Here’s the cutely animated result of a short script we wrote recently to explain QuidCycle, a new ethical peer-to-peer lending programme. totalcontent was brought in by branding agency Collider to help with launch materials for this new venture — and to write their website too. The aim was to take the fear factor out of money by using reassuringly friendly, accessible language.
Showing posts with label illustration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illustration. Show all posts
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| To the letter... publicity poster for the fictitious 'Dig It Festival', calligraphy by Ann Bowen |
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’.
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.
At this time of year, when the print edition of Design Week was still around, I’d often be found rounding up the best and the worst of the Christmas cards on offer. I would have been checking out the goods for personal consumption anyway, so this was the perfect way to kill two partridges with one stone.But rather than beat around the holly bush over 350 words here, I’ll reveal my chosen designs for 2012 without the sound of drummers drumming or pipers piping. The chosen are from Oxfam, who’ve come up with the ingenious idea of not only recycling paper, but recycling designs too. Taking a dip back into their seasonal archive, they’ve plucked out some old favourites, which they’ve branded ‘vintage’ cards.
The two that particularly caught my festive eye were an illustration of the Magi by Douglas Hart from 1972, and a graphic star with some nifty blind embossing by an uncredited designer from 1987. These, we’re informed on the back, have been re-released to celebrate 50 years of Oxfam Christmas cards.
Last year alone, Christmas card sales helped the charity raise the equivalent of a two-year programme in Bangladesh, helping over 11,000 people to earn a better living and protect themselves during emergencies. So delete the impersonal e-cards, dust off your old fountain pen, and help Oxfam celebrate half a century of graphics and good works.
If you are looking for a seasonal round-up of 2012 Christmas cards, you could try this one from Red magazine. The retro family card from the V&A gets my vote.
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.
Groovy Man. So here it is, the latest foray into the obscure nether reaches of graphic design by my old mate Norman Hathaway (with Dan Nadal).You really can’t accuse Norm of tackling the obvious subjects. A couple of years ago, his brilliant book ‘Overspray’ brought us the super-slick, sexually charged excesses of 1970s US West Coast airbrush art. And now, ‘Electrical Banana’ takes us on an LSD-fuelled journey into 1960s psychedelic art, “the look that defined a decade”, according to the blurb.
He may be right … Any Beatles fan will already be familiar with the trippy, exaggerated comic book aesthetic and garish tapestry-like landscapes of Heinz Edlemann, the illustrator behind Yellow Submarine. But the work of the other six artists, whose shared influences are apparent, seems strangely resonant too. Generously illustrated, with insightful interviews, this is a rare and fascinating glimpse into a colourful lost world of sex, music, mayhem and mild peril. And look out for the introductory Q&A featuring Macca himself, offering his take (or should that be toke?) on the psychedelic era.
From the inside flap:
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| Heinz Edelmann... a pre-release drawing from Twen magazine |
The artists include MARIJKE KOGER, the Dutch artist responsible for dressing THE BEATLES; MATI KLARWEIN, who painted the cover for MILES DAVIS’ BITCHES BREW; KEIICHI TANAAMI, the Japanese master of psychedelic posters; HEINZ EDELMANN, the German illustrator and designer of the YELLOW SUBMARINE animated film; TADANORI YOKOO, whose prints and books defined the '60s in Japan; DUDLEY EDWARDS, a painter, car decorator, and graphic embellisher for the London scene, and the enigmatic Australian MARTIN SHARP, whose work for CREAM and the underground made him a hippie household name in Europe.
Electrical Banana
By Norman Hathaway and Dan Nadal
Damani
£17.55 on Amazon
Damon Albarn clearly has his hands full collecting lifetime achievement BRIT awards and preparing for Blur’s Hyde Park show to mark the closing of the Olympics this year. (Or maybe he’s hastily booking some singing lessons.) Anyway, it’s good to see Gorillaz collaborator and comic-book artist Jamie Hewlett is keeping the wolf from the door too. We particularly loved his quirky, inimitable London-thru-the-ages Absolut Vodka bottle design (available exclusively from Selfridges). And you can be sure my eldest will be saving his pennies for a pair of these limited-edition Gorillaz Converse All Stars. The business, if we may be so bold.
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| Mind your own biscuit... retrotastic packaging from Crabtree & Evelyn |
My Private View columns in ‘Design Week’ occasionally touched a nerve. In December 2008, I berated the laziness and impersonality of e-Christmas cards. A student of sustainable design called Harry Wilson got particularly hot under the collar accusing me of an “archaic way of thinking” in the following week's letters page. Perhaps the line “to hell with deforestation” was a step too far, but of course my tongue was firmly placed in my cheek when I wrote it.
It was unfortunate too that one of my then best clients sent me an e-Christmas card between the time of filing the article and publication. For some reason they went pretty quiet on me in 2009.
On twitter yesterday, fellow copywriter Nick Asbury came up with the neologism “Sanctimoanemail: (n) An email sent to say you’ve donated to charity the money you would have spent on an environmentally unsound Xmas card.” And it’s exactly that kind of public outpouring of smugness (environmental or otherwise) that really sticks in my craw.
Personally, I love the annual agony of finding the right off-the-shelf card for friends and designers, or designer-friends. Something typographic or ironic, simple or amusing that stands out in the racks of predictable festive fodder. Back in the day when I had world enough and time, I used to design and make my own. A miserable-looking Bryan Ferry in a Santa hat with the line ‘Ferry Christmas’ was an instant classic.
And it struck me as I wrote my (recycled charity) Christmas cards last week that it’s the time you devote to writing them that’s important. Two minutes or so thinking about your friends or colleagues, is two minutes of silent communion. You’re with them in spirit, remembering your shared past, the times and projects you had in common. Stained-glass stamps, coloured envelopes and stuffing cards into an overfilled post box just before the last posting date are an essential part of Christmas.
You can’t compare it to just pressing send. ’Scuse my archaic way of thinking.
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| Top trunks... this year’s retro pick, courtesy of Oxfam |
It was unfortunate too that one of my then best clients sent me an e-Christmas card between the time of filing the article and publication. For some reason they went pretty quiet on me in 2009.
On twitter yesterday, fellow copywriter Nick Asbury came up with the neologism “Sanctimoanemail: (n) An email sent to say you’ve donated to charity the money you would have spent on an environmentally unsound Xmas card.” And it’s exactly that kind of public outpouring of smugness (environmental or otherwise) that really sticks in my craw.
Personally, I love the annual agony of finding the right off-the-shelf card for friends and designers, or designer-friends. Something typographic or ironic, simple or amusing that stands out in the racks of predictable festive fodder. Back in the day when I had world enough and time, I used to design and make my own. A miserable-looking Bryan Ferry in a Santa hat with the line ‘Ferry Christmas’ was an instant classic.
And it struck me as I wrote my (recycled charity) Christmas cards last week that it’s the time you devote to writing them that’s important. Two minutes or so thinking about your friends or colleagues, is two minutes of silent communion. You’re with them in spirit, remembering your shared past, the times and projects you had in common. Stained-glass stamps, coloured envelopes and stuffing cards into an overfilled post box just before the last posting date are an essential part of Christmas.
You can’t compare it to just pressing send. ’Scuse my archaic way of thinking.
It features Rob’s interpretations of 50 bad-ass baddies from the movies, and comes complete with a niftily designed key, so you can tell who’s who and what film they appeared in. Each face is beautifully observed and rendered, and the printing detail is so good, you’d swear you’re looking at the real thing.
Last year, I commissioned Rob to draw the chimps for totalcontent’s typewriting monkey posters, and he tells me, this has reawakened his inner illustrator. Off to the framers tomorrow. Rob’s baddies will rub shoulders in the studio with a couple of Barnbrooks, a Peter Grundy and a Mark Denton.
You can round up some of your own villains by ordering a poster from here. But hurry, he’s only printed 50 of the blighters. Click on the image for a closer look.
totalcontent were asked to come up with no more than 50 words to express the sights, sounds and smells of city life. These were then beautifully hand-lettered and illustrated by Jamie Brown, and sit on one side of a poster explaining the genesis and development of the paper sculpture project.
It’s our second collaboration with ycn, whose quirkiness, imaginative flair and tireless championing of illustration we love.
Zap! Voosh! Kerpow! You wait for ages, and then two come along at once. It’s quite uncanny... on the very same day, I get an email from Selfridges touting MAC's new range of ‘Wonder Woman’ cosmetics, and the White Stuff catalogue featuring a super hero dog on the front cover. Both have that familiar retro comic book styling, with the flat blocks of primary colour, exaggerated perspective, visible halftone dots, yellow headlines, and angled caps in speech bubbles. Selfridges, of course, is the real McCoy, with an official DC Comics trademark acknowledgement in the bottom right-hand corner. White Stuff is more of a jokey homage (although Superman did have a canine sidekick called Krypto).
There’s nothing new about it, of course. It’s been appropriated and recycled since 1960s pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (bottom) built his career around it, and has enjoyed countless resurrections, revivals, plunderings and parodies ever since. So the more interesting question is why have two such different brands chosen this moment in time to follow a similar route?
I don’t particularly have an answer. It’s just curious how often this happens. There’s usually something in the creative air which leads designers in the same direction at the same time, even if they’re working in completely different parts of the country. Last year the big thing was bold mono printing on grainy recycled stock, this year designers have gone more delicate and decorative. Until Super Dog came along.
Prepare to be Marvelled.
Prepare to be Marvelled.
It turned up with a sticker on it which read “We apologise that February 29th appears on your 2009 calendar. This error does not affect the rest of the calendar. All other dates are correct”. No mention of this on the web site and no discount. You’d think for a company that specialises in selling calendars, the one they’d get right are the dates. If ever there was a case of form before function, this is it.
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