totalcontent - the blog.: design

Showing posts with label design. Show all posts

the perfect wine glass?

Touch of glass... at once primitive and sophisticated.

After years of conscientious, selfless research, I’m pleased to announce that I have finally discovered the perfect wine glass. It’s called Essence, and was designed by Alfredo Häberli for the celebrated Finnish glassware and ceramics company Iittala.

What’s so great about it? Working on a book about modern Finnish design for Nokia a couple of years ago, I came to appreciate the beautiful functional simplicity inherent in all manner of products from that part of the world. As I wrote at the time, Finnish design has “a touching, unpretentious simplicity that is at once primitive and sophisticated; lines, forms and materials aligned to the natural world; a purity and integrity that speaks directly to the soul.” Sounds good... shame it never made it to the printers.

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from idioms to idiots 2014 calendar.

It all started with a slightly skewed phrase that popped into my head one day for no reason... ‘A leopard never changes his spats’. This conjured a comical image of a dapper feline with an immaculate top hat and cane but inexplicably dirty footwear. A children's illustrator could have a field day, I thought.

Building on the theme, I racked my brain for more well-known sayings, and made a rule for myself... each idiom could only be changed by a single letter. And then I came up with a title that explained the concept by almost acting it out — ‘From Idioms to Idiots — How One Letter Can Make All The Difference’.

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poster post – a word about the 26 Words project.

To the letter... publicity poster for the fictitious 'Dig It Festival', calligraphy by Ann Bowen

It’s been a while since I took part in a collaborative project with 26, the writer’s group I co-founded with seven others ten years ago. ‘26 Words’, was a kind of reprise of ‘26 Posters’, one of our very first efforts, which randomly paired writers with designers, gave them a letter of the alphabet and asked them to go off and produce a poster together. Back then I got editorial design legend Derek Birdsall and the letter I. Both wonderful.

This time round 26 writers were paired with 26 lettering artists from the crafts-based lettering association Letter Exchange. I was teamed with the hugely talented calligrapher Ann Bowen and given the letter D, but there was also a twist this time. In a slightly shamanistic ceremony held in the basement of the Betsy Trotwood pub in Clerkenwell, we were asked to stick a knife into a dictionary to pick out a word starting with our given letter. In our case, the tip of knife pointed to ‘dig’.

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new work – Royal Mail Christmas Competition stamp pack.

Christmas seems to have come early at totalcontent. Last week we brought you Royal Mail's Madonna and Child stamp presentation pack. This week, we unwrap the children's Christmas stamp competition pack, charmingly designed by our good friends at NB Studio.

Here, we were asked to tell the story of the nationwide hunt for designs striking enough to grace first- and second-class during the 2013 festive period. The challenge was open to children in the UK aged 4–11, and there were prizes of £100, £500 and £1000 to be won. This is only the third time Royal Mail have staged a kids' stamp competition, and the response was overwhelming, with over 240,000 entries covering all kinds of Yuletide subject matter in every conceivable style.

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new work – Royal Mail Christmas 2013 presentation pack.

I’m really pleased to have contributed to this rather classy pack showcasing this year’s Madonna and Child Christmas stamps. The set of five (plus two extended large-letter stamps) feature depictions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus through the ages, as well as a specially commissioned (and strikingly beautiful) new painting by neo-Coptic artist Fadi Mikhail, which sits on the £1.88 stamp. I helped Royal Mail tell Fadi’s story, including his tutelage under neo-Coptic master Isaac Fanous; his process and thinking; and the heavy symbolism of this very prescribed genre of painting. On the reverse side of the sheet, there’s a potted history of Madonna and Child paintings by art historian Rowena Loverance. You can get hold of a special Christmas presentation pack, designed by Robert Maud and Sarah Davies here. Or of course, pick up Christmas stamps for all your cards from your local Post Office.

new work — Supple Studio website.

Supple and demand... Jamie Ellul’s clean, copy-focused website

A small-but-satisfying job for the newly formed Supple Studio. This is the latest incarnation of the hugely talented and affable Jamie Ellul, latterly of Magpie. Branching out on his own and making the move to Bath from London, naturally enough, he needed a website to set up stall and tout his wares.

Jamie already had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to say, but brought us in to refine, edit and add our own thoughts to his rough draft. We tried to keep the overall tone friendly-yet-professional, confident without being arrogant.

We particularly like the simplicity of the Supple website, and how the bold words take centre stage. The Supple logo, based on a section sign glyph in the typeface Bella, is pretty smart too.

Often, writing for designers can be tortuous. I remember a certain ‘About Us’ paragraph taking six months to get approval as it did the rounds of everybody at the agency. Fortunately, this project went beautifully smoothly. We hope Jamie’s exciting new venture does the same.

anyone for T?

Just a quick nudge to let you know that the new Repeat Repeat website has gone live. Our friends Mark Faulkner and Gill Naylor have run this wonderful design and ceramics company since they left college back in the 1980s, producing fine bone china mugs and crockery with a quirky contemporary twist. It’s all beautifully hand made in Staffordshire, the heart of the Potteries.

totalcontent were delighted to help out with words for the website, and especially taken with the new Alphabet range, which we’re sure will go down a storm with letter-crazy graphic designers. In case you’re wondering, the typeface is Orator (all lower case apart from the L, which looked decidedly odd). And you can order a gross of them for your studio here.

Bowie, Barnbrook and fingerless gloves on the pulse.

I held off from listening to the new David Bowie single for as long as I could. I wanted the media noise to die down and to make up my own mind. But I was also worried about being disappointed. Like the retired boxer’s ill-judged comeback, or the faded matinee idol who can’t resist another movie, there was a distinct possibility that Bowie had lost it, or was finally a man out of time. The longer I kept away from ‘Where Are We Now?’, the longer Bowie’s spell would remain intact.

Digitised... Bowie and friend reminisce about the old Berlin days.

But when I finally took the plunge, I was relieved. The song itself had a haunting, elegiac quality, an evocation of lost love and lost times. Where once Bowie cut up random phrases to create an overblown world of sci-fi fantasy and psychodrama, here we had low-key fragments of memory — faraway places and faraway people, faded and muffled. The man’s many masks had been removed at last… he was seemingly speaking from the heart rather than through some artfully constructed character. All rather beautiful and touching.

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new work – Royal Mail 2012 Year Pack.

The Royal Mail Year Pack is the feisty little brother of the Year Book. It includes all the past year’s pictorial stamps, plus a quick run-down on the subject that inspired them. This is the tenth one I’ve written, and while it’s not a Marathon like the Year Book, it’s still a testing 1500 metres. You have around 200 words to cover anything from Space Science to Charles Dickens to British comics. Which means keeping the words punchy yet informative, finding an interesting angle, and casting a small but incisive spotlight on the subject in hand.

For the designer, it’s an equally demanding task. They need to encapsulate the visual spirit of 100 or so stamps on the front and back of a simple fold-out. This year, Magpie Studio did a sterling job of not only of bringing such disparate material together, but also in expressing a sense of British pride in the year of the Golden Jubilee and the Olympic Games.

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