UrbanicaBlog
by Israel Baumgartner
Currently viewing the category: "Graphic Design"
Via http://www.nobrow.net/8140
Swan Lake is a beautiful concertina book detailing a night at the Ballet. Illustrated by Californian artist Ping Zhu, we see the pristine theatre, audience and performance on one side and the back-stage bustle and nerves on the other. Based on a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the images are not only inspired by the dramatic story but also the atmosphere of a working dance venue.
After music and film it is about time to trade other products in the digital realm. Their shared conceptual-aesthetic approach led Lucas Maassen and Raw Color to research how a physical product can function in a digital environment. How one could acquire it via digital structures. And which opportunities it could offer the consumer. For the project D/struct they collected 60 plastic commodities. Using 3D scanning and printing techniques, they exhaustively detached the object’s design from the material it was made of.
Resultingly, they came to a new product. Maassen and Raw Color put the intriguing little bags up for offer on www.d-struct.nl. Containing the pulverized matter of the selected product. Goodbye original. The buyer receives a complete 3D-scan of the chosen object along with the package. As such encouraging him to trace the route back to the original. In order to reconstruct another version — or endlessly come up with other versions and variations — of the shattered original using his own 3D-printer.
FutureBrand’s role involves developing the ‘Look’ of London 2012 and an identity system that works across every touchpoint. From pin badges to stadium interiors, medal ribbons to retail stores and from the London 2012 Festival (the Cultural Olympiad) to the ‘look’ of cities and working with sponsor partners, FutureBrand is involved with every touchpoint of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The first book from Berlin illustration dynamic duo Golden Cosmos and their maiden book collaboration with Nobrow Press. This beautiful Leporello book folds out to a stunning 139cm panorama detailing the history and mythology of flight, from the legendary attempts of Icarus, to the revolutionary innovations of the Jet Age! The wrap-around cover provides educational entries for each panel, detailing notable benchmarks in the history of aviation.
A fantastic educational tool and a great work of art, Nobrow’s best-selling Leporello series is an ideal gift for people of all ages! A beautiful concertina book that can be read as a book, displayed on a mantlepiece, or even framed as a print.Golden Cosmos was set up in 2010 as a collborative moniker for German artistic couple Daniel Doltz and Doris Freigofas. Their deep knowledge of traditional printmaking techniques and experiences in self publishing that have won them widespread critical acclaim in illustration circles made them the perfect choice for our trademark concertina series. Their bold use of colour and adeptness for shape and form recall the bold patterns and geometry of early Russian constructivism, with a nod to mid century French commercial art. Whilst the book itself can be read, displayed or framed, the new wraparound cover allows us at Nobrow to add an educational element to the series, with entries for each panel of the concertina detailing the notable benchmarks in the history and mythology of aviation.
London-based artist Marine Hugonnier is best known for examining
the relationship between words and images. In her ongoing series,
‘Art for Modern Architecture’ (2004 – present), Hugonnier manipulates
the front pages of well-known newspapers like The New York Times and
The Guardian, replacing the photographs with colorful abstract images.
The effect is disorientating and thought-provoking –
headlines take on greater significance,
and the notion of the ‘media spectacle’ takes on new meaning.
“Postiche” the adorning of one’s manly jowls with patchwork or quilted beards (often handed down through the generations!) “Postichery” is actually the invention of Julian Wolkenstein, who teamed up with Paul Sharp to stage this act of bold fakery – presenting their “historical findings” in a faux-exhibition catalogue from the imaginary Museum of Helsinki. Julian calls his work a “metafiction…sitting on the knife’s edge of believable/unbelievable.”
Ansonia, Connecticut – 1884
Cincinnati, Ohio – 1904
Charlottesville, Virginia – October, 1907
Washington DC – 1903
Indianapolis, Indiana – 1914
Spartanburg, South Carolina – 1923
Manhattan, New York – 1911
Springfield, Missouri – 1910
Allentown, Pennsylvania – March 1885
Allentown, Pennsylvania – 1911
Many may think 2012 is the year of the apocalypse according to the Mayan Calendar. Art Lebedev Studio, designer of the prototype Flashkus, has collaborated with several illustrators and is in the process of designing a calendar entitled “Fuckopalypse” which each month shows a different way that it could all come tumbling down. One of the collaborating illustrators is the Russian design duo People Too, which have made an incredibly detailed paper depiction of plant life taking over and causing large amounts of chaos at precisely 12:12. Their attention to detail makes for remarkable scenarios like the new years scene that they did. Below you can see their process and more close up details and see more of their work at peopletoo.ru.
Bradbury Thompson (1911-1995) was truly one of the giants of 20th-century graphic design. He was born in 1911 in Topeka, where he attended Washburn College, graduating in 1934. After a brief period as a designer at Capper Publications, where he thoroughly learned every aspect of printing production, Thompson moved to New York in 1938. Over the next sixty-some years he unfurled an astonishing talent and embraced every graphic design opportunity he could. He worked as art director at the Rogers-Kellogg-Stillson printing firm and then at Mademoiselle magazine, consulted and designed for Westvaco Corporation, designed a new alphabet, and began a teaching career at Yale University, where he stayed for many years.
He had an uncanny ability to merge and blend modernist typographic organization with classic typefaces and historic illustrations, all seasoned with affectionate sentiment and impeccable taste. Working with modest resources, he saw himself as teacher and guide: ”The art of typography, like architecture, is concerned with beauty and utility in contemporary terms… the typographic designer must present the arts and sciences of past centuries as well as those of today… And although he works with the graphics of past centuries, he must create in the spirit of his own time, showing in his designs an essential understanding rather than a labored copying of past masters.” (from Westvaco Inspirations 206, 1956).
\ Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design? As good design cannot be [...]
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Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?
As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.)
The work of Dieter Rams can be summarised best by his 10 design propositions:
1. Good design is innovative.
2. Good design makes a product understandable.
3. Good design is elegant.
4. Good design makes a product useful.
5. Good design is unobtrusive.
6. Good design is honest.
7. Good design is long living.
8. Good design is consequent right to the very last detail.
9. Good design is friendly to the environment.
10. Good design is as little design as possible.
A retrospective exhibition dedicated to Dieter Rams, one of the 20th century’s most influential industrial designers. As head of design at Braun, the German consumer electronics manufacturer, Rams defined an elegant and rigorous visual language for its products.
