Okay, graphic design students, if you’re interested in book design, stop whatever you’re doing, and enter this competition.
Penguin (UK) have announced the brief for their annual Design Award, which has been running since 2007. The competition is open to degree and HND level students, and there are two briefs: one for Penguin, to design a cover for Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; the other for Puffin, to design a cover for Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach.
You can download the templates from the competition site, as well as a set of logo files.
Brilliantly, each winner gets a placement: six weeks at Penguin, or four weeks at Puffin – and a placement like that could very easily kick start a career. Each winner also gets a £1,000 prize – which can only be a good thing given the current cost of doing a degree course. Second and third prize winners also get some cash.
Here are a couple of covers from the previous competitions – Kirsty White won last year with her elegant cover for Perfume, and Jez Burrows came 2nd in 2007 with his fantastic cover for On The Road (which went viral and popped up all over the web that year).
The closing date for entries is Friday 15 April, so you’ve got plenty of time to put your designs together. Penguin will then create a shortlist for each cover, and give you feedback on your designs, for final submission on 1 June.
We nipped across to the private view of the fantastic new letterpress show Reverting to Type at the Standpoint Gallery in Hoxton last week. The private view was rammed, so we popped back the following day for a proper look, and to take some pictures.
The show is really extensive, the walls packed with fine examples of work, ranging from seasoned professionals to students from local art colleges; and there are also a series of prints that have been created specifically for the show. Nearly all the work is for sale, either as one-off originals, or limited edition prints; both framed and unframed.
There’s also a range of cards and artists-books on sale, including the stunning The Travelling Bar Maid by Lisa Rahman, printed by Graham Bignell.
Take a look at all our shots from the show on Alistair’s Flickr set. The show is open daily from 10-6, running from now until 24 December, then re-opening from 4 to 22 January 2011.
Following hot on the heels of that is Reverting to Type, an exhibition of work by contemporary letterpress practitioners from right around the globe, curated by New North Press and Richard Ardagh. The show runs from 10 to 24 December at the Standpoint Gallery, 45 Coronet Street, London N1. You’ll be able to buy a lot of the work on show, and even have a go at creating your own Christmas card on an Adana press.
We nipped across to Trafalgar Square last night to check out Outrace, one of the centrepieces of this year’s London Design Festival.
Outrace is a large scale installation of eight industrial robots (on loan from Audi), each of which has a powerful LED head attached to the end of its arm. If you log on to the Outrace website you can submit a message of up to 70 characters which the robots will then recreate in a 3D cursive graffiti font written in light (assuming they deem your message interesting enough – we quite liked “Bow to your robot overlords puny humans” which someone has already posted). Long exposure cameras placed round the base of the installation then capture these interactive light paintings, and display them on screens just below the robots, as well as sending them to their YouTube channel (it’s 2010, nothing exists unless it’s on YouTube), and emailing them back to you. Here’s ours (with a couple of stray characters, guess those robots aren’t infallible…):
The project was designed by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, who in the newspaper handed out at the installation are described as being very different from standard ‘professional designers’: ”You will know these genteel people by their office pallor and their dainty Apple iPhones. Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar do not fit this mould.”
Well boys, judging by your bio shots on the Outrace site, you fit the mould just fine:
To be fair, the newspaper has a fairly tongue-in-cheek tone (in parts – other parts are dripping with painfully sincere academic analysis of the project) so perhaps us genteel folk shouldn’t get too worked up…
The project is evidently mind-blowingly complex as a piece of software engineering, which is all well and good, but what’s the actual experience like?
Well, it’s kinda groovy to have a gang of beautiful robots girating around in Trafalgar Square – you can check out the live stream to see them doing their thing – they’re like a nest of rhythmic vipers, dancing to some unheard tune (Bjork’s All is Full of Love perhaps?) Very beautiful.
As an interactive text piece though it works far better online than it does as a physical piece – when you’re in the square you can’t see the letterforms left by the light traces (unless you photograph them at night as we did, which means taking an SLR and a tripod along), and the screens below the robots showing the messages don’t feel entirely connected to what’s going on above them. And while we were there they’d run out of the explanatory newspapers, which was leaving people in the dark, as it were. The online films are great though, and the graffiti font works well for the kinds of messages that are being sent in (‘Kirstin, I love you with all of my heart. A xxx’ being one of the latest), pleasantly undercutting the mechanical movements of the robots.
All in all a fine centrepiece to the festival. Outrace continues until tomorrow evening (23 September) so get down there sharpish if you want to take a look.
Larger versions of our shots are on Alistair’s LDF10 Flickr set.
So the kids over at Berg have been playing around again, this time for creative communications agency Dentsu, and have produced this beautiful little piece of stop frame animation.
They created wireframe models of words, and then did virtual CAT scans of them, creating thin slivers of the letterforms. Each of these became single frames, which were then played in sequence on an iPad, and photographed with long exposures of between 3 and 6 seconds. The photographs were then spliced back together as stop frame animation, a rather tasty mix of lo-tech and hi-tech. (And reminiscent of the great stuff that the Lichtfaktor gang have been doing.)
The good folks over at Veer (the stock image & font library) have recently revamped their site, and in an attempt to coerce us into blogging about it are letting us have five of their Creatives Understand t-shirts to give away to you lot, totally free.
We’re generally a bit wary of this blog becoming a mindless promotional tool for PR machines, but we’ve always liked the way Veer works, so we’re happy giving them a quick nod. If you’d like one of their t-shirts*, just drop us a comment in the box below (make sure you fill in the email box) telling us what size you’d like (XS to XXL), and we’ll give you a shout.
They’ve also asked us to mention that they’ve got a 25% discount thing going with their various of their fonts over what’s left of the summer
*First come, first served; one per person; UK only
UPDATE – Thanks for entering folks – competition’s now closed, and we’ll be sending out the t-shirts to the five winners mighty soon.
The good folks over at FontShop have just launched their Education page, which features a series of really rather helpful documents about all things typographic.
The first of these, Meet Your Type: A field guide to love & typography, looks at the elements of typography, typeface selection, typographic details and buying fonts (of course). It’s a really good primer, looking at kerning, leading, letterspacing and so on, all written in Erik Spiekermann’s enjoyably quirky style.
There’s a Type Tips document too, which looks at capitalisation, en and em dashes, tabular figures, speech marks (or smart quotes), ligatures, justification and bullet marks.
All in all they work as a great introduction to typography. Take a look.
We’ve just picked up a batch of posters we designed for Twickenham Carnival, which is organised by the London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames. The posters have been printed up from original woodblock and metal letterpress type by the good folks at New North Press, and we’re dead chuffed with them.
Richmond Council asked us to put together the posters for the carnival based on the theme ‘Heritage Now!’ So by way of research we took a trip to the Local Studies Collection at Richmond Library, which is a real treasure trove. We unearthed some giant scrapbooks which had a whole series of fantastic original posters from local carnivals back in the 1920s, which was too good a gift to ignore.
We discussed the idea of doing purely typographic posters with the client, who could see that it fit snugly with their heritage theme. We then put together a rough layout, and took it to New North Press, who matched the type where possible, and proposed some great substitutions where not.
They printed an all-black version for us to scan (so that we could create artwork for a large run of digitally printed posters), and then created a short run of original two-colour prints.
See the full set of shots of the reference imagery and the printing process on Alistair’s Flickr set.
The carnival is at Orleans House Gallery, on Sunday 13 June.
We've recently been doing some work with the lovely folk over at New North Press, a letterpress studio over near Old Street, run by Graham Bignell, who set it up in 1986. They have stacks of woodblock and metal type, and specialise in artists' books, portfolios and print editions; as well as producing a rather fine series of posters, as we've mentioned before. Well worth a look.
Our studio-mate David Pearson spent a large chunk of last year working on a frankly fantastic series of covers for Cormac McCarthy's books, which have recently been published. They're a distinctly visceral set of typographic designs, reflecting the novels' frequently dark content.
The designs were a real labour of love, and we thought it might be interesting to share with you how Dave put them together (and anyway, he's promised us a beer if we make this a longish post).
The initial text designs were done in a layout programme, and then output as bitmaps for sending off to be made into rubber stamps. Here's the text for the cover quote for The Road – the original designs featured quotes taken from the novels themselves, but these were rejected in favour of marketing quotes from reviews.
Dave then created piles of prints from each stamp, experimenting with different amounts of black ink, different amounts of pressure (often by placing paper on the floor and standing on the stamps), and even by adding in some water to the mix to achieve some of the distressed textures (particularly on The Road cover).
The prints were then scanned in, and combinations of the different versions were layered up in Photoshop, sometimes combined with background textures, and given colour. Here's the No Country for Old Men cover part way through, stamped, scanned, and with a texture added.
They're a gorgeous set of covers, and there's one more currently in the pipeline. If you fancy reading more about Dave's work, check out these pieces about him on Casual Optimist and It's Nice That.
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