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Archived posts: Illustration

Dickens Dark London

You’d be hard pressed not to have noticed it, but this year is the 200 year anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birthday. The Museum of London is hosting a major exhibition about his life, and to coincide with that, they’ve created a rather delicious iPhone & iPad app called Dickens Dark London.

The app is an interactive graphic novel, illustrated by the frankly brilliant David Foldvari, and based on Dickens’ Sketches by Boz. It will run to five issues (just the first one is available so far), each one centred on a different location. As well as Foldvari’s stunning images, the app includes excerpts from the sketches, read in gravelly tones by the actor Mark Strong; as well as a map that shows story locations on a map from 1862, which overlays the standard Google Maps.

The first issue (available free) is set in Covent Garden’s Seven Dials - here are a few of the pages:

Simply stunning.

26 January 2012 | 1 Comment

Random Spectacular

We’ve recently been making our way through the first issue of Random Spectacular, the lovely limited-edition magazine created by the folks at St Jude’s Prints, and it’s just great.

The magazine was produced in a print run of just 750 copies (all of which sold within 48 hours), the profits from which go to Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres. The magazine features a mix of stories and illustrations from a wide range of very talented people. Here’s a selection of just some of those:

Mark Hearld (above) has put together a menagerie of random and spectacular animals.

Artist, designer, writer and photographer Jake Tilson shows the typefaces he designed for his recent cookery book In at the Deep End.

There’s a lovely interview with the Gentle Author of the fantastic daily blog, Spitalfields Life.

And we also liked this piece by Phil Abel of Hand & Eye Letterpress about the joys of machine-made printing.

Though the first issue has sold out, they’re planning subsequent issues, each one taking a different format. Sign up at the Random Spectacular site to find out more.

11 January 2012 | No Comments

The Awfully Bad Guide to Monster Housekeeping

Just under a year ago, the Ministry of Stories, and its fantastical shop front, Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, opened its doors to the world. (You can read all about that on one of our earlier blog posts.)

Since then, they’ve both been doing really rather well.

The Ministry has helped thousands of kids with their writing, whether in group workshops, or with one-to-one mentoring. The kids get help with all kinds of writing – stories, lyrics, journalism, and even soap-opera scripts. They’ve published a book or two already, as well as a newspaper all about Hoxton Street.

The latest fruit of their labours is the fantastic Awfully Bad Guide to Monster Housekeeping. The original guide was rather tragically burnt to a crisp by a dragon called Vera, so the young writers of the Ministry were tasked with writing an entirely new guide, divided into four separate books: The Alphabet, Fashion & Grooming, Food & Recipes, and Home & Recreation.

They were helped out by a ridiculously talented selection of volunteer illustrators (Nadia Shireen, Katie Cleminson, Alexis Deacon, Hannah Shaw and Chris Wormell) and poets (Ross Sutherland, Polarbear, Laura Dockrill, Naomi Woddis, and Charlie Dark).

Each section is full of tips to help monsters manage their daily lives, and the books also feature pages where the readers can add in their own ideas.

The books were brilliantly designed by Ed Cornish, with art direction from We Made This.

The books are being sold individually for £3 each, or as a collection of four for just £10.

And heck, they’d make a rather fantastic Christmas present for any young monsters you might know. (Just saying.) You can pick them up at the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies shop.

2 November 2011 | 1 Comment

Eleanor Crow on variations on a theme

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from the quite marvellous book designer Eleanor Crow. ~

It might indicate borderline stamp collecting syndrome, but an ephemera spotter can find a good visual multiple to be irresistible. This True-Fit Seat Covers postcard (©1987 Quantity Postcards, San Francisco), sent by a friend (thanks Clare), is one such example. The variations in weave pattern and colour of the textiles are a delight.

And another card Outils de Jardinage (©1995 Editions du Désastre, France) is of interest not only because I’ve recently been allotted an allotment, but for the charming comparison of prong, spike and blade on the humble garden tool.

My battered copy of Dictionnaire Usuel par le texte et par l’image (Librairies Quillet-Flammarion, Paris 1956) relies heavily on visual multiples. I cannot think that I might urgently need to compare timber grains from European trees in the immediate future, but this mis-registered depiction of their subtle variations in pattern and colour is enough to merit more than a glance. The stuttering speckled lines of the Platane, or plane tree, is particularly lovely.

Similarly, the Dictionnaire Usuel’s colour plate of horse types is deeply appealing to even the equine ignoramus. The horses face in rows alternately to the left and the right, in uniform threes, until the last line where the tiny Shetland pony has snuck in as a rebellious fourth, and persuaded its tall friends to break with the rhythm and face to the left.

This colour plate from one of my favourite costume reference books, A Pictorial History of Costume (©1955 Zwemmer, Germany) provides a colourful display of historic oriental footwear in all its embroidered and sculpted glory – a museum display at a glance.

It’s precisely this idea of comparison at a glance that makes such multiples both informative and a visual delight. Information designers rely on such techniques – creating ‘small multiples’, a term popularised and described with characteristic elegance by Edward R. Tufte in Envisioning Information(©1990 Graphics Press, Connecticut). He writes of ‘small multiple designs, multivariate and data bountiful’ that enforce visual comparisons and ‘demonstrate the scope of alternatives’.

Here’s a page from the legendary Rookledge’s Classic International Typefinder (©1983 PBC International, New York), demonstrating the special ‘earmarks’ or distinctive identifying features of typefaces. Technically useful, it’s also visually arresting in an abstract way with its array of Vs and Ws pinned to the page like butterfly wings.

But it’s not just the small multiple that appeals when enjoying a good visual comparison – spotting a difference-spotter spotting the difference can be fun too. Here’s a 1950s Du Pont employee investigating weather wear across varying paint samples (from the March 1956 edition of Fortune magazine). It’s the contrast of his sombre figure angled across the serried ranks of colour hues that gives this image its charm.

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

20 September 2011 | No Comments

Joe McLaren on Whizzer and Chips

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from the wonderful illustrator Joe McLaren (who also writes a rather fantastic blog of his own). ~

We were a Beano household when I was a child. I’ve no idea why exactly, but it would have seemed unthinkable to have taken The Dandy instead- like changing political allegiance, or your religion. We read and relished the Beano week in, week out, my brother and I. We were paid up members of the Dennis the Menace Fan Club, and a trip to my uncle’s was a chance to pore over his huge collection of decades’ worth of old issues.

Occasionally though, a copy of Whizzer and Chips would find its way into the house; my mum worked in Dillons the Newsagents, and she saved the odd unsold copy from the bins for us. It seemed a bit more exciting than the Beano: more disreputable, a little cruder. Also, it took far longer to read. The pictures were tiny, and every spare corner of its cheap newsprint pages were crammed with frantic action.

Favourite strips included Norman Mansbridge’s Fuss Pot (“the fussiest girl of the lot”), Terry Bave’s Oddball, about a sentient rubber ball from space who would assist its owner Nobby by turning into a rubber version of any object at will, and Colin Whittock’s seminal Lazy Bones, the picaresque chronicle of young narcoleptic Benny Bones and his eternal quest for a bit of shut-eye.

The artwork bristles with vigour, and as a whole owes a bit more to American stuff like the Disney comics of the ‘60s than the slightly more sedate Beano or Dandy (Leo Baxendale’s willfully chaotic Bash Street Kids notwithstanding). The cheapness of the paper, the sparing use of colour ink and the always wonky printing gave Whizzer and Chips the feeling of a scurrilous chapbook or incendiary revolutionary pamphlet.

Unlike American superhero comics, this part of British comic heritage is vastly under-appreciated. A look at the children’s comic section at the newsagent tells you how much we’ve lost – the Beano and the Dandy hang on, but everything else is a franchised magazine spin-off of a TV programme, with a free toy. Whizzer and Chips perished in 1990. Some of its characters found homes in Buster, which itself ceased publication in 2000.

For the price of a Dora the Explorer comic or Ben 10 fortnightly magazine you can buy a young relative a bundle of old Whizzer and Chips from eBay or a couple of annuals from a charity shop – they’ll still be chuckling weeks later. Decades later, in my case.

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

11 September 2011 | No Comments

David Pearson on Phillumeny

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from one of our studio partners, the irritatingly brilliant book designer David Pearson. ~

Around five years ago Alistair invited me along to an ephemera fair in Bloomsbury. Like a lot of designers I can be a bit of a magpie and have always been susceptible to collecting, arranging, colour- and number-coding (see, for example, all of my work) so I was in trouble when I stumbled across a container full of matchbox labels. Membership to the British Matchbox Label and Bookmatch Society; 50,000 matchbox labels; and a half-written book later, I’m slowly getting to grips with my latest print-based addiction.

In the former Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe, the matchbox as a means of delivering propaganda had no equal. Readily available, cheap and collectible, matchboxes and their printed labels presented idealistic images promoting communism as the moderniser of society.

The images displayed here are the output of four Eastern Bloc countries (Russia, Hungary, Lithuania and Czechoslovakia), from 1956–79. During this period, post-Stalinist Russia and its satellite states were struggling to free themselves from authoritarian state policies, but relative liberalisation provided some optimism after years of material deprivation. For the first time, Western advertising models were adopted and ‘cultured’ consumption encouraged, with the emphasis on individual and family happiness. The result was a new vision of civilisation and the matchbox label was key to the widespread circulation of this message.

Collectors’ associations were encouraged by the authorities in many of the Eastern Bloc countries and this resulted in the printing and distribution of huge quantities of labels – often in their uncut form – providing collectors with access to complete, themed series. In the case of Czechoslovakia, dedicated albums were produced to house collections, and Russian labels were often packaged in gift sets for the export market. These otherwise ephemeral objects would therefore long outlive the boxes of matches they were designed for.

 

Reproduction can be crude – with overprinted colours regularly appearing out of register – but such quirks can provide the collector with a uniquely interesting acquisition and enliven compositions in unexpected ways.

It’s no coincidence that a book designer should be drawn to matchbox labels. Their shape is intrinsically book-like, their method of communication instantaneous and spare, and they provide a dizzying range of illustrative styles. Their uncluttered compositions ensure communication across language barriers, and designs appear cohesive as a result of type and image being rendered by the same hand. But perhaps most alluring of all is their uncompromised clarity of purpose, an attribute that most modern designers can only dream about.

Generally speaking, matchbox labels aren’t valuable. The examples shown here were amassed for pence rather than pounds and owing to their vast numbers, generally considered a nuisance by collectors more interested in scarcity. My own labels are stored in stamp collecting folders that far outweigh their contents in terms of cost.

Perhaps this hints at the reason why matchbox labels are rarely of interest to art critics and almost never to cultural historians; but of all the visual images displayed by a culture, the matchbox must be ranked amongst the most democratic and accessible, and it therefore provides us with a fascinating study of a fast-changing social landscape.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- A NOTE ABOUT THE IMAGES -

Over the past few years, matchbox labels have become increasingly visible thanks to wonderful online collections such as Jane McDevitt’s. As much as possible, I have tried to avoid duplicating Jane’s images here, so do take a look at her collection if you’re hungry for more.

I have chosen to show just three labels from each themed series but in general, Russian export sets run to sixteen small labels (54mm x 35mm), one medium-sized label (107mm x 70mm) and one large label (228mm x 113mm). Czech groupings range from anywhere between two and 64 small labels whilst Hungarian and Lithuanian sets are most commonly found in groups of nine small labels.

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

 

5 September 2011 | 3 Comments

Clare Skeats on Foundation

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from the marvellous Clare Skeats – an incredible book designer, and brilliant design teacher. ~

Since 2009, I’ve been lucky enough to work as an Associate Lecturer on the Central Saint Martins Foundation Course in Art & Design. This involves leaving my stress-inducing desk for a day each week and immersing myself in the creative educations of 30 or so young people. For those of you who don’t know, Foundation is the year of study (usually undertaken around age 19) in which students experience learning in every art and design discipline, before deciding what to specialise in for a BA. Its main objective is as much to de-programme school conditioning, as it is to inform, provoke, equip and inspire.

I often find myself having to explain to people who have not come through an art or design education, what, exactly, the point of Foundation is. A frequently occurring question is ‘why do they need to do that?’. Fair point. Why should it take a year longer to graduate in jewellery design than say, marine biology? Doubts aside, almost everyone I speak to who has done this year of study (myself included), cite it as one of the most vital, pivotal and enjoyable years of their education. But it’s a year that is quickly overlooked – it’s the support act for the more talked-about BA. It’s also no secret that some Foundation courses are facing closure due to funding. So I wanted to use my 15 minutes in the We Made This spotlight to celebrate this stage in an artist’s or designer’s development and explain why I think it’s so special.

One of the first things we have to do on the course is to get students over their fears – fears of a new place (often a new country), new people, a new way of working – and one excellent (if unlikely) way of doing this is to get them to do something where we deny them an element or two of their control.

These two objects (above and top) are the results of an exercise where the students were asked to sculpt an elephant from clay, in 30 seconds with their hands behind their backs. When restrictions such as these are imposed, it’s impossible not to produce something with this much honesty and charm – it’s such a pure and uninhibited response to a creative brief. The laughter that ensues when these roughly-hewn grey lumps are offered up, represents a significant threshold of the first few days experience.

A major requirement of Foundation students is for them to keep a sketchbook. A Foundation sketchbook is instantly recognisable by its bulging form. It is the fertile receptacle of ideas, inspiration, tests, mistakes, frustrations and triumphs.

I love the sense of urgency and spontaneity that comes across in this spread by Sing Yu Chan (progressing to BA Fashion Design Technology (Menswear) at London College of Fashion); the instant visual connection he makes between the reference on the left and its hasty translation to cardboard and string weaving samples in the centre.

This impressive escalation of an idea (below), which grew from an exercise in folding a sheet of paper, is another example of sketchbook brilliance from Yang Yang (progressing to BA Costume Design at Wimbledon College of Art). It demonstrates so succinctly how a sketchbook can give a platform to the most ambitious (if ephemeral) creative plans.

One of the things I get most excited about with teaching at this level, is the scale of ideas that can be suggested through the most humble of materials.

This rather unassuming-looking object by Florence Lam (progressing to BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins) was produced in response to a visit to a recent exhibition of South African photography at the V&A. The black line (which is intended to be continuous – encircling the floor, walls and ceiling of the gallery space), is intended as a comment on Apartheid. I was surprised by my reaction to this piece when I saw it – yes it’s just some bits of foam board and black paint – but peering through the miniature doorway, it was so easy to imagine oneself in this impossibly cavernous and divided space. The scale is so perfectly judged and the whole piece is so much more than the sum of its parts – it’s an unexpectedly powerful expression of an idea from very limited means.

Another masterful deployment of basic materials can be found in these wonderful, organic, pod-like objects from Yao Wang (also progressing to BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins). Who knew that a balloon, a bucket, Plaster of Paris and physics could produce such beautiful forms?

When I was speaking to Yao, shortly after her prototype stage, she had an urge to remove the shreds of balloon – an understandable drive to ‘finish’ the project as she’d first intended. But we decided that the unforeseen beauty of the red latex stretched over the smooth plaster was way too interesting and so ‘finishing’ the project in its most conventional sense became completely unimportant. Whilst we try to instil a disciplined approach with a focus on pragmatic problem solving – it is these unexpectedly brilliant outcomes and deviations that keep the students open to possibilities and reminds us as tutors not to be too rigid.

Allowing students the flexibility to bend rules is always a difficult one to judge. On the one hand, we put time and effort into writing a brief and we want the students to learn to respond to set questions with rigour and focus – but on the other, we run the risk of sucking the life out of a project if we’re too dogmatic. The following film piece by Venice Wanakornkul (progressing to BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins), is the most perfect and playful example of why we need to allow students to bend rules. When faced with a brief to produce a piece of work in response to a culture (chosen from artefacts within the V&A), Venice opted to focus her outcome on the culture of museums. Hm…. not quite what we’d asked for – but the idea Venice had, subverted the brief in such a delightful way, we simply had to allow her to pursue it. Here is her film:

I never cease to be surprised and impressed by how sophisticated some students are in their thinking at this stage – how they utilise research and process information. The images here are from the sketchbook of Michael Ng (progressing to BA Product Design at Central Saint Martins) and they are such an impressive demonstration of lateral thinking in response to the Culture project described above.

Having made some initial drawings of these Japanese artefacts in the V&A (traditional cases for holding small objects), Michael undertakes further internet research, before leaping to references of inter-locking pens, stacking crates and coffee cups, then back to Samurai warrior helmets for a further re-think on the form, before producing this prototype to a more geometric design. Michael went on to develop the design even further, incorporating lights, (yes lights!), but I think even up to this stage of his project, his sense of investigation and spirit of ‘how can I make this better?’ is so wonderfully clear to see.

The experience of teaching on Foundation has lead me to re-appraise my own working methods and to be more open to wider influences. It has made me reconnect to my own experiences on Foundation and reminds me of a time when everything seemed new and different – sometimes uncomfortably so. But most importantly, it puts me in an environment once a week, where industry cynicism makes no unwelcome intrusions and anything can be possible.

With thanks to the staff and students on the Central Saint Martins Foundation Plus course, 2011.

[The opinions expressed above are those of Clare Skeats and do not necessarily reflect those of Central Saint Martins.]

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

4 September 2011 | No Comments

Joe Dunthorne on Le Gun

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from the wonderful writer Joe Dunthorne – his award-winning novel Submarine was recently made into a fantastic movie, and his new novel Wild Abandon has just been published. ~

I’m a fan of the East London art collective, Le Gun. I’m always impressed by the way that, despite using the work of many different artists and illustrators, they manage to keep a unified tone. Their tone is morbid but witty, like the grim reaper wearing clogs.

Here’s an amazing stain-glass window by one of the collective, Neal Fox, of J.G.Ballard:

And here’s an illustration by Zoe Taylor called Swimmer:

In fact, it was at one of Le Gun’s shows that, for the first time in my life, I decided to pay actual money to own some original art. I’m glad I did. I bought this lovely illustration by Zoe Taylor:

And I bought this, upside down cat, who now watches over all who enter my lounge. Like some great, heartless, hungry, Egyptian God, she silently judges us while we eat dinner:

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

3 September 2011 | No Comments

Catherine Dixon on José Luiz Benicio da Fonseca

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from the very lovely Catherine Dixon: a graphic designer, writer, and teacher, who’s currently working in Brazil. ~

The Brazilian illustrator José Luiz Benicio da Fonseca, or simply Benicio, would be speaking in Rio while I was there. All I knew was his reputation, a career spanning some 60 years, and a sense of the fond regard that many I was working with in the design community in Brazil held him in. So I thought that I should probably go.

Talks from the ‘old guys’ can be great – insightful, funny (charm being one of the most underrated essential skills of the graphic designer) and generous. And so it was on this occasion. Not that Benicio is just filling in his retirement days remininiscing. Now 75 years old he is still working, and so the evening was as much grounded in discussion of present illustration practice as that of the past.

He is a ‘pro’. And he is also prolific. His working output includes some 300 film posters, countless magazine covers, illustrations for books across the market from adult to children’s books and from fiction to non-fiction, along with a great many advertising campaigns and even architectural illustration.

Though the scope of his commissioned work is diverse it is rendered with an incredible consistency due to his unswerving fidelity to the use of gouache. The rich projections of jewel-coloured pieces of artwork showed time and again his old-school mastery of the medium. Clues to the age of the illustrations lay only in the context of use, the shifting fashions of magazine cover layout or the inclusion of digital accessories on the models.

Here’s the title page from Foi Expulso – it’s not often that the cover designer’s name is set at the same type size as the author!

His most famous works are undoubtedly his illustrated pin-ups. From the 1960s he worked for twenty years for the publisher Monterrey on covers for their ‘pocket books’ – cheap populist fiction titles featuring cowboy heroes, detectives, crime, sex and spies. For them alone he created almost 3000 covers, at times producing up to 22 covers a month in addition to other client work. He described how at a stretch he could produce 4 covers a day, albeit simple ones. This is in part due to his method of drawing from the huge visual library of photography he has built up, stock poses and so on that he can refer to and very quickly begin to build the image needed to match the title synopsis. Though he was careful to articulate the role of ‘design’ in this illustration process, showing how he would edit back from his references and then elaborate on them in order to tell a very particular story.

Of these titles the most outstanding are generally acknowledged as those for collection ZZ7 featuring perhaps his most iconic character Brigitte Montfort. This work is in many ways deeply unfashionable, though the audience for the talk spanned the generations with many young design students and enthusiasts in the mix. The work is also about as politically incorrect as it gets – poor Brigitte often being in want of some clothes. Yet the audience and discussion afterwards reflected the strength of popularity of Benicio’s work to a female audience too.

And I find I am also won over. Their irrelevance to me as potential reading material and trashy associations had previously rendered the graphic design of these books invisible. To hear Benicio speak was then something of a visual wake-up call. His jobbing professionalism, the strength of the visual story-telling, the drama (or melodrama) of the covers, the exquisite technique were actually all quite stunning. Get me to a second-hand bookshop in Rio now!

[Benicio was speaking as part of Ciclo Mandacaru de Oficinas de Ilustração at Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro – a week of workshops and talks about illustration. Photographs courtesy of Ana Paula Mendes.]

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

1 September 2011 | No Comments

Mind Over Matter

Kemistry Gallery is fast becoming London’s best place to see classic graphic design work, and their new show looks set to cement that reputation.

Opening on 25 August, Mind Over Matter celebrates the work of Alan Fletcher, and specifically the 10th anniversary of the publication of The Art of Looking Sideways, his seminal book on graphic design.

The show runs until 1 October.

10 August 2011 | No Comments

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