The third issue of The Ride Journal has just come out, and as with the previous two issues, it's a sumptuous mix of insightful and deeply personal writing, stunning photography, and fantastic illustrations.
Alistair's feeling dead chuffed, as they've included a piece he wrote about the all-night bike ride called the Dunwich Dynamo, featuring some stunning photos by Joe McGorty.
Pick up a copy online.
Loving this. Flickrer insect54 has set up Autografik, a Flickr group "...to act as an archive for modernist graphic design applied to motor vehicles. Planes, trains and automobiles." Lovely stuff.
The folks at Arjowiggins got in touch to show us this little video*, which is part of a campaign they're running, pushing their environmentally friendly stocks.
It put us in mind of a post we ran a couple of years ago about recycled papers, which then made us check out the Lovely as a Tree site, which is perhaps the most useful place to visit, especially as it's been updated fairly recently, and has a comprehensive list of the different recycled papers available.
Interesting to note that Lovely as a Tree also shows you where the papers are manufactured, so you can make sure that you're not mistakenly shipping your stock for an A5 leaflet half way round the world first.
Paperback still seem to be leading the pack when it comes to supplying truly environmentally friendly papers.
*Flatulence is nearly always funny isn't it?
We nipped along to the Royal Academy over the weekend to check out the Anish Kapoor show that opened there recently.
The show collects together a few of Kapoor's early pieces, including some of the pigment works from the 80s; as well as two of his amorphous works: When I Am Pregnant (1992), and Yellow (1999).
The rest of the exhibition is made up of work from the past three years. Of these, there are a range of mirror pieces, the Non-Object series, which are like a hall of mirrors for grown-ups; and three large site-specific installations. The largest of these, Svayambh (2007), takes up five rooms in the gallery, and is an immense thirty-ton block of wax that inches its way on tracks through a series of the Academy's arched doorways.
The companion to this is Shooting into the Corner (2008-2009), in which a canon is fired at twenty minute intervals, shooting twenty pound shells of red wax from one room into another, in the process splattering the walls, floor and ceiling of the gallery with wax shrapnel.
All in all it's an intriguingly visceral show, with the installations working particularly well in the classical spaces of the Royal Academy. Unfortunately, our experience of it was hampered by a rather rigidly enforced no-photography policy, with gallery attendants actually shouting at anyone they saw trying to take a picture. We just don't get why galleries do this. We emailed the Academy to ask about it, and Vistitor Services Manager Natasha Bennett replied:
"Photography is not permitted in the Anish Kapoor exhibition owing to copyright issues. I am sorry if this affected your enjoyment of the exhibition but this is standard in loan exhibitions, as the Royal Academy of Arts does not own the works."
To our mind it's a damn shame, preventing visitors from interacting with the work in a creative way. And since you can photograph one of the works in the gallery's courtyard, surely it can't hurt to let people photograph all of the works. After all, people are going to take pictures anyway, as this Flickr search happily reveals.
So, generally we post about design stuff on here, but occasionally something else brilliant comes across our path that we can't help but share, and that happened last night when we caught the fantastic new play If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet at the Bush Theatre:
"Surviving school as a fat kid is tough enough. When your Mum's a teacher, it's hell. What's more, Anna's Dad is obsessed with saving the world and her maverick uncle Terry is dossing on the couch."
The play is the first outing from 26 year old writer Nick Payne, and is a fantastically nuanced piece, striking a perfect balance between comedy and tragedy, particularly in the character of uncle Terry, brilliantly played by the captivating Rafe Spall (in fact, it's a bit unfair singling him out, as the entire cast is spot on). The direction, by the Bush's Artistic Director Josie Rourke, steers well clear of the subject's potential for melodrama, and kept us gripped throughout.
The play runs through to 21 November, catch it if you can.
We've just got our new set of stationery back from the printer, and are dead happy with it. It's been printed by the lovely folks over at Benwells. The business card is a matt silver foil on Kapok - a 100% recycled 500gsm kraft board from the wonderful gang at Fenner Paper - while the comp slips and letterhead are on Episode IV, another recycled stock from Fenner. (And hey - check out the blog Justin at Fenner is running - it's ace.)
Grafik (the UK based graphic design magazine) has just launched its website, beautifully and elegantly designed by our studio-mates Fitzroy and Finn. The site is divided up into a blog, a talent section, a profile section, and an archive of all the old issues.
'Can Graphic Design be considered Art?' It's one of those questions that comes up time and again, and one of those questions to which the quick glib answer is as good as any 10,000 word thesis response: 'Yeah, sure, if you want it to be'.
But the intersection between design and art can be an interesting place to hang out, and we were reminded of this over the weekend, when we checked out the new Ed Ruscha and Sophie Calle shows that opened in town recently. Both artists create work that plays with text extensively, though in very distinct ways.
The retrospective of American artist Ed Ruscha (pronounced Rew-shay fact-fans) is at the Hayward. Ruscha actually studied as a graphic designer at Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts), and his first job was as a layout artist at an advertising agency.
His career has spanned fifty years, and has constantly shown a preoccupation with typography and lettering, often in an almost abstract sense, using words for their forms rather than their meaning; although in the 80s his work started to use longer sentences, set in his own typeface, Boy Scout Utility Modern (which looks like a buggered-up version of Wim Crouwel's Gridnik).
The show features work from right across Ruscha's career but, apart from the first room, it left us feeling a little flat...
In contrast, Sophie Calle's show Talking to Strangers, at the Whitechapel Gallery, left us feeling excited and energised. We've loved her work since seeing her fantastic show Double Game at Camden Arts Centre back in 1999 - check out the disgustingly gorgeous book of the same name that Vince Frost designed for her - you'll find it on his site under Discipline > Book Design. (And heck, you can still pick up used copies of Double Game
The main installation at the Whitechapel show is Take Care of Yourself, first shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The work is based on a break-up email sent to her by an ex-lover. Calle sent the email on to 107 women (including judges, lawyers, ballerinas, actresses, her mum...) and asked them to interpret it. She then documented the results in utterly beautiful pieces that combine photographs of the women and typographic representations of their repsonses (as well as in a few short film pieces). Suitably for a work based on written communication, the installation feels a bit like walking through a book. It's really great, and well worth a visit.
The Ruscha show runs until 10 January, the Calle until 3 January. Read more about Sophie Calle in this Guardian interview, or pick up a copy of Sophie Calle: M'as tu vue? - Did you see me?
Physical letterforms... just delicious. We've spotted a spate of new ones available to buy around town lately. The ones above are from the newly opened Anthropologie store on Regent St. (They only have a limited UK website so far, but you can check out their full range on the USA site.) The zinc letters come in two sizes, the 8" set above, and a huge set that stand 25" tall - as with the ampersand below.
Just round the corner from there, at Do Shop (on Beak Street), we saw these set of Metalvetica letters from Seletti, which each stand around 35cm high, and as with the Anthropologie set have holes in the back for hanging on walls. They're weighted too, so will sit happily on a shelf.
And at the same store, you can also pick up ceramic Clarendon letterforms in black or white, also from Seletti, which stand about 25cm tall.
Lettertastic eh?
Following on from our post about the 2012 pictograms, we've pulled these beauties out of the archives. The set on the left are the Tokyo 1964 series (Artistic director: Masaru Katzumie, Graphic designer: Yoshiro Yamashita), and the set on the right are Otl Aicher's from Munich 1972. (Check out Alistair's Signs & Lettering Flickr set for larger scans.)
What's the betting these are just all over the design blogs today? The pictograms for London 2012 have just been unveiled, and they're the work of design studio Someone.
They've been created in two versions, a silhouette (above) and a 'dynamic' version (below) designed to 'bring the representations to life' for use on merchandise, posters and sign-posts: which makes you wonder what the silhouette version is supposed to be doing in the first place. The dynamic versions are inspired by the London Underground map apparently.
Here are the pictograms from Beijing, set to the same grid - interesting to see the 2012 set have far more cycling versions (including this year's special bonus BMX discipline), as well as a couple more equestrian ones.
(If you want to see some from previous Olympics, check out Hona Design's mini history of Olympic pictograms.)
We reckon the acid test is whether you or not you can easily work out which discipline is which without relying on text. As well as that though there's the larger question of the overall aesthetic. Having to use a larger box for the modern pentathalon seems a bit wrong, and the sailing pictogram seems to have drifted in from somewhere else...
But what are your thoughts? Love them, loathe them? Do they beat Otl Aicher's much-lauded Munich set?
Chris from C-Coy sent us this short film he shot in 2006 of Milton Glaser talking and sketching. Great stuff - makes you want to pick up a pencil and get busy.
Illustrator Johanna Basford has been in touch to let us know about an interesting little project she's running over the next couple of days (Wednesday 14 & Thursday 15 October), called Twitter Picture.
She's going to create one of her rather beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, inspired entirely by suggestions from Twitter users (check out @johannabasford), and then do a limited edition of 100 silk-screened prints from the drawing.
Sounds like a smart way to get lots of people to check out her work, and could be an interesting snap-shot of what's going on in the collective consciousness right now...
We picked up this little number at the most recent Ephemera Society Fair. We've done (an admittedly cursory) google about it, but not turned up any useful info (if you can shed any light on it, drop us a line). But regardless, it's just great isn't it? We're loving the laying of type, made all the more special with the scratchy handwritten text. Ace. More stuff, as ever, on Alistair's Ephemera Flickr Set.
This looks like a well tasty show: Designs on Delivery is an exhibition of posters from the General Post Office (GPO) from 1930 to 1960, courtesy of the British Postal Museum & Archive.
The show starts today at London College of Communication (LCC), featuring work from a range of top designers, including Tom Eckersley's stark warning about packing parcels carefully (below).
The image up top is Action Stations: Saving Is Everyone's War Job (1944) by FHK Henrion - check out more images from the show in this Guardian slide show.
It looks like a fantastic collection of work, and stands in stark contrast with the current stuff being churned out for the dire 'People's Post Office' campaign.
The show runs from today until 4 November at the Well Gallery at LCC, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB - directions here.
Our friend Richard over at Elephant's Graveyard has been in touch to let us know about the lovely letterpress poster series he's been working on with Graham Bignell at New North Press.
The posters are set and printed by hand, and are available for £75 from the New North Press site.
Alistair has written up his experience of the trip for the third issue of gorgeous cycling magazine The Ride Journal, to accompany a beautiful series of images by photographer Joe McGorty.
Here's an excerpt from the piece:
"Almost imperceptibly though, the group began to stir. Helmets were tightened. Route sheets pocketed. Watches checked. Clusters of riders rose to pick up their bikes, transforming into a loose pack with a single fixed purpose: to ride right through the night.
As the pinks and reds of a setting sun gave way to the deeper hues of night, we gently paced our way out of the tight bright urban sprawl into the space and calm of the countryside. Up ahead, the column of cyclists formed a shifting string of blinking red lights, stretched out along the road, twisting lithely like a living organism next to the stationary lights of the queuing traffic. It was a fantastic sight."
(For more pics of the ride, check out Alistair's pics on his Dunwich Flickr set.)
We trekked across London on Friday and Saturday checking out various bits and bobs at the London Design Festival: we'll post a few highlights on here in the coming days, and thought we'd kick off with our favourite find at 100% Design.
Lost Values, the brainchild of creative director Elena Corchero, was showing as part of Jorg & Olif's Bike Feature. Ditching the standard lycra/tech feeling of most cycling garms, the lovely Lost Values team had created the Reflective Lace range, a selection of hand-woven high-visibility products for cyclists. Under standard lighting conditions the clothes look completely normal, but hit them with some car headlights (or a flashgun), and the reflective threads leap out at you. Check it out with the shoelaces in the two shots below, where the one on the left is shot without flash, and the one on the right with flash.
Lost Values picked up a Blueprint Best Use of Materials award for their work, richly deserved, particularly considering the focus they're placing on ethical and local manufacture. We particularly loved the scarf they'd created, and can't wait for their stuff to be available on the high street - we can imagine them hooking up with the likes of Howies, Swrve or Rapha to do some really interesting stuff.
Lost Land of the Volcano is a three-part nature documentary that follows an international team of scientists, film-makers and cavers as they explore the jungle islands of Papua New Guinea hoping to find and document rare and endangered animals, and perhaps even discover some new species.
The film-making is breathtaking, but it's the sense of discovery, of pure scientific awe, that really blows you away. In the final episode, in the extinct volcano Mount Bosavi (on the island of New Guinea), they even discover two new species of mammal.
And, brilliantly, the BBC has even seen fit to upload the PDF of the final report made by Dr George McGavin (the show's bug expert) about the trip - here's its summary:
"An international team of scientists and filmmakers spent six weeks in the forests in and around Mount Bosavi in the Southern Highland Province of Papua New Guinea. In the course of the expedition, it is estimated that at least forty new species were collected. These include at least sixteen new species of frog, two new species of lizards, three new species of fish, one new species of bat and an undescribed, endemic subspecies of the Silky Cuscus were documented. Another mammal and the largest new species of animal discovered during the trip, was a Woolly Giant-rat, found in the forest inside the crater of Mount Bosavi. In addition there are undoubtedly many new species of insects and spiders represented in the material collected. Our findings show that Mount Bosavi and the surrounding area is unusually rich, especially in local and regional endemic species. It is therefore vitally important for conservation organisations and the government of Papua New Guinea to work in partnership with local landowners to ensure that the forests of Mount Bosavi are incorporated into Papua New Guinea’s protected area network as soon as possible."
Great stuff eh? Makes you glad to pay the licence fee.
UK folk can watch the show on the BBC's iPlayer, and there's more info about the show on this Out of the Wild page.