Initial sketches by Richard Green for the new-look Pelican logo (on left). He explains that the bird’s ‘eye’ was a challenge to get right (original Pelican logos shown top left in both grids; Green’s final logos show bottom right in each)
For our latest edition of Monograph, free with subscriber copies of CR, we talked to Penguin Press’ art department about the rebirth of the Pelican imprint which relaunched this month. It was a chance to discuss design decisions, logo sketches and early cover treatments – and also look to where the brand is going next…
Pelican was relaunched this month after three decades in hibernation – and while one might think that the rich heritage of the imprint might weigh heavily on the shoulders of the design team (the brand originally ran from 1937 to 1984), it was in fact the digital era that influenced its new direction as much as anything.
Our new 18-page Monograph – which is available with new subscriptions starting with the June issue – features early Pelican designs by Edward Young, William Grimmond and Jan Tschichold, but focuses on the work that the current design team, led by art director Jim Stoddart, has been doing since last year.
Pages from Hans Schmoller’s notebooks showing the first Pelican logos from the 1930s and 40s
Launching in the late 1930s with Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, & Fascism, the non-fiction series was to continue the Penguin ethos of printing quality books at an affordable price. Pelican was about self-improvement – making knowledge accessible to a wider readership.
Indeed, Pelican’s were to be “the true everyman’s library for the twentieth century,” said Penguin founder Allen Lane. Now, Penguin’s art department has resurrected the imprint for the twenty-first.
Pelican covers from the 1940s and 50s
Pelican covers from the 1960s and 70s
Cover experiments by the current Penguin Press art department
Grid and logos for the new-look Pelican books
With a new logo by Penguin’s Richard Green and cover, text and digital design by Matthew Young, the project has put the talents of this tight-knit team to great use.
When the brief was announce last year, Young initially worked on a responsive website for Pelican – and from his experiments with typefaces there, chose Brandon and Freight as display and text fonts, respectively.
The first five editions in Pelican’s 2014 range
The full story of the rebirth of Pelican is in this month’s Monograph – available only with a subscription to Creative Review (it comes with our June issue, a World Cup special). Go to our Shopify page to start your subscription today.
Samplers from the first five Pelican books are now available from pelicanbooks.com – the books are in shops now (£7.99). The full website launches on June 1.
In a commitment to drawn art in an age of digital communication, type designer Dave Foster has been hand-lettering all his @FosterType tweets during the month of May…
The Sydney-based type designer is using the hashtag #MayDave alongside examples of his hand-drawn work, rendering ‘@’ names and the contents of tweets in a range of different styles.
Foster’s tweets have ranged from simple replies (“Nah” or “Thanks!”) or details about lettering workshops, to lengthier statements such as yesterday’s, “It’s times like these when I wish I had more to say…”.
You can see his latest work on @FosterType and via the #MayDave hashtag – and he still has a week to go. Foster’s portfolio is at fostertype.com.
A record seven Black Pencils were awarded at D&AD this year, several of them for social or public awareness projects. Here’s our comprehensive round-up of the winners
EdenSpiekermann’s Improving Safety and Comfort on Train Platforms project for NS Dutch Railways won Black in Digital Design. It uses a colour-coded LED strip running above a station platform to help guide passengers to the right part of the train. The strip includes information on the different class carriages, as well as where there are free seats available
Also in Digital Design, Finch won Black for The Most Powerful Arm campaign for charity Save our Sons
No surprise that Volvo Trucks The Epic Split from Forsman & Bodenfors is among the major winners – this time in the Online Branded Films category. The entrie campaign also won a Yellow Pencil
Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves’ GravityLight powers a light source or other electrical device using the power of gravity. A bag filled with rocks or sand generates power as it slowly falls. It was one of two Black Pencils from the White Pencil category (confused?)
The other White Pencil Black Pencil was for the Terre des Hommes Sweetie campaign by LEMZ. The project reportedly helped identify over 1,000 online sexual predators
In Crafts for Advertising, Dentsu Tokyo won Black for Sound of Honda/ Ayrton Senna 1989 in which the driver’s record-breaking lap at the Suzuka circuit was recreated as a sound and light experience
WAX Partnership’s Calgary Society for Persons with Disabilities 2012 Annual Report won Black in Graphic Design. It is bound with a single, central staple in an attempt to convey the difficulties of living with a disability. This is somewhat painfully explained on the D&AD site thus: “Using the insight that ‘being handicapped is hard’ we decided to make the annual hard to read”. Hmmm
This year’s Yellow Pencils are:
The Mac Pro for Product Design
In Writing for Design, McCann Erickson Melbourne won for Phubbing: A Word is Born, for the Macquarie Dictionary
Serial award winners Bloomberg Businessweek chalked up another gong in Magazine & Newspaper Design for a series of covers
Another much-garlanded project, OgilvyOne Worldwide London’s BA Magic of Flying won two Pencils in Integrated & Earned Media
And it’s no surprise to see Dove Real Beauty Sketches, by Ogilvy & Mather Brazil, picking up a Yellow in the same category
Ogilvy & Mather’s New York office won Yellow for IBM Datagrams, in Crafts for Design. which visualised stats about tennis matches to be shared on social media
In the same category, Stinkdigital won for Luxottica (Ray Ban) Social Visionaries,
As did hat-trick design for glow in the dark story book, Hide & Eek!
And Barcelona-based Mucho won for Nitsa 94/96: El Giro Electrónico. Here’s how they describe the project: “‘Nitsa 94/96: El giro electrónico’, is a documentary that chronicles the beginnings of Nitsa, an iconic nightclub in Barcelona. We were asked to design a limited edition poster to promote the film’s premiere. The visual idea is based on Nitsa’s famous revolving dance floor that the club once featured. In order to create 150 unique posters, we invented a wooden surface that allowed us to turn the paper in a silkscreen machine, printing on a different angle each time. The posters also have a fluorescent colour dot that refers to psychotropic drugs as well as to the proportions of vinyl records. “
A2/SW/HK won for the typefaces it created for The Independent Newspaper redesign (the newspaper itself did not pick up a pencil, however)
Outdor advertising/Ambient A Yellow for La Voz del Interior, Life Signs by Ogilvy & Mather Buenos Aires in Outdoor Advertising.a road safety campaign from a Colombian newspaper using real crashed cars
Digital Design Box, Bot & Dolly “Box explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection mapping on moving surfaces. The film documents a live performance, captured entirely on camera.”
Press Advertising The Sunday Times – Rich List, Grey London
Book Design Nineteen Eighty-Four, Type as Image
Film Advertising Crafts Hennessy, The Man Who Couldn’t Slow Down, Droga5
Southern Comfort , Whatever’s Comfortable: Karate, Wieden+Kennedy New York
PETA “98% Human”, The Mill/BBDO
Daimler, Chicken, Jung von Matt
Mobile Marketing Unicef, Food Photos Save Lives, Draftfcb New Zealand
Natalia Project, RBK Communication
Smart Communications, TXTBKS by DDB DM9JaymeSyfu
Direct
Colombian Ministry of Defence, You Are My Son by Lowe/SSP3
Amnesty International Trial by Timeline by Colenso BBDO
New Museum, Recalling 1993 by Droga5
Graphic Design Royal Canadian Mint, Heart of the Arctic by Jam3
Amsterdam Sinfonietta posters by Studio Dumbar
Art On The Underground, Labyrinth by Mark Wallinger by Rose
Whitney Museum of American Art Identity by Experimental Jetset
Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, Mind and Movement by Magpie Studio
Digital Marketing Delta Airlines, Delta Photon Shower by Wieden+Kennedy New York
Dove, Real Beauty Sketches by Ogilvy & Mather Brazil
Packaging Design Nippon Design Center, Pierre Hermé Paris “These three designs were created to package the Ispahan, a macaroon that is one of Pierre Hermé’s most well-known pastries. Using a study of hand-moulding, we designed the packages with smooth joint-free curves and a delicate white texture so that they wrap the Ispahan in a fluid, curvaceous body, as if it were made of dough pressed lightly by a single touch.”
Branding Lidl, Dill – The Restaurant by INGO
“Lidl tried to convince Sweden about the quality in their products. Low price and quality just don’t go together. We built and opened a gourmet restaurant. The British two starred Guide Michelin Chef Michael Wignall was in charge of the cooking. What nobody knew was that ALL food that was used was bought at Lidl, down to the smallest grain of salt. The restaurant, named DILL was open during 3 weeks and fully booked from first day to last.”
Tama Art University, Tamabi by MR_DESIGN “TAMABI is a nickname for the Tama Art University which is one of the top art schools in Japan. These official advertisements needed to incorporate the university’s slogan ‘MADE BY HANDS’ and principles : the avant-garde, the challenge, and creating something new. We focused on the hand-crafted. We produced many different visuals in a simple format and with a limited selection of motifs. This series consists of about 100 variations. A lot of variations represent the university’s slogan ‘MADE BY HANDS’ and principles. Also we tried to represent the spirit of art and design.”
Harvey Nichols, Sorry, I Spent It On Myself by adam&eveDDB
Writing for Advertising 350 Action, Climate Name Change, Barton F. Graf 9000
Art Direction Mori Building , Tokyo City Symphony by SIX
Music Videos Les Télécréateurs, Gesaffelstein Pursuit directed by Fleur & Manu (two Yellow Pencils)
Is Tropical, Dancing Anymore directed by Raphael Rodriguez (NSFW!)
Magazine & Newspaper Design Series of Moscovskie Novosti newspapers
Crafts for Design Yoshida Hideo Memorial Foundation, The Beautiful Black List by Dentsu Tokyo “Celebrating its 50th anniversary, D&AD exhibited successive Black Pencil works together for the first time. We named these collectively as the ‘Black List’ and executed the exhibition’s total design. The main theme is that of the whale. We feel its ability to travel the world without boundaries is equal to D&AD’s unparalleled potential for new discovery.”
Further details (including two radio Yellow Pencils) and credits here
Glasgow studio D8 has designed branding, packaging and signage for a new craft brewery opening in Glasgow today.
Housed in a former box factory in the city’s east end, Drygate describes itself as the UK’s first experiential craft brewery: the site includes a beer hall, shop, gallery space and outpost of Edinburgh gastropub Vintage and from June, visitors will be able to try brewing their own beer.
We first featured Drygate back in February, when D8 invited Glasgow School of Art alumni to design artwork for packaging. Fifteen designs were selected and displayed at a one-day exhibition in the city, and three have so far been used on bottles.
The initial range of beers includes Bearface Lager, with a label illustrated by Jack Bedford and Linda Sweenie:
Outaspace Apple Ale, with artwork by Patch Keyes and Good Press:
And Gladeye IPA, by Andrew Park:
Large-scale versions of Bedford, Sweenie and Park’s illustrations have also been applied to walls and equipment around the building. The remaining twelve designs will be used on future packaging and some are currently featured in the brewery’s gallery space.
D8’s David Shanks says the choice of artwork was based on “gut feeling and standout. Choosing something that would catch the eye on the shelf and try to bring something new to the crowd of craft beers already out there.”
Illustrations were inspired by flavours in the beer, and each beer’s name is based on the artwork on packaging. Keyes and Good Press’ illustration, for example, depicts funk and soul singer Billy Preston, who was the first signing to the Beatle’s Apple record label. “He’s also apparently the only other person to be name-credited on a Beatles record, bar the Fab Four that is, [and] the name came from one of his classic funk tracks Outaspace,” explains Shanks.
The brewery’s marque is inspired by the German/Nordic translation of Drygate, which mean’s ‘Priest’s path’:
And the structure fo the building itself. ‘The seven peaks of the Drygate building give it a strong aesthetic, hinting at its industrial past…Drygate wants to take people on a journey from the everyday to the exceptional, but being exceptional isn’t easy, so the path isn’t straight,’ says D8.
The rounded logotype includes a reference to the building, too, says Shanks: the crossbar of the ‘a’ is inspired by the apex of the roof of a walkway that leads to Drygate’s beer garden.
D8 has also designed a website for the brewery and worked closely with local studio Graven Images on interiors. “The client sought to reflect the grit and glamour of Glasgow, keep the unique industrial details of the space, which was previously a box factory, but still have warmth: somewhere you would want to stay, eat and drink,” says Shanks.
Drygate’s logo and signature zig zag appears on glasses and murals but the overall approach to branding inside is restrained. “There’s no need to over brand the interiors…Graven’s reflection appears subtly, as it should, in furniture details, such as angle stitching in the banquets, edges of tables, dual colour tile work, parquet flooring, [and] trusses between bespoke made beer benches,” says Shanks.
The choice of artwork used on bottles is diverse, but the custom type and Drygate marque give packaging a unified look that should stand out on the shelves against more established brands. Drygate says it will release new guest ales on a regular basis, and the first round is expected in early July.
Adobe’s Typekit has just launched a new site dedicated to honing typographic skills, via a series of lessons and resources, under the name Typekit Practice…
“Typekit Practice is a collection of resources and a place to try things, hone your skills, and stay sharp,” runs the site’s introduction. “Everyone can practice typography.”
On offer are featured lessons, including one on using shades for “eye-catching emphasis”, a list of useful online references (blogs, articles, talks etc), and a reading list of books on typography. Of course, there are also links to Typekit’s own fonts and its accompanying blog.
Aimed at both the type novice and expert, Typekit Practice is certainly informative – the lesson on shades offers some good pointers as to the various shading techniques available – from ‘drop’ and ‘close’ shades to ‘offset’ and ‘printer’s’ iterations – while the site itself is clearly laid out and nicely written.
As Brown writes on the TK blog, ” Lessons stand on a foundation of references to articles, blog posts, books, websites, talks, and other solid resources.”
It looks like Typekit Practice could evolve into a useful collection of hints and tips for those starting to play with typographic technique, and for others looking for some well-researched information on the discipline.
“We have lots of ideas for Typekit Practice,” writes Brown, “plus an extraordinary group of authors and teachers helping us think up valuable lessons and make good references. Come practice with us.”
Mucho, the design studio with partners working in seven different cities in Europe and the US, is the subject of the next Typo Talk at the Typographic Circle
The original members of Mucho met while working at Pentagram in London. Eventually, they all went their separate ways but now work together in a mini-network spanning offices in Barcelona, Berlin, Newark (Nottinghamshire not New Jersey), Paris, San Francisco, London and New York.
John, Loran, Marc, Pablo, Rob and Tilman will be explaining how they make this unusual arrangement work in practice at Typo Circle’s regular venue, the offices of ad agency JWT in Knightsbridge, London SW1, on May 1.
With the Tour de France starting in July, Yellow Jersey Press has reissued five classic cycling books with covers referencing some of the most famous colours in the sport…
Designed in-house by Matt Broughton, the series includes broadcaster Ned Boulting’s tale of becoming obsessed by Le Tour, How I Won the Yellow Jumper, and the first British winner Bradley Wiggins’ autobiography, My Time.
Three of the covers reference the colourways of the jerseys awarded to Le Tour cyclists – hence the yellow (worn by the overall time leader) on the aforementioned titles, the bright green of the jersey awarded to the winner of the points competition, and the red and white Maillot à Pois pattern for the ‘King of the Mountains’ – the rider who tops the climbing classification – on Richard Moore’s Slaying the Badger (the ‘Badger’ in question being French cyclist, Bernard Hinault).
The five stripes of the world champion jersey appear on William Fotheringham’s Put Me Back on My Bike, while writer Tim Moore’s retracing of the Tour de France route, French Revolutions, gets a tricolore treatment, complete with up-ended type evocative of the challenge he took on.
All the titles in the series are republished by Yellow Jersey Press (Vintage). More at vintage-books.co.uk.
Design studio Kellenberger-White has created a hand painted font and identity system for arts festival Glasgow International.
The festival launched in the city last week and includes talks, exhibitions, screenings and performances from local and international visual artists. Kellenberger-White was asked to create an identity that would relate to Glasgow in some way, and opted for a handmade font inspired by the city’s ship-building and design heritage.
“We were looking at the lettering and signage on large ships, and saw that some Greenpeace activists had painted ‘No Whales’ on to one with a roller,” explains Eva Kellenberger. “We liked the idea of this as a quick communication tool and thought it would be interesting to create an array of roller paint signs across the city,” she says.
Kellenberger and co-director Sebastian White created letters by standing up and painting with a long roller at arm’s length. “All of the arks and shapes of letters are produced completely by hand. It had to be done using a roller from quite high up, using the arch of the hand and the radius of the arm,” explains Kellenberger.
“There are also a few quirks that relate to some of the type that [Scottish designer] Charles Rennie Mackintosh drew – the b’s and e’s and a’s, for example, have quite high waistlines,” says White.
The font has been applied to signage around the city as well as merchandise, maps, brochures and the festival’s website. Kellenberger-White has used a colourful palette, inherited from a previous project commissioned by the festival, for which local artists were asked to paint the word Glasgow on to tote bags.
“They’d used quite an eccentric set of colours, a lot of Victorian blues, browns and greys as well as brighter colours, and it seemed like a great palette to inherit,” says White.
The identity system doesn’t feature images of work that will be on display, as Kellenberger and White say they wanted to avoid selecting one particular artist to represent the show, or compromising work by cropping or editing it to fit.
“A lot of the festival is quite a spatial experience. Events are in unusual buildings or ones that aren’t used very often, and it’s not a white cube gallery event, so we didn’t want it to feel like that,” says White.
Its an unusual approach to arts branding, which often features sleek or minimal typefaces, and both Kellenberger and White say they wanted Glasgow International’s to have a human and friendly feel.
“We wanted the identity to reference the themes artists are playing with – lots of the works are funny, or loud, or have a sense of irony,” she says.
The studio has created several custom typefaces (including one for Frieze Foundation), but Kellenberger and White say this is the first they’ve done entirely by hand.
“It wasn’t labouring for months on a computer screen, so it was quite quick and intuitive – we changed the configuration of the studio, started working on the floor and came up with all sorts of elements for communication materials, from maps to social icons and symbols for water,” says Kellenberger.
“We had such a rich palette to work from after it and we wouldn’t have got such a particular visual language from using something off the shelf,” she adds.
Dalton Maag has worked with design agency Red Peak to create technology company Intel’s first ever proprietary font, Intel Clear. We spoke to Bruno Maag about the project…
Intel Clear is designed to work across all writing systems and on any media platform. Dalton Maag has so far released Latin, Greek and Cyrillic styles in a range of weights, and the font will eventually be applied to all Intel communications in every language.
The new font is part of Red Peak’s ongoing efforts to simplify the company’s branding: as Intel’s previous font choice was only available in Latin, similar looking ones had to be sourced for other scripts, resulting in inconsistent branding and multiple complex licensing deals. It also wasn’t optimised for use on screen, and Red Peak felt the company needed one that would work just as well on tablets as billboards.
“[The old font] looked outdated and had a slightly mechanical feel,” says Dalton Maag creative director Bruno Maag. “Intel needed a brand font with personality… to be read by a five year old as much as by an 80 year old, used in small, large, in print, on screen and on devices that haven’t even been invented yet.”
Dalton Maag has been working on the project for around a year, and spent a month with Red Peak developing 20 initial concepts. The old Intel font was “completely disregarded,” says Maag, in favour of a cleaner design that references Intel’s logo and its values of openness and friendliness. “We picked up a few elements and basic proportions from the logo – you can see it in the way strokes are rounded off,” adds Maag.
Consistency is achieved across various scripts in the contrast, terminals and soft angles and Maag says characters are designed to have a “human” feel. “If you look at the way the lower case ‘a’ terminates, there’s a nice feature in the bottom of the stroke, a little like calligraphy pen lettering. We wanted the characters to have a human, friendly quality,” he says.
While Intel Clear had to communicate the brand’s personality, however, Maag says it was important to exercise restraint. “If you have too much personality, it leads to a fashionable design, which feels outdated in five years,” he says. “For a company like Intel, it needs to live at least 10-15 years and ideally even longer.”
It was also important to ensure Intel Clear looked contemporary across different scripts, says Maag. “Designing a font like this, you have to really think about functionality and how it looks in other languages. Something might look contemporary in a Latin font but old fashioned or totally inappropriate for Arabic. You have to find the one that works for both,” he says.
Throughout the development process, Intel Clear had to be tested on a range of different screens, from smartphones to tablets and PCs. The main challenge, says Maag, was creating one that would cater to various screen sizes and resolutions. “In print, you have a fairly clear idea of where the font’s going to end up but with digital, you have to consider legacy devices, such as black and white or low resolution phones used in the developing world, [as well as] multi colour, hi res tablets. We had to exclude some devices below 100dpi,” he explains.
Another technical challenge was creating characters that would meet the height restrictions set by bounding boxes on digital devices. “Some Hindi letters, for example, are extremely tall, so we had to contextualise the proportional relationship. It did mean some compromises on design,” says Maag. To avoid text looking too condensed on small screens, Maag says characters had to be generous and relaxed.
Intel Clear is still a work in progress (some scripts have yet to be released) but from what we’ve seen, Dalton Maag and Red Peak have created a versatile font that gives Intel a more distinctive yet streamlined identity system. Every modern technology company should have a font that’s optimised for on-screen usage, and by creating one that works across all scripts, the agencies will likely save Intel a great deal of money in long term legal and licensing costs.
Matthew Young at Penguin has designed an austere cover for a forthcoming edition of Robert Graves’ Good-bye To All That, published as part of the company’s ongoing First World War-related series…
The type-only design is a sombre take on Graves’ autobiographical account of his wartime experience; with centred text and in a brushed gun-metal grey the A-format design is akin to a field manual or handbook (and similar in appearance to Warne’s Observer’s Books from the 1930s).
The date set bottom-right signifies that the text is of Graves’ original 1929 version of his memoir which he revised and republished it in 1957. The strange, unsettling first edition cover of the book is shown at the bottom of this post.
Good-bye To All That is republished by Penguin on May 1; £5.50. Details here. More of Youngs work is at mymymy.co.uk.
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