Long Live Magazines!
To console myself after missing, due to ‘work commitments’, the excellent ‘Magazines are dead! Long live the Magazine!’ event at St Brides (reports of which are still filtering through) [stbride.org], I had a rummage through some of my fave bookstores and came across a couple of ace new titles on magazine design and magazine designers.
The 10 Influential Creators for Magazine Design [piebooks.com]
‘The 10 Influential Creators for Magazine Design’ is a type of follow up to the less successful ‘The Secret Sense of Japanese Magazine Design’, this time ticking all the right boxes in presenting a snap shot of the current state of contemporary magazine design. The actual editorial is fairly light, and possibly too polite in places, but with this you also get a visual insight into the workplaces these creatives inhabit and lush double page spreads of flooded with photographed examples. Creatives featured include MM Paris [mmparis.com], Christophe Brunnquell [purple.fr] and Kazunari Hattori [ryukotsushin.jp].
Cover Image: Interviews with Magazine Designers
Cover Image is ace because it’s cheap and has exclusive interviews with a wide range of magazine creatives chatting about all sorts of magazine related issues. Interviewees include Jop Van Bennekom [re-magazine.com], Matt Willey [studio8design.co.uk] and Yorgo Tloupas [intersectionmagazine.com]. The design is a little overbearing in places, but being that this publication is so solid editorially and has been put together by such a young and enthusiastic editorial team, these distractions are easy to overlook. Some more images of actual magazine design would have help this publication a lot though.
Trend! Graphic Illustration
I was recently asked to help compile a list of illustrators for a couple of publications I’m helping put together. We put together a bunch of strong and very current samples of work from a number of talented and note-worthy creative types. Most examples involved some some of ‘craft’ aspect, ie there was a very definite, implied reference to an image being ‘made’ by ‘hand’ and not by machine ie, a very literal interpretation of what it means to ‘illustrate’. It occurred to me that this what has defined illustration over the few years. There seems to have been a flood of young creatives shirking rigid geometric designs in favour of getting back to drawing and making things by hand. We presented said samples but something about them just wasn’t quite right. What we should have been looking for was not what’s current but what’s next. What we needed was something more graphic.
After the last few years of ‘making’ there seems to be a need to turn up the ‘concept’ and present clear and accurate ‘graphic illustrations’. Think old style information graphics [wikipedia] like the sort you used to see in Time magazine in the 1980s [nigelholmes.com] but with a modern twist or the work of Shigeo Fukuda [macauart.net] (who Alan Fletcher once curiously described as a ‘doughnut’ [icm.gov.mo]) or, more recently, Alexander Gelman [designmachine.net] and Christoph Niemann [christophniemann.com] (whose work can been seen above). It’s moving away from ‘interpreting ideas’ to ‘visualising information’. It’s ‘problem solving’ rather than just ‘investigation’. So our hunt has began for these up-and-coming ‘graphic illustrators’. I’ve included a couple of links to creatives that are already heading in this direction, if you have any suggestions be sure to leave a comment or drop me a line.
Holly Wales (Recent Work) [eatjapanesefood.co.uk] / Siggi Eggertsson (Logo Designs) [vanillusaft.com] / Darren Wall (Hot Chip Sleeve Designs) [wallzo.com] / Anthony Burrill [anthonyburrill.com] / Mick Marston [thefutilevignette.com] / …more to come
The Repopulation Continues
As previously noted [see boicozine/009] we are continuing to repopulate Boicozine with the blog posts that I stupidly lost in transit. So far we’ve reposted 80 posts which is not bad considering there were over 300 before Boicozine was taken off the air. All the What’s Up posts have been reinstated [see boicozine/whats-up] with more new ones to come (if you have any suggestions let us know) plus posts from Colophon2007 [see boicozine/colophon2007]. We’d like to thank everyone who has relinked us with our new address. I did mean to email you all to let you know, honest. As always there’s loads more to come as well as news on this mysterious mm thing [mm.boico.net] (just so you know, it’s called millimetre). So keep watching the skys and thanks for dropping by.
— The Management
Postscript: Boicozine’s ‘Zine’ is back online too in a spruced up edition for 2008. Available via Print-on-Demand or to download from here [lulu.com]. All money goes back into supporting Boicozine so it’s for a good cause. :)
How Novel
We’re living in an age of rich cross-media content, were it seems that every image is clickable, every page is searchable, and every thought is commentable. The paperback may seem increasingly obsolete in comparison. However, in terms of content, the humble novel wins the race in my… er, book. During Boicozine’s down time, I gave my mouse finger and ’screen weary’ eyes a break by reading the following novels. It’s great that these can often be uncovered at op/charity shops, for under one unit of your local currency.
The Fountainhead
Jane Austin meets Roland Barthes, in a slightly wacky story of two ‘great’ architects in the early 20th Century [Wikipedia]. Has lofty ideals that you may take or leave. Eerily true to today’s design world, and absolutely unputdownable. If you really can’t leave the screen, there’s a film version [iMDB]. Get a vintage copy online here [www.abebooks.com].
The Guttenberg Revolution
The story of Johan Guttenberg, inventor of the moveable type printing press that lead to all of this. You can see his amazing Bible online here [bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg] and find yourself a copy of the story of The Story here [abebooks.com].
Of course, if you’d prefer to just look at the covers, and let’s face it, as a designer it’s hard not to, there’s always Penguin by Design [penguin.com.au] and Seven Hundred Penguins [penguin.com.au]. Or if you fancy becoming a proper Penguinophile you could delve into any number of the publications produced by The Penguin Collectors’ Society [penguincollectorssociety.org].
Whoever Dies With The Best Tshirt Wins #2
Continuing the search for the the penultimate tshirt design, French streetwear label Sixpack [sixpack.fr] have just released a fresh batch of graphic designs created by the likes of Akroe [costume3pieces.com/akroe] (whose work you can see here), Cody Hudson [struggleinc.com] and Laurent Fetis [laurentfetis.com]. My favourite has to be ‘The Eye’ by Gaspirator [myspace.com/gaspirator]. You can purchase them through the Sixpack website or visit the excellent Royal Cheese [royalcheese.com] whose store in Paris is always worth swinging by.
While we’re on the subject too, Graniph [graniph.com/en] have just laucnhed an English language version of their site so you can shop online as well as their first Australian store in Sydney. Let’s hope it’s going to be a hot summer.
What’s Up #24: Tom Havell
A curious thing is happening down at Brighton University’s Graphic Design course [brighton.ac.uk]. For the past couple of years, they have not only been helping spawn a hi qual batch of intelligent, risk-taking illustrators and designers. The last year of so has seen them issuing forth fully fledged Art Directors, who are already rejecting a life of being tethered to a computer in favour of rigourously thought out concept based work and collaboration. This development of the role of ‘Junior Art Director’ is a curious trend as the position of ‘Art Director’ is something a designer usually evolves into (sort of like a Pokemon, I guess [bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net]). It’ll be interesting to see how the creative industry reacts to this development. Tom Havell [tomhavell.com] is one such Brighton grad who is happy to flit between the three disciplines of graphic design, illustration and art direction as exemplified in his recently launched foliosite.
Cover Stars
The crazy chicks who bought you last year’s The Design Grotto [thedesigngrotto.com] have issued an invitation to be part of a massive book cover project at the London flash-mobber’s venue of choice, Liverpool Street Station [facebook.com]. Hit the lower concourse at 1pm to give your fizgig on the cover of… well, I’m not exactly what it is… but it’s the cover, man! Be there or be slightly less famous than you already are.
Update: I suspected as much. It’s all part of Random House’s ‘Coversourcing’ experiment. You can see the results from yesterday’s shoot online here [flickr] and make sure you swing over to the Coversourcing website [coversourcing.co.uk] and vote for your fave covers. So far there’s some pretty dire stuff in the Top 20 so make your vote count and help ensure the shit doesn’t float to the top. My current faves by Amit Patel, Loïc Boyer and Wes West are pictured below.
Rant: The Difference Between
Uettbein? & Wellbeing
The rise of the ‘logo designer’ is an interesting phenomenon. The logo designer is freed from the shackles of ordinary graphic design conventions. They actively shirk the responsibility of creating cohesive and rigourously designed visual identities in favour of creating mere stamps for clients to stick wherever they please. I imagine it’s quite an easy life, doling out logos like bites of candy (expensive candy, some logo designers may charge up to £600 for said ‘mere stamp’ without having to worry about implementation or ‘after sales care’). In the case of Gareth Howell’s ‘Optical Pleasure’ [opticalpleasure.co.uk] you don’t even have to bother with generating your own ideas for said logos. Just visit a website you like, grab a bit of artwork and away you go.
Am I sounding a little sarky? You might too is you opened up Computer Arts magazine [computerarts.co.uk] and saw you’re own original carefully considered artwork (in this case a typeface) with someone else’s name under it… and reworked so badly. In the image below, the top graphic is Gareth’s butchered rendition of the word ‘wellbeing’ which actually reads something like ‘Uettbein?’; in the middle there is the graphic posted on my foliosite which I guessing he used to make said logo and below is how the logo should have looked had Gareth actually had the ‘Bubbleblock’ typeface and used the letters correctly.
Gareth’s biggest blunder was mistaking a typeface for straight artwork. The typeface in question, Bubbleblock, is still in development and he could have asked for a Beta version which I have been gingerly distributing to a handful of fellow designers to see if it’s any good (it also comes with a legal notice outlining terms of use which Gareth’s wellbeing logo has breached). If you’d like a version of the Bubbleblock typeface, email [michael at boico.net] and if you’re especially nice I’ll email you back a Beta Test version for you to have a play with… then we can all start to create logos as special as the one Gareth has chosen to fling out into the world (well, into Swansea anyways).
At the risk of sounding like an accident insurance advert… have you had your work right royally ripped off (and I don’t just mean ‘re-appropriated’) by a another so-called ‘creative’? If so and you feel the need to vent, send us examples and we’ll post the best… er, most well jusified examples up here on Boicozine or just repeat after me… out with anger, in with love, out with anger, in with love…
millimetre maximus
Strange things are afoot at the double m…
[mm.boico.net]
Repopulation
Hi. If you stumbled across this blog and think it’s look kind of familiar that’s cause we’ve changed webhosts and have a new address. We’ve also lost most of our content in the change over, through a mixture of a lack of techknowledge on our part and a sloppy customer service on our old webhosts part (although they pulled through eventually). Cool thing is, it means we can start a-fresh and I get to go through all our old posts and pick was stays and what doesn’t. It’s going to take awhile to wade through them all but hopefully you’ll feel like revisiting old posts as they magically re-appear. So thanks, as always, for stopping by and keep watching this space.
— The Management
