Hasta La Ideas

The founders of Huck and Little White Lies are publishing a book about magazine design funded by Kickstarter donations.

Curious Iconic Craft is a 100-page book offering advice on editorial design, cover illustrations and custom typefaces. It’s also a retrospective, documenting the creative process behind film magazine Little White Lies and culture magazine Huck, set up in 2005 and 2006 by The Church of London.

Former TCoL directors Danny Miller, Rob Longworth, Alex Capes and Paul Willoughby have since set up creative agency Human After All (featured in the May issue of Creative Review) and no longer work on either title, but wanted to compile their shared knowledge and experience of working on 85 issues.

“It’s been quite a cathartic project for us,” says Miller, who came up with the idea for Little White Lies while studying design at Northumbria University.

“We were quite sad about not working on the mags anymore, and we had compiled a lot of material on magazine design – Paul had delivered talks on it, we’d put together an FAQ for students who approached us looking for advice and we had years of behind-the-scenes and process material – so we thought this would be a good opportunity to take what we’ve learned and do something useful with it,” he adds.

Human After All came up with the idea just a few weeks ago and since launching the project on crowd sourcing site Kickstarter on June 6, they have exceeded their £13,000 fundraising target and received donations from more than 500 backers.

Unusually for a Kickstarter project, the team has been working on the book while raising funds and it will be printed the day after fundraising ends on June 30. As it’s a one-off project, the only way to purchase a copy is to make a Kickstarter donation before midnight on Sunday.

“We could have self-published the book and set up a microsite for it, but we only wanted to do it if there was demand, which is why we went through Kickstarter. We used a little money we had aside to get started while fundraising – and we were a little nervous that we wouldn’t reach target – but we’ve had a steady stream of donations, averaging about £500 a day,” says Miller.

HAA have provided a detailed breakdown of what the money from donations will be spent on and since meeting their target, they have also introduced some new goals: if donations reach £15,000, for example, the team will introduce pantone ink throughout the book.

While Curious Iconic Craft includes a look at Huck and Little White Lies, Miller is keen to point out that it’s a working guide and not a portfolio. “There will be a lot of best practice sections and breakdowns of how we did things, but there will also be a lot of examples of things we did wrong and anecdotes about times we messed up and what we learned from them,” explains Miller.

“We’re not saying we’re the best magazine designers in the world, but we hope people can enjoy the book and take something from it,” he adds.

To view or donate to Human After All’s Kickstarter project, click here.

Images (from top): CIC’s working cover; spreads from the book; 85 Little White Lies and Huck covers; previously unseen final cover sketches provided by HAA.

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

The August issue of CR is going to be a Summer School special. We want to look at all the ways in which readers sharpen their creative skills via workshops or similar, or find inspiration in taking part in creative activities outside of their day-to-day roles. So, what do you do?

We want to know what you do to inspire and invigorate yourselves and the staff at your studios and agencies. Do you bring in external speakers for example? Do you take any craft-based workshops, such as paper-making or screenprinting?

We’re also looking for people who run workshops or courses for creatives – anyone who goes into agencies or studios or who runs workshops and courses themselves, whether they are on more ‘serious’ subjects like art direction or coding or more esoteric, fun activities such as toy-making, building a pinhole camera or learning calligraphy.

Here’s a few examples of what we mean:

At Pick Me Up this year, CR ran a felt-toy-making workshop with Felt Mistress

The Glasgow School of Yarn, run by The Yarn Cake

James Victore, Paul Sahre and James Wilker have run a series of summer workshops at the Art Directors Club in New York

Osborne Signs run traditional signwriting courses in Sussex

The London Centre for Book Arts runs an extensive programme of workshops on bookbinding, letterpress printing, papermaking etc

Alan Kitching’s renowned two-day Typography Workshop

Alexandra Taylor runs a very well-regarded advertising art direction workshop (eg here)

Decoded promises to teach anyone coding in a day

And, of course, D&AD runs an extensive programme of courses under its Workout scheme

If you’ve been on anything like this, anywhere in the world, or if you run such courses yourself, please let us know in the comments below. Please also let us know about anything you do internally at your studio or agency to keep yourselves inspired and energised

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue, along with an interview with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late, great Storm Thorgerson. Elsewhere in the issue we take a first look at The Purple Book: Symbolism and Sensuality in Contemporary Illustration, hear from the curators of a fascinating new V&A show conceived as a ‘walk-in book’ plus we have all the regular debate and analysis on the world of visual communications.

You can buy Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe, save money and have CR delivered direct to your door every month.

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Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app updates with new content throughout each month. Get it here.

McCann Erickson Melbourne’s Dumb Ways to Die and 4Creative’s Meet the Superhumans were the big winners at this year’s D&AD Awards, with Black Pencils also going to Gov.uk and Thomas Heatherwick’s Olympics Cauldron

Heatherwick’s magical Olympic Cauldron (above) won a Black Pencil in the Spatial Design: Installations category.

The 4Creative Meet The Superhumans spot, directed by Tom Tagholm, won Black in TV & Cinema Communications: TV Promotions & Programme Junctions. Meet the Superhumans also picked up three Yellows, in Film Advertising Crafts: Editing for Film Advertising, Film Advertising Crafts:Direction for Film Advertising and Film Advertising Crafts: Use of  Music for Film Advertising.

The other two Black Pencils this year are for public service or at least public information projects: Gov.uk and McCann Erickson Melbourne’s Dumb Ways to Die for Metro Trains.

Gov.uk won its award in the Writing for Design: Writing for Websites & Digital Design category, curiously missing out on any Pencils in the digital design area.

Dumb Ways to Die, the charming animation promoting safety on Melbourne’s railways, won Black in Integrated & Earned Media:Earned Media Campaigns (where those 46m+ YouTube views must have swayed any doubters) plus four Yellows in other categories: Outdoor Advertising: Poster Advertising Campaigns, Digital Advertising:Web Films, TV & Cinema Advertising: TV Commercials 120–240 seconds
and Writing for Advertising: Writing for Film Advertising

Adding to this spirit of creativity in a good cause is the first White Pencil winner since the category (launched last year) was merged into the main awards. Congratulations to Droga5 for a project that offers a practical solution to a huge problem. Help I Want To Save a Life marks the fruition of a ten-year project begun by Droga5 creative Graham Douglas. Donor registration kits are included with packs of Help Remedies plasters. The kits require a small sample of blood, though as the donor is likely to be bleeding anyway – hence reaching for the plasters – this is a simple action. The samples are then sent to DKMS, the donor centre affiliated with the project, which will follow up upon receipt.

In the Yellow Pencils, McCann Worldgroup won in Writing For Design: Writing for Brands for its LOCOG Gamesmaker project for the 2012 Olympics volunteer programme

R/GA won in Crafts for Advertising: Sound Design & Use of Music for Digital Advertising for One Copy Song. Adam Tensta is Sweden’s biggest hip-hop artist. To promote his song Pass It On, R/GA created a Facebook app that allows only one person to listen at a time before passing it to the next person in line.

Mars Petcare: Donation Glasses from Colenso BBDO, Proximity New Zealand and FINCH won in Direct: Direct Response/TV & Cinema Advertising. NZ cinemagoers were given a choice – donate to help rescue abused dogs and receive a pair of yellow glasses, or pay nothing for the red pair. In the ad which followed, those who watched through yellow saw a happy ending

In Graphic Design: Annual Reports, Brighten the Corners won for its Zumtobel Annual Report. For the Austrian lighting company’s 2011/12 annual report, Brighten the Corners worked with artist Anish Kapoor to create a two-volume publication: one book contained the facts and figures for the year, the other was a printed version of a 1998 video piece by the artist, Wounds and Absent Objects

And there was a Yellow in Branding: Brand Expression in Print for Leo Burnett London’s Pantone Queen, a Diamond Jubilee tie-in documents the colours that the Queen wore on 60 different occasions during her 60-year reign, including the Primrose Yellow she wore at William and Kate’s wedding and the Canal Blue she chose for Ascot in 2008

The much-garlanded #CokeHands from Ogilvy & Mather Shanghai picjed up yet another award, this time a Yellow in Crafts for Advertising: Illustration for Advertising

While there was another win for Droga5 came in Film Advertising Crafts: Production Design for Film Advertising for the Kraft Moreing campaign. To advertise the Boost chocolate bar, Droga5 came up with the Boosted Inspiration Series of mock-documentaires. In this first film we meet the artist behind ‘M0reing’, a new trend/art project involving doing everything in multiples: wearing four hats, watching three TVs, walking three dogs. Scarily plausible

PARTY took a Yellow in Graphic Design: Moving Image (Graphic Design) for its Kanji City film. The City of Kyoto is represented as a series of 16 Kanji animations, each of which symbolises a tree, river, temple, gate and so on found in the city itself

In Outdoor Advertising: Poster Advertising Campaigns there was a Yellow for the Parkinson’s: Everyday campaign by The Assembly in which everyday images, such as a cup of tea or a pair of shoes, are mixed up to represent how Parkinson’s can affect messages the brain gives to the body

In Branding: Branding Schemes/Medium Business, 6D-K won Yellow for its charming icon-based identity scheme for Japanese agricultural co-operative, Minds

And Singapore-based WORK won in Branding: Brand Expression in Print for its Louis Vuitton: Yayoi Kusama Fine Book 2012, a limited edition book for Dover Street Market Ginza formed part of a wider collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The book features images and works drawn from the last 50 years of Kusama’s career.

There was also a Yellow for Sagmeister & Walsh’s Now is Better film in Craft for Design: Typography for Design (of which more later, as the work’s inclusion was the subject of some debate)

The Guardian’s modern-day retelling of the Three Little Pigs, which re-imagined the tale as a contemporary news story illustrating the multiple platforms for news-gathering and reporting utilised by the paper, won in TV & Cinema Advertising:TV Commercials 61–120 seconds. Director: Ringan Ledwidge
.

In Film Advertising Crafts: Cinematography for Film Advertising, F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi in Brazil won for Leica Store São Paulo: Soul, teling the story of the Leica M camera and its role in 20th century history. The film also won Yellow in Film Advertising Crafts: Direction for Film Advertising

There were three Yellows for R/GA and its work on Nike+ FuelBand, in Integrated & Earned Media, Integrated Digital Advertising: Digital Solutions and Mobile Marketing: Mobile Interaction & Experience

Wieden+Kennedy New York’s Southern Comfort: Beach won in TV & Cinema Advertising: TV Commercials 41–60 seconds

While another Brazilian agency, Leo Burnett Tailor Made, won in Integrated & Earned Media: Earned Media Campaigns for My Blood is Red and Black. To combat a shortage of blood donations in Bahia, Brazil, local football club Esporte Clube Vitoria changed its red and black striped kit to white, pledging to change it back stripe by stripe until donations reached the target amount.

Film Advertising Crafts: Special Effects for Film Advertising saw a Yellow for 4Creative for the 4Seven idents it created with ManvsMachine

In Snickers’ You’re Not You When You’re Hungry Twitter campaign, five celebrities were asked to tweet out of character. Katie Price tweeted about economics and Rio Ferdinand confused his followers by talking about his new hobby of knitting before eventually revealing the gag. It won Yellow in Integrated & Earned Media: Earned Media Campaigns forAMV BBDO/AMV Pulse

Radio produced two Yellows this year. In Radio Advertising: Radio Advertising over 30 seconds, Y&R New York won for Campbell’s Soup: Poetry in which the opposing characters in a passive-aggressive mother-daughter row describe the action as it happens, with much door slamming and storming off. Listen here

And in the same category, DraftFCB New Zealand won for Prime Television: Call Girl. For a new season of TV show Secret Diary of a Call Girl, DraftFCB hired an actress to engage in ‘call girl-like’ behaviour across the road from a radio station. The watching DJs soon started commenting on what they saw

In Packaging Design: Packaging Design there was a win for Family Business for Absolut Unique. Some four million unique bottles of Absolut vodka were created by converting machines on the bottling line to spray paint randomly onto them. Each one was numbered

Film Advertising Crafts: Direction for Film Advertising saw a win for We Are Pi and director Körner Union for Human Arabesque. Introducing the TEDX Summit event, this film combined dancers and kaleidoscopic effects to create beautiful patterns from the letter x.

ONLY Jeans: The Liberation won for Uncle Grey Copenhagen in Crafts for Design: Sound Design & Use of Music for Websites & Digital Design. A combined movie, catalogue and game, produced by North Kingdom, click at any time and the film would freeze and load a still via which users could like, share or buy clothes

Volkswagen: The Bark Side, by Deutsch LA and directed by Keith Schofield won in Film Advertising Crafts: Use of Music for Film Advertising

And these Long-Tongued Animal Shoehorns for Closed by gürtlerbachmann won in Packaging Design: Packaging Design

And Johnny Hardstaff’s eerie David viral for Prometheus picked up Yellows in Film Advertising Crafts: Production Design for Film Advertising and Film Advertising Crafts: Direction for Film Advertising

In Digital Design: Websites there was a Yellow for The Martin Agency and its JFK Presidential Library & Museum: Clouds Over Cuba project. In this interactive documentary experience about the Cuban Missile Crisis, extra background material in various forms was made available at key points of the narrative.

Let’s Make Some Great Fingerprint Art by Mrion Deuchars and art directed by Angus Hyland won in Crafts for Design: Illustration for Design

R/GA picked up another Yellow Pencil, this time in Branding: Digital Brand Expression for OneNike which nified more than 70 Nike brands, plus commerce and social media functions

And Apple (it wouldn’t be D&AD without an award for Apple, would it?) won in Product Design: Consumer Product Design for the 27-inch iMac

In Film Advertising Crafts: Animation for Film Advertising, Good Books: Metamorphosis, animated by Buck for ad agency String Theory won Yellow. A Hunter S Thompson-style character goes in search of a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in this film promoting Good Books, the online bookseller in aid of Oxfam

In Digital Advertising: Web Films, AlmapBBDO’s From Love to Bingo for Getty Images, a love story told in 873 stock images, won Yellow

And in Digital Design: Digital Design, Local Projects won for Cleveland Museum of Art: Gallery One. Interactive installations, including a 40-foot multi-touch Collection Wall, allow visitors to explore the permament collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art

In Art Direction: Art Direction for Poster Advertising The Monkeys/MAUD won for their Diageo: Mixionary campaign where series of cocktails are broken down graphically into their constituent parts

And the final Olympic-related project to win was Barber Osgerby’s torch, which won in Product Design: Industrial Product Design

A supplement listing all the winning work, plus details of the President’s Award, will be published with the July issue of CR, out June 19

MagCulture‘s Jeremy Leslie and New York-based editor Andrew Losowsky are putting together a special publication celebrating people’s favourite magazines. The compendium will be printed and sold with all profits going to help the US art director, Bob Newman, who was recently hospitalised. If you’d like to contribute, read on – you have until Monday June 3 as MC has just announced a deadline extension…

“It’s going to be a fast, one-off publication with the working title ‘My Favorite Magazine’, and all profits going to support Bob Newman (above), a great art director, true magaholic and the man behind Newmanology,” Leslie writes on magCulture. “You can read more about Bob’s situation here. The magazine will be published as a print-on-demand project through MagCloud.”

Here’s what you need to do to take part (the brief is grabbed from today’s magCulture post).

“Choose your favourite single magazine issue, and tell us about it. Any magazine, from any country, from any era. To join in, take 1-3 hi-res photos of the issue (no more than three, and at least one should be of the magazine cover) and write 100-500 words about your choice. Then zip and send it (or, if the images are too big to email, a link to download them) along with:

Magazine name
Country
Date of publication
Your Name
Job Title
City, Country
Web address
Twitter name

to: myfavouritemagazine@magculture.com

Deadline: Monday 3 June

We’ll compile all the responses and prepare the print-on-demand magazine.”

FAQs regarding the project are here on magCulture. We look forward to seeing the results and wish Bob well.

The image used on this month’s cover will be strangely familiar to many music fans. It introduces our interview with Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, the legendary photo-design studio that created some of the most memorable album sleeves from the late 1960s to the early 80s…

Following the untimely death of Hipgnosis co-founder Storm Thorgerson in April, we talked to Powell about the work the studio created from 1968 to 1983, and were given a brief tour of the company archive which he is in the process of organising.

The sketch on the issue’s cover is the “mechanical line drawn artwork” for Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album. The sleeve itself is a Hipgnosis classic (illustrated by George Hardie) but is notably different from the majority of the studio’s output which featured all manner of surrealist constructions that were famously shot ‘for real’. This method continued in Thorgerson’s working life in the studios he set up post-Hipgnosis, most notably StormStudios, where artwork for Muse, Audioslave and Biffy Clyro among others was created.

The Dark Side of the Moon cover is of course more familiar in its finished guise – a beam of light hits a white-edged prism, which then refracts a six-colour rainbow that bleeds off the right-hand edge, on black. (There’s no indigo.)

Cover of Pink Floyd’s 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon. Design and photography: Hipgnosis. Illustrator: George Hardie. © Pink Floyd Music Ltd/Pink Floyd (1987) Ltd.

But the image shown on our cover is of what was sent to the printers of the gatefold design, complete with a series of hand-written notes that appear next to the artwork for the imagery of the back (shown, below). “No keylines to appear,” the note reads. “All black on board and small overlay”; “to look as near possible like rough”.

For Powell, the Dark Side sleeve changed everything for Hipgnosis. In fact, 1973, he says, became something of a classic year for the studio who went on to create the cover for Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy a few months later (not bad work if you can get it – though that particular trip saw Powell lugging his camera over to Giant’s Causeway on a decidedly grey day. We have some exclusive images of the shoot in the issue).

The idea for the Dark Side sleeve – or at least the direction Hipgnosis would go in – was actually suggested by Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright. According to John Harris’ book on the album, the keyboardist issued a challenge to Thorgerson that for this album he create something “smarter, neater – more classy”.

Thorgerson was struck by the image of a prism on the cover of a book he had seen; and so Hardie was duly asked to illustrate the process of light refraction, more commonly found in student textbooks. When the range of different cover ideas were put to the band, the prism was the unanimous choice. And for both Hipgnosis and Pink Floyd, it came at the right time, too.

“It wasn’t just that the design was unique,” Powell recalls in our interview. “It’s a very simple design, it’s not very Hipgnosis, it’s not photographic, but it was the combination of Pink Floyd at that time, plus the design [with] all the interior bits and pieces, a poster of the pyramids, the stickers. It was the combination of everything.”

For Thorgerson, the prism not only hinted at the visual experience of seeing one of Pink Floyd’s light shows, but was itself a universal image; a magical trick of the light based firmly in reality, not fantasy.

“This prism refracted into a spectrum belongs to everybody,” he writes in the forthcoming book, The Gathering Storm, completed at StormStudios shortly before his death.

“[It’s] a quality of nature, but by rendering it as a graphic, against black, it turns into a design which seemed to fit the album to a tee. It is the black that does it.”

CR’s June issue is in the shops tomorrow and can be bought online here. The Gathering Storm: The Album Art of Storm Thorgerson will be published in September by StormStudios and de Milo (£30).

More details at thegatheringstorm.firebrandstore.com. For a chance to win a signed copy of the book, check out the Gallery page in the new issue.

Out now, the May 2013 issue of Creative Review is our biggest ever. Features over 100 pages of the year’s best work in the Creative Review Annual 2013 (in association with iStockphoto), plus profiles on Morag Myerscough, Part of a Bigger Plan and Human After All as well as analysis, comment, reviews and opinion

You can buy Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe, save money and have CR delivered direct to your door every month. If you subscribe before May 3, you will get the Annual issue thrown in for free. The offer also applies to anyone renewing their subscription. Details here

CR for the iPad

Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month.