Quick! Brag about how great your festival season was/how edgy the first band you went to see was (mine was Wheatus, deal with it) on the Dr. Martens website and win gig tickets to the slightly wimpy British Sea Power, the more shouty Rolo Tomassi or the er… welsh… The Blackout. Sounds good eh. Then tweet all about it with #firstandforever as your hashtag to carry on bragging.
A couple of weeks ago we held a zine workshop with Alex Zamora from FEVERZINE - have a watch of this video to see what we got up to. We’ll be putting up photos of some of the zines shortly (the video barely scratches the surface of the body of work produced), but until then be content with pausing the HD footage and salivating/giggling over it.
We absolutely loved this workshop, there’s nothing better than getting people to stretch their creative muscles in new ways and producing a magazine in 3 hours is definitely a good way to do it.
More New Blood videos to come…
Go to John Thurbin for all your stop-motiony black-and-whitey illustrationy needs. This video is sort of mesmerising and his designs are lovely too. A 2011 Middlesex grad, hopefully we’ll be seeing more of John in the near future. JT will triumph indeed.
Candid advice and stylish visuals from ex-Falmouth designer Gus Cook, which go some way towards explaining how he landed a couple of placements, then a job with the design legends jkr. Well worth a read for all you sleep-deprived undergrads, high on spray-mount, guillotining your custom business cards and preparing your firm handshakes for degree shows and New Blood. Best of luck (and see you there)!
The design agency and capital letter-avoider jkr has released a new book entitled “The Blue Lady’s New Look and Other Curiosities”, or just “Blue Lady” to its mates. I got hold of a copy a few weeks ago and since then I have been reading it on a variety of trains and deck chairs around the country.
The purpose of the book is to present a collection of posts from jkr’s blog, the Design Gazette. Almost daily, its author, Silas Amos, provides an intelligent, thought-provoking critique of the latest developments in design and branding, delivered entirely without ego, which is impressive from an agency described by a leading creative industry commentator as “pretty shit hot”. To describe the Blue Lady as an anthology is to sell it short though. In my opinion, the book is much more than a collection of disparate essays. The pieces have been lovingly organised into a number of themed sections building to a climactic final chapter that articulately captures the current state of design and culture.
Like an episode of Scrubs, each of the essays introduces an important question that often has no clear-cut answer. Should you continuously refresh your brand’s image or stick with what’s familiar? Is it a good idea to associate the brand with a particular celebrity? Should packaging be different for items bought online rather than in-store? For each of these issues, the Blue Lady presents a spectrum of recent cases that have been successful and some that haven’t. This makes the book a great source of inspiration and guidance for both students and design professionals. It’s a shame there isn’t an index to help search through different brands or key concepts.
One of the Blue Lady’s closing points is that design today is highly referential, so it is fitting that Amos regularly draws from an encyclopaedic knowledge of past designs, literature and the arts. At times when reading the book, I felt like a young apprentice, smiling and nodding as my mentor spoke in a language of past icons and learned cultural references, then scurrying off to Wikipedia to work out what he was on about. Don’t get me wrong, the Blue Lady reads well and is free from impenetrable jargon, but it treats the reader as a peer, expecting them to share a certain level of cultural understanding. By the end of the book you’ll be well equipped to contribute to the discussion (if you weren’t already).
So yeah, get a copy. It will inform you about the many factors that are shaping today’s cultural context and make you think about where things might go in the future. Which is important because you’ll be the one doing the shaping. It’s only £7.19 on Amazon right now and, in case you were wondering, it smells great.
It’s a cracking tune anyway, but I particularly enjoyed this (unofficial) video of AWOLNATION‘s sail performed live and interspersed with some cool looking homeless types by Austin (Texas) based videographer Fuller… Exploitation ftw.
Some great old-school shots from Obama’s younger days. Straight from a SSZ fave site: How to be a Retronaut – the closest thing to a tardis we’ve found to-date.
Now our exuberant lives are settling down after a few weeks of travel we can hit the delicious buffet of submissions that have recent hit our doormat. This is Bradford boy Patrick O’Leary, with humourous tales of the impossible. Tree hugging, human-eating chickens and everything in between. I want a screen print.
The London Art Fair features a boat-load of modern British and contemporary art and is on til Sunday at the Business Design Centre in Islington. I went along earlier today and was swamped by the amount and diversity of the artwork being displayed by galleries from around the world. One of the exhibits featured work from the Catlin Guide (above), which is an annual, independently-curated book of the 40 most promising art graduates from all over the UK (it’s very nicely presented and smells great in case you were wondering). According to Justin Hammond, the editor of the guide, it is really tough for new artists to get exposure or gallery space, particularly if they aren’t based in London. He added that many graduates leave university ill-equipped for challenges such as pricing and promoting their work. A familiar story for many of you design grads!
One of my favourite exhibits from the whole show was the rapidly ripening Bananaboat (below), by Jacob Dahlstrup Jensen, graduate of Glasgow School of Art, which was the centre-piece of the Catlin Guide collection. I’ve put a few of my other favourite works from the fair up here. Get down to Islington and see for yourself if you get the chance – some very famous artists featured (such as Magritte, Mattisse, Paolozzi, Hirst), and the people-watching is tremendous!
Mike Diver and Pedro Aguilar from DMB have painstakingly recreated some of Caravaggio’s most famous paintings in a set of rich, lustrous photos for the Italian Moda Magazine. They seem to have hired a motley bunch of roadies and bike couriers to add extra menace to the pictures.
via LoveArtLondon
Our mates at Brave just sent us a brand spanking new Panasonic TA1! They recently crowdsourced a crack-team of UK designers to create a huge range of skins to customise their latest HD MMC camera – our little number is adorned with a monster skin designed by Brave art director Chris Weston. Check out the full range here.
This post comes from the heart. If you are at all interested in print, independent magazines or free bloody speech then you need to subscribe to this service; it has, quite frankly, changed my life.*
The concept of Stack is to promote independent press by sending subscribers one (or quite often several) independent rags a month. This can range from Eye (RRP £17!) to Little White Lies, Bad Idea, VNA, Anorak, the list is endless. If you’ve heard of these then you’ll know what a good deal this is, if you haven’t then you, child, are the most in need of it.
Strangely though, for me at least, it’s the other ‘free’ magazines you get with the featured title that make it all worthwhile. One example is Manzine, an outspoken reaction to mens magazines written by some of their editors. Reading-on-the-bus-kudos aside, it has helped to reinforce my confidence in the power of a print mag, however home-made – No-one else will own my copy of Manzine, I’ve spilt coffee on it and dog-eared the corners, it’s truly been a journey. I still pick it up months later and it’s as ball-splittingly hilarious as it was the day I got it.
I can’t recommend Stack enough, it’s a bundle of joy landing on your doormat every month, a constant in a world of wars, politics, doom, gloom and digital media. Plus they delivered issue one of our magazine last month, getting them a gold star in my book.
Jonny
*well maybe not changed my life but it’s definitely been the best £40 I’ve spent this year
£2.50 for 64 pages, an Eboy cover and fold-out poster, articles by creative types including Adrian Shaughnessy, Sanky, D&AD, Glug, Eboy etc. Want it? Buy it here.
Our latest issue is out now. Click here to get it!
We have a new facebook ‘page’ (finally) – you can visit it here… w00t!
To see some of what we got up to click here…
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