Hasta La Ideas

It’s that time again when we stick up some pics of the books (and other nice print things) that are currently in the Extra Nice pile of stuff here in CR towers…

First up is the beautifully produced hardback tome called, coincidentally enough, Stuff We Really Like – a 785 page exploration by design studio Music of, well, stuff they really like… The likeable stuff inside includes such no-brainers as Christmas day morning and The Muppet Show – but also more personal likes such as the music of Scott Walker, Edward Hopper paintings, South Indian Food, cycling round London and Asterix comic books. Whether you like everything listed or not, the book is wittily laid out and full of joyous anecdotes about such things as Boarding A Moving Routemaster Bus. We really like this one – here are a few spreads:

Now then, we recently posted about the splendid group exhibition entitled If You Could Collaborate – organised by Alex Bec and Will Hudson – the dynamic duo behind previous If You Could exhibitions and publications – and the pair also founded the rather lovely blog, It’s Nice That. What we didn’t mention in any detail in our post about the exhibition was what a great job the pair have done on the accompanying catalogue. Rather than simply show the work of the exhibition, the book’s 310 pages include profiles on all the included artists and interviews with them about the work they created specially for the show and of the collaborative processes involved in making the works. Having enjoyed the show immensely, it’s great be abe to find out a little more about the processes, conversations, journeys and considerable efforts that have gone into the production of the artworks from the show…

Catlin is an insurance company with a growing art collection and its own Catlin Art Prize (now in its fourth year) that looks to nurture emerging artists. The Catlin Guide is a new publication funded by the company that collects together profiles of 40 up and coming artists selected by curator, gallerist and art writer Justin Hammond. To make his selection, Hammond travelled up and down the UK last year visiting degree and MA shows scouting for the hottest new talents in the world of fine art. The 40 artists featured are, essentially, the shortlisted artists for this year’s art prize. The book, housed in a red slipcase (above), has been designed by YES studio and looks like this:

Illustrator David Janes sent us a little box full of old fashioned record cards with a personalised note to CR editor, Patrick, on one – and a pen illustration on each of the others of a political figure of some sort along with either an asinine quote by the person depicted or some witty anecdote about something silly they did or said…

The sixth issue of Draft magazine features a print of a Jake and Dinos Chapman artwork entitled If Hitler Had Been A Hippy How Happy Would We Be printed onto watercolour paper and tipped on to the glossy black cover. Inside a note informs the reader that everything included in the issue has been drawn from the Archive of Modern Conflict. And so a host of contributors including Anthony Burrill, Martin Parr, Ian Jeffrey, Stephen Gill and Garry Hume introduce the artifacts that they have selected from the archive… the result makes for an interesting trawl through a huge variety of visual material spanning photography, illustration, graphic design and even some experimental images that were transmitted by radio in the early 1930s in Paris. 

Also in our pile of nice projects is this box which we received in the post with a horeshoe graphic on the top. On opening the box, it turns out not to contain a horseshoe, but a nice photographic print of a horseshoe (see below) – and a whole heap of prints stacked underneath it of other imagery, mostly portraits, shot by photographer Alex Telfer as part of his series of images entitled The Travellers. Wonderful stuff.

For some reason my camera finds this book cover tricky to photograph… sorry about that. The book is called It’s A Wonderful Life and it was sent to us just before Christmas by Dorothy up in Manchester. Just to clarify, the cover is white cloth with debossed angel wings and gold type. The text at the bottom reads “From the film by Frank Capra, retold by Dorothy”. So yes, it’s Dorothy’s version of the 1946 film of the same name, in which the story is told in verse (penned by Guy Nelson) and illustrated by Tracy Worrall. Here are some spreads…

The January 2010 cover of CR was designed and produced by the Urcuhuaranga brothers at Publicidad Viusa, their print shop just outside Lima.

The Urcuhuarangas create posters for Chicha concerts, the popular Peruvian style that mixes indigenous sounds with Colombian and other Latin music (subscribers can read more about the Chicha visual culture here).

In this documentary film, Elliot Urcuhuaranga explains the origins of the Chicha visual language and how his father handed down the secrets of the unique process used to make the posters (and our cover)

We first came to hear of the Chicha style from designer and author Tristan Manco. Readers will remember that Manco helped us with our January 2009 cover which was produced in the style of Lambe Lambe posters in São Paulo, Brazil. Manco had come to hear of this indigenous Peruvian graphic style from the Spanish art collective Equipo Plastico who had seen the work on a recent visit to Lima. He put us in touch with local curator Jules Bay who arranged for the production of our cover.

Unfortunately, no-one from CR got to go out to Peru to oversee things. Instead, we sent Jules the text to appear on the cover which Eliot Urcuhuaranga then drew up on paper by hand in the distinctive Chicha style, using a pencil and a ruler as his sole design tools.

Each typographic element was then cut out and fixed directly on to the screen to make a stencil. A black version of the cover was then printed, copies of which were then cut to make additional stencils in order to run the four fluoro colours used for various elements on the final poster.

Jules then arranged for the finished poster to be scanned and sent us the file for us to print from. Our thanks go to Jules Bay, the Urcuhuaranga brothers and everyone at Publicidad Viusa and to Tristan Manco for their help in making our January cover. More on the January issue here

Reggie Kray and grandfather (1964). Photograph: Brian Duffy

“My approach was always the same – obsequious toadyism”. BBC4’s Duffy documentary last night was a funny and honest portrait of London’s ‘other’ great photographer of the 60s

The Man Who Shot The Sixties was a long overdue rehabilitation for Brian Duffy – with Terence Donovan and David Bailey, one of the three photographers who dominated Swinging London. Now 76, the film followed Duffy as, with his son Chris, he prepared for what was, incredibly, his first gallery show (at the Chris Beetles Gallery in London).

But it was no hagiography. Asked to describe his great friend in one word, Bailey called him “awkward … he was always angry at somebody”. Molly Parkin called him “a bit of a bastard”. Others were similalry clear-eyed about his shortcomings as a person, if not as a photographer.

Originally a fashion designer, then an illustrator, Duffy said that what attracted him to photography was its combination of “women, clothes and gadgets”. And it seemed much easier than drawing. First at Vogue, then for David Hillman at Nova and for French Elle (his favourite), Duffy’s images helped define the 60s.

The film was full of great stories, as you might expect. Like when his first assignment for Vogue ended in disaster after he had left the lens cap on, the ‘boys in the lab’ covering for him by telling the editor that the blank negatives were their fault. Or the time, when shooting David Bowie for the Aladdin Sane cover in 1973, he was urged by Bowie’s manager Tony Defries to spend as much money as he could on the shoot (De Vries’s reasoning was that the record label would have to pay more attention to an album that had cost them a fortune to produce). Duffy was happy to oblige, using a dye transfer for the image, sending plates to Switzerland to be processed and employing London’s most expensive typesetters to work on Celia Philo’s cover design (Duffy had set up his own design studio, Duffy Design Concepts, with Philo in order to have more control over his work).

David Bowie as Aladdin Sane (1973). Photograph: Brian Duffy

By the mid-70s he was earning a fortune shooting advertising – including working with Alan Waldie on the landmark surrealism of CDP’s Benson & Hedges campaign. But he wasn’t happy. “99.9% of what I was shooting then was advertising – crap,” he said in the film. “The people who were hiring me, I didn’t like. It was like being on the game and disliking the men who are fucking you … Keeping a civil tongue up the rectum of the society that pays you” was not, he said, something he was good at.

He became steadily more disillusioned (in a Guardian interview this week, Duffy claims that photography had died in 1972, with everything else simply copying what had gone before) until, one day in 1979, he decided to burn all his negatives in the garden of his St John’s Wood studio. Thankfully, they didn’t burn very well and neighbours alerted the council who stopped him before he’d got through the lot.

But he didn’t take another shot for 30 years. Why? “I’d taken all the snaps I needed to take,” he said, simply.

If you are in the UK, you can watch the film on the BBC iPlayer here

Postscript: The Man Who Shot The Sixties was not the only show on the BBC last night of interest to CR viewers. But the less said about the truly execrable adland ‘comedy’ The Persuasionists the better.

To mark the end of the decade we still can’t get used to calling the ‘noughties’, New York magazine invited imagemakers to come up with their own takes on 00

New York subscribers received their copy bearing a cover by Todd St John/Huntergatherer (above left) while Fellow Designers created the newsstand cover (above right).

St John’s piece is a physical model…

While Fellow Designers’ is 3D

Other versions are featured within the magazine, from

David Carson

Marian Bantjes

Jonathan Gray/Gray318

Studio8

Mario Hugo

Matt Owens

And Alex Trochut

Design director: Chris Dixon. See a slide show of all the 00s here

Dutch independent magazine OK Periodicals has created what it claims is the world’s first crowdsourced magazine cover.

OK Periodicals is a biannual featuring up and coming and established creative talent published by Arnhem-based design studio OK Parking and Bouwe van der Molen Graphic Design. Its third issue took the theme Repeat, hence the cover idea. The OK team designed a front and back cover, then split it into hundreds of small segments.

Original front cover

Original back cover design

Through its blog, OK then appealed for contributors to take a segment each and re-do it in their own style.

Over a week, the contributions came in and were assembled to make the final cover. So, for example, one person received this piece of the original cover and came back with this version of their own.

So this original segment

Became this in the final artwork

This

became this

And this

changed to this

The final front cover looked like this

And the back like this

Successful? Well, not entirely. Even OK’s William van Glessen admits that the resulting artwork isn’t exactly a thing of beauty: “Okay, maybe it’s not very beautiful or aesthetically pleasing,” he says. “But that’s a thing I’m never looking for. The proces of this design and the experimental way of achieving it was for me the most pleasing aspect.”

And, of course, all of the hundreds of people who contributed their segment will presumably want to buy a copy, which has to be good for sales.

OK Periodicals #3 costs €9.50. More info here