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Well, how weird was that? A bank holiday here in England, and the sun shone for the whole weekend. About damn time too...
Alistair made the most of the sunshine, and jumped on his bike to cycle alongside the Kennet & Avon Canal, part of National Cycle Route 4.
Like any half-decent graphic designer, he came back with a memory-card full of signs he'd seen along the way. These are just a small selection, you can see more at his Signs and Lettering Flickr Set.
Just loving this from 9031.com. An old-school flip clock as a screen saver. Yum yum yum.
Via Design Observer and Viewers Like You
While we were digging around at the Ephemera Fair (see our previous post), we were lucky enough to find a copy of A Book of Typefaces, the wonderful type sample book produced in 1952 by printers W.S.Cowell Ltd; and designed by John Lewis.
Here's a bit from the introduction:
This type book is intended for those who either for their amusement, or in the course of their calling, deal in print. The amateur must be content with the fact that it is limited to the typefaces carried by this printing house. To the professional user that limitation is, of course, a necessity.The introduction of coloured illustration, and other decorative matter may distress the typographic purist. Our reason for this is that many succeeding pages of type specimens can become confusing to the layman. Illustrations offer a relief and an appropriate illustration can often illuminate the qualities of a typeface.
At the other end of the book, there's a panel detailing how the book was produced:
This book has been printed throughout by letterpress on a two-sheet ivorex board made by Tullis Russell & Co. Ltd. It has been Spirax bound by James Burn and Co. Ltd. and cased by Cowells. The cover is printed by offset lithography on white book cloth from some seahorse designs drawn on Plastocowell [they're by Denis Wirth-Miller].Apart from the specimen pages of typefaces, the text matter for prelims, etc., has been set in Plantin Series 110 and the captions on illustrated pages in Bodoni Series 135.
Because it was spiral bound, Cowell's could produce extra pages for the book at a later date, as and when they had new typefaces available. Readers filled in a card when they bought the book, and as the extra pages were produced, they were mailed out to them. The new pages could then just be slotted in to the binding - our copy has 12 of them.
John Lewis, the typographer and designer behind the book, was born in 1912, and studied at Goldsmiths, joining the printing works W.S.Cowell after the war, in 1946. He went on to teach at the Royal College of Art, where he founded the private press that ran there from 1953 to 1970. He also published the first real study of printed ephemera with the suitably titled Printed Ephemera in 1962.
He died in 1996 - you can read his full obituary from The Independent. His collection of ephemera is now held at Reading University, and includes 20,000 items, dating from the 15th Century to the present day.
As David mentioned on his blog last week, this weekend was the latest Ephemera Society Bazaar, and we made our way over to Holborn on Sunday morning to see what we could dig up.
We must have wanderlust at the moment, as the stuff that really caught our eye was mainly travel related.
Here's a selection of fantastic luggage labels that we found. And if this whets your appetite, then take a look at this fine collection of 1920s and 1930s travel ephemera.
Living in London rocks. Except sometimes. Like now. Because it means we can't go to the first QBN Session, from the folks behind Newstoday, which takes place on 7 September at the Getty Centre in Los Angeles.
Shepard Fairey, Joshua Davis, Phunk Studio, Michael C. Place (isn't he just everywhere right now?), Michael Muller, The Mill and Matt & Mark Owens will be sharing the wisdom. It's $240 for a ticket, but you get a gourmet lunch box and two drinks tickets.
We're, like, totally bummed not to be there.
We're creatures of habit here at We Made This, so the weekend found us making our way down to London's southbank for a bit of food and culture.
We kicked off at Borough Market. If you're ever down that way round lunchtime, make sure you find the place that does the chicken wraps - they're utterly delicious. And go rather well with a Berry Bliss smoothie.
We then ambled down to the Tate Modern for their Global Cities show, which you can still catch if you get along there in the next couple of weeks (it runs till 27 August). It's a fascinating show, though it was the historical and sociological stuff that really got us going, rather than the art pieces.
While there, we browsed through the Tate bookshop, which is always a box of delights, and picked up The Incredible Book Eating Boy
Sunday then found us meeting some friends at the Design Museum, which is currently showing an interesting Zaha Hadid show, and a huge exhibition of Jonathan Barnbrook's work. We're not massive fans of Barnbrook's style (it's just too damn hectic for our simple tastes), but his dedication to creating design with a social conscience is brilliant.
In the cafe there's also a small exhibition of the Blanka posters created for the 50th Anniversary of Helvetica, and our favourite is the one by... Oliver Jeffers.
We headed back along the southbank having been tipped off that Stormtroopers had been seen outside County Hall.
They're there as part of the Star Wars show (careful, noisy link) that's on at the moment. We didn't linger, as that whole particular bit of the southbank is a grim tourist trap (which is a massive shame considering how wonderful the section by the Royal Festival Hall is). But, if we had gone into the show, we would have seen yet another bit of Jeffers' work, in the form of his customised Darth Vader helmet for Toys R Evil.
Oliver Jeffers, Lord of Southbank: we love you.
We were strolling through Foyles the other day and stumbled across this stunning new Future Classics series from Gollancz, the science-fiction and fantasty arm of Orion Books.
The front covers are really startling in their boldness. No title. No author name. No publisher's logo. Just fantastically striking and truly graphic images, combined with a great use of material and print process.
Of the three above, from left to right, Fairyland
The spines and back covers have been given a series style with what looks like American Typewriter as the series typeface.
When you see what the previous cover was for Fairyland (below), you can see how radical a shift they've made. From a quick browse of a few online sci-fi forums it looks like existing readers aren't overjoyed at the new look, but that's really not the point - these covers are designed to reach out to a new audience who wouldn't dream of picking up the standard sci-fi book.
There are eight in the series, produced in-house by Emma Wallace, with a brief that was simply 'do what you want, but bring them to a new audience'. She's done that in spades.
