Memo Random by Black and Ginger, Liverpool

At last year's Interior Design Show in Toronto, Ikea pulled the sheets off of their bold country kitchen look, an aesthetic departure from the blonde-wood kitchens with which their showrooms had become associated. The kitchen won the show's Gold Booth Award and our entry on it quickly caught Facebook fire.

At this year's IDS, the design pendulum has swung the other way: Ikea's display kitchen features a distinctly sleek and modern look, one reportedly inspired by "the classic fashion combination of a black dress and pearls." In sharp contrast to last year's kitchen, where pots, pans, and kitchen storage objects were all made visible, this year's kitchen design renders most objects invisible, tucking them away behind glossy surfaces. In a second nod to the fashion world the backsplash tiles are meant to evoke patent leather quilted handbags and the island has received special focus.

Terschelling, Netherlands-based Bart de Graaff has got good hands and an imagination to match, as evidenced by the copious renderings in his book. With expressive work spanning graphics, transportation, and conceptual design of the sort you'd find in a sci-fi movie, de Graaff could be mistaken for a grizzled vet of the design field. Which makes his personal statement all the more surprising:

via http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/e31ky/its_a_messy_room_and_nobody_gives_a_fuck/

I read an article about a summer camp where one of the activities was showing the kids a bunch of old pieces of technology, and having them play around with them. The astonished author reported that most of the kids could not figure out how to dial a number on a rotary phone; they'd place their finger in the hole for "0" and drag the dial to the number they wanted to "activate," then release the dial.

This video here is similarly funny: Writer and blogger John Scalzi shows his 13-year-old daughter a vinyl LP, something she has never seen (or apparently heard of) before:

via http://www.booooooom.com/2010/01/18/photographer-andrew-tomchyshyn/

via http://www.booooooom.com/2009/06/12/dhear-one-illustration/

We are so hungry after perusing the Design in the Wild entries from the EAT category! Incredible readers from around the world submitted beautifully designed everyday objects that help them prep, cook, eat and drink. Whether it was your kitchen's 1985 General Electric Stove or a seat at your favorite cafe, we were delighted to be a guest at your dining table in this round's EAT submissions. Today we're opening up submissions for our second theme, PLAY, and announcing the jury and popular pick theme winners—theme winners receive their choice of Braun products and are qualified to move forward into the final round of voting for the grand prize of a notebook computer and tablet!

Without further ado...

JURY WINNER
Cutlery
Felix Stark, Germany

Cutlery of the armed forces of Germany. The fork functions like a spring to fix everything in the carrying case which is also a can opener. I am not a fan of collecting military items, but the cutlery works really great. I always showing it to my students as example of great functional design.

POPULAR WINNER
Citrus Squeezer
Taylor Welden, United States

We didn't have these when I grew up in the Northeast. When I moved to the South, Texas specifically, there is much more citrus (limes are 12/$1) and the need to extract the juice from citrus increases dramatically. Margaritas are an every day type of drink here, not something fancy for Saturdays. Lime and lemon juice are used in all types of cuisine, especially as an element Mexican dishes. That being said, when I moved here, I knew exactly what this item did the first time I saw it. I purchased mine for $3 or $4 almost 10 years ago, it still looks and performs as new. Heavy duty aluminum parts, nice colorful thick coating, no plastic parts anywhere, no branding anywhere. A simple tool, easily overlooked. It squeezes every last drop out of the citrus, quickly, easily, efficiently. No mess and no acid in the eyes either. Squeeze, juice pours out, open it up, the citrus half pops out to be easily discarded. Perfect. Genius.

Only two weeks left in the regular entry period for the 2012 IDSA IDEA Awards. Since 1980, the IDSA has been honoring design excellence through their international awards program. This year, the program includes categories that encompass products, ecodesign, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research and concepts. Get your work in front of leaders within the field of design including Core77 friends Tad Toulis, Lance Hussey, Mike Kruzeniski, Jan Chipchase and more. For our Brazilian readers, register for the IDEA/Brasil Awards here!

Check out some of our favs from 2011—bronze, silver and gold—for inspiration or head over to the IDEA2012 website for more details and to enter! The deadline for regular submissions is February 10th, 2012 (with late registration continuing till February 17th, 2012.)

UI Designer
Spotify
New York, New York

Spotify is looking for exceptional designers to make the Spotify of tomorrow beautiful, usable and inventive. Working from our brand new New York office, the UI Designer will be part of a small and rapidly growing team. His or her responsibilities will range from ideation and mocking up new UI features to creating well balanced layouts and stunning new icons.

» view

The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

The second UK Designers Accord Town Hall was held on January 19 at The Design Council offices in London. The event was organised and facilitated by Engage by Design, with sponsorship from The Design Council Challenges Team. People from different industries and ages came together to explore the theme of Social Innovation and what we can do to insure its success. Following an introduction from Zoe Olivia John of Engage by Design and Marianne Guldbrandsen, Head of Design Strategies for the Design Council Challenges Team, six speakers delivered fantastic and thought-provoking presentations:

1: Tools & Skills - The Kaleidoscope Project - Engage by Design
Engage by Design kicked off the presentations with the short film 'Tools & Skills' from 'The Kaleidoscope Project,' which focuses on using four key values (Balance, Culture, Meaning, and Innovation) to frame the question: "What tools and skills do we need to build a better future?" This was a fantastic way to stimulate the attendees and get the creative juices flowing. Watch all the videos in the series on the Engage by Design website.

Tools & Skills, The Kaleidoscope Project from Engage by Design on Vimeo.

2. Fiona Bennie - Forum for the Future
"How can we enable people to share in a low carbon economy?"
"How can designers make sharing cars appealing?"
"How can low income families save energy?"
"How can looking into the future help designers?"
The prices of everything from food to cotton are rising. As humans and consumers, we need to truly evaluate how we will spend our money. Forum for the Future believes it is all about changing demographics—carbon reduction targets of 50% by 2025 will force people to realize there must be a big change in what we eat, how we travel, and many other things that can easily pass without thought.

Check out this great link from the presentation: Wikihouse bringing affordable housing to the masses in an accessible way.

3. Mike Smart - Challenges Team, The Design Council
"It's all about being smart with what you can get your hands on, creating 'low-fi' solutions to social problems."
The Challenge Team's Mike Smart showed us how this is already being done in concrete and non-traditional ways:

• Jamie Oliver is not only a celebrity chef, but also someone who picks issues and creates campaigns to make change in an accessible way. He makes things visual and tangible, importantly starting on a small scale.


• Untergunther is another example - they are a group "with a mission", breaking into abandoned public monuments in order to restore them.

Check out how the Challenges Team is continuing this work with their current projects: The Amazings and Casserole.

Architect-turned-interaction-designer Nitipak "Dot" Samsen first caught our attention a couple years ago, when he'd just completed his MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art. For the 2009 thesis show, he exhibited series of coin flippers, a diverting exercise in iteration and probability if nothing else.

For his latest project, he's shifted his attention from the element of chance to a sort of economic determinism, exploring the hypothetical evolution of currency in the near future.

The short film TRAIL$, produced as part of Samsen's award-winning project "The Money Trailer," is an all-too-timely tale of capitalism in the digital age:

Global company Proto Labs, which bills itself as "the world's fastest provider of CNC machined parts and injection moulded parts," runs an award program called "Cool Idea!" whereby they award promising design concepts with credits to use their services. Introduced last year in the United States, "Cool Idea!" is being expanded into Europe this year, in keeping with the company's global facilities.

We've profiled some of the recipients of the Cool Idea! awards over the past year including Whirlwind Wheelchair's RoughRider and Professor James McLurkin's R-One Robot kit.

We're here to help make cool ideas come to life, in the form of smart, enjoyable, problem-solving, life-improving and of course, brilliantly successful products. There are a lot of competitions for products that are already in production and on the market. The Cool Idea! Award comes in much further upstream, at the design and development stage, when innovators are too often stymied by lack of resources to turn their ideas into real products.

If you're wondering about specifically what you can design, the competition is pretty open-ended in terms of content: "We look for anything that would make life a little better, easier, safer, healthier, less frustrating, more fun—if it's cool and it involves parts that Proto Labs can make, it's fair game," writes the company. And while they haven't specified what the individual awards breakdown will be, or even how many finalists they intend to select, they've reported the total credit awarded will add up to $250,000.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis and reviewed monthly, up until the final deadline at the end of this calendar year. And while winning a "Cool Idea!" award is no guarantee of future success--one of last year's winners was the non-Kickstarted Quickaddy we posted about earlier--as far as we can tell there's no application fee, so you've got no reason not to try. Check out the Rules & Regulations here.

Though not as relentlessly rectilinear as Joey Ruiter's wicked Moto Undone motorcycle, designer Eric Vaughn's Boxx scooter is an innovative transportation design with a similarly unconventional shape. Portland- based Vaughn, who has until now stuck with leaking a slow trickle of press images, finally debuted the Boxx to the public at this week's Portland International Auto Show.

What makes the Boxx so unique is how an often overlooked element of the vehicle—its initial distribution to consumers—has directly informed its physical design. At 40 inches in length, the Boxx's easily-boxed shape can be shipped directly to purchasers via UPS, though its 120-pound weight may vex the man in the brown suit. Also, all of the Boxx's electronic components are stored in an internal device called the Cube (we're guessing it's that break-line-defined area immediately aft of the handlebars), which can be easily popped out of the scooter and shipped for servicing.

More handy reference charts.

Handy reference charts.

Sam Bosma, you magnificent bastard.

sbosma:

One of my short stories.

Solid Edge is a MCAD package that has been serving the engineering community since 1996 and has been offering levels of functionality that are in many ways equal to its main competitors Solidworks and Inventor. Three years ago Solid Edge introduced a different paradigm into the parametric modeling world called Synchronous Technology (ST) that adds a level of functionality that bridges the world of parametric and direct editing (history-free modeling) at the same time. In it's forth iteration, ST has been finely tuned in regards to offering a balance between these two sides of modeling that makes the software something you'd actually like to use everyday.

Siemens, the company that now owns Solid Edge, has decided to partner up with Local Motors [Ed Note: Jay Rogers, CEO and Founder of Local Motors is our Transportation Jury Captain for the 2012 Core77 Design Awards!] and is now offering several different monthly subscription-based versions of their software. Local Motors is an open source community which brings together industrial designers, engineers, fabricators, and 3D CAD models to help generate content for collaborative automotive parts, "to lead the next generation of crowd-powered automotive manufacturing, design, and technology in order to enable the creation of game changing vehicles." With this new approach Solid Edge is now offering their software for a fee ranging from $19-$299 per month.

What's the catch? you ask. This just seems too good to be true. How can they offer this kind of deal?

One of the odd things you derive pleasure from as an industrial designer is knowing how various things are made. You see an ornate table leg and you picture the lathe; you choose one metal product over another at the hardware store because you can see the stamping quality is better; you touch a plastic housing and find yourself instinctively looking for the parting line.

Every once in a while you run across an object that makes you shudder, because you have just a vague idea of how it was made and you suspect it was a royal pain in the ass. That was what I felt when I first saw Texas-based Johnny the woodworker's checkered boxes, pictured here. I almost felt irritated when I saw them, because they instantly reminded me of those times when you were waiting to use the table saw in the ID shop at school, and you saw the complicated thing the person in front of you was working on and realized you were going to be waiting for a while.

Can’t wait for this — Beauty is Embarrassing, a documentary on artist Wayne White.

Now-successful children’s illustrator Brian Biggs has been posting a strip a day from his 1987 college newspaper comic strip Roommates.

Brian writes:

With twenty-five years of hindsight, it’s now evident to me that these strips are pretty awful. The humor is dumb, the drawings are dumber, and the whole idea was fairly derivative of what was my favorite strip at the time, Berke Breathed’s Bloom County. To a lesser extent I ripped off Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes and Dan Piraro’s Bizarro whenever I could. I was eighteen years old when the strip began, nineteen years old when it ended, and ambitious as hell. Nevertheless, they’re my first published work and I’ll always love them.

Comics Are a Man’s World, by Faith Erin Hicks

Hugo Pratt Interview (en français). I’m not certain when this was shot exactly.

He talks here about how comics are seriously hard work, if you’re doing it right, and about the intense research he’d perform whenever embarking on a new project. 

I’ve become a little obsessed with Pratt since arriving here (the apartment we’re staying in has, among many other wonderful books, 13 issues of Pratt’s Corto Maltese, which are helping me learn Spanish!), especially since I realized he also created “Jesuit Joe”, a sort of Native American Robin Hood, riding around the “frozen Canadian North” wearing a stolen RCMP jacket. Boss!

En Masse @ Miami MMXI - Part Two from Fred Caron on Vimeo.

Sorry, the NFB has taken this video down for some reason.

Check out Dimanche (“Sunday”) - by young Quebec animator Patrick Doyon. This film is one of the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short this year.

Check out his other short, Square Roots here).

Dimanche is a funny and stylish portrait of mid-century Quebec with a surreal ending. You can feel the influence of current Quebec comic book artists like Janice Nadeau and Philippe Girard.

From the AT&T Archives:

Jim Henson made this film in 1963 for The Bell System. Specifically, it was made for an elite seminar given for business owners, on the then-brand-new topic — Data Communications.

Click through for some beautiful spreads from the book Everyone Likes to Draw by V. Legkobit.

The latest instalment of Asaf Hanuka’s The Realist.

Rendering of the exterior of the new Design Museum

The Design Museum in London today revealed the plans for its new space, which will open in 2014 and be sited at the former Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington, in the west of the city.

The move comes as a result of the museum outgrowing its current venue, on London's Shad Thames. "It's full to the brim and bursting at the seams," said the Design Museum's founder, Sir Terence Conran, at the launch event. The new space will give the Design Museum three times more room to showcase its collection, and the museum hopes to double its visitor numbers to 500,000 a year as well as expand its education and events programmes. The film below further describes the project.

Entrance foyer rendering

Second floor rendering

The move sees the Design Museum join Kensington's 'cultural corner', where it will sit alongside the V&A, Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Royal College of Art and the Serpentine Gallery. Conran hopes the expanded space will help raise the profile of design in the UK. "If you go to the Scandinavian countries, design is part of their DNA," he said at the launch. "We've not achieved that in this country, but we ought to. I hope the new Design Museum will help persuade governments that housing, public buildings, transport etc are vitally important and can improve the quality of life of the people who live in this country." Conran said that if he were a graduating student today he would team up with an engineering graduate to "make things of quality and originality". "That's what people expect of this country," he continued, "but we don't ever seem to recognise this." He sees the museum as a champion of British design. "The Design Museum will be the showcase for these projects and it will educate."

Second floor, showing the permanent exhibition. All renderings from John Pawson Ltd, with images by Alex Morris Visualisation

The second floor of the Commonwealth Institute today

The £80 million project will see the Commonwealth Institute, which has lain dormant for a decade, given a new lease of life. Designs for the site have been produced by John Pawson, who has redesigned the interior of the Grade 2* listed building, and OMA, who has planned the surrounding residential development consisting of three buildings. Pawson described the main challenge of the project being that of "working inside the skin of an existing building".

"The Commonwealth Institute is iconic," he continued, "it opened in 1962 but still to me seems very daring." Pawson's intention is to work with the existing space, and in particular to retain the impact of the building's original hyperbolic paraboloid roof structure. The space will be opened up to allow sightlines to the roof; from the entrance foyer a visitor will see the entire route through the building, winding up from the central platform around the opening at first floor level to the permanent exhibition space on the top floor and the sweeping curve of the roof. As one might expect from Pawson, the material palette is purposefully restricted, and he intends to "retain and enhance all the qualities of the existing building, and retain the atmosphere".

The space is split over five floors in total, providing approximately 10,000 square metres of space. It will feature rolling exhibition spaces and an exhibition of the museum's permanent collection, designed by Studio Myerscough, as well as a café, restaurant, members' room, bookshop and design store. Also included is the new Sackler Library, funded by the Dr Mortimer & Theresa Sackler Foundation, which will focus on design and architecture.

The exterior of the Commonwealth Insitute today

The interior of the Commonwealth Institute today. All photos by Luke Hayes

The new museum will be the third iteration of the Design Museum in London. The first was the Conran Foundation's Boilerhouse Project, which opened in 1981 in the basement area of the V&A. While the Boilerhouse, and its director, Stephen Bayley, brought many significant exhibitions of design to the city, including exhibitions on Issey Miyake, Sony, Dieter Rams, and Coca-Cola, it proved challenging to the V&A curators at the time and in 1987 metamorphosed into the Design Museum and relocated to Shad Thames. The new museum opened in 1989, and its current director, Deyan Sudjic, joined in 2006. Sir Terence Conran today expressed some satisfaction at the museum's return to the "V&A's territory", and seemed keen to stoke up a little good-natured rivalry between the two spaces, as well as to emphasise the Design Museum's devotion to contemporary design and design solutions. "The V&A's a wonderful place and always an inspiration to designers, but it's a museum of decorative arts and we are a museum of industrial arts," he said. "We are a museum of industry."

More info on the new Design Museum (and the present museum) is online at designmuseum.org.

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you're missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK,you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year

Last week the Editorial Design Organisation played host to Arem Duplessis, design director of The New York Times Magazine and one of the most respected magazine designers working today. I went along to hear him talk through his body of work...

Duplessis is best known for his work at the NYT Magazine, which he covers regularly on the newspaper's excellent 6th Floor Blog. But during this hour-long lecture he also found time to mention some of his early work, too.

For example, the following pages, spreads and covers are from Spin magazine, which Duplessis worked on from 2002-2004.

At a time when overseas magazines were hard to obtain in the UK, especially outside of London, Spin was a prized import which, along with Raygun, Emigré and a handful of other titles, were swapped eagerly among young design students hungry for new ideas.

Looking back now, I can see a distinct affinity with The Face, which also assimilated David Carson's experimentalism within a tighter framework during this period. And here's some more bold typography from GQ, where Duplessis worked briefly during 1999-2001.

It was while at Spin that he got the call from creative director Janet Froelich to join her at The New York Times and take over the design direction of its magazine. Froelich is, of course, a tough act to follow, but since Duplessis' arrival the magazine has been consistently strong.

It's the sheer range of subjects covered, he says, which makes the magazine the perfect fit for him. It means he can be working on a heavyweight news story one week and a comic photoshoot the next.

And it does look like a labour of love. Week in, week out, Duplessis and his team produce a magazine that is both playful and authoritative – a rare mix in the editorial design world.

For the recent redesign of the magazine, Duplessis enlisted the help of Studio8's Matt Willey, and together they looked back to the Times' archives for inspiration.

A new font, NYTE Condensed, based on an old byline face from the paper, was commissioned from Dino dos Santos (used in the headlines, shown below, and in the Danny Meyer spread, top), and the result is a classic and powerful piece of editorial design with shades of Willy Fleckhaus' seminal German title, Twen.

Duplessis ended his talk with a few words about the role of the editorial designer in different media. Most magazines and newspapers exist on multiple platforms now, and the New York Times has long been at the forefront of developing a strong presence on the web.

The magazine also regularly produces short films to promote special issues and Duplessis has used both web and film to document interesting cover shoots and instigate creative projects which compliment the issue content. One film by Karim Charlebois-Zariffa covers the shoot of the 10th Annual Year In Ideas issue, in which a workable QR code was built from a grid of balloons (watch it here).

And for another set of films, which you can view here, director Alex Prager and cinematographer Ross Richardson invited Hollywood A-listers to reinvent themselves as the villain of their choice. I particularly like Brad Pitt as Eraserhead.

Paul Pensom is the art director of Creative Review. More information about the EDO at editorialdesign.org.

Joy Division and Disney aren't the most obvious combination, but as it turns out, it looks like Mickey might be a fan of the band too. Listed on the Disney online store as a 'Waves Mickey Mouse tee for Adults', Disney appear to have referenced the artwork for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album, and turned it into a set of mouse ears.

The T-shirt, which has now sold out, is described by Disney as incorporating "Mickey's image within the graphic of the pulse of a star. That's appropriate given few stars have made bigger waves than Mickey."

Whilst Disney is half right here – the graphic depicts pulses from the first pulsar to have been discovered – there is no mention of Joy Division. The original listing details appear to have been amended however – when Pitchfork reported the story, they described the listing as including the line  "inspired by the iconic sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album".

Since this post, the listing appears to have been changed, removing all mention of the band.

The Unknown Pleasures artwork was designed by Peter Saville, who himself, of course, borrowed the image from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy (indeed Saville has a history of referencing existing works in his music sleeve design).

Saville came across the image via Joy Division's drummer Stephen Morris. The image originally used black lines on a white background, but Saville reversed this to create the final artwork.

There's a post over here that delves further into the more detailed background of the image, and the issue of copyright.

Pitchfork have reacted to this with horror, commenting, "Does Disney know that the singer of this band hanged himself?!" and "Do they know where the name Joy Division comes from?"

We'd like to know what other iconic covers Disney plans to mouse-ify.

Digital channel More4 launched a new identity yesterday created by ManvsMachine and Channel 4's in-house agency, 4Creative. The graphic device is also carried across a range of idents featuring installations made up of 400 mechanical 'flippers'...

The redesign replaces the inaugural identity created by Spin for the channel's launch in 2005 and will be used in idents and across marketing material. Spin's design employed a graphic number "4" housing the word 'MORE' and (to my mind at least) resembled a stylised hand with one finger pressing a remote control. (More images of the previous identity are on Spin's website, here.)

"The original branding of More4 was very bold and uncompromising," says Chris Wood, 4Creative's head of on-air promotions for More4. "The colourways and graphic look gave the channel a unique 'grown up' look that worked perfectly with the original content and ambitions. However, over the years the content of the channel has shifted and with the plans to launch the upcoming 'scrapbook' service, it was felt it was time to redress the gap between the channel branding and channel content."

More4's original identity design by Spin

ManvsMachine's new identity moves away from the minimal approach of the previous design and incorporates 15 differently coloured triangular shapes, which also animate, again making up the numeral with the text similarly placed.

"We still wanted to create an identity that had a singular strong design feel, but one that had more flexibility and a lot more warmth and tactility," adds Wood. "In addition, in the back of your mind you have to ensure any new look can sit comfortably and hold it's own along side the other Channel 4 brands."

Here's how the new identity works on-air:

While the new graphic device is clearly an attempt to use something that has a bit more activity to it, the sense of movement is translated in a series of live action idents designed and directed by ManvsMachine in collaboration with art installation designers, Jason Bruges Studio, and students from Middlesex University.

Each one is made up of hundreds of mechanical 'flipper' units that, when set in motion, reveal a range of colours and patterns. These structures are placed within a series of different environments, such as a cafe, a staircase, on a tree, and on an abandoned boat on a beach in Dungeness.

"The new idents are definitely born from the new mark," says Wood. "We knew we want to create live action idents, initially ideas were too convoluted or grandiose, but as ManvsMachine developed how the logo would animate it inspired them to think about taking elements and breaking them out into the real world. After that, creatively, things pretty quickly came to the point at where the idents are now.

"However, the realities of designing, manufacturing, installing and transporting 400 flipper units was a challenge, but all those variables, the extra input and expertise we gained along the way, means we've ended up with something that is incredibly visually satisfying, is unpretentious, and has warmth and charm."

According to ManvsMachine's James Greenfield the flexible logo "morphs through a series of flips, folds and reveals [and so] the colour palette reflects the vibrant nature of interiors, food culture, fashion and other contemporary lifestyle programming." The typeface used is More4 Omne, a version of Darden Studio's Omnes Pro.

"A lot of More4's programming is about making things," Wood adds, "so we in turn wanted to physically build these idents, construct them and film them in real locations, rather than computer generating all the magic in post-production. I think the installations we eventually came up with subtly reinforce the new look but offer a satisfying spontaneity which, I hope, will make them continually watchable ."

Here's ManvsMachine's making of film for the idents work:

Creative Director: Tom Tagholm
Head of On air, More4: Chris Wood
Design & Creative: ManvsMachine/4Creative
Director: Mike Alderson/Tim Swift/Chris Wood
Producer: Louise Oliver
DOP: Daniel Trapp
Production Design: Jason Bruges Studio
Design Co-ordinator: James Greenfield
Editor: Jamie Foord
Post producer: Pete Winslett & Sarah Antrobus (Envy Post)
VFX: Marcus D. Dryden
Composer: Guy Connelly
Music: commissioned by Alice Godfrey at Channel 4, Pete Beck at Warner Chappell
Sound Design: Rich Martin (Envy Post)

Having just moved to a new studio last year, London-based No Days Off needed to get new stationery printed. Being designers, they naturally saw an opportunity to refresh their own identity. But what to do with all the redundant old business cards and letterheads? Recycle them, of course...

"We wondered whether we might be able to do something a bit more interesting than just sticking [the old stationery] in the recycle bin and buying in a load of new paper," explains Patrick Duffy of No Days Off. "In our minds, the simplest thing to do was to just pulp all this old paper and make it into new paper, and then print our new stationery on that," Duffy continues. "Direct recycling, cutting out the middle-man. Easy, we thought...

"After a series of fairly negative responses from paper suppliers (of the 'can't be done' variety), we were eventually led to Jim Patterson of Two Rivers Paper. Jim proved to be extremely helpful, and said that he could do the job, no problem. So we bundled everything together and sent it off to Frogmore Mil in Hemel Hempstead."

The Making of Red Hat Paper from No Days Off on Vimeo.

"We ended up with just under 200 sheets of 320gsm SRA2 paper, which was more than enough for our new stationery requirements," says Duffy. "So we decided to make a new print too. By a happy coincidence, we discovered that a young printer, James Boughen, had set up a studio right next door to the Two Rivers paper mill, so we asked him to produce this new print for us:

"We exhibited the letterpress print in a recent show at ad agency AMV BBDO, and we have a limited number for sale (at £35 each) in our Shop," adds Duffy.

The stationery was all hand typeset and letterpress printed by Adams of Rye.

nodaysoff.com

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you're missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK,you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

The installations of American artist Daniel Arsham play with the very fabric of the gallery itself. His first solo show, the fall, the ball and the wall, has just opened at the OHWOW gallery in Los Angeles

Hiding Figure, 2011, Fiberglas, paint, joint compound, mannequin, fabric, and shoes, 87 x 48.5 x 13 inches

The show, OHWOW says "illustrates the artist's continued interest in manipulating architecture and in challenging expectations of accepted realities".

In these latest works, Arsham uses materials such as fibreglass and foam to create pieces that appear to be formed out of the walls of the gallery itself.

Curtain, EPS foam, plaster gauze

Mail Slot, 2008, Bronze, plaster, paint, joint compound

the fall, the ball and the wall is at OHWOW, 937 N. La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, until February 16. Details here

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you're missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK,you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

After relaunching its entire line of comics last year, publishers DC has unveiled a new identity, its second since Milton Glaser's classic stamp design was replaced in 2005. Almost immediately, Landor's new design met with the power of comics nostalgia...

'The New 52' was how DC referred to its restart of 52 monthly stories from issue #1 in an attempt to attract new readers, introducing new characters and freshening up some old favourites along the way. It also saw the launch of same day publishing for both its printed comics and their digital versions. And last week DC revealed a brand new identity design created by Landor. This being the world of plugged-in comics fans, blogs and forums across the internet quickly lit up.

Landor's vast flexible 'system' is of course a long way from the look of the Detective Comics series that launched in 1937 and carried Batman's debut two years later. The founding of DC Comics Inc – off the back of National Allied Publications – took the series title as the company name, later reducing it to DC. Now DC is the publishing wing of DC Entertainment and is owned by Warner Bros., itself part of Time Warner (DC's rival, Marvel, is a Disney brand).

So at face value DC's new identity reflects its current standing within American corporate culture. But perhaps it points further to the inherent differences between a "comics" publisher and an "entertainment" company. Indeed, Landor's design looks less like it belongs on a printed front cover than it does on screen, or in motion. The hint of 'reveal' certainly suggests the latter. (Armin over at Brand New makes some good observations about various "formal deficiencies" within this potentially exciting identity system.)

And this is no doubt the point. Comics have always enjoyed a life outside of print, particularly in film, online and, much more recently, in app form. But the 'culture' of comics still seems bound up with strong feelings of nostalgia. With a particularly fervent core readership, any changes to a title's key elements – like plot development or artwork – are bound to generate a reaction. Likewise for a logo that marks out a particular comic series as coming from the famous DC stable.

Someone who managed to do that perfectly was Milton Glaser. In the mid-1970s he was approached to create a new identity for DC. His design (above, left), a shield of four stars inlaid with the company's initials – known as the 'DC Bullet' – was in use from 1977 until 2005 when it was reworked (above, right) by Brainchild Studios.

While I have fond memories of Glaser's design, it was the logo used at the time that I first encountered comics. So whether I 'liked' it in late 1980s doesn't particularly matter: it's the design I recall when I think about the dark inks of Batman comics, or the vivid yellow of the Watchmen (see top image). It's embedded itself and now has a resonance that, I imagine, many others feel similarly attached to.

Will Landor's design, with its clever nod to the superhero's twin identity and the 'peeling back' of the mask, remain as fondly remembered in another thirty years? The logo exists in a completely different world to the one in which I bought comics: the way we experience it – and later recall it – will of course be different too.

More details on the new DC identity can be found here on the DC Comics blog.

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you're missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK,you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

There's been lots of great music videos released recently; here's a round-up of the ones that have particularly caught our attention over the last month. First up is a brilliant new promo from Shynola for Coldplay...

The video is the second to be made for the track Paradise (the first, by Mat Whitecross, came out three months ago when the single was first released). Shynola's version is a gritty live action tale, suggesting something of a new style for the directing collective, who have previously specialised in animation. There are moments of animation here still, but the promo's strength lies in some excellent performances by the young actors who star in it, particularly the central character, played by Lily-May Crosby.

Directors: Shynola. Production company: Black Dog Films Limited.

Actor and director Samantha Morton has shot this simple but effective video for The Kills track The Last Goodbye. Production company: Prettybird.

Next up is Chris Milk's latest for Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's project Rome. The animated promo is for track Two Against One, and was created in collaboration with Anthony Francisco Schepperd. It follows Milk's multimedia extravaganza for Rome, released last summer. Production company: @radical.media.

David Wilson's video for David Guetta track Titanium (ft. Sia) features another outstanding performance, this time from Super 8 star Ryan Lee. The promo's been going great guns on YouTube so the chances are you might have already seen it, but I thought I'd include it here just in case. Production company: Iconoclast.

Morgan Beringer has created this hypnotic, abstract film for Matthew Dear track In The Middle (I Met You There) (ft. Jonny Pierce).

Director Daniel Brereton and Django Django's drummer David Maclean hand-painted over 4,000 frames of film and reassembled them to create this fun promo for the band's track, Default. Production company: Partizan.

We finish with this totally charming video for Stephin Merritt's cover of Franz Ferdinand track Dream Again. The promo sees various familiar pieces of audio equipment come to life to sing the song. Director: Russell Weekes.

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you're missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK,you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year

The latest commission for design and illustration duo Craig Redman and Karl Maier of Craig & Karl was to apply a bold graphic approach not to an editorial piece or gallery project, but to an underground car park in Sydney...

"The objective of the project was to breathe new life into the space (the underground car park of an award-winning residence in Sydney's Darling Point by architect Marsh Cashman Koolloos) which, having been rendered in concrete with little inlet of natural light, felt quite dark and heavy," explains Maier. "Working closely with the owners, who possess a keen design sensibility, it was decided that the mural would cover all surfaces in a blanket of bright colour. There was also a request that the larger wall surfaces be left blank with an eye towards potentially introducing additional, individually commissioned works at a future date."

"The resulting design is a dynamic mix of overlapping geometric forms that mirror and respond to the angularity of the architecture," Maier continues. "The whole piece is tied together by a winding, ribbon-style device which, acting as a central axis, leads in from the driveway, through the space and out to the garden beyond."

See more work by Craig & Karl at craigandkarl.com

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you're missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK,you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Lots of great work to share with you this week. First up is a new VW Star Wars themed spot, which has been flying round the web. Sit back and relax while we journey to The Bark Side...

The ad is a trailer for the brand's forthcoming Super Bowl spot, which will air during the game on February 5. This might all seem like a lot of fuss for an ad launch, but after the huge success of VW's The Force spot last year, the car brand clearly knows the power of mixing Star Wars and the Super Bowl and is keen to get as much hype out of the occasion as possible. With over three million views on YouTube in just two days, it is a strategy that is clearly working. Agency: Deutsch LA. CCO: Mark Hunter. Group creative directors: Michael Kadin, Matt Ian, Jerome Austria. Creatives: Kate O'Connor, Donna Ko. Director: Keith Schofield. Production company: Caviar.

Wieden + Kennedy New York has created this new online campaign for Jordan. Made to launch Chris Paul's newest shoe, the CP3.V, the site "tells the story of how Chris' quickness causes chaos both on and off the basketball court" and includes a film of a basketball game where a number of unexpected events take place. Viewers are able to view the film's action from anywhere on a nearly 180-degree arc, and then zoom in on certain 'hot spots' to get more info on the weirder scenes featured. Visit the site here. Creative directors: Andy Ferguson, Brandon Mugar. Interactive art director: Tomiwa Alabi. Director: Paul Hunter. Production company: Pretty Bird.

Venebles Bell & Partners created a giant, hand-crafted labyrinth game to promote Google Maps. ECDs: Paul Venables, Will McGinness. Creative director: Paul Foulkes. Creatives: Byron Del Rosario, Kelly Diaz. Production company: 1st Avenue Machine. Directors: Bob Partington, Aaron Duffy.

This sweet Robot love story was created for Manikako, a non-profit, non-government Filipino organisation that teaches children in need how to make their own dolls from old clothes and recycled materials. The film was created in association with Energizer batteries. Agency: TBWA SMP. Creative directors: Melvin Mangada, Joey David Tiempo. Creatives: Ali Silao, CJ de Silva, Joey David Tiempo, Paolo Salcedo. Director: A/F Benaza. Production company: Revolver. Post: Post Manila.

DDB Paris has created a series of posters for wordplay game Boggle from Hasbro. Two are shown above. ECD: Alexandre Hervé. Creatives: Pierre-Antoine Dupin, Frédéric Lahache. Photographer: Joseph Ford.

Winkreative teamed up with Passion Pictures' animators Kevin Dart and Chris Turnham to create this sunny animation for Persol, the Italian eyewear brand.

We finish with this beautiful teaser film for Kenzo's men's fall 2012 collection. Directed by Lernert & Sander, the features a lovely use of the ordinary household blind. Production company: White Lodge.