Designer, artist, writer: Scott King defies easy or lazy categorisation. A new book, Scott King: Art Works covers the full range of his output from 1992 to the present. For the November issue of CR, Rick Poynor took a look inside
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The Independent launches i today, its new daily newspaper “designed for people with busy, modern lives”. But regardless of who it’s aimed at, what is it for, exactly?
In championing i (and yes, it’s already getting the blood up squinting at all the lowercase “i”s that dot this post), editor-in-chief Simon Kelner claims the 20p title is “the first quality daily paper to be launched in Britain for 25 years” and that it is “colourful and accessible, concise and intelligent.”
It is all these things, in part, but it also desperately wants to be heavyweight within the confines of a “lite” delivery. And the results are confusing.
On first look, the pages are very busy, with ubiquitous splashes of colour making the uniformity of black and white newsprint now seem even more like a distant memory. There are also small boxes of text and tabs everywhere, that are more familiar to the design of news online.
The point being that i’s content is intended to be consumed in a small amout of time. The News Matrix (shown below, with an inexplicable picture of Jeremy Clarkson) thus provides 15 stories over a spread; each a mere 40-word paragraph.
So from this opening spread it very quickly feels like a freesheet.
And perhaps this isn’t surprising given that Alexander Lebedev, the owner of The Independent and Independent on Sunday since March, famously turned The Evening Standard into a giveaway when he acquired it last year.
But does i really offer a quick-fix version of The Independent? There are opinion pieces for sure, but with news pages that segue a story on whether Bert from Sesame Street is actually gay with a smaller piece on the re-examination of the Nazi foreign ministry, it’s much nearer Metro territory than it thinks.
The more successful sections are, unsurprisingly, the ones devoid of boisterous advertising.
A Health spread, despite some ugly pull quotes, at least gives the impression that there’s a more in-depth feature to be read, whereas the tiny reviews in the “i arts” section offer little of substance, no matter how rushed your commute might be.
The Business section seems to offer the most coherence design-wise, however, perhaps because it only features two ads over its five pages.
But in trying to create a reading experience that fits in with the pace of contemporary life, it seems that i, for now, merely adds more confusion to it.
We’ll keep an, um, eye on how the paper looks over the next few months. In the face of ever-growing news consumption online and via mobile apps, it will be interesting to see just how digestable this Independent Lite really is.
Wired magazine’s Scott Dadich reveals the primary goals of setting out to create a digital version of the magazine
OFFSET festival drew to a close in Dublin yesterday evening and I’m thoroughly exhausted. While I’d love to say I was hitting its myriad satellite events hard, sadly my hotel wasn’t conducive to sleep so I was too knackered to party. Despite that, OFFSET was one the of the best design conferences I’ve ever attended…
And I should point out that it is more than just a brilliantly scheduled conference. OFFSET is a visual arts festival that could (and perhaps should) be considered as Dublin’s premier annual design festival.
Exhibitions, related club nights, discussions and debates focussed on illustration, street art, short film, design, photography, publishing and artistic collaborations have been taking place all week. Way too much, in fact, for a sleep deprived visitor to the city to take in the three days during the conference – although I did check out Daniel Eatock’s show last Thursday night at the Monster Truck Gallery shortly after arriving in Dublin.
Burnt rubber circle created by a motorcyclist to open Daniel Eatock’s show at Dublin’s Monster Truck Gallery last week. Photo by David Wall of Conor & David
The exhibition saw the gallery turn into a studio for a week as Eatock encouraged volunteering participants to create as near perfect a freehand circle as possible, plus other collaborative artworks under his direction. On the opening night of the show on September 24, there was nothing in the space – but a motorcyclist revved up a high performance machine to burn a rubber circle directly onto the gallery’s concrete floor: a spectacular opening to a participatory and fun week long art event. Watch a film of the motorcycle circle being created here.
I should also mention that at the conference there were two rooms running events simultaneously. While talks were delivered in the main auditorium of the theatre, upstairs in “Room Two” a series of discussions and debates had been scheduled. Topics such as routes into illustration/graphic design, the benefits of internships, and getting your childrens book published were explored, and delegates were also offered the chance to ask questions – in dedicated hour-long sessions – to some of the conference’s illustrious speakers, such as graphic design legends Lance Wyman and David Carson.
On Saturday evening I sat in on the Future of Publishing group discussion in Room Two, fronted by a panel comprising Unit Editions’ Adrian Shaughnessy, Stephen Heller (author and former art director of The New York Times), Scott Dadich of Wired magazine (as well as being the creative director at Wired, Dadich is in charge of digital magazine development for Condé Nast), and Hugh Linehan, online editor at The Irish Times.
When Stephen Heller suggested, in his role as devil’s advocate, that the death of print publication was inevitable, Linehan said he doubted that was true and that, actually, almost all forms of communication ever invented, bar the telegram, are still going strong: cinema, painting, magazines, newspapers. All of this stuff still exists and thrives despite the arrival of new technologies and media over the years.
Printed matter may decrease in terms of the sheer amount of newspapers and magazines that are sold, but people will still want the physical things, Linehan added. He then memorably likened the will-printed-publications-disappear situation to the part in Spinal Tap where the band’s manager defends decreasing sales of the band’s albums by saying: “Er, I just think their appeal is becoming more selective…”.
I’d made sure I got to Dadich’s talk on Friday evening (shortly after completing my first post from OFFSET), hoping he’d talk about the development of the Wired iPad app, and he didn’t disappoint.
He explained how he’d been thinking about digital magazines for years and also how he’s been talking to the bods at Adobe for several years about introducing functions within InDesign CS5 that will enable editorial designers to also design and develop iPad versions alongside their print publications.
As well as showing Wired’s approach to structure, and thus the architecture of the magazine’s iPad edition (the slide above shows the basic architecture of the Wired Reader), he talked about various interactions that his team have developed and embedded within the iPad editions of Wired magazine – most notably an interactive feature where users can explore the surface of Mars.
He then showed the difference between how the New Yorker iPad app is different to the Wired Reader because the content demands to be updated more – so it makes more sense to have a much more html-led content management system, rather than an InDesign reliant one.
Each title entering the world of digital editions, either on the iPad or other tablet style gadgets must, he suggested, understand their audience, their content and, of course, the very nature of the interactions possible via said gadget. His goals when working on the Wired Reader (see this post’s topmost image) can be applied by most titles in terms of basic approach.
There were more great talks on Saturday, all of which ran like clockwork until David Carson’s talk, scheduled for 3pm.
At 2.55pm, three of the festival’s organisers were in the foyer of the theatre looking worried. No sign of Carson. But then, hang on – here he is with only a minute to spare. And so relax… I took my seat in the auditorium and waited. And waited a bit more. Carson finally took to the stage fifteen minutes late. Not too bad considering he’s been known to not turn up at all to scheduled talks. The auditorium was packed: apparently there were about 1,200 people in attendance. Carson began by struggling to find his opening slide on his messy-looking laptop desktop…
After making a bit of a show of not really being able to navigate through the myriad images he’d brought along for his talk, Carson did manage to show lots of images.
Predominantly he shared dozens of photographs he’d taken of things that make him tick, things that inspire him day-to-day. Amusing street signage, beautiful rubbish bins in Zurich, a shadow cast by typography on glass, surfboards, and the occasional image of a young woman’s breast kept the audience amused and entertained.
As well as these photographs of things that inspire him, Carson also showed various projects he’d worked on explaining his approach to each particualr piece.
Although his talk lacked any kind of formal structure, the gist of it can be compressed to just a few sentences: “Put some of yourself into the work,” he said. “Nobody can pull from your experience so use it in your work – it will be unique and you’ll have a lot more fun with it.”
Regardless of the fact that Carson then proceeded to run over his allotted time (despite promising to wrap up several times when prompted to do so, thus totally screwing with the well-honed timetable for the rest of the day’s events) – one thing was clear. Carson was putting something of himself over in his talk – and he was clearly having fun with it.
Next up, Mark Farrow took the stage with Adrian Shaughnessy in comfy looking chairs to look through various pieces of work by Farrow’s studio Farrow Design. The interview format worked really well, with Shaughnessy digging for extra insight on working processes without giving the feeling that Farrow was being put on the spot.
Pharmaceutical style packaging for Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space album
One of several images created for Manic Street Preachers’ Lifeblood album and campaign, art directed by Farrow, shot by John Ross. “To be honest, I consider this image as much my work as I do it John’s,” says Mark Farrow. “I know John feels the same way.”
“I put this in [the slideshow] because, well, I’ve worked with Kylie.” Mark Farrow
As well as talking about projects such as the identity and packaging for Peyton and Byrne, work for Levi’s, artwork and packaging for bands Manic Street Preachers and also Spiritualized, perhaps inevitably it was work done for the Pet Shop Boys that was discussed in most detail, with Farrow talking about the work on the Yes album and the subsequent Pandemonium tour as a special case study.
While Farrow spoke of the collaborative relationship he has with the Pet Shop Boys, Shaughnessy asked about the relationship with the record label who, Farrow told us, don’t get involed, they just “take delivery of the artwork.”
(Actually, we posted about Farrow’s work on the sleeve in March last year. Read that post here. Read about the special edition vinyl edition in our blogpost about it here.)
Shaughnessy asked Farrow at this point about whether he thought that he had copied in any way the Richter artwork. “Where we ended up is far away enough from what was a reference point for us,” Farrow explained. “Gerhard Richter doesn’t own coloured squares.” Shaughnessy then pointed out that Farrow’s ideas get ripped off a lot. “That’s completely fucking different,” came Farrow’s instant and laugh-inducing reply. “There’s nothing wrong with being influenced by something,” Farrow continued. “Where we ended up is so far divorced from that image, I really don’t think it’s a problem.”
Perhaps the most telling revelation about the work on PSB’s Yes artwork – and of Farrow’s relationship with the band – was that there were originally 12 tracks on the album, with one square of the tick on the cover representing a track on the album. “But the tick looked much better if it was just comprised of 11 diamonds,” said Farrow.
The band duly dropped a track to make the album artwork work better. Er, wow.
Lance Wyman’s first ever poster, created at high school
OK – I realise this is a long post – but I just wanted to share one last highlight of OFFSET 2010: graphic design legend Lance Wyman talking yesterday morning.
Wyman condensed his life story into just an hour, starting with his childhood in Kearny, New Jersey, the tales his grandfather told about his contemporaries such as Billy The Kid, through to his studying of industrial design (the term graphic design hadn’t been coined at that stage) at the Pratt school in Brooklyn, and his early days designing for General Motors.
His wayfinding work for the Chrysler Pavilion at the New York world fair in 1964/5 was charming and hinted at the kind of universally readable icon-based work that he would later become famous for / prolific at.
Of course, he spoke of his experience working on the 1968 Mexico Olympics logotype and identity and how, because Mexico didn’t have much money to spend on architecture (Tokyo had spent a fortune on new stadiums and other buildings for the 1964 Olympics) the Mexican Games “became the graphics Olympics.” With graphics being applied to all sorts of things, both on a huge architectural scale, right down to clothing and hats….
Lance Wyman’s original compass drawing showing how the numeral 68, the year of the Mexico Olympics which he designed the identity for, could actually work, graphically, with the five rings Olympics logo
As well as talking of how the icons and other graphical elements of the Mexico 68 work were influenced by Mexican culture, both ancient and modern, Wyman also showed how his graphic work was referenced in work, such as the one above, during the student uprisings of 1968. They found that Wyman had created a graphic language that they could use and recycle to express their feelings visually.
Wyman showed more great work that he created in Mexico over subsequent years, such as the Mexico City Metro logo, typeface and icons created for the Metro’s opening in 1969, and the logo and mascot (shown above) designed for the 1970 soccer World Cup held in Mexico. He also told how he loved seeing the mascot hand painted (not always correctly – see image below) around Mexico city.
Wyman spoke of his return to New York and of setting up a studio with Bill Cannan – Wyman & Cannan. He showed a selection of the studio’s brilliant logo and icons for the National Zoological Park in Washington DC, created as part of a comprehensive branding and wayfinding system…
… and his later studio’s work for Minnesota’s Zoo exhibit areas:
To see Wyman present his work was a real treat and a really good moment for me to bow out of Dublin’s Grand Canal Theatre and head towards the airport to return home.
If it wasn’t press week here at CR towers this week, perhaps I could have stayed for the rest of yesterday’s talks… I was particularly sad to be missing the Wooster Collective talk, and also animator David O’Reilly’s talk too. I bumped into O’Reilly on the Sunday and he’s a different character since I last interviewed him back in 2007 when we named him as a Creative Future and commissioned him to create a new piece of work, Please Say Something. He’s promised to show me new work soon and keep in touch.
So that was my OFFSET experience which, apart from the insomnia, was a thoroughly positive and enjoyable one. My hat is doffed in the direction of organisers Richard Seabrook and team who, to their credit, have entirely self-funded the whole event and who have yet to work out whether this year’s event has even broke even.
Ireland’s economy is just as screwed as ours here in the UK – if not more so, with unemployment rising at a similar frightening rate to property reposessions. Encouraging its own design community to be inspired and to work harder, as well as giving designers and creatives from around the world a very good reason to visit Dublin, OFFSET is a huge asset to Ireland as well as to the international design community at large. I really hope we get to again next year.
The June issue of CR focuses on CGI, with six illustrators collaborating with six CGI studios to create original images. Plus, this year’s Graduate Guide supplement and, for subscribers, a World Cup Wallchart
Our Graduate Guide has a wealth of advice and information for graduating students as well as degree show listings
Meanwhile, in the issue, we have organised a bit of cross-pollination between two very different styles of imagemaker.
We ran our first CGI special issue last July. In it we talked about the fact that, although CGI is a great photo-realistic problem-solving tool, it might be more interesting to see what use the technology could be put to in creating new kinds of imagery. So, for this issue we picked six illustrators and designers, most of whom have a hand-drawn aesthetic, and matched them with six CGI studios. We asked each pair to come up with one image which would represent a synthesis of their skills.
For the cover, we have a crop of one the images created for us. It’s based on this original pencil drawing by Von
Von and Ed Taylor, creative lead at CGI studio Taylor James, then worked together on how this image might translate into 3D. Eventually, they came up with this
Elsewhere in the issue we have a profile on Paul White and Me Company, currently celebrating 25 years of visualising the future
In Crit, Rick Poynor grapples with a difficult but rewarding new book on corporate identity from Dutch studio Metahaven
James Pallister checks out the Pick Me Up graphic art fair
And Jeremy Leslie checks out the first, faltering attempts to make magazines work on the iPad
In Monograph this month, for subscribers only, we have Kheiron, one of Me Company’s abstract image series, this time on the theme of hands
Last, but by no means least, we have the latest in our subscriber extras. You may recall that, over the past year, subscribers have received fold-out binders for Monograph, a Christmas tree, a kit to grow tomatoes, prints from the Photography Annual and postcards of previous covers.
With this issue, design studio Greenspace has kindly donated a copy of its World Cup Wallchart to all our UK subscribers.
Set in Cordale by Dalton Maag, the chart lists all 64 matches at the World Cup with the match number, date and kick-off time. The result of each game can then be written in, but only by arty types with extremely neat handwriting and fancy pens, of course.
Here’s the whole thing, as modelled in true design style by our deputy editor Mark
The June issue of CR goes on sale on May 28. Next issue: July and our first Illustration Annual
Goodwill Fernandes is the latest project from Peet Pienaar, creative director of The President – a design agency and publishing company in Cape Town. The President has recently opened an office in Buenos Aires and so this tiny magazine features work by writers and designers from both South Africa and Argentina…
The magazine comes in a tiny slipcase which can be removed to reveal the tiny, landscape format magazine (5 x 8 cm). Inside there are short stories from both sides of the Atlantic and an interview by Pienaar with Francois van Coke – South Africa’s most controversial rock star; a story on a group called Jesus Saves that cleans up Cape Town’s graffity by painting block shapes or stripes over the old graffiti; and a look at how Argentina’s government uses the medium of graffiti (which is otherwise banned in the country) as its most effective medium for propaganda and campaigning. And a whole lot more including a selection of knock knock jokes… It might be small, but this magazine packs quite a punch!
Richard Turley, art director of The Guardian’s G2 section, has just completed a redesign of Bloomberg Businessweek. Intriguingly, it includes some ideas that were originally intended for The Guardian’s redesign
The redesign comes following Bloomberg’s takeover of Business Week and the magazine’s renaming to reflect that fact. Turley relocated to New York to carry out the project, on which he worked with type designer Christian Schwartz, who also worked, with Paul Barnes, on The Guardian redesign in 2004 (Barnes also worked on CR’s recent redesign).
The original intention on The Guardian had been to use a recut of Helvetica as the main display face. Christian Schwartz and Berton Hasebe completed and expanded Max Miedinger’s Neue Haas Grotesk family (the original name for Helvetica), working from the original drawings to revive Miedinger’s italics and adding lighter weights. However, their work was eventually ditched in favour of The Guardian’s Egyptian typeface.
His choice of serif face is another by-product of the Guardian redesign process – Publico. As Schwartz’s Commercial Type states on its website, “Although this family debuted in Mark Porter and Simon Esterson’s 2006 redesign of Portuguese daily Público, it originated in the design process that resulted in the Guardian collection.” As such, it was originally designed to work alongside the revived version of Helvetica then being planned for The Guardian.
Turley also brought in New York design studio Karlsson Wilker to create graphics for Businessweek. They worked alongside design director Cindy Hoffman.
The cover for the relaunch issue leads on the controversy at Goldman Sachs. Turley, however, had hoped to use a different design utilising this rather nice illustration from Al Murphy
Our May issue features an extra 96 pages of great work in The Annual plus features on Ruth Ansel, folk-influenced illustration and much more. Plus a cover image that was grown in the lab…
This month’s cover, by Craig Ward of Words are Pictures, uses an image that was literally grown in an immunology lab using pollen cells. For more on how it was done, see here
Inside, we have The Annual, our showcase of the finest work of the year
For the first time, we are also making the Annual available as an iPhone App. All the content is included as well as links to video, interactive projects etc. For more on our Annual iPhone App (below) see here
Flip the magazine over to the issue side (as usual, May is a double issue with The Annual one side and the regular magazine on the other) and we have all the regulars including Hi-Res, featuring two projects on the decay of Detroit (that’s a real clock on the right, by the way, not a Dali painting)
Plus a feature on Ruth Ansel, the first female art director of Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair
Gavin Lucas looks at the current trend for folk-art inspired illustration
And we have a great piece from Karrie Jacobs on 3D typography
While in Crit we look at the idea of the logo as a receptacle for imagery, Gordon Comstock complains about the crushing banality of political advertising, James McNulty wonders why ad agencies bother with the increasingly ludicrous making-of films, Paula Scher tells readers about what you don’t learn in design school and much more
All in the 178-page May issue of CR, in shops from April 22
Observant readers may notice that this issue is ever-so-slightly smaller than last month’s. No, this isn’t part of a cunning plan to keep shaving millimetres off the magazine until you end up with nothing at all but rather the result of some duff advice we received about the Royal Mail’s sizes and the tolerances they work to – we won’t bore you with the details. Apologies if your line up of CRs on the shelf now looks even more uneven. That’s it for the size changes – we promise.
Creative Review’s 2010 Annual is available as an iPhone App, which includes all the selected work from our showcase of the best in visual communication over the past 12 months
For the first time at Creative Review we are making our Annual available as an iPhone App (you can get it here). All the work selected for this year’s Annual is included on the App, along with extra images and full credits. Users can click through to watch video content and link to websites, share their favourites and tweet about the work. Here’s a video to show you how it works:
As with the printed version, the App lists all the content according to the month in which it was first published, aired or launched along with the Best in Book section. But, for added functionality, you can also search by entrant.
Moving image work can be viewed via YouTube links to each piece of film while digital projects link to the websites concerned.
There is also a wealth of extra hi-res imagery on the App, much of which is not included in the print version. Just zoom in for extra detail.
The App was designed and built for us by Russell Quinn, who also created the highly-regarded App for McSweeney’s and Wallpaper*’s city guides. It is available from the iTunes App Store, priced £2.99.
The cover image for our May Annual issue was literally grown in an immunology lab, using pollen cells. Here’s how it was done
Each year for The Annual we ask a different person to come up with a cover image based on a capital A (see our back issues page for previous ones)
In recent years, this has resulted in imagery on an increasingly grand scale. This time, however, Craig Ward of Words are Pictures decided to buck this trend by going much, much smaller and creating some “cell-level typography”.
Ward approached a couple of UK universities with his idea and discovered that making letterforms from cells was do-able, if a little costly (he was quoted anything up to £250,000). But he persevered and was eventually put in touch with Frank Conrad, “a friend of a friend,” he says, “who happened to be an immunologist at the University of Colorado in Denver” (lab shown below).
So for the last few months the pair of them have been busily shaping cells and growing them into an A shape here in the lab.
“The first hurdle was creating an ‘A’ small enough yet still legible,” Ward explains. “We settled on melting plastic, putting it under a high pressure into a mould – in this case the ‘A’ from a ‘Made in the USA’ stamp on an aluminium pen – and then applying the cells.”
Here you can see the cells growing within the A mould created by the letters on the pen.
“Our original choice was to use Chinese Hamster ovary cells,” Ward says, “but the techniques we were using proved too much for them and they died, en masse, every time we went to check them. The solution was to use pollen as the cells themselves are graphic and cool-looking. But we had trouble getting enough on the slide while being able to achieve an image at a high enough resolution for the CR cover.”
Above are sample slides on which the cells are growing
“My favourite of the ‘A’s were at 200× resolution, but my favourite pollen cells were at 400× so we had to settle in between,” Ward says. “The images are weird, a little sinister even. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot along the way. A successful brief by any measure.”
Here are the final two images that we chose to use on the two sides of the Annual issue
And here is how they look on the cover of the May issue, which is out on April 22. The covers were printed using a metallic base ink to bring out the details
Photography and cell manipulation: Frank Conrad. Lab assistant: Bastion Ridley.
We’ve launched a new digital subscription to CR which means that you can now access all the magazine content, going all the way back to 2006, at a much-reduced price, anywhere in the world
If you only read the blog posts here at creativereview.co.uk, you are missing out on an enormous amount of content. Each month we also post up the stories, features and reviews from each issue of the magazine online (check out this month’s issue here), but this, as well as some CRTV and Feed content, is restricted to subscribers only. Now you can access all that content via our new digital subscription.
It’s aimed primarily at overseas readers, who make up two thirds of our online audience. Shipping physical magazines around the world has always been a problem – they can arrive late and sometimes in bad condition. And it’s costly.
So we are now making the content of each magazine available through the website to anyone, anywhere in the world for a special offer price of £40 a year. This is a 60% saving on the cost of a rest of the world print subscription, and half the price of a one-year US or European sub. You’ll have to hurry though, because this offer applies for a limited period only.
For £40 a year, you get access to all the content of each current issue of the magazine. The magazine pieces online frequently have additional content not found in the printed version, including extra images and, of course, video. And you will get to see all the content selected for our Annual, Illustration Annual and Photography Annnual, which will not be available on the blog.
Digital subscribers also get full access to the archive of every issue going back to July 2006. Many of these issues are now sold out and so their contents is unavailable elsewhere.
You also get access to all the online issues of Monograph. And you will also qualify for discounts in the CR Shop and on extras such as awards entries.
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