The latest product range from Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, Salt made from Tears, has just launched.

The salt is collected from humans experiencing a range of emotions, and in various situations. You can pick up salt made from: tears of sorrow, tears shed while sneezing, tears shed while chopping onions, tears of laughter, and tears of anger. Each has a distinctly different flavour – salt made from tears of sorrow has a delicate lavender flavour, perfect for seasoning limbs and organs.

The salts are produced by the fine folk at Halen Mon, and are the brilliant idea of the lovely people at Studio Weave, with additional design by We Made This. You can buy them in the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies shop, or from their online store, either individually, or as the full range.

(And heck, the style press are even taking an interest…)

UPDATE:

The Salt has been getting good press all over the place, including: Gizmodo, Channel 5′s The Wright Stuff, The Independent, the Daily Mail, Uncrate, and the Huffington Post.

We’ve been dipping in and out of GraphicDesign&’s new publication Page 1: Great Expectations over the last couple of days, and it’s a mighty interesting read.

GraphicDesign& is a collaborative project from Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright, which is aiming create publications which make connections between graphic designers and other subject areas. (We’d perhaps suggest that that’s an inherent part of graphic design – it’s what we do every day – connect with other disciplines to help communicate their messages.)

Page 1 is their first book, and it’s really interesting. The brief they sent out to 70 designers (mainly established names, but a few students too) was to take the first page of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and lay it out however they saw fit, within the paramaters of a standard A format paperback, 110mm x 178mm.

In the final book, each designer is given a couple of spreads – one with their name and their design, and then another with the rationale for their design, and the specifics of typefaces and sizes.

This layout works really well – rather than just being a gallery space for a bunch of designs, we get the chance to listen to the designers explaining the thoughts and ideas behind those designs. Some of the designers might perhaps be accused of taking themselves just a tad too seriously, but in general there’s a pleasing breadth of responses, from the very dry to the very experimental.

Our studio partner Paul Finn was one of the designers included – here’s his page:

And here are a few others:

Great stuff. You can buy the book here.

John Lawrence

Linzie Hunter

Kai and Sunny

The Paper Cinema (aka Nic Rawling)

Peter Schrank

Helen Stephens

As well as a Mike Nicholson illustrating live as the conference progresses, and various demonstrations of letterpress and calligraphy.

This is the new animation that Penguin have commissioned from director Woof Wan-Bau to celebrate the launch of their new series, the Penguin English Library.

The series consists of “100 of the best novels in the English language”, starting with 20 launch titles, with cover designs from Coralie Bickford-Smith. (Check out the Facebook page to see details of the designs, and how they’ve played with the Timeline there.)

The covers are all well and good, but what got us really excited here was seeing the Penguin logo animated. It’s really beautifully done. Agencies love to talk about “bringing the brand alive”. Well here it is – living and breathing. Brilliant.

We were over in Berlin this weekend, and took the chance to visit the lovely Buchstaben Museum (Museum of Letters) there.

The small museum, housed on the first floor of a shopping centre, is a fantastic archive of signage and lettering. It’s only open for a few hours each week (1pm to 3pm Thursday to Saturday), but it’s definitely worth a trip if you’re in the city. Here are a few photos of the bits we saw.

We nipped along this morning to the big new show at the V&A, British Design 1948-2012, a retrospective of the creative industries in Britain since the end of the Second World War. Timed to make the most of the Olympic hordes who’ll be hitting the capital this summer (the show ends the same day as the Olympic closing ceremony), it’s a clear attempt to grab back some of the glory from the sporting crowd. Which is no bad thing.

This is the first big exhibition of post-war design that the V&A has staged, and it covers fashion, furniture, fine art, graphic design, photography, ceramics, architecture and industrial products. It’s good to have all of that creative output lumped together, even if it does mean that you can only have a few key pieces from each discipline. Pleasingly there’s rather more graphic design than we’d anticipated, particularly from the period just after the war, with work from Abram Games, Edward Bawden, Reginald Mount, and David Gentleman.

The show is grouped into three main areas, Tradition & Modernity; Subversion; and Innovation and Creativity, which run more or less chronologically from 1948 to the present day. The three groupings don’t necessarily help, creating rather forced divisions between periods and styles. But there’s lots of great stuff on display, including four hand-painted maquettes for British road signs by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert; and a page from Design Research Unit’s British Rail Design Manual.

The second section, Subversion, deals mainly with the rise of the art school and a more youth oriented period of design – so you get Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols posters, Vivienne Westwood’s punk clothing designs, some Beatles album covers, and of course Peter Saville, Barney Bubbles and Neville Brody. Which is all well and good, but unfortunately this part of the exhibition is designed with a rather clichéd underground vibe – lots of black walls and industrial fittings, which really cheapens the work on display, making it feel like we’re walking through some sort of gaudy themed tourist attraction.

The third section focuses more on manufacturing industries, technology and architecture. Somehow the curators have managed to use Apple’s iMac as a pioneering example of British technology design (Jonathan Ive, the iMac’s designer is from these shores, sure, but come on…). Elsewhere there’s a model of Concorde, an E-Type Jag, a Topper sailing boat, and Kenneth Grange’s Brownie Vecta camera.

Meanwhile, graphic design in this section is represented by Wolff Olins’ hideous London 2012 logo (it just doesn’t get any better does it?); their Orange logo from 1994, and Alan Fletcher’s lovely V&A logo from 1989 (rather happily referencing Ian Dennis’s National Theatre logo, which is shown earlier in the exhibition).

Our favourite exhibit though was these Globoots from 1969:

They were unique at the time of their production, being double dip-moulded in two different plastics, so that the translucent uppers and opaque soles were made in one piece, without seams. And crikey, don’t they look like a certain coloured computer designed in the USA by a British bloke called Jonny?

Our only real gripe is that it features way too much art. The show is British Design 1948-2012, not British Art & Design 1948-2012, but we’re treated to work from Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Allen Jones, David Hockney and Damien Hirst. Obviously there’s crossover between the disciplines, and many of those artists worked in design as well as art, but the pieces shown are their artworks rather than their design pieces. So for example, we get Hockney’s We Two Boys Together Clinging painting rather than any of his fantastic stage designs. This seems like a real shame, given how much great design has had to be left out to make room for the art.

Overall though, it’s a great show, and anyone interested in design should get along quick smart.

The show opens on Saturday 31 March, and runs until 12 August.

Picture credit for top image: Children crossing sign, by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir for the Ministry of Transport, 1964 © Margaret Calvert

Shot, directed & edited by Glen Milner for the Daily Telegraph, this short film was shot at Smith-Settle Printers in Leeds. The book being printed is Suzanne St Albans’ ‘Mango and Mimosa’ published as part of the Slightly Foxed series.

via The Casual Optimist

Noma Bar. He’s a bit clever isn’t he?

He’s just created a series of eight covers for the latest issue of Wallpaper* magazine, and they’re stunners. The covers relate to eight design hubs: Germany, USA, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Belgium and Scandinavia. Known for his witty and economical use of positive and negative space, for Wallpaper Bar has moved into the physical world, creating painted room sets in which products and furniture become part of the illustrations (Nouvel chairs for France, a Schönbuch umbrella stand for Germany, and a Babaghuri ink box for Japan).

Great stuff. And they’re available as posters and limited-edition prints (of course) from Wallpaper.

On March 6 2006 we decided it might be an idea to start a blog (you can find the remnants of that over here - though we transported nearly all those posts over to this site too).

Things in the digital world were quite different back then – you weren’t on Facebook, you didn’t tweet unless you were a bird (Twitter launched in July that year), and Tumblr wasn’t even on the horizon. You would have still been using buttons on your phone to make calls (though we were looking forward to that all changing), and video calls were still something you only really saw in sci-fi movies. Microsoft was getting excited about something called Zune.

Six full years later, we’re still banging on about design and visual culture and stuff. And according to our slightly temperamental feed counter, over four thousand of you are paying attention on the blog itself, with a thousand or so of you over on Facebook, and around a thousand on Twitter. (Hello! to each and every one of you. You’re lovely.)

So we just wanted to say thanks for reading, and for commenting now and again.

If you’ve really been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that we’ve been posting a bit less recently. That’s partly because of Twitter – there’s a lot of stuff that we would previously have blogged, but now just tweet. But also, you know, we’ve just been busy. Particularly with our work over at the Ministry of Stories and Hoxton Street Monster Supplies. (Have you bought anything there yet? You should.)

This coming year, we really want to spend some more time making stuff, rather than blogging about it, so it might get a little quieter still. But we’re not planning on going silent just yet.

So stay tuned. Here’s to the next six.

So, what did you get up to with your extra day?

February 29th only comes around once every four years, so the good folks at Spread the Word decided they’d mark the leap day by getting writers from across the globe to collaborate on writing a book. In a single day. And then publishing it as an e-book today, as part of the World Book Day celebrations. And they asked us to design the book for them.

In preparation, they put together four teams of writers: in Kuala Lumpur, Delhi, London and Vancouver; and created a loose structure with four main characters, one in each city. The writing process kicked off in Kuala Lumpur, overlapping with Delhi, and then London and Vancouver joined in as the sun came up over their skies.

In London the main character was called Dave Martin. To help provide some inspiration for the writers, Alistair spent the day playing the fictional character, wandering around London taking pictures and uploading them on Twitter for the writers to respond to, using the hash tag #24hourbook. You can check out the feed at @Mr_Dave_Martin, or check out this slideshow of the images. Here are just a few:

Meanwhile, the writers created a story that pulled the characters and cities together. They shared their progress on a Facebook page, writing the book itself on Google Docs.

The writing was edited late into the night, and we kicked off the design very early this morning. We worked in InDesign, and created both an .epub and a .pdf version of the finished book, which was published on the Spread the Word website around 5pm this afternoon. (We’re fairly sure we’ll be tweaking and refining the design in the next few days.)

If you’d like to check it out, you can download the ebook in the ePub format (which should work on Apple’s iBooks on the iPad and iPhone; and on most e-readers – though not Kindles. It’ll work on Adobe’s Digital Editions, but won’t look so nice) or as a PDF.

(Oh, and the lovely cover image is by the equally lovely Lee Roberts).