Hasta La Ideas

Newsstand copies of the November issue of CR come in a revolutionary new bag that simply dissolves in hot water. No waste. No landfill.

Anyone buying their copy of CR on the newsstand this month will find that the issue comes in a transparent bag bearing the words ‘This bag dissolves in water’. And it does.

We are the first magazine anywhere to trial a new packaging material called harmless-dissolve which was created in the UK by Cyberpac. Here’s what you do:

1, Take the magazine out of the bag

2, Cut off the sealing strip – the glue of the strip is biodegradeable but will not dissolve in water

3, Place the bag in a receptacle filled with hot water (60+ degrees recommended by manufacturer)

The clear plastic dissolves into the water almost immediately

The printed area takes a little longer to break down – here’s ours after about a minute

After a couple of minutes, the printed area has broken down sufficiently for it to disintegrate when rubbed between finger and thumb – it’s a bit gunky and sticky but washes off straightaway

4, Pour the residue down the drain

We are assured that any residue is perfectly harmless. Apparently you can even drink it – we tried, it tastes horrible, so we wouldn’t recommend this.

A quick sluice around with water clears up any remaining residue both in the sink and in the receptacle.

CR is working with Cyberpac on a range of experimental packaging solutions. Subscribers received our September issue in an envelope that could be re-used as a binder for our Monograph series (see here), while in October we gave subscribers one of six static prints of images from the Photography Annual (see here).

Why do a bag at all? We needed to bag this month’s issue on the newsstand because it contains a free CMYK colour guide from Heidelberg. Rather than using a traditional polybag, we tried this. If subscribers would like one of the colour guides, please contact aminah.marshall@centaur.co.uk and we will send you one.

Subscriber issues come in regular, non-dissolvable, packaging this month – next month, though, we have something special for you.

UPDATE
More details from Cyberpac on how it works, also in the comments below: “The hot water is just to show you the biodegradability at speed. You don’t need to boil it, just chuck it on the compost heap! We use this to package fish food as it dissolves in the water releasing the bait.

“Harmless-Dissolve is made from a hydro-degradable substrate which is 5 times stronger than normal polythene. It is a readily biodegradable, water soluble polymer which completely biodegrades in a composting environment, in a dishwasher or in a washing machine. It has no harmful residues and will biodegrade into naturally occuring substances – the bugs love it.

“It’s non-toxic and is degraded by micro-organisms, moulds and yeasts. These organisms can occur in both artificial environments, such as anaerobic digesters, activated sewage sludge and composts and natural environments such as aquatic systems and soil. The micro-organisms use Harmless-Dissolve as a food source by producing a variety of enzymes that are capable of reacting with it. In the end the bag becomes carbon dioxide, water and biomass.” More here

If you’d like to know more about harmless-dissolve, please contact Will Anderson at Cyberpac, willanderson@cyberpac.co.uk

Marc Valli, owner of the Magma design bookshops, is to launch a new visual arts and culture magazine called Elephant. Why?

The first issue of Elephant magazine, with design and art direction by Matt Willey of Studio8, will be published in October. We asked editor Marc Valli why Elephant and why now?

CR As the owner of Magma, you better than anyone know it’s a pretty tough time for magazines right now, so why launch a new one?
MV Yes, times are difficult. Sales of books, expensive showcase books in particular, have been hit by the credit crunch. Yet from where I’m standing (and that’s often behind a shop counter) the magazine market looks more alive than ever. The drop in advertising revenues is hurting a lot of people, I know, but again, maybe that will encourage some renewal. Hopefully some of the fat old magazine clichés will die out and some fresh new ideas will emerge. In fact, if I curse the credit crunch on a daily basis (every evening when I get the sales figures from our shops), I cannot help but think it’s a healthy and necessary process. At the same time, it’s very scary…

CR What’s the idea behind Elephant?
MV The visual art world seems to be sadly divided between, on one side, the world of contemporary art, with museums and galleries and collectors and, on the other, the applied arts, or commercial art. I feel these divisions do not reflect the reality, and the richness, and the complexity of the current visual arts scene. More seriously, I think this division has meant that some of the most interesting work went right under the radar. I want Elephant to sit squarely in the middle. I believe that by looking at different art forms from that position, you can create a whole new kind of discourse. I had this dream of doing the kind of magazine a group of beat friends would have done in the 50s, before the art world became the art world, and the creative industries took over, a time when artists didn’t measure the worth of their work according to auction prices, but by the opinion of their peers. I think the credit crunch may have taught us a few lessons… Maybe this is a time for less cynicism.

CR Who is the audience?
MV Difficult question. Some magazines have a very narrow target audience. I don’t think that’s really the case with us. We would like to reach as wide a market as possible. It’s a risk. I suppose in my mind, I see the audience as being made up of people who are enthusiastic and curious (I was going to say ‘young’, but you don’t need to be young to be that), not snobbish, but very ambitious about the quality of the art they look at, use, collect, think about, and produce.

CR How will it be structured? Will it be the same each time?
MV Yes, the basic structure will remain the same. I think that creating a structure that makes sense of a diverse range of material is the second most difficult thing when starting a magazine – the first being coming up with a name…

We divided Elephant in 5 parts:
Part 1 is called Meetings and consists of long interviews with people that I see as visual thinkers, people who have ‘thought up’ or changed our time up through the medium of visual arts.

Part 2 consists of a series of Research Subjects. We pick a few themes and explore those. For example, in issue one we looked at how artists and illustrators have started to use collage again. We also tried to revisit the idea of art in the internet. Visual artists seem to have fallen in and out of love with it rather quickly… We also looked at people who use text as the main subject of their artwork, and at the work Scandinavian fashion designers, and even bike polo and the culture of customisation that revolves around it!

Part 3 is called Studios. We visit the studios of a number of artists and showcase their work.

Part 4 (Economies) looks at how artists are taking matters into their hands and starting businesses based on their own creative output. How are things made?

Finally, in part 5, we take a city and write a creative guide to that city, showcasing the work of artists from that place and asking them about their relationship to that city: how they feel about it, why they moved there, where they hang out, shop, eat, etc.

CR Do you have anyone backing Elephant or is it your own venture?
MV Originally, the magazine was backed by BIS publishers in the Netherlands. But BIS is a relatively small book publisher and we have now transferred the magazine to Frame, who already publish Frame and Mark magazines. They are a very dynamic magazine publisher and we should benefit from their network and experience.

CR Where will it be distributed?
MV Worldwide, both in newsagents and shops.

CR Are you still publishing Graphic?
MV Elephant replaces Graphic. Graphic never found its feet as a magazine proper, and ended up as more of a book series, with every issue looking at one theme in particular. Making a whole magazine on just one theme can be tricky. Sometimes a theme works, and the issue sells, sometimes it doesn’t, and then…

The September issue of CR is all about this year’s graduates. We have given all our feature space over to eight eager, fresh-faced young creative types yearning to make their mark

They are:

James Callahan and Joe Keirs from University of Leeds

Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth from Kingston

Tomomi Sayuda from LCC

Mark Boardman from Falmouth

Tom Lovell from Lincoln (who also designed the cover this month)

And Eilin Bergum from Ravensbourne

As well as showing their work, we have also asked them about their hopes, dreams and fears about starting a career in visual communication. All of them will be showing their work at an exhibition that we are staging with Mother at Downstairs at Mother from September 3 to 12 (more on this soon)

Also in this issue….

We have the first in a series of exclusive extracts from Adrian Shaughnessy’s new book, Graphic Design: A User’s Manual

Rick Poynor reports from the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival

magCulture‘s Jeremy Leslie begins his new monthly column on magazines, plus James McNulty asks what ad agencies mean by the ‘big idea’

Guy Bird reveals why Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s book Subway Art (recently released in a 25th anniversary edition) was such an influence

And Gordon Comstock discusses the world of chatty objects

And you can win an Olympus Pen digital SLR worth £700 in our Gallery competition

The September issue of CR is out on August 27

Back cover design by Eilin Bergum

Launched at the RCA’s recent Show 2, Monika is an anonymously produced magazine that aims to free its content from preconceived notions of authorship. “Anonymity in the arts isn’t anything new,” explains Monika’s editor, “but it’s due a return”…

Monika is an arts journal featuring essays, short stories and photography that “invites readers to decode identities, unravel mysteries and embrace the unfamilar”, according to the first issue’s editorial.

“The magazine idea grew out of the dissertation research I did at the RCA and the designer was on board at an early stage,” says Monika’s editor, whose work on the magazine was completed as part of the Communication Art & Design course.

Fellow RCA graduate Povilas Utovka is the one name we do know that worked on the magazine: he designed it and created the typography, which was on display at the CA&D show.

“The exciting thing is to have created a structured canvas that is moulded by our collaboration with contributors as well as through reader speculation and interpretation,” says the editor.

“Part of what intrigues us about the idea of anonymity is how very fragile and difficult it is to maintain, how we live in a contradictory society that is both sprawling and faceless – the metropolis, the internet – and identity-obsessed – ID cards, CCTV, celebrity.”

“Monika isn’t about eliminating identities, it’s about creating a delay in the reader’s discovery of them,” says the editor. “By familiarising themselves with patterns and styles within the magazine, through word of mouth, and through piecing together clues, readers can discover the contributor’s identities for themselves.” 

“The non-disclosure of names means that the content must hold its own without being supported or justified by a known contributor’s back catalogue, which presents a challenge for both editor and participant. Equally, the feedback that contributors receive for their input is unbiased and the lack of self-publicity means the content is work for works sake, so it does require guts to contribute to Monika.

“Monika believes that works should be judged on merit rather than name, and that celebrity culture within the arts (and elsewhere) sometimes misses the point: that quite often we fail to acknowledge the extent that collaboration has to play in the creation of works, and that people’s motivation to write or make images isn’t often to become the ‘next big thing’, but rather the desire to record and make sense of the world.

“But playfulness also comes into it, I guess a fair bit of what Monika is about comes from a desire to tease.”

Monika is published biannually and issue two will be released before Christmas this year.

Orders can be placed via monikamagazine.com and copies, which retail at £4.95, can also be bought at YCN, 72 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3AY.

A full list of stockists will be available on the Monika website soon. If you run a bookshop, library, or gallery and would like to stock the magazine, please get in touch with the editor on monika@monikamagazine.com or via the website. 

Earlier this week we posted on a cryptic cover that Neville Brody has designed for the August issue of Wallpaper*. He also came up with two, rather less cryptic suggestions that the magazine decided not to use…

One features the Peace 2 typeface that Brody designed for the issue

The other doesn’t

And here, once again, is the design that was used

Thanks to Sarah Douglas at Wallpaper* for sending these over.