Monograph: Taxi Series

A collection of photographs that attempt to capture the beguiling beauty of life’s everyday confinements, re-proposing the ordinary, the displaced and the overlooked.

This series was shot in the vibrant, neon - soaked cities of Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai. The images illustrate our fascination with the energy of urban taxis at night: they glow with a sense of urgency in the business of someone’s journey playing out. The way the landscape of the city can interact with the reflective surfaces of the taxi is often overlooked – these images aim to capture that light play with the energy and bustle of city life and the stillness of the individual within it.

They were shot hand-held on medium format from some precarious locations, such as on highways and at lane intersections. As with all our personal projects, they are presented as shot. We see the process as cathartic rather than as a critical one, and this dedication to ‘in - camera’ purity establishes a predominant focal point for our personal practice.

Alex & Cocco are commercial, advertising and still-life photographers, based in London.

007 Quantum of Solace Type

Hand crafted typography for the location cards in the latest 007 film, QUANTUM OF SOlace by design studio tomato.

Nouvelle Vague 3 Album Sleeve

The creation of the cover was a mixture of the digital with the analogue – for example, the numerals on the cover were designed digitally before being made in a4 plywood and then printed using an old flypress (a manually operated screwpress with a massive ball-weighted handle on top).

To create the large text for the cover, Kendle used vintage wooden headline type bought on eBay, with the credits and additional label copy made using a junior typewriter. “Sore fingers,” is his comment on the latter process.

Finally, the imagery for the cover was originally composed and optimised as digital half tones before being outputted as laser-etched woodblocks that were used for printing. All the elements are then brought together in the final album and singles sleeves.

Dylan Kendle of design studio Tomato has created the art work for the third Nouvelle Vague album.

DJG Design

Typographer Danny-J-Gibson from Missouri, North America. Discovered his typographic posters on www.typographicposters.com. Some of his work resembles the kind of work I am currently pursuing/wanting to produce. Design that is organized chaos.

www.djgdesign.com

Mark Webber - Map Linocuts

Designer Mark Webber's project based on street maps of some of the worlds metropolitan cities such as New York, London, Amsterdam and Paris. The cities streets depending on size are represented typographically and created by etching into lino. They are then inked up and printed.

www.markandrewwebber.com

New York

London

Amsterdam

Paris

Ink Calendar by Oscar Diaz

Ink Calendar make use of the timed pace of the ink spreading on the paper to indicate time. The ink is absorbed slowly, and the numbers in the calendar are ‘printed ‘ daily. One a day, they are filled with ink until the end of the month. The calendar enhances the perception of time passing and not only signaling it. The aim of the project is to address our senses, rather than the logical and conscious brain.

The ink colors are based on a spectrum, which relate to a “color temperature scale”, each month having a color related to our perception of the weather on that month. The colors range from dark blue in December to three shades of green in spring or orange and red in the summer.

http://www.oscar-diaz.net

Crazy Paul Rand

Another Paul Rand film.

Crit: Jeremy Leslie: What makes a magazine?

Article from Creative Review September 09 about what makes a magazine a magazine.

To kick off this series of columns on magazines and editorial design, let’s start at the beginning and ask what makes a maga zine a magazine. This may seem a curious question – what you’re looking at right now is a magazine, right? – but it’s worth a closer look as it also helps establish a value for judging what a good magazine is. The subject also has an element of currency, following the refusal by South Africa’s abc (Audit Bureau of Circulation) to recognise MK Bruce/Lee as a magazine.

MK Bruce/Lee is an extraordinary project published by South African company The President on behalf of the music tv station mk. The maga zine focuses on music, and each issue comes in two versions, one (Lee) for women and one (Bruce) for men. But what makes it stand out as special is its physical form. Creative director Peet Pienaar has conceived the project as a lucky dip bag of printed goodies including stickers, fold-out posters, booklets and postcards. Every surface buzzes with multi-coloured repeat dingbat patterns using different paper stocks and print effects. It could hardly be further from the ‘standard’ maga zine format. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a magazine, it just makes it a very special magazine. I’ve argued many times before that magazines have to emphasise their printed nature, their ‘magaziney-ness’, to set them apart from digital experiences and secure a foothold in the future, and MK Bruce/ Lee is a perfect example of how to do this. Yet, in the words of the ABC, “The board rejected your application for membership of the ABC on the basis that it was not considered to be a magazine.”

But if MK Bruce/Lee can partly be defined by its difference from the mainstream, what are the factors it shares with the mainstream that mean both can be considered magazines?

I will come to some key attributes but I prefer to start with the more open definition expressed by editorial designer Fernando Gutiérrez for my book Issues: “The word magazine means storage space for dynamite. A magazine is full of surprises and it can explode at any minute.” By that defini tion, half the magazines on the news stand today should struggle to earn the right to be called magazine. And therein lies one of the main issues to be addressed in defining ‘magazine’. For many people, the ubiquity and familiarity of magazines renders them almost invisible. They pick up the latest issue of their regular read and take it completely for granted. The lack of surprise in mainstream titles has played a major part in their success but is arguably now playing a part in their slow decline. They are predictable not only in format and appearance but in content too.

There are exceptions. The ‘surprise’ factor explains why magazines like The New Yorker and The Face remain regarded with such high esteem. But great though such titles are, they not only stick to a traditional physical format but cannot be described as typical. They are (or were in the case of The Face) exceptional for their refusal to be predictable. It is difficult to describe the New Yorker in a single sentence, its scope is so broad. Every issue contains surprises – as David Hepworth has said, “one of its chief delights is that it’s impossible to predict what’s going to be in it”. This was what made The Face great in its heyday too. It managed to combine the most unlikely parts. Political reportage sat next to fashion in a way that hadn’t been seen since earlier titles like Twen and Nova. And yes, they got things wrong: the fashion shoot based on terrorist chic springs to mind. But it was only later, when The Face became scared of making such mistakes, that it began its decline toward closure.

With the majority of magazines being nervous of straying too far from their comfort zones we need to celebrate those titles that are attempt ing to do something different. Whether mainstream or independent, consumer, b2b or customer, old or new, industry bodies like abc should be supporting innovative publications. And if we’re supporting innovation in content and presentation, why not format too? It is only relatively recently that the increased scale of magazine production has prompted so much homogeneity in physical format.

I offer two criteria that define some thing as a magazine rather than a news paper or book. Firstly, a magazine is a vehicle for edited content. Text, pictures and design work together to present a mediated view on a subject/subjects. The usp of the New Yorker is that you the reader are placing your trust in the editorial team to deliver a surprising combination of material, including content you perhaps didn’t expect would interest you. This mediation is an important difference from other content providers, particularly digital media where content is sourced by search or by random links.

Secondly, a magazine is part of a series, an ongoing project that gets published under a single banner. The period between issues might be weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual or irregular, but another issue is always on its way. It is this that allows the reader to develop an ongoing relationship with a publication, and is what publishers rely on to create loyalty and contin uing sales.

Weeklies like Grazia, Heat and Pick Me Up are magazines, as are monthlies like Vogue, Esquire and indeed Creative Review. But so are ever- changing projects like Mono.Kultur (every issue a different binding format), La Mas Bella (one issue a map, another an apron, another a tapas-making kit) and perhaps most spectacularly Visionaire (one issue a lightbox and transparencies, another a series of pop-up books). And so, of course, is MK Bruce/Lee.

All these magazines and more will be fair game for this column over the coming months.

See more about MK Bruce/Lee at mkbruce lee.co.za

Jeremy Leslie blogs at magculture.com and is a curator of the international magazine symposium, Colophon.

Verdana: Ikea's Flat-Pack Font

Type design discussed in the Guardian. To mark this occasion this post will be published using Verdana, enjoy.

Not so long ago, in an ungainly and annoying queue at a hangar on the outskirts of town, the talk was all about great-value scented tealights. Today, the conversation has switched to fonts, and there is apoplexy. In case news hasn't reached you, Ikea has changed its global font from Futura to Verdana. This wouldn't normally raise an eyebrow, but the new catalogues have just arrived on type designers' doormats (Thud! The new Ektorp Tullsta armchair cover – only £49!), and instead of looking all industrial and tough, it now looks a little more crafted and generously rounded. It also looks less suited to a Swedish company founded on original design, and a bit more like a company you wouldn't think twice about. Online design forums are fuming, and typomaniacs are saying terrible things.

Futura has a quirkiness to it that Verdana does not, as well as a much longer history linked to a political art movement. Futura, dating from the 1920s, is loosely Constructivist (only loosely, because the proprietary version that Ikea made its own – Ikea Sans – is slightly tweaked to distinguish it from, say, something Joseph Stalin might have used). Verdana, however, is linked to something modern and frequently reviled: Microsoft. It is one of the most widely used fonts in the world, and people who care about these things dislike the way our words are becoming homogenised: the way a sign over a bank looks the same as one over a cinema; the way magazines that once looked original now look like something designed for reading online. This is what has happened with Ikea: the new look has been defined not by a company proudly parading its 66-year heritage, but by something driven by the clarity of the digital age.

Nothing wrong with that – it's a business. A new font is unlikely to have a detrimental effect on sales. (Indeed, the publicity generated by all this chatter may boost them.) But what would happen to our appreciation of the world if all our decisions were governed by commerce alone?

Futura is the most enduring work of the German designer Paul Renner. It still looks modern 82 years after its release. Verdana was designed in 1993 by Matthew Carter, a Brit now living in Boston, one of the most elegant and highly regarded type designers in the world. Carter is responsible for a great amount of the world's newsprint type; if an art editor wants a modernised newspaper masthead, they will more likely than not get Carter. I met the man recently over dinner, and he explained that Verdana was a typeface simply designed to look good on a computer screen. It was clear; it worked well in many languages; it was unambiguous even at small point sizes. (Its simplicity belies the fact that, like most typefaces, it took many months of painstaking work to perfect.)

Our awareness of different typefaces has blossomed with the pull-down menu on personal computers. "In the past," Carter says, "people who had a very well-defined sense of taste in what they wore or what they drove, didn't really have any way of expressing their taste in type. But now you can say, 'I prefer Bookman to Palatino,' and people do have feelings about it." Verdana is now the default font of choice for many who are grateful to the freedoms provided by their computers, but don't have time to consider how their work looks to others.

Which is precisely why those who do care are so upset. Verdana seems to have been chosen by Ikea by default, or at least by economics. An Ikea spokeswoman, Monika Gocic, has said that Verdana is for them because "it is more efficient and cost-effective". This is another way of saying: "We use it because everyone else does."

Should we care about these things as much as type designers do? I believe we should, and not just because in my experience type designers tend to be wise souls. If everything looked like a front page of the Times from 1950, then we may as well all still be living in black-and-white. And beyond the risk of homogeneity, there is emotion. Used well, type design defines mood, and how we think about everything we see. It can make us think seriously or frivolously; it can guide us effortlessly, or it can entertain us viscerally.

According to Swedish folklore, there are more copies of the Ikea catalogue printed each year than the Bible. It certainly has more Billy bookcases than either the Old or New Testatment, but its designers would do well to remember their history. The first movable type appeared with Gutenberg's Bible in the 1450s, and everything followed from there. In this strange way, the multi-million print-run of the Ikea catalogue has now adopted a cloak of heavy responsibility. But things could be worse. It could be in Helvetica.

- Simon Garfield's book about type design will be published by Profile Books next year

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/02/ikea-verdana-font

Paul Rand Interview

Paul Rand Interview from some time in the 80's maybe. Interviewer seems to be growing an afro, he looks cool.

Partie un.

Partie deux.

Partie trois.