special edition DSi, complete with Pokémon Black game, which was a bargain at £102 here, while a Depeche Mode deluxe box set of Sounds of the Universe here made £46.

More prints: three rare and tasty-looking A3 digital prints by graphic artist Rob Flowers, with never-to-be-repeated packaging went here for £77 and a James Jarvis Sole Inspector print, donated by footwear connoisseurs Art & Sole went here for £87.

We also had bundles of fantastic books from Laurence King and Picador. The Laurence King ones, here, made £122 and the Picador ones here earned £88.

For fashion lovers, artist and designer Petra Börner donated two signed pieces of original artwork: clown here made £28, cocoa beans here £77.

Plus, some of the peeps at Peepshow donated nice things too. A Space Cowboy print by Spencer Wilson, here made £77.67. Chrissie Macdonald‘s paper shredder made from paper image (shot by John Short) here, made £36. Andrew Rae‘s limited edition, signed Mob screenprint here, made £51 and Miles Donovan‘s similarly signed and limited edition Giclee print here made £35.

And then we had two more people offering to give up their time for charidee. For those without the cash to splash, we set up a prize draw for a young creative team to win a 30-minute crit with M&C Saatchi’s Executive Creative Director Graham Fink. To enter the draw, we charged £5 a pop on our JustGiving page. £170.50 plus £26.80 in Gift Aid was raised.

Finally, Adrian Shaughnessy offered an entire set of Unit Editions books plus half a day’s consultancy to help a design studio improve its business. He went for £715 here.

Total: £4208.97

Thank you to everyone who bid, everyone who bought and everyone who donated.

Wildlife Series

L’illustrateur anglais Iain Macarthur propose une nouvelle série de visuels autour des animaux intitulée “Wildlife”. Toujours dans un style étoffé et composés d’éléments naturels et de motifs géométriques, ses oeuvres impressionnent par leur richesse. Plus d’images dans la suite.



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Previously on Fubiz

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Say ‘I Do’ to Adrian Tomine’s Prenuptial Mini-Memoir

At a time of year when bethrothed couples from Albuquerque to Zurich are imploring you to “Save the Date!” for their summer nuptials, cartoonist and illustrator Adrian Tomine offers a peek into his own path to the altar in Scenes from an Impending Marriage (Drawn and Quarterly). The little blue book chronicles the adventures of Tomine and his bride-to-be, Sarah, as they navigate the wedding planning process, from guest list politics and venue selection to dance lessons and “an even-handed acknowlegement of both families’ cultural heritages” (taiko drummers versus bagpipe players, both of which are ultimately nixed by Tomine “in the name of cultural sensitivity and harmony”). A charming series of comic vignettes depicts the increasingly anxious couple meeting with one D.J. Buttercream (“please, just call me Bryan”) and sparring about wedding favors, until Sarah hits upon the idea of an illustrated book of short comics about the trials and tribulations of wedding preparations (how meta!). Our favorite scene takes place in the department store where the couple has chosen to register for wedding gifts. “It looks like everyone’s casually aiming a gun at wicker tissue box holders or whatever!” says Tomine’s cartoon doppelganger at the sight of affianced twosomes armed with bar-code scanners. “It’s emblematic of our whole culture: ‘I want lots of stuff and I want to shoot a gun!’”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Japan: how to respond?

The creative community, appalled by events in Japan, has rushed to help. But is the resultant plethora of fundraising prints and posters an adequate or appropriate response? And does visual communications have a longer-term role to play in disaster relief?

Just as happened with Haiti, almost as soon as news of the awful earthquake in Japan spread across the world, they started to appear: fund-raising posters produced by designers, ad agencies and illustrators anxious to do their bit. The logic is straightforward – buy the poster and the proceeds go to aid those in need.

But this approach has not gone unquestioned. There’s a good debate about the issues over at Eye plus Johnson Banks has also summarised the arguments on its Thought for the Week page. In a piece for the Fast Company website, writer John Pavlus called a poster (above) created by Signalnoise that has raised over $7000 for the Canadian Red Cross “fundamentally grotesque”. “Shouldn’t our desire to donate come from actual compassion, not as a side effect of our fascination with pretty artifacts?” Pavlus asked.

The QBN forum has also been debating the topic, asking whether the desire to create such posters is driven as much by self-promotion as it is by a genuine desire to help. And just what are the buyers of such posters supposed to do with them once they get them home? Does anyone really want an image of a crying Japanese flag hanging on their wall? Is such a poster’s presence serving merely, as Pavlus writes, “as some sick, bragging monument to my own willingness to ‘help’?”

These are important questions to ask, but I really don’t believe such posters’ makers are primarily or even substantially motivated by self-promotion. It seems to me entirely legitimate that imagemakers should respond to an urge to help by making an image – it’s what they do. It’s why musicians, respond to the same urge with benefit gigs or charity records.

Wieden + Kennedy’s poster to raise funds for Japan, available here

Why do we have to buy things at all in order to donate? Shouldn’t we just donate directly to charity without acquiring a poster or a CD along the way?

Many do just that, but the history of charity fundraising suggests that, as humans, we often need a little prompting in order to contribute. Everything from Live Aid, through charity auctions down to a raffle for the local hospice or a sponsored walk for a day centre exists because of this. In an ideal world, we would all make charitable donations entirely unbidden, but experience shows that sometimes we need helping along, whether by a concert from a favourite band or just by an old lady shaking a collecting tin and giving us a sticker.

One of the organisations that is involved on the ground in Japan is ShelterBox which delivers emergency aid via distinctive green boxes packed with vital equipment and supplies.

Go to the Get Involved section on its website and its position seems quite clear “By organising, or taking part in an event that raises funds for ShelterBox,” it says “you will be directly providing aid for people affected by disasters all over the world.” For an imagemaker, a simple and cost-effective way to do that is to make a print and sell it. In doing so, chances are they will end up channeling more much-needed cash ShelterBox’s way than if they had just stuck their hand in their pocket and donated directly.

Perhaps some of our community’s unease over the charity poster stems from feelings of inadequacy in comparison to other areas of design. Architects, for example, with a desire to assist disaster relief have the skills to design emergency shelters. Product designers can create simple, cheap forms of heating food. Is a poster really the best we can do? What can visual communicators do to directly influence operations on the ground?

Photo: Rob Kollaard

One possible answer was proposed by Gert Dumbar and his son Derk in 2007. A Safe Place is a system of pictograms designed as a tool for communication between aid workers and victims of disasters. Giving people in disaster areas good and accurate information, the theory goes, can save many lives.

Are there other, similarly practical ways in which visual communicators can get involved? It’s something we are going to look at in the May issue of CR but if readers know of more examples, please let us know in the comments below.

Such projects would give our community the chance to get involved at a deeper, more long-term level. Reactive fundraising is valuable and welcome, but it also would be good to see visual communicators affecting disaster relief on the ground in a similarly positive way. Hopefully, our forthcoming piece will point up some opportunities.

All this has been on my mind of late not just because of the online debates but also because I have been involved in attempting to organise a response to the Japan disaster from the creative community.

Just over a week ago, a prominent designer called. He wanted to do something to help Japan, could CR help? The designer contacted friends and colleagues, many of whom had friends in Japan and who felt a great affinity for the country. All were keen to help in addition to donating money themselves, but how?

For a group of people with limited resources, selling Giclée prints is do-able and it’s effective. A very high proportion of the money raised in this way goes to the charity concerned as there are few up-front costs. Organisations like ShelterBox and the Red Cross who are engaged on the ground in Japan need cash and they need it quickly. Selling prints will provide it, so that route seemed sensible as a first response.

But it also seemed necessary to divorce the works from the disaster itself. There’s no need to illustrate what just happened, and no need to raise awareness. Contributors have been asked to concentrate not on the disaster but on why they love Japan, what makes it beautiful, unique and important to them. In this way we hope that the prints will have a longer life and will act not as a reminder of something awful but as a reminder of a moment when the creative community came together to support their friends and colleagues at a time of great need.

But what else can we do? A lot of people have offered items for auction, so that will happen soon. But besides fundraising, can this community help on the ground in any meaningful way? Do you know of any ways in which it is already doing so? Can we help to make sure that agencies are better equipped to respond to any future disaster?

Can we create a model for future disaster responses by the creative community? We will be setting up a website to act as a forum for suggestions and debate. We will be contacting Japanese designers and NGOs for their views but we would like to invite all CR readers to advise us also. Please let us know your suggestions in the comments below. If you know of anyone else who is already tackling these issues, please give us details.

UPDATE: really interesting Washington Post story here (linked by magCuture) on a local Japanese newspaper producing a handwritten edition. “People need food, water and, also, information.”

Press Here

The “Prince of Preschool’s” new book makes magic with little more than dots

Parisian art director and illustrator Hervé Tullet‘s childrens book “Press Here” uses a charmingly simple concept to keep children coming back for more while building their cognitive skills. Using just yellow, red and blue dots, Tullet encourages interaction with the book by tasking little ones with pressing or blowing on the dots, shaking the book, clapping their hands and more. Clever instructions stimulate wee minds, giving the resulting impression that they’re involved in some kind of magic trick.

“Press Here” sells from Chronicle Books or can be pre-ordered from Amazon.


CR for CR: DeLillo and Easton Ellis books

Earlier in the week Mark highlighted Picador’s new set of Don DeLillo books with covers by Noma Bar. The nice people at Picador have kindly agreed to donate a complete set of these books – 10 in total – along with a set of 6 Brett Easton Ellis paperbacks to aid Comic Relief.

The Easton Ellis paperbacks are a repackaged backlist released to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of Less Than Zero. The covers were designed by none other than the marvellous Chip Kidd.

If you’d like to bid to get your hands on these, you can bid for them here.

Galy Tots print by Ken Garland

The cover of Ken Garland’s catalogue for Galt Toys’ 1969/70 season has been made into a beautiful art print. You’ll have to be quick to get one mind, as only 25 have been produced by Jonny Trunk of Trunk Records…

In what is, surprisingly, the first fine art print to be made of Garland’s work, the charming ‘Galy Tots’ is for sale from the Trunk Records site and will also be available from Haji&White’s stand at the Mid Century Modern show at Dulwich College, London this Sunday March 20.

Produced by Jonny Trunk, each of the 60 x 42cm giclée art prints is annotated and signed by Garland and priced at £200. They are available from the Trunk site, here. Garland’s website is at kengarland.co.uk and an image of the original catalogue, produced by Ken Garland Associates in 1969, is here.

CR for CR: Laurence King book bundle

Publishers Laurence King have just given us a big box of books to auction off as part of this week’s CR for CR campaign…

The box contains the following bibliographic gems:

Whose Hair?
The 3D Type Book
Protest Stencil Toolkit
Pentagram Marks
Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books
The Picture Book

Two specially commissioned tote bags from their Tote Bag book
PLUS they’ll also add in a copy of ANY other Laurence King book that’s still in print (under £50)

Not bad eh?

Get bidding for this fantastic box of goodies, here.