Hasta La Ideas

Our March issue is a craft special and examines how a range of creative work was made, including Maya Almeida’s underwater photographs and a 3D-printed slipcase by Helen Yentus. We also explore the science behind Jessica Eaton’s extraordinary images, and go behind-the-scenes of new ads for Schwartz and Honda…

On top of all that we look at the BBC’s new iWonder platform, review the Design of Understanding conference and books by Wally Olins and on the Ulm School of Design, and Paul Belford explains the power behind one of the most famous posters from Paris 1968.

The March issue of Creative Review will be available to buy direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money, too. Details here.

Opening the issue, our Month in Review section looks back at the The Lego Movies’ ‘ad break takeover’; Black + Decker’s new identity; the return of the Old Spice guy; and the debate around the new Squarespace Logo service.

Daniel Benneworth-Gray raises a sleep-deprived toast to working through the night; while Michael Evamy’s Logo Log salutes the Mobil identity on its 50th anniversary.

Our craft features begin with a look at the work of underwater photographer, Maya Almeida. Antonia Wilson talks to her about what it takes to create her beautiful images…

And Helen Yentus, art director at Riverhead Books in New York, talks us through her radical 3D-printed slipcase she recently designed for a special edition of Chang-Rae Lee’s novel, On Such a Full Sea. (Yentus also created this month’s cover.)

Rachael Steven looks at the thinking behind iWonder, the new online storytelling platform from the BBC…

…While six of the objects that appear in BarberOsgerby’s In the Making show at the Design Museum are featured – each one ‘paused’ midway through its manufacture and beautifully shot by György Körössy (two pound coin shown, above right).

Antonia Wilson also talks to photographer Jessica Eaton about the process behind making her stunning images of cubic forms.

And Eliza Williams discovers how over a hundred sacks of spices were blown up in a new ad for Schwartz…

… while a more sedate approach is explored in a behind-the-scenes look at Honda’s Inner Beauty spot from Wieden + Kennedy.

We also look at why VFX is becoming more invisible, and (above) look at the latest trends in packaging.

In Crit, Nick Asbury reviews Wally Olins’ new book, Brand New…

…Mark Sinclair reports back from the recent Design of Understanding conference…

… and Professor Ian McLaren looks at a new book on the influential Ulm School of Design, which he attended in the early 1960s.

Finally, this month’s edition of Monograph, free with subscriber copies of CR, features photographs of Norfolk by designer Pearce Marchbank.

The March issue of Creative Review will be available to buy direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money, too. Details here.

The Design Museum has announced the nominations for Designs of the Year 2014. The diverse line-up includes life-saving inventions, experimental architecture and some intriguing graphics and digital work…

Seventy six projects have been shortlisted by industry figures and entries are divided into six categories: product, digital, fashion, architecture, graphics and transport. As always, this includes designs chosen for their beauty, orginality or unusual approach – entries include a floating school in a Nigerian lagoon, a watch that allows users to feel the time as well as read it and the ABC Syringe (below), which changes colour when exposed to air thus alerting users to its pre-use or potential exposure to infection.

Digital

In the digital category, the screen-based aspects of McCann Melbourne’s multi-award-winning Dumb Ways to Die rail safety campaign has been shortlisted alongside Bristol studio PAN’s Hello Lamp Post – a platform that allows residents to converse with street furniture using the text function on their mobile phones. (Read our blog post on the project here). Bare Conductive’s Touchboard project also offered an ingenious take on interactivity, turning almost any surface into an interface using electrodes.

As well as immersive gaming experiences such as the Oculus Rift headset, the digital category contains some potentially life-saving  inventions. The Aerosee (above) is a crowdsourced search and rescue drone that enables smartphone, desktop or tablet users to search mountains in the Lake District for people in danger, and the Portable Eye Examination Kit enables eye exams to be carried out in remote or low-income areas where traditional eye exams aren’t possible.

Nominations such as Vitamins’ Lego Calendar (above), the allowing studio to visualise how much time they spend on different projects using different coloured bricks (when you take a photo of it with a smartphone all of the events and timings are synchronised to an online calendar), and City Mapper (below) an app that helps users navigate large and complicated cities on foot and public transport, simply make life easier.

Graphics

Nominees in the graphics category include Experimental Jetset’s ‘Responsive W’ identity for the Whitney Museum (above, which we covered back in July), Marina Willer and Brian Boylan’s identity for the Serpentine Galleries (below), and the M to M of M/M Paris: a 528-page book on graphic designers Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustiniak, designed by Graphic Thought Facility (featured in CR Nov 12 issue, read our piece here).

Also featured is the Art Directors Club Annual 91 with illustrations poking gentle fun at the industry (see our post here).

Chris Ware’s amazing Building Stories graphic novel (see review by Jimmy Stamp here) in the form of a a boxed set, consisting of 14 distinct printed works-cloth-bound books, newspapers, broadsheets and flip books.

Stephen Jones’ issue of A Magazine Curated By, which was dedicated to Anna Piaggi and the art of illustration

Jean-Marie Courant, Marie Proyart, Olivier Vadrot’s identity system for the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur

An identity for the Escuyer underwear brand by Modern Practice

Chineasy, a Chinese language learning system created by entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh and illustrated by Noma Bar:

James Bridles’ Drone Shadows, a series of installations depicting an outline of an unmanned military aerial vehicle promoting Jeremy Scahill’s investigative documentary Dirty Wars:

Grand-Central by Thibault Brevet, an open internet platform that lets people express themselves freely through a tangible output device (see top an above). Users can submit text via their smartphones which is then ‘written’ in marker pen by a mechanical printer – creating a physical embodiment of a digital message.

Arts and culture journal, The Gourmand, Created by David Lane (Creative Director), Marina Tweed & David Lane (Founders/Editors-in-chief)

And Anthony Sheret, Edd Harrington and Rupert Dunk’s Castledown Primary School Type Family – a typeface commissioned for a primary school in Sussex that evolved into a project aiming to create a unified, dyslexic friendly type system in UK primary schools.

Because of the way it is put together (submissions from ‘industry experts’ which are then reviewed by a Design Museum-appointed panel rather than a paid-for entry system), Designs of the Year always throws up a quirkier selection than industry awards such as D&AD. That is both a strength and a weakness in that some nominations can appear a little random but there are always delightful surprises and some welcome attention for designers who may not figure in other schemes.

Makoko Floating School in Nigeria, A prototype floating structure, built for an historic water community. Designed by NLÉ, Makoko Community Building Team

Shortlisted entries will be on display at the Design Museum from March 26 to August 25 and you can view the full list of nominations here.

A visitor’s vote will be open to the public. The museum is introducing a social vote this year, too, allowing Twitter and Facebook users to choose their favourite of two exhibits from the show each day. Design of the Year is supported by Bird & Bird

Alain de Botton heads the editorial team behind The Philosophers’ Mail, a new website that aims to make us think about why some aspects of the news prove so captivating (and why we shouldn’t neccessarily feel too guilty about enjoying them)…

Borrowing from the Daily Mail school of lengthy headline-writing, there’s also an Onion-esque ring to some of the writing on The Philosophers’ Mail with articles ranging from the world weary (“Best not spend too long on all this”), to wordier ruminations on the merits of Tyler Swift’s legs (above).

Written by a group of philosophers, the site has been produced in support of de Botton’s forthcoming book, The News: A User’s Manual, which is published next month by Hamish Hamilton. But far from being a satirical take on the World’s Most Popular News Website, it’s clear that The Philosophers’ Mail heralds a different approach to online news and gossip.

It’s more philosophy-led contemporary news analysis with celebrities providing the jumping off point. (“Simon Cowell, on holiday in Barbados, proves suffering part of the human condition,” for example.)

Dig deeper and an article headlined “Not as much news as previously thought”, is in fact an interesting piece on why celebrity stories captivate readers.

These kinds of tales are, TPM argues, mostly recycled stories, ‘archetypes’ that repeat down the ages. And rather than honing in on the details of every case – what the particular MP/actor/singer did and to whom – the more important thing to gauge is why these things happen like this. If readers can become more conscious of the story archtypes, says TPM, then we would have a lot less news to take in. In a way, we can then look at celebrities in order to realise some form of truth:

“When we’re stressing to fit the baby car seat in the back or when we get a take-away coffee and have to drink it in the rain, we realise that we are not – as we might normally feel – suffering an irritating indignity or a banal humiliation – we are in fact sharing the life of the stars; not because we are making ourselves like them, but for a deeper and more moving reason: they are like us.”

While it promotes the ideas in de Botton’s new book, the site is written and published by The School of Life, the London-based “cultural enterprise offering good ideas for everyday life”, which runs “a variety of programmes and services concerned with how to live wisely”. (It is listed as TPM’s “sponsoring organisation”).

A release states that each day the publication will look to record the stories that “everyone is interested in – a double suicide, Miley Cyrus, a paedophile teacher, Gwyneth Paltrow’s marriage, a fireball on the runway, but then [apply] its own very particular spin, in the direction of traditional philosophical interests: calm, complexity, dignity and wisdom.”

It will be interesting to see how the site develops amid the noise of the top level gossip websites – their stories, after all, provide TPM with its material. But as a taster of some of the ideas de Botton is set to discuss in his new book, The Philosophers’ Mail already offers much to think about.

The News: A User’s Manual is published on February 6 by Hamish Hamilton.

Covers for Penguin fiction titles by designers including Derek Birdsall (above, top left) and Alan Fletcher (bottom left)

In 1962, issue five in the second series of the design journal Typographica spotlighted the work of Penguin’s design team under newly-appointed art director, Germano Facetti. The extensive feature is now reproduced as a brilliantly-realised facsimile edition, published by the Penguin Collectors Society…

Part of the PCS’s remit as an educational charity is to collect and archive material which aids further understanding of the history of the publisher.

While many of its discoveries end up in the physical Penguin archive at the University of Bristol Library, the PCS is also an active publisher and events organiser itself, exploring the design of both Penguin and Puffin through study days and books.

Cover of the PCS facsimile edition of Typographica 5

Its latest publication reproduces a landmark piece of design writing which put a critical focus on the work that Penguin was doing some 52 years ago: Herbert Spencer’s survey of the publisher’s design approach, Penguins on the March, which appeared in the fifth issue of the second series of the journal he had founded in 1949.

Covers for Penguin Crime by Romek Marber, except for two shown top left (George Mayhew) and top, second from left (John Sewell)

Complete with 28 colour and black-and-white images of Penguin covers (as per the original spreads), the reproduction of the feature is impressive. The new edition even replicates the foldout section that showed a further 36 covers.

Much credit is due here to the Chippenham-based printers, Octoprint, who worked to replicate the original in every way; the design, typography and paper all hark back to its first outing in June 1962.

Pelican Books covers

The spreads themselves are also remarkable in the space they give to imagery. Spencer’s text does not dominate the layout; rather there is more of an equal footing between the analysis and the visual examples. While original single editions of the journal command around £100 on eBay, Rick Poynor’s 2001 book, Typographica, remains the authoritative text on the journal’s 18-year existence – and is well illustrated with spreads from the publication throughout.

The evolution of the Penguin logo, originally drawn by Edward Young in 1935, refined in 1939 and then redrawn by Jan Tschichold

With an introduction by the designer and design historian Richard Hollis, the PCS’s facsimile edition aims to bring this hard-to-find feature on Penguin’s design heritage to a wider audience (though it is limited to a run of 700 copies). Hollis’ introduction also contextualises the original feature, a very useful way in to understanding Spencer’s take on Penguin’s design standing in the 60s.

Foldout section of various Penguin covers

But the publication of Typographica 5 also has its own peculiar story to tell, which the PCS addresses within this single volume. The reproduction also includes the ‘correction’ that was printed in Typographica 6 which pointed out that it was Romek Marber who designed the ‘crime grid’ for Penguin – afterwards applied to the whole Penguin range – rather than Facetti, as stated in issue 5.

The ‘correction’ spread from Typographica 6 showing Romek Marber’s cover grid and his notes on its design

Marber’s handwritten notes and drawn grids are as important an inclusion here as they were in the December 1962 edition, six months after the main Penguin piece appeared. Thankfully, design history has since maintained the significance of his input, and it is heartening to reflect on the achievements being made at the company at the time.

The Typographica facsimile is published in an edition of 700 by the Penguin Collectors Society, 24pp (plus a four-page foldout); £8 plus p&p. Published with the approval and permission of Lund Humphries, Typographica’s original publisher, and Herbert Spencer’s daughter, Mafalda, it is available from the PCS online store. Further details on the 2009 exhibition Typographica curated by Rick Poynor can be found here; while an index of contents featured in the first 16 editions of the second series of the journal is available at modernism101.com.

In today’s print edition of The Guardian, the regular ‘Eyewitness’ centre spread is given over to nine images from Guinness’ latest advertising campaign, Made of More…

Designed in the Eyewitness format, the ‘advertisement feature’ includes a mixture of stills from the brand’s recent TV campaign featuring the well-dressed ‘Sapeurs’ of Congo-Brazzaville’s Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, and portraits of the group’s members by Héctor Mediavilla. (CR’s Eliza wrote about the TV ad from AMV BBDO here.)

On The Guardian’s website, however, today’s Eyewitness image is listed as a photograph by Ian Langsdon of the culmination of Karl Largerfeld’s Chanel show at Paris fashion week (images from which feature on the front page and further inside).

So it’s unclear whether the Guinness feature – which runs over pages 22-23 with the brand’s logo shown top-right – only appears in the London edition, or is used more widely.

The link-up is the latest initiative from Guardian Labs, through which it produces “sponsored content” (it has editorial guidelines relating to this online) and has resulted in the collaboration at theguardian.com/guinness-made-of-more.

From there visitors can watch Mediavilla’s short film about the Sapeurs, access the Eyewitness spread and also read an accompanying feature on the group, A stylish philosophy. Writing in The Guardian earlier this month, Mark Sweeney also covered the campaign in the paper’s Media pages.

While photographs of the subjects of Guinness’ new campaign undeniably make for interesting images, the Eyewitness spread is usually the preserve of the best news photography captured on a particular day.

Whether other brands can slot so neatly into this section in partnership with the newspaper – without alienating fans of photojournalism and reportage – remains to be seen.

Editor: Anna Goldie. Produced for Guardian Labs by Guardian Creative to a brief agreed with Guinness. Paid for by Guinness. All editorial controlled by the Guardian, except those articles labelled as advertisement feature.