We Made This

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Being a graphic designer is basically a fun job. Obviously, like any job, it has its dull moments; and sometimes you have days when you feel like tearing your hair out in frustration... but in the main, it's big fun.

We were reminded of this recently when we put together this typographic identity for a five day music and entertainment festival for Brent Council (you can check out the finished article here). The text is created using three different curry powders and a hand-cut stencil, and meant that we got to spend an afternoon sitting outside playing with stencils, spraymount, curry powder and a camera.

It's basically play-school for grown-ups.

Supertent - London Design Festival

Friday evening found us at the Super Design Market at the Royal Festival Hall. A fine collection of pieces from up and coming design names was on sale, and we were particularly taken with Carl Clerkin's new take-away light.

On Sunday we headed east, to check out the Tent London shows at the Truman Brewery. There was stacks to see here, divided into six main sections, including a fantastic selection of vintage British design.

Chair company Emeco had a great display for their 20-06 aluminium chair (below), designed by his highness Norman Foster, which they displayed supporting a ship's anchor, and being suspended by a weather balloon. The chair itself is just beautiful, and will hopefully be available in the UK soon. UPDATE - Oop, it is available - via Ruth Ainger Brands Limited - check the comment on this post below. ALSO - more about the installation on the Wieden & Kennedy blog.

Dupont's 40 Years / 40 Designers show (previously shown in Milan, New York and Frankfurt) featured a collection of products made from their Corian material. We loved the Rainbow Calendar by Niels Kjeldsen Design.

We also loved the Reveal table from Ku Designs, made from moulded plywood, in a range of veneers, and with your choice of colour for the interior opening. Tasty.

Well, that's it then. Another year over for the London Design Festival. It came and went like a highly stylised whirlwind, spreading its stunning chaos across a huge swathe of the city: north, south, east and west.

Here's to next year.

More London Design Festival goodness

We hit two of the big design shows in town yesterday, heading over to 100% Design in the morning, and then Designersblock in the afternoon.

100% Design, over at Earls Court, is a bit of a corporate monster, with lots of polished display stands and men in suits looking serious, but it has a few interesting bits and pieces.

The main section that really caught our eye was the fantastic Sit Up show organised by [re]design in the 100% Futures section. The show is a collection of sixteen seats that have been designed with sustainability at the forefont of the design process. We particularly liked Sprout and Pli's Reee chair, made from recycled computer games consoles; and Claire Heather-Danthois's elegant Once-a-door seat.

Over at Designersblock it's a much more informal atmosphere, taking place at the old Nicholls & Clarke Buildings on Shoreditch High Street. There's stacks to see here. We liked Mr Jones Watches, and the Karl Marx collection by Fresh West Design (a cut-price version of their standard range of products, created because they realised they couldn't afford to buy any of their own designs).

The highlight of the show though is Designboom's Handled with Care - contemporary ceramic works. Frankly this should be a show in its own right - it's a fantastically curated collection of witty and entertaining ceramic work. We especially liked Cecilia Leon de la Barra's dog-shelf, Claudio Cardoso's Cut plate, and Maxim Velkovsky's Little Joseph candle holders. Read more about it all on their blog.

Size + Matter: the materials project

On our way over to the Irma Boom lecture (see below), we checked out the two new installations outside the Royal Festival Hall, forming the Size + Matter project for the London Design Festival: Urban Nebula is by Zaha Hadid, and Prototile is by Amanda Levete . Both pieces will be hanging out on the Southbank for a month or so, before being auctioned off.

The pair of them have a nice yin and yang thing going on.

We liked Zaha Hadid's piece best - it reminded us of a bike tyre. Made of basalt. Acting like a snake.

And Hadid picked up the first London Design Medal last night, at the official opening of the London Design Festival.

You can read more about Urban Nebula on the Zaha Hadid blog, and check out more of Alistair's LDF images on his Flickr set.

Penguin Celebrations

The Penguin nostalgiafest rolls on, with the release of the Penguin Celebrations series:

Whether orange, blue, green, pink or purple, Penguin Celebrations give readers everywhere unique voices, enthralling stories and quite simply the best books of their kind to be published in recent years. What's not to celebrate?

Um. The name perhaps?

Still, the thirtysix books look lovely, published in six different series: "Light Blue for big ideas, Green for mystery, Orange for fantastic fiction, Pink for distant lands, Dark Blue for real lives and Purple for viewpoints"; all using an adaptation of the classic Jan Tschichold grid.

It does feel slightly odd to read contemporary literature dressed up in period costume though, and you get the feeling that these are books to be displayed and collected rather than read. Particularly as they're only doing one print run.

If you are going to read one of them though, we'd suggest picking up The Secret History by Donna Tart. It really is a classic.

You can pick them up from the Penguin site in a three-for-two offer.

Irma Boom, amazing book designer

We trundled over to the Royal Festival Hall last night to catch the D&AD lecture by the wonderful book designer Irma Boom.

She was introduced by Simon Waterfall, the new D&AD president, who seems like a charming chap, and who described his guest speaker as "mad as a box of snakes".

Irma kicked off the lecture by reading out a list of words that describe her work. She started with a lot of words that began with the letter A, and you could almost hear the collective thoughts of the audience as they realised where it was leading: "Hmm. A list or words beginning with 'A'. Oh! She's moved on to words beginning with 'B'. This could take a while, but probably she's just doing an ABC of book design. Oh... no... it is in fact the entire alphabet."

500 or so words later, it felt like it was going to be a long, long lecture.

But not a bit of it. Irma Boom is utterly fascinating, and her work is quite simply stunning. She used a sort of live-action overhead projector thing (a document camera), which meant that as she flipped through her books, we could see them on the projection screen.

She talked us through her career book by book, in great and fascinating detail, so much so that she ran out of time, despite being given an extra half hour. We would have happily listened for another hour.

Her book design seems to embody a sort of (at times literally) rough-edged sensuality, as well as a real sense of luxury, whether that be in her use of materials, or the sheer extent of her books - the book she created for Dutch conglomerate SHV ran to 2136 pages.

Check out more about her in the following links:

Design Museum: a good biography
Tyotheque: interview from Abitare, discussing the SHV book and the Otto Treumann monograph
Eye magazine: review of The Book as sculpture, created to commemorate her winning The Gutenburg Prize
Irmaboom.nl: her personal website, but currently under construction

(Image: SHV, courtesy of the Design Museum site.)

Yesterday's Tomorrows

Posting about Comics Britannia (below) reminded us to post about a fantastic book we picked up recently, Yesterday's Tomorrows by Rian Hughes.

Hughes is an illustrator, typographer and graphic designer. We first came across him (unkowingly at the time) as teenagers, when we picked up Revolver magazine, a kind of more grown-up, rock'n'roll version of 2000AD. He'd created the logo for the magazine, and designed and art directed it's brilliant lead story, Dare, a reworking of the classic Eagle character Dan Dare.

Jump cut to seventeen or so years later, and we find ourselves using a typeface called Roadkill, from the Device typefoundry; created by the very same Rian Hughes.

Yesterday's Tomorrows is a great collection of various strips by Hughes, including Dare, as well as featuring a stack of background sketches cover artwork, concepts and illustrations. It took us right back to the future.

Comics Britannia

If you were a British teenager in the early 80's, and into comics, then you were almost certainly a fan of 2000AD. We still have fond memories of tearing down to the local newsagent on a Saturday morning to pick up the latest weekly issue. It cost 24p "in Earth money" back in 1985 - amazingly it's still going strong, though a copy will set you back £1.75 now.

BBC4 is currently running a great series all about the British comics industry, Comics Britannia. We missed the first episode, but caught the middle one (which is repeated on Wednesday 19 at 11.30pm), and are totally looking forward to the third and final one, which deals with 2000AD, Viz, and the growth of the graphic novel. You can catch it on Monday 24 at 10.30pm. There's also a season of related programmes to sink your teeth into.

Splundig vur thrigg!

(The frame above is from Prog 500 of 2000AD, which featured the debut of Bad Company, written by Pete Milligan, with artwork by Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy.)

Tom Dixon: Great Light Giveaway

We cycled over to Trafalgar Square last night to check out the Tom Dixon Great Light Giveaway. He's created a huge chandelier out of his Blow lights, and installed it in front of the National Gallery. It's not as interactive a piece as he created last year, but it's worth taking a look anyway. If you can't get along, there are some more of Alistair's photos over on his Flickr LDF set.

As mentioned below, Dixon will be giving away 1,000 of the lights on Wednesday at 5pm, which is pretty generous of him really.

Hand & Eye

When we put the identity together for the RDI Summer School last year, we wanted to get the text letterpressed, so we went to Hand & Eye Letterpress, who did a top-notch job. They've just sent us this moving card, which is quite delicious.

Don't envy them moving all that metal type though...