Quote of Note | Marcel Dzama

“I’ve always remembered Where the Wild Things Are so clearly, which isn’t the case with most other children’s books. Wild Things was a favorite from the start. I remember looking at the images a lot and really studying [Maurice Sendak‘s] crosshatching at a young age—and even attempting to draw like him on my own. This was probably kindergarten, and so he was an early influence. All of the fantastic creatures—and especially the monsters…have such character and personality, and it’s so great that they’re not evil monsters but more co-conspirators. Maybe Maurice got me started on monsters and beasts, which pop in my work a lot, too.”

-Artist Marcel Dzama, in an interview with Spike Jonze that appears in Marcel Dzama: Sower of Discord, the sublime new monograph from Abrams

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Spheric Dialogues by James Jarvis

While his spherical characters are perhaps the most simple to execute on paper, James Jarvis‘ first book of their philosophising tackles some of the more complex questions in life…

During 2011, Jarvis managed to produce a single lino-print featuring his new sphere-shaped creations every week, selling the work via a blog and exhibiting the series at Beach London the following year.

At Typo London 2012 he also presented a personal A to Z, drawn live on stage, which touched on his own interest in philosophy – not to mention other favourites such as Conan the Barbarian and doom metal.

That same year Jarvis increased his spherical output to a drawing a day and added his philosophical streak on to the page. Now all 365 of these strips have been reproduced in Spheric Dialogues, which has just been published by Swiss press Nieves.

Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Aristotle, Kant and even Conan feature. And there’s plenty of existential swearing.

As a toy designer, Jarvis has said that his work is often constrained by production methods; working on exact plans for the toy’s design, adhering to tighter structures. But with the spheres, his drawing style can be much looser.

And much of the artwork Jarvis produced with his previous company, Amos, dealt in reduction, too. His characters were formed from simple lines and his drawing process often involved honing objects down in an attempt to capture the ‘essence’ of something on paper.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that his latest book should concern the existential thought of a group of shapes – they are his most reductive characters, but in Spheric Dialogues, also perhaps his most thoughtful. (OK, thoughtful and prone to occasional violence.)

It’s a rougher approach to drawing that Jarvis has been experimenting with since the publication of his first illustrated storybook, Vortigern’s Machine, which he produced with Russell Waterman in 2006. It’s drawing in a “free and unaffected” way, as he told Dazed and Confused magazine prior to the original show of sphere prints.

Philosophy has always found a home in the cartoon and comic strip, from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. In just a few panels character’s can question the meaning of life itself and, of course, the existence of their own artist-creator.

In Jarvis’ new book, the spheres get their heads around art, death, being and reality. Well, they are largely all ‘head’ after all.

Spheric Dialogues is published by Nieves ($28), and available from nieves.ch. An exhibition of work from the book is currently showing at colette in Paris (more here), with prints of the work for sale too. James Jarvis’ website is studiojarvis.com.

Interabang’s new home for Cardboard Citizens

London design agency Interabang has transformed homeless charity and theatre company Cardboard Citizens‘ new headquarters with illustrations by artist Roderick Mills.

Cardboard Citizens is the UK’s only homeless people’s professional theatre company, putting on plays performed by homeless and displaced actors. It also runs workshops and support programmes for homeless people, helping them to find jobs and housing.

The company was previously based in a small office with no rehearsal space, but recently moved to a former gallery in East London. Interabang was asked to customise the venue and has designed a charming and homely interior with a personal touch.

Mill’s black pen and paint doodles present an image of domesticity – books line one wall and picture frames another, filled with posters advertising past productions. There’s also a floor lamp, a telephone, a hoover, and a stag’s head above a door:

Other illustrations are a reference to the company’s past productions and annual activities. Signs above a bike rack pointing to London, Paris and Amsterdam represent the company’s annual fundraising cycle, while mice in sunglasses refer to a production of Three Blind Mice.

“We were asked by Cardboard Citizens’ CEO, Adrian Jackson, to create something a bit different with some personality,” explains Adam Giles, who co-founded Interabang with Ian McLean. “The space was amazing but it was quite sterile, so it was our aim to make it feel more like a home,” he adds.

Touring the building is designed to be “a little journey of discovery” says McLean, “and even if people don’t know what all the drawings mean, we hope they’ll enjoy them anyway,” he adds.

Most of Mills’ illustrations were produced in small scale on paper before being projected and painted on to walls. “I’ve admired Roderick’s work for years, and his style felt really appropriate for the project – we wanted it to feel like someone had come along and customised the building in their own slightly subversive way,” says McLean. “He was really enthusiastic about it, producing lots of his own brainstorms and doodles,” he says.

Interabang was also asked to design something to recognise the charity’s supporters and in keeping with the homely/theatre theme, created ‘Your Name in Lights’: an installation made up of painted lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling bearing the names of friends and patrons.

“We thought of a wall with names on but wanted to do something unique that tied in with the aesthetic of the space,” says Giles. “It’s something we can add to, and we thought it was a charming idea for a theatre group,” he adds.

Interabang has designed several projects for Cardboard Citizens, including annual reviews and the identity for a fundraising dinner at Draper’s Hall, and the charity is one of the agency’s oldest clients.”This felt like the culmination of our work with them – it was a dream brief and a lot of fun to do,” says McLean.

See more images of the interior here.

Miguel Cardona’s Coffee Cups for Charity: A San Francisco-based artist illustrates on the common to-go cup and donates all the proceeds to children in need

Miguel Cardona's Coffee Cups for Charity


by Eva Glettner Miguel Cardona is a professor of design and an illustrator with an unusual canvas: the paper coffee cup. No subject is off limits for Cardona—in fact, the more obscure, the better; be it…

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Wellcome Images releases 100,000 pictures online

Horoscope of Prince Iskandar (grandson of Timur who ruled the province of Farsin, Iran) showing the positions of the heavens at the moment of his birth on 25th April 1384. Wellcome Library, London

The Wellcome Library, one of the world’s leading collections of medical history, has announced that over 100,000 pictures from its archives are now freely available from its Images pages online…

In a move similar to the British Library’s recent announcement that it had uploaded over a million images to Flickr, the Wellcome Library has now also decided that a large selection of its images – dedicated to the history of health and medicine – should be made free for use under the Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Illustration of an ‘exploded thorax’ (1823) by Paulo Mascagni, Prosector of Anatomy at the University of Siena. Wellcome Library, London

This means that the images downloaded from wellcomeimages.org can be used for personal or commercial use, providing an acknowledgement to the original source is given.

Images in the digitised collection range from scans of paintings, illustrations and manuscripts to early examples of photography. As one would expect with a medical archive, the oldest examples from which go back two thousand years, there are many weird and wonderful pictures to explore, from a Paolo Mascagni’s coloured etching of an ‘exploded’ torso (above), to a sketch of a female genital tattoo.

Photogravure by Eadweard Muybridge of a man standing on his hands (1887). Wellcome Library, London

“Together the collection amounts to a dizzying visual record of centuries of human culture, and our attempts to understand our bodies, minds and health through art and observation,” says Simon Chaplin, head of the Wellcome Library. “As a strong supporter of open access, we want to make sure these images can be used and enjoyed by anyone without restriction.”

A classic dentist’s trick: ‘A surgeon holding a dental key behind his back to conceal it from the patient’ by Luciano Nezzo (born 1856). Wellcome Library, London

The Wellcome Images website is at wellcomeimages.org.

The Book of Everyone

Ad creatives Jason Bramley, Jonny Biggins and Steve Hanson have launched a website selling personalised books that combine randomly generated trivia with artwork from leading illustrators.

The Book of Everyone offers 50-page digital, paper or hardback books. Customers are asked to enter the name and date of birth of the person they’d like to make a book for, followed by their own name, and a preview is ready to view in around thirty seconds. Users can then edit some pages further, choosing subjects the recipient is most likely think about or super powers that would best suit their personality.

The finished result is a collection of weird and fascinating facts illustrated by creatives including Brosmind, Jean Julien, Malike Favre, MVM, Ian Stevenson and Supermundane.

Trivia includes the likely weight of all the food you’ve consumed in your life time or how many heart beats you’ve experienced, as well as the usual list of chart hits, popular TV shows and world leaders on the day/year/month you were born. Stats in each book are generated using a custom database that contains more than 130,000 scenarios and took developers Hugh Williams and Dan Evans-Jones two years to make.

Of course, personalised books are nothing new but Biggins, Bramley and Hanson felt there was still a gap in the market, which is why they decided to launch the business in 2012.

“We decided to build a technology platform that could create a beautiful personalised book around anyone in a few seconds…something that was well written rather than skimming off the web and tha used a great roster of designers and illustrators to make every page. We wanted every book to feel upbeat and celebratory, with lots of little curious facts and weird witticisms to keep you leafing through,” say Hanson and Biggins.

To celebrate its launch, The Book of Everyone is hosting an exhibition at KK Outlet featuring work from contributing illustrators and a collection of sample books. Biggins and Hanson also say they are interested in launching greetings cards and merchandising but have no fixed plans just yet.

“It’s a great opportunity to work with lots of different styles and work with loads of great artists, [and] we really encourage the collaborators to have fun and make their own interpretation of the assignment,” say the pair.


Supermundane, you can store 1,000 terabytes of memories in your head.

As it’s all compiled digitally, The Book of Everyone lacks a certain hand-crafted appeal but the custom platform makes ordering one quick and simple. Each copy includes some excellent illustrations and Biggins and Hanson say they will be commissioning new work on a regular basis.

“We really want to work with all the illustrators again, while at the same time adding adding to the list of great people that we work with. The nature of The Book of Everyone means that we are always looking for new contributors,” they add.

Malika Favre

Jean Julienthe word eco terrorist was added to the diction

 

Patrick Kyle, the Gameboy was the biggest selling toy in 1989

The Book of Everyone launch takes place at KK Outlet, London N1 6PB on Thursday January 30. For details see thebookofeveryone.co

Link About It: This Week’s Picks : A Twitter-shaped short story, Google’s new Nest, Four Tet’s “Thriller” and more in our weekly look at the web

Link About It: This Week's Picks


1. Hero-Glyphics Designer, illustrator and self-proclaimed nerd, Josh Lane perfectly blends hieroglyphics with mythical superheroes through his series of “hero-glyphics,” in which the likes of Spiderman, the X Men and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles get the…

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Denis Carrier for GoldCoast Skateboards : The French illustrator creates a cheeky graphic for the California-based board maker

Denis Carrier for GoldCoast Skateboards


Split between Utah and California, GoldCoast Skateboards makes everything one needs to enjoy life on four urethane wheels. With design-minded graphics and a focus on having fun, the brand connects…

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Soviet Film Posters of the Silent Screen

The Gallery of Russian Art and Design’s latest exhibition includes rarely seen posters promoting silent films from the 1920s. Open until March, it offers a fascinating look at early film advertising and the use of cinematic techniques in print communications.

Kino/Film: Soviet Posters of the Silent Screen was curated by GRAD director Elena Sudakova and art historian Lutz Becker. While the 30 posters on show were mass produced, few copies of them exist today and several have never been exhibited in the UK until now.

The Russian Government invested heavily in silent film in the 1920s – a state controlled organisation, Sovkino, was appointed to oversee the distribution of foreign films and revenue generated from ticket sales was used to fund domestic propaganda productions such as Sergei Eisentein’s October and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg, which celebrate the October Revolution of 1917.

Posters promoting domestic and foreign titles were produced by a subsidiary department, Reklam Films, led by designer Yakov Ruklevsky, who appointed a number of young creatives including Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg, Izrail Bograd, Grigorii Borisov, Nikolai Prusakov, Mikhail Dlugach, Aleksandr Naumov and Semen Semenov Menes. Some went on to design adverts for consumer goods while others specialised in set design and political posters, but all used the same vivid colours, experimental typography and avante garde techniques.

As the films were produced in black and white, designers were free to experiment with vivid blocks of colour, such as in the Stenberg’s print promoting 1926 film The Three Million Case (above). Propaganda art of the time was mostly limited to one or two colours but Reklam’s film posters used three.

Many of the works shown in the exhibition also feature large floating heads, acting in the same way as close-up stills in film posters today. As Alexandra Chiriac explains in an accompanying book, stills could not be directly transferred onto posters, so artists drew scenes and characters by hand from projections. Their layouts were later transferred by craftsmen onto stone or zinc plates using litho crayon or ink.

As well as employing vivid colours and close-ups, Reklam’s designers used a range of cinematic techniques that were pioneered in the films they promoted – such as repetition, asymmetric viewpoints and dramatic foreshortenings. These distorted proportions were often created by toying with the angle or size of projections, creating dramatic and often eerie or unsettling artwork.

These techniques were employed with the sole intention of startling passers by – according to Chiriac, the Stenbergs once declared: “We produce a poster that is noticeable…designed to shock, to hold attention…To reach this aim, we treat the source material with total freedom, which is also spurred on by the size of the poster. We do not preserve proportionality between several objects and are turning figures upside down – in short, we employ everything that could stop even a hurrying passer by in his tracks”.

While the works on display are rarely seen today, they were exhibited in Russia in 1925 and 1926, and samples were filed at the Lenin Library at the insistence of art critic and politician Lunacharski. The GRAD show is a rare chance to see these iconic works up close in the size and format their designers intended.

Posters also featured in Sudakov and Becker’s book (priced at £25) and GRAD is hosting a series of accompanying events including film screenings and a panel discussion on January 22. See grad-london.com for details.

Kino/Film: Soviet Posters of the Silent Screen is open at the Grad Gallery, 3-4a Little Portland Street, London W1W 7JB until March 29 2014.

Front to back: The Metamorphosis

For WW Norton’s new translation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, book cover designer Jamie Keenan reworked an old Italian typeface to form the shape of the ‘transformation’ itself. For the second in our series examining the design process behind a single cover or series, we talk to Keenan about how he made it…

New York-based publishers WW Norton’s edition of Kafka’s classic tale is in a new translation by Susan Bernofsky and features an introduction by film director David Cronenberg. The famous story concerns travelling salesman Gregor Samsa who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into an insect. Norton’s art director Albert Tang approached British designer Keenan with the cover commission.

According to Tang his requirement was simply for “something really cool, hip and [that] stands out among the numerous other copies out there.”

“Generally with book covers you’re attempting to sell a story, mood, style, idea and everything else to someone who knows little or nothing about the book at all,” says Keenan. “The cover is like a corporate identity that has to convey everything about the book in a couple of seconds. Which is why, when just about any book becomes successful, it’s not unusual to see covers on other books appear that imitate the feel of that original to grab the attention of people who have become familiar with its visual language.”

Working on the cover of a classic presents the designer with a slightly different challenge. “The need for the cover to communicate everything about the book is no longer so important,” he says.

“You can rely on people’s existing knowledge of the book and use (or even abuse) that knowledge in some way. Also, once a classic is no longer under copyright, you can buy a few different versions of it – the cheapest version of Metamorphosis on Amazon is just £1.70, so you have to attempt to give people some reason to buy your version.”

For the design of the cover, Keenan says he quickly decided upon “the idea of turning the title of The Metamorphosis into the cover image – and I knew I wanted to get across that shiny black quality that beetles have and that weirdo, fiddly, twitchy thing that a lot creepy crawly things have, too.

“This attempt to get across the feeling of ‘fiddlyness’ led to me finding a scan of an old Italian typeface that instantly conveyed that quality and also had enough solid sections for the shiny black part of the equation,” says Keenan. “Fairly quickly a combination of this typeface and some legs donated by an image of a stag beetle produced the cover that pretty much ended up on the final thing.”

Most of the letters that Keenan used on the final cover have been tweaked in some way – curlicues are moved to a different part of the letter, or removed altogether – though the ‘S’ remains as it was in the original font, with the addition of a beetle leg.

The really clever part of the design, however, is how Keenan has balanced the letters in order to create the beetle shape. The ‘M’ forms a symmetrical head; the first ‘O’ helps to form the centre of the body, with other letters flanking it for limbs; while the ‘SIS’ formation neatly closes off the end of the shape.

“The secondary font is much straighter with just a hint of the Gothic about it, while being straight enough to ensure it doesn’t fight for attention,” adds Keenan of the type used to display the rest of the text on the cover. “And the finished version is embossed and uses a gloss to give the beetle a bit of added shine.”

Early version of the cover with different secondary type and less prominence to Kafka’s name

When presented with the first draft of the cover last year, Tang was more than satisfied that the idea would work, as this amusing email exchange between him and Keenan reveals (reading from the bottom).

The Metamorphosis is published this month by WW Norton; $10.95. More of Keenan’s work is at keenandesign.com.