Wedding Present Hit Parade

In 1992, UK ‘Indie’ band, The Wedding Present [scopitones.co.uk] set themselves the challenge of producing a single every month for a year. The A side would be an original song, the B side would be a cover. They also swapped producers every quarter to vary their sound. This experiment became known as ‘The Hit Parade’. Originally The Hit Parade was going to limited to 12 7 inch vinyl singles but was later released as a complete collection. The actual single sleeves themselves were never reproduced so here they are in their entirety courtesy of Discogs [discogs.com]…

Future High Street

Coming from Melbourne to London, I have to admit I found the term ‘High Street’ baffling at first. Since the 80s, shopping in Australia has been about the ‘Shopping Centre’. They’re ‘climate controlled’, you see. In Melbourne, the weather is either far too hot or oppressively wet and grey, so escaping from the world outside to do your shopping follows a type of twisted logic. It comes as little surprise to discover Westfield, the developers behind London’s ambitious new shopping complex in White City [westfield.com/london] (they’re building a new tube station especially for it), is the same group who look after some of Melbourne’s largest shopping centres. The whole idea of ‘village life’ doesn’t really gel in Australia. It’s all suburbs, small towns and lots and lots of car parks, so the idea of every ‘village’ having a ‘high street’ becomes kind of fascinating.—It’s for this reason that I found Monocle magazine’s ‘Perfect High Street’ particularly exciting. You can watch and listen to the article on the website [monoclemagazine.com]. The article itself is fun but, unfortunately, has echoes of Wallpaper magazine’s early po-faced ponce and thinly sliced camp (which, actually seems to come across less irksome in narration than on the written page). But it’s the sort of article everyone would have an opinion on. Personally, I’d like to see this so-called ‘Perfect High Street’ completely pedestrianised but then I don’t drive. It also reminded me of Zozotown…

Zozotown [zozo.jp] is Japan’s wide variety of various retail obsessions laid out in one place… along a vast stretch of the internet highway. Each retailer has their own little piece of screen real estate on which to build whatever structure best represents their brand as well as being able to design their dream virtual store interiors. The concept has proved so popular that you can now climb Zozotower [zozo.jp/tower] to visit retailers hanging precariously off it’s various platforms or visit the curious Zozo Arigato [arigato.zozo.jp], which I have to admit, is kind of mysterious to this non-Japanese reader. Various cities and countries around the world are mooshed into a thin stretch of space across the top of the page. It’s cute… one thing though, Zozo… you spelt Australia wrong.

Saint Etienne on the Southbank

This weekend sees the relaunch of the newly redecorated Royal Festival Hall and the revamped Southbank Centre (with hideous new identity by current enemy of the people, Wolff Olins). Called ‘Overture’ [southbankcentre.co.uk], if you’re not sure where to start with the myriad of activities that are on for the event, follow your nose to the 6th Floor where Saint Etienne [saintetienne.com] are hosting an extra special version of their Turntable Café series that’s running all weekend long. There’s regular and guest DJs, live bands such as Poppy and the Jezebels, Mervyn, Let’s Wrestle, The Duloks, The Priscillas, and Jaymay plus loads of ace films. Saint Etienne are also putting the finishing touches on their next mini feature film ‘This is Tomorrow’, Find out more about it at [thisistomorrow.co.uk].

Neue Rave Olympics

The newly unvealed London Olympics 2012 identity [london2012.com]… This topic is already being given a sound thrashing all over the blogosphere so I’m not going to waffle on about it. For the record I don’t hate it, I don’t really get it. It’s wierd. Still, it could have been a lot worse (just look at Wolff Olin’s [wolff-olins.com] recent unworkable rebrand for the Southbank Centre [southbankcentre.co.uk]) and it’s a vast improvement on the previous ‘the ribbon represents the Thames - see what we did there’ Olympic bid logo. Personally, I’ll always prefer Foundation 33’s [foundation33.com/olympics] concentric rings idea from back in 2003 – Who better to design the London Olympics logo than the designer’s behind the Big Brother logo [danieleatock.com/bigbrother8]. That’s it at the top there, with a cheeky bit of typographic embellishment courtesy of Boicozine.

What’s Up #3: Homework

The 2nd edition of Danish men’s fashion magazine, He Magazine [he-magazine.com] should be available this month. In, what seems to be, an increasingly incestuous bond between various fashion and style magazines, it features profiles on the editor’s of both Acne Paper [acnepaper.com] and V Man [vman.com] as well as a brief feature on Visionaire Design Supremo Greg Foley (repsonsible for the look of both V Magazine [vmagazine.com] and V Man). You could say V started this recent trend for magazines promoting other magazines with their irregular ‘Powerhouse’ series of articles where they visit creative teams from a variety of disciplines. The issue is designed with the usual clean and robust graphic detailing courtesy of Homework [homework.dk].