Hasta La Ideas

A new campaign featuring dogs snapped mid chase has been launched to promote the Guardian’s running content on their Life & Style site.

As interest in running steadily grows, so do the resources available online, including the Guardian site for running which provides space for inspiration, advice and discussion. The campaign, for both print and online, aims to engage new users and promote the increasingly popular online hub to an expanding online community of runners.

The site hosts a stream of running related content, including articles, videos, interviews, open threads, polls, live Q&A’s and competitions. There is also an interactive that allows you to compare your 5k time with the nation, and a new series of podcasts, with the choice of beginner or advanced.

The campaign include three images of different dogs running, produced as full page print ads with the excited pooches bounding towards you, static skins for websites with the same images, and rich media banners with a video of two dogs running round in circles, accompanying by the tagline “Shouldn’t your run be this much fun?”.

The ads have been produced by creative agency BBH, who have created other Guardian campaigns including the Three Little Pigs video and ‘the whole picture’ brand campaign posters, the Own the Weekend video to promote the weekend papers, and the ‘One woman, a nation divided’ print ads featuring Thatcher Marmite jars.

With multiple brands competing for attention in the running world, each claiming authority on how to make you faster and fitter, with scientific research and the faces of Olympic hero’s plastered across a well-established branded landscape, the BBH team knew that finding a voice in this field for a newspaper, may prove challenging.

However, by taking a step back and considering why we run in the first place, BBH chose a more feel-good standpoint. “It brings a little bit of joy to run through a park listening to your favourite tune or to beat your personal best. Sure, there’s a fair amount of pain too but by and large, most of us run because we love it,” says BBH’s Jonny Price. And with our canine friends being some of the most joyful runners of all, they proved the perfect new ‘faces’ of running. “They don’t care where they’re going or why their going there, they run until their legs are tired for the sheer joy of it.”

theguardian.com/running-hub

bartleboglehegarty.com

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In May, Andrew Losowsky and Jeremy Leslie announced the launch of a special, one-off publication celebrating magazine-makers’ favourite magazines, with the profits from the venture going to help US art director, Bob Newman, who was recently hospitalised. My Favo(u)rite Magazine is now available to buy…

The idea for the project was simple. Designers, creative directors and art directors from all over the world were asked to nominate their favourite magazine and explain why they felt it was a great example of the medium.

As Leslie informs us, creative directors from the likes of the New York Times Magazine, Fast Company, Pentagram, Wired, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Observer, AOL and the NME have all chosen a title.

Included on this post are a few shots of the publication – readers will spot Design, Details, Avant Garde, Big, The Germans, Hard Werken and Harper’s Bazaar among the magazines selected.

The profits from the sale of the publication will go towards helping Bob Newman’s recovery. The former design director of titles including New York, The Village Voice, Details and Entertainment Weekly, Newman recently suffered an accident that left him in a coma for two weeks, and he now has a long path to recovery ahead. (The Friends of Bob Newman campaign has so far raised over £56k for his medical bills – more details on his condition are here.)

Billed as “a love letter to print” the 64-page My Favo(u)rite Magazine can now be bought from magculture.com/shop as a print publication (£15.99 plus P&P) or PDF (£12.99).

Leslie adds that “We also have a limited edition of ten that will be signed by Andrew and I and come with an original copy of one of the featured magazines – each of the ten comes with a different title – plus the PDF.” The limited edition numbers are £59.99 including P&P.

Pre-press (PHMedia) and print services (Newspaper Club) were provided free/at cost price.

Hey, Hey Mobile 1965, Illustration for London Life magazine

Ian Dury’s promising early career as an artist and illustrator is celebrated in More Than Fair, a show at his former college, the Royal College of Art, in London

Dany Bubbles c1963-66, Pencil and acrylic (framed) 29″ x 20″

Before he became a much-loved and brilliantly witty singer and songwriter with, first Kilburn and the High Roads and, later, The Blockheads, Ian Dury showed a great deal of promise as an artist and illustrator. Dury studied Painting at the Royal College of Art between 1963 and 1966 where he was taught by Sir Peter Blake. During his time at the College, Dury developed a unique Pop style that combined text, bold colour and photorealist elements to reference a growing culture of music and celebrity.

Lee Marvin 1968, Pencil (unframed) 30″ x 22″

His work is celebrated at Ian Dury: More Than Fair – Paintings, Drawings and Artworks, 1961–1972, an exhibition at the RCA (above) which is on until September 1. The show was put together by Dury’s daughter Jemima who spent two years assembling her father’s collection of paintings and drawings, and garnering financial support for the exhibition both through a Kickstarter campaign and donations from amongst others, the actor Andy Serkis and singer Robbie Williams.

Tony Bennett 1965, front cover for London Life magazine

Regular CR readers will remember that we featured Dury’s work in our piece on London Life magazine. The short-lived 60s weekly was put together by a ‘dream team’ of contributors including David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton and Davd Puttnam. It was art directed by David Hilman who brought Dury (then still a student) in to contribute occasional illustrations.

“He was a friend of Brian Love, who was one of those multitalented people,” says Hillman. “They were at the Royal College together. Brian used to do stuff for me at the Sunday Times and said ‘I know a very nice young guy who could do some things for you’. This hairy monster came in and muttered ‘Alright Dave’. He did a couple of jobs on London Life and a bit on The Sunday Times but he’d already started a band. I thought it was a great shame because he was a very talented illustrator but I’m sure he made a lot more money being a pop star.”

Read the full feature here.

Jemima Proust, 1969 , Aquatec, sequins and varnish

Sir Bernard and Lady Docker 1966, pencil and pastel (unframed) 24″ x 32″

To commemorate the opening of the show, Sir Peter Blake has produced ta limited edition print of Dury which is on sale for £200 at www.iandury.co.uk. All proceeds go to Macmillan Cancer Support, Graeae Theatre and Kids Co.

Ian Dury: More Than Fair – Paintings, Drawings and Artworks, 1961–1972 is at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU until September 1. Open 11am–6pm; Sundays: 12–5pm. Closed Mondays

Newspaper Club and cycling brand Vulpine have joined forces with some top illustrators and designers to create a promotional paper that doubles as a handy shoe-drying kit

The paper is a collaboration between Newspaper Club co-founder Terrett (who is also head of design at the Government Digital Service) and James Greig at Vulpine . Between them they recruited a host of illustrators and designers to contribute work around the theme of cycling in the rain.

The paper features contributions from the likes of Bloomberg Businessweek’s Richard Turley, Anthony Burrill, Carolyn Roberts of the Observer and Matt Jones from Google Creative Lab.

Spread by Rebecca J Kaye

Left-hand page by Ben Everitt, a creative at Wieden+Kennedy London.

Mike Howard

Images by Alex Parrott (l) and Jennifer Daniel

Spread by Jennifer Daniel

Spread by Richard Hooker

The paper will be available on Sunday at the Vulpine summer fete. “The idea is to give it to cycling shops and they can make them available – for free – when it’s raining,” Terrett says.

And when cyclists are done reading it, they can scrunch it up and use it to dry their shoes.

Back cover, with shoe-stuffing instructions

Or, as The Observer’s Carolyn Roberts suggests in this spread, they could keep their nice Vulpine paper, and use a mid-market tabloid instead

Buy the current print issue of CR, or subscribe, here

The July issue of Creative Review is a type special, with features on the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, the new Whitney identity and the resurgence of type-only design. Plus the Logo Lounge Trend Report, how Ideas Foundation is encouraging diversity in advertising and more.

An intriguing polystyrene box of artefacts, Container is the latest project from Artomatic’s Tim Milne. It has contributors, a theme, content and ambitions to be produced regularly – so that does that make it a magazine? asks Jeremy Leslie

However many times you try to replace it with ‘publication’ or ‘periodical’, the word ‘magazine’ remains the most pertinent, direct word for what I spend most of my days thinking about. Those other words just don’t hack it, and remain only as useful secondary alternatives along with adjectives like ‘annual’, ‘biannual’, ‘quarterly’, ‘monthly’ and ‘weekly’. You can sometimes get away with the abbreviation ‘mag’ but even that’s best saved for deeper into the article, once the full word has set the scene.

Container #1: Hot & Cold

So what happens when you’re developing a magazine that is consciously unlike others? At one level we find ridiculous made-up words such as bookazine and mook, words that exaggerate the difference between magazine and book. But what if your publication is really different? This was the challenge facing Artomatic’s Tim Milne when planning his new project Container, a box of objects created by a group of invited contributors in response to a theme.

Expressed like that, the metaphorical link with the traditional form of printed magazine appears obvious. Milne has set a theme, invited contributors to respond, and is publishing the resulting collection as a set. Not so different to the copy of CR you’re reading now? The finished item, though, could hardly be more different to CR, and calls into question the very nature of what a magazine is.

When talking to Milne, the conversation is littered with phrases such as “a magazine that’s not a magazine”, as he struggles to define Container in relation to traditional print publications. Yet Container is an ingenious name, as it describes the physical reality of the project as a box of objects, while also referring to the origins of the word ‘magazine’.

“It’s actually close to the original definition in its meaning of warehouse or repository to hold things in,” Milne explains. “It’s a colloquialistic stretch that we think a magazine can only be a printed book.”

There have of course been other magazines that have resisted the bound, printed format. Last year the 1960s art magazine Aspen was exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery to much excitement (as reviewed in this column at the time). “What struck me about Aspen was that it didn’t deviate that much from the printed format,” says Milne. “Most issues were really just a handful of printed pieces presented in a box.” What caught his attention was that even without stepping so far from the traditional format, Aspen was powerfully different to most magazines. “With Aspen you got something a lot richer and more fragmented, you got the sense that each individual item is the product of that contributor. The relationship is with the individual contributors and not with Aspen.”

David Hieatt’s contribution to Container – a bundle of pitch pine twigs

Milne has taken this a stage further by pushing the contributions to Container beyond print. “The brief was to make an object based around the theme ‘Hot & Cold’. It could be both Hot and Cold, or just Hot or just Cold. We said the objects would be put in a box determined by the things you make – implied in that was that the things had to be of a hand-held scale.”

The ten contributors encompass a rounded selection of different creative areas: graphic design (Malcolm Garrett), advertising (Mother), art (Daniel Eatock), product design (Nic Roope and Violetta Boxill), entrepreneurship (David Hieatt), writing (Leila Johnston). For future issues, Milne would like to broaden that out. “An object is a fundamental human language. Artists and designers shouldn’t have a monopoly,” he says, listing economists and scientists as possible future contributors.

For his Container contribution, James Bridle created a 3D printed model of the GPS system

So what can you expect from issue one? Under the name Artomatic, Milne has been sourcing creative print and production for clients since 1982 so it’s no surprise that the attention to detail across the whole project is remarkable. Milne has collaborated closely with his selected contributors, helping them execute their ideas in the most authentic manner.

Design studio Accept & Proceed’s diagrammatic etching of routes across the North and South Poles

The objects arrive packed in a polystyrene box, perfect for keeping the contents hot or cold, and inside, the ten objects range from a small hardback book to a length of heat-sensitive till receipt paper via a bundle of wood and a 3D-printed object. Most contributors have been seduced by the opposition of Hot and Cold, and only one, Accept & Proceed, went for Cold alone, with a diagrammatic etching of routes across the North and South Poles.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence we had so few cold ideas,” says Milne, “Hot gets people excited, cold has a numbing effect.”

Hot and cold together: lolly stick jokes are transferred to chip forks by Violetta Boxill and Nicolas Roope

Violetta Boxill and Nic Roope have added lolly stick jokes to wooden chip forks, the surface humour strengthened by the subtle reference to their respective Caribbean and Scandinavian heritages; advertising duo Rebecca and Mike have swapped CDs with their opposites (eg The Very Best of Donna Summer and The Best Of Johnny Winter), recalling a time when music meant physical objects and CDs and their jewel cases could get muddled (see below).

The links between the ten objects and their stories might easily have been made explicit in a printed addition to Container, but Milne has wisely avoided putting written editorial inside the box as that would be a distraction from the objects, almost a “magazine of the magazine,” he says. “We can write about it in much more depth online, so that’s where the back stories will appear.” The polystyrene box will just contain the objects and a signed authentication sheet.

Writer Leila Johnston’s contribution uses heat-sensitive till receipt paper

While Milne avoids the use of the M word, for me Container is everything a magazine should be. It has wit and intelligence, great stories expressed visually, and makes the most of both the physical and digital. As a relatively expensive limited edition of 200 it’ll be beyond the reach of most but we should celebrate its existence and look forward to it inspiring people in future exhibitions. I can see it at the Design Museum rather than the Whitechapel Gallery, a record of an era when the balance between the analogue and digital is tipping.

Jeremy Leslie blogs at magCulture.com and writes a monthly column on magazines for CR – this is an edited version of his piece for our July issue. Container is published and produced by Artomatic. Container #1: Hot & Cold will be made as a limited edition of 200 copies and will be available to buy exclusively from containerwebsite.com from this month. CR readers can win a copy in our Gallery competition this month. See the print magazine for details

Buy the current print issue of CR, or subscribe, here

The July issue of Creative Review is a type special, with features on the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, the new Whitney identity and the resurgence of type-only design. Plus the Logo Lounge Trend Report, how Ideas Foundation is encouraging diversity in advertising and more