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Designer/printer John Boilard, under the name of JP Boneyard, has just completed his latest project: redrawing then screen printing 27 found letters from his collection of around 1,000. You can see them, read more about them and take a look at his other print work here.
Oh well done GF Smith. And SEA of course. Yet again, an annoyingly magnificent, audacious, paper selector that basically blows every other paper merchant out of the design studio. There's probably loads of bloggage about it; the September Industry post, for example.
Last week saw the first edition of The Manual landing on desktops and doormats across the UK. With, I presume, those destined for further afield arriving over the next few days.
For the last four to five years, like so many others, my focus has taken a steady turn from print-related matters to digital things. No surprises there. Way back in time, in my first job, I knew nothing about typography but was blessed by a crotchety Creative Director; a stickler. His reliable and regular trashing of my sorry attempts at typesetting on early Macs proved to be the necessary force that fuelled a passion. A passion for working out how the heck you do this stuff properly. I read loads (and continue to do so).
The web is a different beast. It's not an ancient craft, steeped in traditions, with rules that hardly change. And it's certainly no mere extension of an established field. It's a brand new composite discipline-on-the-move, made up of unequal amounts of graphic design, product design, computer science, neuro science, strategy and lord knows what else. But the struggle to understand it's fundamental nature feels, nevertheless, similar to how it felt all those years ago. And like then, I'm hungry for insights and understandings.
The Manual helps.
Not that it attempts to define this new industry in hyper-detail. What it does is express the thoughts and ideas of a few good men/women who are playing a part in the formulation and appreciation of a new industry. Each expression a component; a small constituent part of a very big thing. How right each is, or how vital their fragment proves to be, is not as important as their endeavour; their efforts to make this thing as good as it can be.
That's a strangle, noble and thrilling adventure. And, I feel, The Manual (second edition already in the pipeline) will play its part.
The Manual is published by Andy McMillan/Fiction, was funded via Kickstarter, designed by Jez Burrows and will be available to buy soon. You can sign up for updates here.
Astronomically-obsessed, Montréal-based, designer Stephen Di Donato has a new Kickstarter project. Beyond Earth is a self-initiated poster (and postcard) series designed from a 1965 perspective, the year of the first space walk. A planet per silk-screened poster, each will detail what was known of the heavenly bodies at the time. You can find out more, including how to support the project, on the Kickstarter site.
If pressed, I would say Derek Birdsall is my favourite designer of all time. A couple of years ago Mike Dempsey opened a blog post on Birdsall with a sweeping statement, "If you don't know of [Birdsall] then you are not a graphic designer]". I think right now, in 2011, that might be a little harsh but then again, as a designer of a certain age myself, I also feel that it's not a totally unfair assertion.
At its best, Birdsall's work (and that of his studio Ominfic) is utterly meaningful and incredibly simple. Often so simple, you feel that each piece must have taken mere mintues to produce. And yet they're so powerful, it's impossible to imagine how you could better express the idea.
It was a Birdsall/Omnific cover design that got me into collecting Penguin books. When I stumbled across Juniors I was blown away; it was perfect and about as minimal as you can get. The studio produced many covers for the publishers Education imprint; the ones I have are on Flickr. I've just added this one.
(@H_FJ quite rightly pointed out on Twitter that that character is, of course, Psi, not as the title of this post might suggest Chi. I did know that. I DID. Really! The Chi reference comes from an overly obscure extract on the back cover that I haven't shown you. In other words: I have made no attempt to make this make sense.)