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.

It’s a dog’s life.

Eddie is an art-school drop out from Barking who likes sports, visual art and loafing by the river. He’s sort of seeing someone, but he also does a bit of rent on the side… though he hasn’t told his boyfriend Dan that just yet. Oh, and he’s also got a crush on Nelson, who’s tall, muscular, hung, and can fulfil your wildest fantasties.

Welcome to The Lengths.

Drawn in stark monochrome, The Lengths is the brilliant new comic series written and illustrated by Howard Hardiman. Set in a contemporary London where men are dogs, literally and metaphorically, it revolves around Eddie, a young gay guy who’s trying to have a successful relationship while working as a rent boy.

The illustrations are powerful yet sensitive, with a real eye for physical form, but fortunately without ever becoming simply pornographic, despite the subject matter. The characters might all have the heads of dogs, but they feel like people you know all too well.

The comic is four issues in so far (you can buy all four as a bundle for just £10), and Issue 5 is on its way mighty soon.

Can’t wait.

We finally made our way over to the Imperial War Museum London yesterday to check out the excellent Don McCullin retrospective, Shaped by War, that’s been running there since October.

McCullin is one of the world’s most respected photojournalists, best known for his war photography (though his street photography at home in the UK, as well as his more recent landscapes, are also fantastic); and it’s his work from the world’s many war-zones that is the focus of this show.

A self-confessed war junkie, McCullin worked extensively for The Sunday Times in the 60s and 70s, travelling to the most dangerous places on the planet to bring back images of the events there. Perhaps one of his most famous images is this shot of a shell-shocked US marine during Vietnam War:

In the show there’s a print of the shot showing McCullin’s notes about its printing, which is fascinating. It shows the care and attention paid to the printing of a photographic image, but also shows how the analogue process of printing a photograph shares a lot with the the digital process of adjusting an image in Photoshop.

The show features a great half-hour filmed interview with McCullin in which he talks candidly about his experiences – about how he taught himself photography from a series of photographic books, about growing up in Finsbury Park, about the darkness inside him that comes from seeing the things he’s seen, and about moments of near-madness.

(Above: portrait of Don McCullin by Nik Wheeler)

The show also has a collection of ephemera from McCullin’s life, including one of his Nikon F Cameras, which was his by a bullet from an Khmer Rouge AK47, narrowly missing his head.

He’s had an incredible life, which you can read about in his autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour. You can see more images from the show in this Guardian slideshow, and in the book of the exhibition, Shaped By War. Read more about him in this Guardian interview, or watch this film from the Tate.

The show at the Imperial War Museum runs until 15 April. Get along if you can.

People have been foretelling the death of the book for years now.

Obviously, that’s not going to happen entirely, but more and more of our reading is already taking place on e-readers (Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sony’s Reader, and WH Smith’s Kobo amongst others).

The Kindle is the current king, currently available in the UK just in its monotone e-ink format, but in the US also in its full-colour multimedia Fire version, which is much closer to Apple’s ubiquitous iPad.

These days books are released in a whole stack of different formats. Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro, originally available as a signed and numbered limited edition hardback, is now available as a paperback, as an e-book for all the major formats, and as a multimedia app for the iPhone and iPad, and also as an audio book.

For book designers, whether they work on covers, texts, or on integrated books (words and pictures), the industry is obviously undergoing a metamorphosis. A metamorphosis that brings possibilities as well as peril.

Looking just at book covers, which are designed to lure in readers, they’re no longer primarily experienced physically, but instead as tiny thumbnails on a computer screen or handheld device. Instead of a wealth of sizes, of formats, of textures and of finishes, we just have pixels.

This isn’t a massively new situation – people have been buying books from Amazon for a good few years now. But where previously you would still end up with a physical book in your hands, that’s no longer necessarily the case.

To add insult to injury, in the current incarnation of iBooks on the iPad and iPhone you hardly even get to see covers at full size – they blink past momentarily when you start a book, but that’s about it. You do at least get a full size cover on the Kindle (well, full screen-size that is, which is always the same size no matter what book you’re reading), but on the e-ink version it’s always black and white.

At the same time though, there’s a resurgence in the love of the book as an object, with all the main publishers pumping out high-end versions of their backlists, such as Penguin’s Clothbound Classics. Surely a designer’s playground.

So, what is the next chapter for books?

For what it’s worth, our best guess is that paperbacks will start to disappear, as more and more people buy e-readers (how long is it before a major author releases a best-seller just as an e-book?). Hopefully though the various bits of e-book software will develop so that covers will still be considered a fundamental part of a book. We can also see lavish editions of hardbacks becoming more common; and integrated books perhaps becoming more and more interactive, following the lead of magazines.

But heck, what do we know?

Fortunately, if you’re out in New York, you can go and listen to some folk who might know just a little bit more.

The Next Chapter – The Design and Publishing of the Digital Book is a talk taking place at Parsons on Thursday 26 January. It’s organised by the AIGA NY, and is moderated by Chip Kidd. Should be a good one.

Hopefully they’ll be recording it for those of us who can’t make it…

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.

There’s been a heck of a lot of press this month about book cover design, which is a Very Good Thing. It’s often woefully overlooked in the design industry, let alone in the world at large.

Most of the press comes as a direct result of Julian Barnes namechecking the designer Suzanne Dean (creative director at Random House) in his acceptance speech for the Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending.

Check out this thoughtful piece from Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, which looks at the growth of the book as object, in the face of the unstoppable march of the e-reader. And then take a look at this piece in the Telegraph about the design process behind the Dean cover; as well as this piece from Nick Duerden in the Independent naming a few of his favourite cover designers. All good stuff.

If you want to go a bit deeper, then make sure you check out Dan Wagstaff’s excellent blog The Casual Optimist, where he’s just published his favourite covers from 2010 and 2011. In the 2011 list, he features Peter Mendelsund’s fantastic series of Kafka covers (top, and below).

Mendelsund, art director at Knopf and Pantheon, is a bit of a god-like genius – we featured his gorgeous Last Werewolf cover back in April. You should definitely take a look at his brilliantly erudite blog, Jacket Mechanical. And if that whets your appetite, then sate it with Debbie Millman’s brilliant Design Matters interview with him. His path to becoming a designer is quite unique, and his thoughts about how a book cover should work are well worth listening to.

Interestingly, he mentions that he’s worried that he might be out of a job within five years, because of the growth of e-readers, and the consequent diminishing of the importance of cover design. Well heck, if he’s gonna be out of a job, there’s not much hope for the rest of us… He also mentions that he himself hasn’t read a physical book in years, as he now reads everything on an iPad; so frankly Mendelsund, you’ve only got yourself to blame.

If that isn’t enough, then check out: designer John Gall’s lovely blog, Spine Out; the Caustic Cover Critic blog, which seems to scoop everyone else on featuring the very latest book cover designs; the Book Cover Archive, which does what it says on the tin, and also has a good set of links to more blogs; and Faceout Books, which features in-depth analysis of individual covers – such as this post about our studio buddy David Pearson’s covers for Penguin’s Great Journeys series.

And if you’re still not done after all that lot, then how about you read an actual book? We can recommend Joe Dunthorne’s lovely Wild Abandon.

Last week we got the chance to take a trip down into one of the many hidden parts of London, courtesy of the London Transport Museum’s Station Open Day at the now-closed Aldwych underground station. The station, on a little branch line off the Piccadilly line, has been closed since the early 90s. It originally opened in 1907 (though it was then named Strand station, being renamed Aldwych in 1915), and right from the start is was rather underused. So underused in fact, that the eastern platform wasn’t used at all for train services from 1914 onwards.

Though it, and the other platform, did operate as air raid shelters for the citizens of London during both wars, and also, during the First World War, for 300 paintings from the National Gallery. In the Second World War, the British Museum even used the station to store the Elgin Marbles. After the war the Eastern platform was used by London Transport to create full scale mock-ups of proposed station designs, and more recently the entire station has been used for film and TV productions, as well for Emergency Response Unit training sessions.

Because of all the film and TV work, it’s rather tricky to work out which bits of existing signage and advertising are real, and which are bits left over from various film art departments.

This roundel, which was leaning against one of the walls, looked fairly authentic though. It features Edward Johnston’s iconic Johnston Sans typeface, (and the roundel itself is Johnston’s design – read more about the roundel’s history), interestingly with the alternate version of the W. Possibly from around the mid 1930s?

There were also some genuine posters from the early 70s on one of the walls – check out the mind-expanding Planetarium poster:

Lovely stuff.

This ad played out at last night at the end of BBC’s latest stunning series, Frozen Planet.

It’s kind of cheesy (and with more than a hint of William Shatner’s version of Pulp’s Common People) but it’s also a touching reminder of the brilliant natural history work that the BBC, and more particularly David Attenborough, has consistently produced.

We can’t help feeling that it’d make an even better ad for someone like Friends of the Earth or the World Wide Fund for Nature. Perhaps with the tag line “It’s a wonderful world. Help us look after it.”

So how about it BBC – how about you just donate it to them?

We’ve been having a bit of fog in town these past few days, so we nipped out to take a few shots…

Ever since it opened its doors a year ago, customers have been clamouring for an online store for Hoxton Street Monster Supplies. And now, thanks to the brilliant work of a team of hugely talented volunteers, the online shop is alive.

And just in time, as we’ve recently created a whole new range of products for the shop*:

These tins of fear are perfect as a top-up for any monster who’s not feeling quite as scary as they should. As well as a batch of fear, each tin also contains an exclusive short story by a top children’s author, so they make rather good presents for kids.

The Night Sweats features a tale by Andy Stanton; The Chills a story by Jeremy Strong; Alarm has a story by Meg Rosoff; the Night Terrors tale is by Eoin Colfer; and Creeping Dread features a story by Charlie Higson.

The boxes of Cubed Earwax are ‘A true delight at any monster’s table’; but we’re more partial to the bars of Impacted Earwax.

The shop is also selling these jars of Daylight – perfect for vampires suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). You simply leave them out in the light during the day, and as soon as dusk falls, they light up. They also come in a Moonlight version for werewolves who don’t want to wait around all month for a full moon:

And just in case you have a really sweet tooth (or fang) there are a couple of new jars of sweets:

You can also pick up some of the original range of products, including T-shirts, Zombie Fresh Mints, Fang Floss, and of course, some of the books written by the kids at the Ministry of Stories, including the new Awfully Bad Guide to Monster Housekeeping.

The site was designed by Gavin and Jason Fox, built by Simon Pearson, project managed by Chris Meachin, user experienced by Mike Towber; and art directed by We Made This.

*Not all the products are available from the online store; and shipping is only available for UK addresses at the time of writing.