Hasta La Ideas

Thomas Allen’s book cover art, as featured in issue 1 of It’s Nice That

Since April 2007, Will Hudson and Alex Bec have trawled the internet for great creative work and published their findings on their blog, It’s Nice That. Two years on, and in and interesting online-to-print transformation, they have just published the first in a series of printed editions of the best of their posts, offering more in-depth articles and images from their favourite projects…

“Although we recognise their importance, we didn’t want to try and produce another design magazine as they typically exist – we wouldn’t have done as good a job and that’s not where our skills lie,” say HudsonBec on the It’s Nice That website.

“Instead, we want to publish an archive of the most interesting work with nice big images and a suitable amount of copy, a series of conversations with interesting figures within the industry, as well as publishing some more unexpected content written by current practitioners.”

Issue 1 includes work from, among others, Peter Callesen, Bryan Dalton, Karl Grandin, Happypets, Myoung Ho Lee, Oliver Jeffers, PES, Alex Trochut, Julien Vallee and Felice Varini and is available here for £10.

A list of stockists is here.

There are also interviews with Jacob Dahlgren, Hort, Michael Hughes, Riitta Ikonen, Hugo & Marie, Andy Rementer and Roel Wouters, and features written by Andreas Konrath, Tao Lin, Stewart Smith and Ian Wright.

Issue 2 will be released at the beginning of October this year.

It’s Nice That is designed by HudsonBec in collaboration with Joeseph Burrin
Print by Push
Paper by Fenner

Matt Dent’s UK coins are among the graphic design nominations at D&AD

The nominations for the 2009 D&AD Awards have just been announced. After last year’s furore, will graphic design figure this time?

The good news for graphic design is that there are 13 nominations this year as opposed to two last year (112 entries are in-book). Traditionally graphic design has a high conversion rate from nominations into pencils so it looks as though there should be a healthy number of graphic design awards this year.

If there are, it will be the result of a lot of hard work behind the scenes. After last year, D&AD worked hard to engage with graphic designers and encourage entries, reducing the price and specifically targeting certain studios. It looks to have worked – Build, for example, has a project in the book this year and I can’t remember them even having entered before (Michael, correct me if I’m wrong).

Elsewhere, Environmental Design and TV & Cinema Crafts lead the nominations, with 14 from each jury. On the ad side, mobile has nine nominations as the field finally starts to turn up some interesting work. There are only five nominations in online advertising, but 19 in press and poster (plus the 14 in commercials) denoting something of a traditional fightback. Also, music videos has an encouraging 11 nominations.

It’s hard to spot too many Black Pencil candidates though – maybe Orange Ballonacy (a Best in Book in the CR Annual) or perhaps D&AD will follow Cannes and award Turner Duckworth’s Coke rebrand the major prize?

We’ll put up more images, links and analysis on this later but in the meantime, the full details are below.

And here are all the in-books for graphic design (sorry for the eye-straining size but it’s the best way to get the information up quickly)

It seems Luke Hayman has a rival for Pentagram’s Mr Magazine title – two redesigns from Angus Hyland and team caught our eye this week…

Both are from the same publisher. First up, UK men’s title Palladium. Usually on projects such as this Pentagram would do the redesign then hand over to an in-house team but here the publisher was interested in an ongoing relationship, asking Hyland and team to art direct all five issues in the coming year. Before committing to such an arrangement, Hyland carried out an analysis of the current title, assessing what should be retained and what changed. “I wanted to be sure we were all on the same page,” he says (no pun intended).

With the parameters of the project agreed, Hyland and team set about “tidying it up and making it better… one would hope.” They identified the diagonal stripe on the cover as something ‘ownable’ for the magazine and introduced it on section dividers and fashion pages.

Gotham was used for headlines which is contrasted with Courier in captions. “We wanted to move it away from being too bookish and predictable. With books you are aiming for en even pace through the publication but in magazines you want to turn over the page and be surprised,” Hyland says.

The same team was also responsible for French men’s magazine, Upstreet. The black frame of the cover was retained but most of the information was moved to a block at the bottom of the page. Typeface Tiffany was introduced for headers.

“Doing magazines is a bit of departure for me,” Hyland says, “but a lot of it is common sense stuff really.”

Remember our January cover? The one where we had the artwork made at a letterpress workshop in São Paulo? Coolhunting has made a very nice film at the same workshop, interviewing the guys who printed our cover artwork

CR January cover, artwork printed at Grafica Fidalga

We spotted this at The Denver Egotist

We’ve been big fans of Abbott Miller’s designs for 2wice magazine for a long time here at CR, so we can heartily recommend a new exhibition of back issues at AIGA in New York that also features another balletomane favourite, Dance Ink

The exhibition, titled Everybody Dance Now: 20 Years of Dancing in Print which was also designed by Miller, features the magazines’ collaborations with many of the world’s most innovative dancers, choreographers, and photographers.

Dance Ink, Summer 1996 issue

The Picnic issue, Summer 2002. The die-cut cover opened to reveal dancer Mark Morris holding a watermelon

A press release explains that “Dance Ink was conceived by its publisher Patsy Tarr as an alternative performance space, one that had the advantage of becoming a physical record of this most ephemeral art form. 2wice, its successor, continues in this tradition with a focus on editions that use the medium of print to evoke the tactile, visual and temporal qualities of performance.”

As well as the publications, books, photographs, posters and artifacts related to the production of the magazines are also on show.

Everybody Dance Now: 20 Years of Dancing in Print is at AIGA, 164 Fifth Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets, New York City until May 15

Animal issue, Summer 1993

The Summer 2005 issue featured costumes by the artist Robert Rauschenberg

Dance Ink, Fall 1994 issue

Interiors, the second issue of 2wice, from Winter 1998

Everybody Dance Now, the current issue of 2wice, a collaboration with the photographer Martin Parr