Hasta La Ideas

Our bumper February issue features the selected work in our first ever Type Annual plus Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Nexus Interactive Arts and more

Our cover this month (which is printed on the rather marvellous Conqueror Iridescent Silica Blue) was created by Jonathan Puckey using the Scriptographer drawing tool. He also created the back cover which introduces the Type Annual.

We’ll be posting more about the how the cover was created soon.

Inside the Type Annual, our Best in Book winners include Park House, a bespoke typeface by NB and Jeremy Tankard

Plus Jean Francois Porchez’s Retiro for Madriz magazine

and Rubal by Atelier Télescopique for a French secondary school

Selected work is split into four categories: Display, Bespoke, Non-Latin and Text

In the issue, our Case Study feature looks at Havas City’s packaging for French supermarket Monoprix

Adrian Shaughnessy, in an extract from Unit Editions’ Supergraphics book, interviews supergraphics pioneer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

And Eliza Williams reports on Nexus Interactive Arts, a new offshoot of the production company that aims to smooth the path between media artists and ad agencies

In Crit this month, Rick Poynor recommends The Book of Symbols

Director Johnny Hardstaff compares perennial designer favourite Tron with its recent sequel

Jeremy Leslie looks at the latest crop of independent magazines

Gavin Lucas has a rant about ‘collectors’ edition’ record re-issues

And Gordon Comstock deconstructs VCCP’s Morethan Freeman campaign

In Monograph this month (our free subscriber-only booklet), we take a closer look at the possibilities of Scriptographer with the work produced by students from the ECAL University of Design in Switzerland during a workshop led by our cover designer Jonathan Puckey and artist Jürg Lehni, the inventor of Scriptographer

The February issue of CR is on sale from January 27

From wallpaper to gravestones, children’s bedrooms to the history of London, we round up the ten most popular stories on the Creative Review website this year

10, StreetMuseum iPhone app
Brothers and Sisters’ app for the Museum of London cleverly brought the Museum’s extensive art and photographic collections to the streets of the capital. It made use of geo tagging and Google Maps to guide users to various sites in London where, via the iPhone screen, various historical images of the city appear.

9, Gap to pull new logo
The US retailer’s spectacular loss of nerve after a vehement online response to its new logo. Throughout the year, logo redesigns sparked more debate on this site than any other topic.

8, Record Sleeves of the Month
Gavin Lucas’s round-up of recent record packaging is a regular feature on this site but the March edition proved particularly popular. Why? There was certainly some great work on show – even though several commenters dismissed it with the lofty disdain that has become all too familiar on here.

7, The Bible according to Google Earth
The story that just won’t go away. If you wanted evidence of the Long Tail theory of web-based content look no further than this account of Glue Society’s cleverly manipulated Biblical scenes, originally posted in DECEMBER 2007 but still bringing in the punters.

6, Penguin Classics team up with [RED] for typographic covers
Book cover stories are always popular on here, as this snappily titled post from March confirms.

5, MTV logo changes, stays same
Another logo story, this time about the minor widening and truncating of one of the most famous marks in the world. Much debate ensued, too much for one commenter – “They’ve cropped it, that’s all. It works. Get over it.”

4, The Helvetica Killer
Ah, don’t you just love a good debate about Helvetica, especially one with a deliberately inflammatory headline and an outspoken protagonist determined to take on one very large sacred cow. Bruno Maag’s attempt to question the vailidity of Helvetica as the world’s favourite typeface, and his proposal of an alternative of his own devising, outraged and enraged with 134 comments.

3, Saville and Kelly’s memorial to Tony Wilson
In death as in life: Peter Saville and Ben Kelly’s memorial to their friend and collaborator Anthony H Wilson was three years late, but it was worth the wait. Another piece of Saville work attracted more comment (his England shirt) but this beautiful piece of black granite had more views, attracting links from mainstream media and a host of music-related sites.

2, Where Children Sleep
Photographer James Mollison’s moving, insightful and revelatory project contrasting the sleeping quarters of children from differing backgrounds around the world won Best in Book in our Photography Annual this year and many admirers when a selection of images was posted here online. “I hope this book will help children think about inequality, within and between societies around the world,” says Mollison in his introduction, “and perhaps start to figure out how, in their own lives, they may respond.” Mollison is currently working on a project about playgrounds.

1, Carnovsky’s RGB wallpaper
Our most popular story of the year and it’s about, err, some wallpaper. Not just any wallpaper though, this is wallpaper that reveals different patterns according to the colour of light shone upon it.

Conclusions? This is a list of most-read stories and so is naturally skewed toward those that are more likely to be linked to by others, which perhaps favours stories of general interest or stories about well-known people or brands. It also, of course, favours the stories that have been up the longest as it is a survey of page views over 12 months and illustrates that many stories have a very long shelf-life.

There’s also something else interesting about the list. We are sometimes lectured in the comments section about the need to publish only stories or work that readers would not have not seen elsewhere before. The inference is that, if a piece of work has appeared anywhere else on the web prior to us featuring it, then it cannot appear here. And yet, of these ten stories, almost half, including the number one story, feature work that had been posted elsewhere beforehand.

One other thing: during the course of this past year, the traffic to this website has increased by almost 50%. Thank you to all our readers for supporting us (even the ones who write obnoxious comments). Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone at CR.

Belgian illustrator Gwénola Carrère designed the cover of our January 2011 issue: she also features inside as one of our Ones to Watch for the coming year

We’ve given the January issue over to six talented creative types who we believe are ready to make their mark in the next 12 months.

From Brussels, we have the aforementioned Gwénola

Plus, photographer Laura Pannack, who first came to our attention last year when CR editor Patrick Burgoyne helped choose the LPA Futures winners, and who has already gone on to pick up some major awards including a World Press Photo prize

From Canada, by way of France, we have Caroline Robert – another designer to benefit from the patronage of Arcade Fire

And from Manchester, though now based in Sweden, we have illustrator, animator, agent, photographer and writer Chris Gray

And from New York, we have director Paul Kamuf

Joined by, from London, interaction designer and all round technical wizard, Marek Bereza

In our Crit section this month, the CR Readers’ Panel picks their stand-out work of 2010

Regular columnist Andy Cameron examines the growth of 2-screen media while Gordon Comstock wonders at the preponderance of the ‘c’ word – that’s ‘creative’ of course

Jeremy Leslie looks at how magazines have mastered the use of infographics and what one particular example reveals about the publishing world

And Jörg M Colberg looks for the truth in Andrej Krementschouk‘s disturbing images

And for subscribers only, Monograph offers a glimpse into the ‘what might have been’ world of movie posters with a selection of Hollywood poster proposals from illustrator Akiko Stehrenberger, many of which never made it past the first round

The January 2011 issue of CR is out on December 16. Our back cover fetaures Shay by Laura Pannack

If you’re not quite sure what to read first in CR’s December issue, the cover features a handy guide to the contents, courtesy of the design department at New York magazine

The cover asks you what you want to read about and offers various (not altogether serious) routes to finding the stories that are right for you

Those stories include our Hi-Res feature on the Non Sign II installation on the US-Canada border

A look at Droga5’s Decode project for Jay-Z

Our major Profile piece this month is on Mike Meiré, art director of 032c magazine and one-time flatmate of Peter Saville

Then we have pieces on the two new Pentagram partners, Naresh Ramchandani and Eddie Opara

While Andy Cameron looks at how interactive art is repositioning itself closer to architecture and product design

In Crit, David Crowley examines the contribution of the Design Research Unit in the wake of a recent exhibition

We have pieces on Crowdsourcing, the infographics of New York, advertising’s rediscovered love of illustration, Michael Johnson on the Brand New conference and even fireworks

And Monograph this month features a selection of infographics produced by the New York magazine design department over the past year

I always feel jealous when I pick up a copy of New York magazine, jealous that my own home city, London, doesn’t have such an intelligent, funny and well-designed equivalent title to document its life and times.

There are lots of things that New York does well, but the thing it does best is its infographics. After Information is Beautiful’s David McCandless had his infamous set-to with Neville Brody on Newsnight, the role of infographics has been increasingly questioned: many are beautiful but are they also meaningless? The infographics in New York are sometimes the former, but never the latter.

What sets New York‘s infographics apart (created by the design department under design director Chris Dixon) is that they combine journalistic rigour with design excellence in almost equal measure. A particular favourite is regular feature The Neighbourhood News. A map of New York is annotated with short news stories from different boroughs across the city, neatly encapsulating its diverse nature: an Upper West Side lady reports the theft of $1 million worth of jewellery from her apartment while, in outlying Soundview, police remove a three-foot-long snake from a man’s bathroom.

Elsewhere, infographics are used to illustrate and explain features and news stories, adding rather than merely decorating. Sometimes a whole spread will be devoted to data, such as Who Got In (above from the 4/10/10 issue), a recent piece on the Manhattan social scene that simply listed the guests at all the biggest parties in one week. And they are frequently funny, especially The Approval Matrix “our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies”.

For this December’s Monograph we have reproduced a selection of New York infographics highlights, analysing everything from the ethnic make-up of New York to readers’ views on socks.

Subscribers will get their copy with the issue, out next week. If you would like to get Monograph, we are currently offering 30% off subscriptions but you’ll have to be quick. The offer ends at the end of today. You can subscribe here