What’s Up #30: peter&wendy
Peter&Wendy are a Parisian design agency [peter-wendy.com] actually run by Xavier and Cécilia. They have just completed the design and direction of the inaugural issue of UK-based high-minded culture mag, Bedeutung [bedeutung.co.uk]. The cover does away with any sort of formal masthead, replacing it with a big red square. Pretty daring. You might be interested in the Grotesque poster that they have for sale at the moment too. Mmm…metallics.
Nevermind the Grad Shows (#3)
After missing Brighton’s show I made sure I got along to the St Martin’s Communication Design show on The Mall (next to the ICA, just down the street from Buckingham Palace), only to miss the Graphic Design show (so what’s the big difference between Communication & Graphic Design? I thought they went hand-in-hand). I’m going to give up on trying to blog about all the top Degree Shows. I may report on a couple if I get to see them. If you’ve been to a show and would like to report abot it for Boicozine please email [zine(at)boico.net] There’s loads of eloquent types much more on the ball than I, reporting on the various goings on. You can read more here…
[creativereview.co.uk/crblog]
[johnsonbanks.co.uk/thoughtfortheweek]
[wemadethis.typepad.com]
Plus Tony Easley has been kind enough to post a few pictures from the Brighton show up on his Flickr page. See them here [flickr].
The Key, The Clock & The Occupant
Got a hankering to return the the days when Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock presents and The Outer Limits ruled the airwaves? Dip your toes in The Lost Room [scifi.com/lostroom] and you might start believing you’re back there… only with better production qualities (natch). Here’s the bit crappy trailer…
Mags and Stuff
I stuck this latest ’stuff’ picture on Flickr a couple of days ago so it was ready to link to this post. It’s got 24 hits already… okay, so that’s not a lot but the same image of some rather attractive perspex rods in a window in Brighton went up at the same time and only three people have looked at them. That’s… some large percentage less than the other picture. Anyhoo, from this I have concluded that pictures of stuff are dead popular. This one’s going to run and run…
This weeks stuff includes a whole bunch of free magazines. To any dedicated magalophile a carefully crafted and well designed free magazine is like a little piece of christmas has been clipped off the end of the year and fallen down the calendar. You’ll find quality free publications in most cities these days. London has a few that you’ll find around the traps. These are Boicozine’s current faves…
Loud & Quiet [loudandquiet.com] has grown from A5 to A4 with some rather fetching new uncoated stock (that’s non-shiny paper to the uninitiated). Downside is, it feels more lightweight now. Upside is that is looks well classy. ¶ Art & Music is pretty decent [artandmusicmagazine.com], if very calm looking magazine, with some cracking articles and a refreshing editorial tone. ¶ Fun looks proper ‘expensive art paper’ with it’s special colours and fold-out poster format but then it features commentary on stuff like dogging! Blimey, didn’t see that one coming! It’s all in good, er… fun though, and gets away with being cheeky and cheery enough to make you care. Nice one Fun [greatenjoyment.com]. ¶ Ello, it’s Monocle again [monocle.com]. Could help meself. It’s their best cities issue with their first Design Directory supplement and a spiffy cover designed by Ken Leung and James Melaugh [dontyouthink.co.uk]. Nice work if you can get it, I say. ¶ Red sunglasses. Not posh, just red. If they’re red, you don’t need posh, do you. It’s enough that they’re red. I’ll be wearing these a lot I think (even though I can’t see a bloody thing through them). ¶ Black Skull Candy. Skulls are a bit popular aren’t they? Do you think it’s because we’ve all got one? This one contains Extra Salty Salmiakpulver and seems to be wearing chips style sunglasses. Probably from Cybercandy [cybercandy.co.uk]. ¶ Dazed & Confused [dazeddigital.com] has a new Art Director and this time it’s someone who actually likes typography (which is lucky cause being a magazine, it’s chock full of the stuff), Rémi Paringaux. No longer do I feel alienated by their uncaring and unthoughtful misuse of dodgy typefaces. I’ve bought the last two issues now, the first for a long long time. Now the UK edition can give their Japanese sibling a run for it’s money.
That’s it fer now. More pictures of stuff soon, I promise. They’re dead popular, yknow.
An Ace Shop With a Slightly Dodgy Name
There’s a new record store in London which, with a little help from No Days Off [nodaysoff.com], is single handedly helping reinvigorate a sad and bedraggled little corner of the formerly hip Clerkenwell district [wikipedia]. If you drop by you can pick up a handy and handsome guide to the local area including quiet little parks to go sit in or a warm summer evening and rowdy yet respectful pubs to loiter in. The store is called Pure Groove [puregroove.co.uk] and they have enrolled the insurmountable talents of Kate Moross [katemoross.com] to scrawl on their freshly painted walls. Look out for loads of events, instore and out-of-store too.
Missing Out: Grad Shows #2
Okay, so I missed all the design shows at Free Range [free-range.org.uk] including University of Brighton’s ‘Into the Woods’ exhibition [gdi08.co.uk]. I turned up on Tuesday and everything was coming down. Have Free Range shows always only run for four days at a time? Jeez did I feel stoopid… and disappointed. I was really looking forward to Brighton this year. Luckily Brighton Grads are such an enterprising lot that is easy enough to catch up with them and what they’ve been creating online. Here’s a brief selection of recently released creative bods you should know…
Illustration still rules at Brighton. Tony Easley’s [nascentideas.com] robust linework makes him a Boicozine fave as is his blog, Nascent Ideas [nascentideas.wordpress.com]. Meanwhile Simon Barna [simonbarna.com] creates posterwork with the ease of a seasoned professional, as does Kerry Beall [kerrybeall.com], with some bold typographic treatments like the one shown above. Evening Tweed [eveningtweed.com] have been producing consistently inspiring work for a couple of years now. The collaborative quartet consist of Jez Burrows, Sarah King (poster below), Owen Gildersleeve and Tom Rowe. In his spare time Jez helps out with the excellent It’s Nice That [itsnicethat.com] too. Amy Preston’s inky experiments combined with her elegant and quirky typography make her a stand out [amypreston.co.uk] as does Verity Keniger’s [veritykeniger.co.uk] mixture of the hand drawn with her precise print work. Jake Blanchard’s [jakeblanchard.co.uk] more traditional type of illustration features some of the most elegant linework you’ll see. Other Brighton bods worth keeping your eyes peeled (ouch!) for include James O’Raw, Hampus Teodor Larsson and Alexander Jones. To tell you the truth, it seems a shame to single people out. Make sure you swing by the official GDi08 website for this year’s cornucopia of cleverness.
AR @ NBD is A-OK!
I’m currently on assignment at Nick Bell Design [nickbelldesign.co.uk] where Mr Bell has the most awesome collection of The Architectural Review [arplus.com] magazines I’ve ever seen. They stretch as far back as the late 50s and were inherited by Nick from an architect looking to rehouse his collection. I took the opportunity to photograph a handful of covers which you can see over on [flickr]. Enjoy.
Showing Out: Grad Shows #1
It’s Graduate Show season in London. A series of events that demands more and more attention each year. I’m going to attempt to pop into as many shows as possible this year and report back on this here on boicozine. The first batter up is the RCA (Royal College of Art)’s SHOW 2008 (you know it’s called ‘SHOW‘ cause they’ve stuck massive letters out the front of the RCA Galleries spelling it out [show2008.rca.ac.uk]. I was kindly invited along to the RCA PARTY launch event by the fine folk at Dazed & Confused [dazeddigital.com] where visitors battled it out with the grads to see who could guzzle up the most Vodka & Russians and Vitamin Water. RCA is unique in that it offers predominantly post-graduate courses and they break their annual show up into several events.
Show One launches the events and features painters, designer-makers, photographers and print-makers. Worth having a gawk at (from a graphic point of view at least) are Alastair Levy’s ‘Proposals for everyday living’, Richard Healy’s wall of geometric work [richard-healy.co.uk], George Charman’s flat-effect 3D assemblages (the internet doesn’t do them justice) [george-charman.co.uk], Edward Austin’s ceramics and Kathryn Hinton’s inter-locking cutlery [kathrynhinton.com].
Ever since working at The Future Laboratory [thefuturelaboratory.com], particularly with the awesome Ms Caroline Till, I’ve been hooked on colour palettes and there were some lush examples of palettes well used in the show this year in painted pieces such as those by Ross Ruislip Taylor and Ellen Stanford [ellenstanford.com]. I have to admit I stood and started at Ellen’s large scale painters for an inordinately long time hoping I’d be able to remember every little shade of colour she had employed and how they worked together. Once you start seeing palettes everywhere, it’s addictive, I tell you. Again the intrenet does not do them justice but I’ve included a coupe of her pieces in this here post. It’s worth mentioning the work of Clare Maunsell too just cause she injected a joyful burst of humour into the proceedings with tombstones that tell you when you’re running out of stuff and loads of crazy bits and pieces.
BTW If you’re feeding a colour palette addiction too you probably already know about Adobe’s Kuler website thingy. If not you should go there now. Honest, it’s dead fun. You can choose palettes from your Flickr photos now too [kuler.adobe.com].
The Antimix Modern Disease Mixtape #3
003 England’s Dreaming The Antimix is back. It’s been an age but we couldn’t resist posting another mp3 of our anonymous disc jockey going by the moniker of Sportspanda yabbering over a hand-picked half hour programme of new and not-so-new musical releases. This edition features Róisín Murphy [YouTube] / The Chap [YouTube] / The Notwist [YouTube] / The Radio Dept [YouTube] / Cut Copy [YouTube] / XX Teens [YouTube] / Cornershop [YouTube]. There’s your tres exclusive artwork above (just click to open full size) and here’s yer podcast…
Time Keeps On Slipping Into The Future
Have you ever tried to pinpoint the exact time when you decided you wanted to be a designer, illustrator, blog host or whatever? You you ask me I’ll always cite i-D’s Heroes & Sheroes issue from 1989 [i-dmagazine.com/63] as the main reason I wanted to become a Graphic Designer. Under Terry Jones [wikipedia.org] direction, Stephen Male created a joyous riot of colour, imagery and ideas. Much of the graphic techniques employed came about from messing around in the tactile world of graphic reproduction, pre-computers. A mere two or three years later and everything had changed with the rise of the Apple Mac (I touched on this briefly in the Colophon2007 compendium, ‘We Love Magazines’ [gestalten.com]). It was during this period in time that I was studying Graphic Design at university and one of the first books I remember buying and making my own mini bible was Terry Jones‘ book ‘Instant Design: A Manual of Graphic Techniques’ [flickr], the back cover of which you can see above.
Inside Mr Jones outlined the many visual effects you could achieve with relatively little equipment and a whole lotta pace. These included using handmarks, stencils, typewriters, photocopiers, collage (or ‘montage‘ as he preferred to call it), polaroids and video. I remember finding photocopiers particularly intriguing (in a design sense, I wasn’t some wierdo photocopier fancier. Promise.) and experimented loads with cutting and pasting blown up typefaces all over the place (sometimes tracing and redrawing them with technical pens to get cleaner lines). Results were relatively instantaneous, but most importantly it was really fun.
Unfortunately my book got damaged by a pesky housemate towards the end of my studies when rain came in through an open window and we have remained apart even since, apart from a brief flirtation (with said book, not the housemate) a year or so ago at the Dover Street Market [doverstreetmarket.com] where expense dictated browsing to be the order of the day… until now. I found a copy in Brighton this weekend and we are now reunited. I want to share Mr Jones’ thought on time with you, dear friends. This text is taken from the back page of said book and goes some way to explain why he thought it’s good to consider design as being ‘instant’ in the first place…
“Time is our most precious commodity. I believe you can only live for the moment, learn from the past and work for the future. Time influences the human state of mind; friend or enemy, we make time or we lose it. Our lives are measured by it and history makes us feel guilty when we waste it…. Clocks are monuments to the world’s greatest commodity… Human preoccupation with time stops when we die and one of the greatest epitaphs, ‘I made the time’, is inscribed on the tombstone of the British painter Stanley Spencer… as Manley Buchanan said… ‘Time is running and passing and running so you better all get it right this time cos’ there might not be a next time’.
Side Notes: Steven Heller is a fan of i-D [aiga.org/defining-style-making-i-d]
A very brief interview for Eye Magazine [eyemagazine.com]
in Colophon2007 / Graphic Design / Ideas / Modern Relics / Publications
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