We Made This

Summer deadline

2008-07-21T09:49:48+01:00

Applications for the RSA's fantastically good RDI Summer School close this Friday, 25 July.

Read all about it here, and apply here.

Deliver us from evil

2008-07-16T09:47:49+01:00

The shot above is of a piece of metal type onto which the Lord's Prayer has been cast. The surface area is about 4mm x 4mm – you could get it onto a 1st Class stamp twenty times over. We were given it as a souvenir of a visit to the fantastic Type Museum in Kennington around eight years ago. But it now looks like the museum is under threat of dismemberment:

"The Type Museum in Kennington is looking like it might finally close, beginning with all its contents being moved from the museum into storage, and then the eventual break-up of the collection. Please help us prevent this from happening.

The Type Museum has successfuly collected a large proportion of all the definitive historical materials relating to the art, design and manufacturing production in Britain of the typefaces in which the world's languages are communicated and recorded. This collection has been closed for two years and needs re-opening to public access, educational and scholarly use – not broken up or put into storage as is curently being proposed. The Type Museum's collections need exhibiting, curatorial and conservation development and educational workshops – not storage. This legacy is vital for the quality of education of future generations of communicators in which Britain has frequently led the world. We appeal for resources to restore and safeguard educational access to these collections."

Sign the petition.

And hey, if you know of any individual, or company, that might be able to help, drop them the link to this post. The Type Museum is a Very Good Thing – it should be saved.

Blowing our own trumpet

2008-07-11T11:25:05+01:00

We hate to smug off, but our good friend Charlie over at the distinctly wonderful Tantramar has just posted an interview with Alistair as part of his series of interviews with artists, designers and illustrators, which currently also features Seripop and Miles Donovan.

Charlie's a groovy guy, and he wears his facial hair better than anyone we know.

Photoshop for real

2008-07-11T11:02:24+01:00

Loving these shots, from a series by a couple of about-to-be 2nd year Central Saint Martins BA Graphics students, Henry Hadlow and Ed Cornish.

A font & bookends & tshirts

2008-07-08T16:01:39+01:00

The kids over at House Industries have released their latest font, Studio Lettering, and with it they've produced a stack of tasty merchandise.

If you've got a couple of hundred bucks to hand, you can pick up a pair of their rather fine ampersand bookends in cast iron (bet the shipping cost is gonna cause some damage), or for slightly less cash (and a third of the weight) you can get them in cast aluminum.

Or, if your wallet's not feeling quite so hefty, you can grab an ampersand t-shirt for just $26. We're getting one sent over, and it's only costing us £20 including shipping.

In your face credit crunch!

Beijing Olympic pictograms

2008-07-08T07:19:11+01:00

Over on Designboom at the moment, there's a fantastic interview with Min Wang, design director for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, and Dean of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA).

For the past five years his design studio, Square Two, together with faculty members and students at CAFA, and the olympic art research center at CAFA, have been heavily involved the design work for the beijing olympics. (It'll be interesting to see if the London 2012 Olympics identity involves London design colleges in any way at all. We're not holding our breath...)

Min Wang's team have been working on identity guidelines, pictograms (above), medals, the way-finding systems, the core graphic, the look for the torch relay, and the overall look of the games. Not a bad gig if you can get it.

The pictograms use strokes of seal characters as their inspiration - they're kind of bonkers aren't they? And they don't half remind us of this postcard from Tom Gauld. Hmmm... Tom Gauld to do the pictograms for the 2012 Olympics... that's not a bad idea...

The pictograms cover the following sports: rowing, badminton, baseball, basketball, boxing, canoe / kayak flatwater, canoe / kayak slalom, cycling, equestrian, fencing, football, artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, trampoline, weightlifting, handball, hockey, judo, wrestling, swimming, synchronized swimming, diving, water polo, modern pentathlon, softball, taekwondo, tennis, table tennis, shooting, archery, triathlon, sailing, volleyball and beach volleyball. Most of those we get - though the distinction between baseball and softball is a bit fuzzy, trampolining looks more like falling-over, and the triathalon seems to involve escaping a swarm of insects.

Check out this page for a full list of what's what, as well as examples of the pictograms from previous games.

Sometimes we forget

2008-07-04T14:48:27+01:00

But when your computer goes a bit wrong, you certainly remember. Playing about with a pencil and some paper: it's really great.

Great Ideas, Volume III

2008-07-02T16:46:24+01:00

Well heck, it's that time of year again, and the third volume of Penguin's Great Ideas Series is about to hit the shelves (early August we're reliably informed). Once again, the bulk of the designs are by the marvellously talented David Pearson, including the magnificent The Sickness unto Death cover (above); with additional covers by Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon. Our very own Alistair Hall also got in on the act with a cover for The Evils of Revolution by Edmund Burke (below).

You can see the complete volume on this Flickr set, and check out David Pearson's site for Volume I and Volume II. We think they're all looking great, but if we had to choose, our personal favourite is Pearson's cover for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which takes the design from the spine and simply repeats it on the front cover (below).

Genius.

On a design trip

2008-07-02T11:03:47+01:00

Swelling the ranks of blogs by designers, Graphic Journey Blog should be worth keeping an eye on.

It's the new blog from Mike Dempsey, one of the founders of CDT Design, now out and about doing his own thing as Studio Dempsey.

And if that doesn't fill your Dempsey shaped hole, you can also check out his series of interviews with the great and the good of the design world at the RDInsights series from the RSA.

A Recent History of Writing and Drawing

2008-07-02T10:42:44+01:00

Now this looks interesting.

A Recent History of Writing and Drawing is the new show at the ICA, opening on Wednesday 9 July. It's curated by design historian Emily King (who's also design editor at Frieze magazine), and is a project by programmer/designer Jürg Lehni, and graphic designer Alex Rich.

The exhibition will look at "the evolving relationship between technologies of communication and their users", which sounds a bit dry, but should be lots of fun. They've got a large wall-drawing machine, and another machine for hole-punching posters. They've also got a running programme of Thursday evening events which promise to be pretty groovy.

We'll fill in some more detail once the show opens.

Image: Dots on Demand, Jürg Lehni & Alex Rich, 2008

Interesting, very interesting

2008-06-23T13:52:55+01:00

We trundled over to Conway Hall in Holborn on Saturday for Interesting 2008, a conference kind of thing organised by the lovely Russell Davies.

This is the second year for the conference, and it's a loose gathering of people who are interested in seeing short talks by interesting people. It's all very lo-fi and collaborative (they even let you play with the logo - that's our remix of it up above), and as a result it's about a hundred times better than a normal conference. If you're familiar with the Pecha Kucha events, then it's a bit like that, but with less exacting time restraints.

The audience is fusion of geeks and designers, so it's getting a stack of coverage on the blogs. You can get a full run-down of the event on Roo Reynolds' site, which also has lots of links to other blog coverage, as well as various bits on Flickr.

Our personal faves were Roo's talk about Lego Vignettes, James Houston's graduation video remix of Radiohead's Nude, Michael Johnson's talk about guitars and graphics, and Jim Le Fevre's wonderful analogue animation using a turntable at 33rpm.

Here's the stuff from last year too.

All in all, a great way to spend a day.

Carson city

2008-06-19T10:19:12+01:00

We made our way over to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith last night for what has to be the most shambolic talk we've ever been to. (And we've been to a typography talk by Erik Spiekermann where none of the fonts on his PDF presentation loaded up. Actually... that was worse. But it's a close run thing.)

The talk, by David Carson, was supposed to be about his new book, but he hasn't quite finished it, so instead the talk was a pretty standard retrospective of his work.

Carson came across pretty much as you'd expect: laid-back and amiable. But he also came across as if he'd never presented before, which just isn't the case, and felt a tad disingenuous. He operated his Mac as if it were an alien device - he was unsure of any key commands, or how to create a spread PDF rather than single pages, and acted as if using the slideshow function was some magical mystery. He's been working on computers for a fair while now - can he really be so unfamiliar with them? Or is it just part of the Carson persona?

Either way, he assured us that he wasn't really a computer kind of guy, and that the meat of his presentation would be on two carousels of slides.

Unfortunately, neither of those worked. They cluttered and stammered their way through his selection of slides, jamming, repeating, freezing, and in the end actually spitting his work out onto the floor. Everyone's a critic, eh?

It meant that things went slowly, with the talk clocking in at two and a half hours; for a fair percentage of the audience, this was just too much, and there was a steady flow of people out of the auditorium as the talk wound on and on.

The content of his talk was a few bits and bobs of new stuff, and a stack of the old stuff, as well as a smattering of found graphics and personal photographs. He showed his recent work for Bark (shown above), which was quieter than his old work, and perhaps better for it.

He also showed the various presentations (six so far, and counting) he's done for the upcoming identity for the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida. Get this: in each presentation he'd show the clients up to thirty different variations of a logo. Staggering.

All in all we didn't dislike the talk as much as some of the audience, and there were some bits we gleaned in amongst the chaos:

Magazines are good as they give you room to experiment in public
When you're using a freelancer, your job is to hire someone good, then get out of the way and let them get on with it
Be open to accidents, but just because something is an accident, don't assume it's good
Carson's dad was a test pilot, and it used to be a career with a 58% mortality rate

Anyway, as we mentioned up top, Carson is in the process of putting together his new book, The Rules of Grafik (sic) Design, and he'd like you to drop him an email. He'd like to know what your personal rules are for graphic design - not the ones you learned at college, but the ones you've created for yourself during your work as a designer.

Um, perhaps we might suggest: Make sure your presentation equipment works?

Degrees of brilliance

2008-06-16T11:33:15+01:00

We made our way across to a couple of the Central Saint Martins degree shows over the weekend.

First up we checked out the MA Communication Design show at the Mall Galleries, and then the BA Graphic Design exhibition at the Bargehouse (just behind the OXO Tower on the Southbank). Both shows were really professional, and had some great bits of work, including Yukinori Motoya's Japanese Icons series, pictured above. The BA show extends across three floors of the Bargehouse, which is a simply fantastic space.

Check out Alistair's pick of his favourites from each show over on this Flickr set. There are some weblinks with each image, though only a few of the students have got their stuff together on them so far.

Both shows run until Thursday, full details here.

One flag to unite them all

2008-06-13T00:27:00+01:00

Can design save the world?

The folks over at Adbusters are asking just that question, with the One Flag brief, inviting designers to submit designs for a flag to embody the idea of global citizenship - essentially, a flag for planet Earth. The competition deadline is 1 December 2008, so you've got plenty of time to think really, really hard about this one. You can even enter in groups. The judging panel is a pretty top notch bunch: Jonathan Barnbrook, Michael Bierut, Vince Frost, Steven Heller, Kalle Lasn, Rick Poynor and Dmitri Siegel; and the winning entry will actually go into production.

That's a pretty great brief.

via Design Observer

Ephemera Society Fair

2008-06-12T10:40:21+01:00

Just a quick note to say that the latest Ephemera Society Fair takes place this Sunday, from 11am the Holiday Inn on Coram Street, London WC1.

The picture above shows a selection of bits we've picked up at past fairs - see the full images over on Alistair's Ephemera Flickr set.

Books, books, glorious books

2008-06-12T10:15:01+01:00

It's always felt a bit like book cover design sits toward the back of the class when it comes to the attention it gets from the design industry. But recently books have been stepping back into the limelight, thanks to a few really stunning bits of design, such as this science fiction series from Gollancz. The weighty tome Fully Booked from Gestalten taps into this revived interest in book design.

Edited by Robert Klanten and Matthias Hübner, the book is divided into two sections, one dealing with book covers (and we get to show off here, as it includes the Great Ideas series we contributed to), the other with artists' books. The two sections start at either end of the book, so you have to turn it upside down to switch from one section to the other. Ironically, we're not totally convinced by this bit of design (we keep opening the wrong section of the book), but the contents are really wonderful (if a bit light on background information), and provide a great showcase of where book design is at right now.

Lovely.

Attack of the Incredible Movie Title Screens!

2008-06-11T14:18:00+01:00

How tasty are these?

They're from Steven Hill's rather spectacular online collection of movie title screens. He's compiled a catalogue of over five thousand different titles, and they're a brilliant record of typographic stylings through the years. Definitely worth a browse.

via ffffound

Wikinomics

2008-06-09T18:08:32+01:00

One of the great things about being a designer is getting to work with fantastically talented people, be they illustrators, photographers, printers, or heck, even clients.

We recently got the chance to work on a book cover with one of our favourite illustrators, the magnificently talented Tom Gauld. The book is the paperback version of the international bestseller Wikinomics. It's an in-depth analysis of the ways people and companies are using the web to collaborate in dazzling and revolutionary ways, and is really worth a read.

We gave Tom a thumbnail sketch of an idea for the cover, where lots of people group together to make up the title of the book, and asked him to make it better. We're dead chuffed with the results.

David Carson's new rules

2008-06-03T12:15:40+01:00

The godfather of grunge graphics and dirty type, David Carson, hits London in a couple of weeks to showcase his new book, The Rules of Graphic Design. He's going to be talking at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith on Wednesday 18 June at 6pm, and tickets are £25 (£15 for concessions).

In the mid-nineties, David Carson was the very definition of graphic design, with The End of Print from 1995 and 2nd Sight from 1997; so it'll be interesting to see what he's been up to for the past decade.

The image above is a screengrab of his desktop, from the Quark promo site ilovedesign (which explains the absence of Adobe icons in Carson's dock...).

Cheers to Caspian for the heads up.

Can't ffffind what you're looking for?

2008-06-03T08:25:24+01:00

We've been getting a stack of hits from an image posted on ffffound, but it links our front page rather than to the specific post that features the image. So if you have come here from ffffound, and you're looking for the beardy guy floating in mid-air just, you'll find him just here.