Showing posts with label Tom Gauld. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Gauld. Show all posts

Sunday 29 November 2020

St Bride Foundation 125th Anniversary

As many readers of this blog will know, this month the St Bride Foundation celebrates their 125th anniversary. To coincide with this, they are running a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the Foundation to fund a year of special events (throughout 2021) and most importantly the beginning of a project to digitise the extensive Library enabling the collections to be shared with the global audience they deserve.

It brought to mind a fantastic project for the St Bride Foundation which I was involved with last year which I never wrote about but now having plagiarised (with permission!) the excellent blog article by Alistair Hall of We Made This, here it is...
Fourteen artists, designers, writers, illustrators and musicians were asked if they would collaborate in pairs to each create a poster designed to celebrate and highlight the rich and varied collections held within the St Bride Library and the building itself. The Collections and Collaborations project culminated in an evening to celebrate their work and the items from the collections that inspired them. The private view, held last May, included a series of short lectures from some of the collaborators about the process behind their work.
The collaborators are: 
Catherine Dixon & Mick Clayton 
Pam Smy & Ness Woo
Bob Richardson & Alistair Hall
Tom Gauld & John L. Walters
David Pearson & Paul Barnes
Anil Aykan & Jonathan Barnbrook (Fragile Self)
Tom Etherington & Keith Houston

There are 7 posters in total, each printed in an edition of 60, all printed on papers supplied by Fenner Paper and all printed Offset Litho by Boss Print ...and what a set it is!

Designer, writer and teacher Catherine Dixon worked with freelance type compositor Mick Clayton, who manages the St Bride Print Workshop. They went the extra mile – well, several extra miles to be honest – and letterpress printed their creation in the print workshops at the library, onto Shiro Echo, White 160gsm. It features a collection of ‘lost words’ from the printing trade.
Click on images to enlarge
Book designer Tom Etherington, from Penguin Press, working with author Keith Houston, who wrote the fantastic books Shady Characters and The Book, created this fantastic print...
Click on images to enlarge
The image above doesn’t really capture the brilliant way it’s been printed though. All the grey text is actually printed in black on the reverse side of the poster, showing through the semi translucent 60gsm Sixties stock, as you can see here:
The type on the above poster is set in Commercial Type’s Thorowgood Grotesque and Caslon Doric Wide.

Anil Aykan & Jonathan Barnbrook from Barnbrook Studio are also musicians and have just released their first self titled Album ‘Fragile Self’. They took a set of song lyrics from a broadside they found in the library, and created this contemporary version, featuring a bespoke typeface...
Click on images to enlarge
I discussed the poster with Jonathan and the concerns about the dark image and how it was important that the reproduction retained it's detail, which is why we decided on using Omnia 150gsm, which would reproduce the image without losing clarity.

Illustrator and teacher Pam Smy teamed up with book designer and lecturer Ness Wood (together with Maisie Paradise Shearring they make up Orange Beak Studio), and created this print based on the work of Beatrice Warde, printed onto Pergraphica Smooth, Natural 120gsm.
Illustrator Tom Gauld was paired with John L. Walters, author, musician, and editor of Eye magazine. John wrote a piece about the experience of visiting St Bride Library, and Tom created this stunning print around it. It’s printed onto Gardapat 13, Klassica 115gsm.
Click on images to enlarge
Here’s a detail...
Book designer David Pearson, worked with type designer Paul Barnes from Commercial Type, showcasing some more types from Commercial Classics. The posters were printed onto different shades from our Colorset range in 120gsm, the below image printed on Colorset Solar...
...and last but by no means least, here is the poster by Alistair Hall and Bob Richardson. After research in the Library, Alistair was inspired by the incredible elongated sans serif typefaces fom the R D DeLittle “Eboracum” Letter Factory. The finished result uses the Colophon Foundry’s recently released Coign type family and was printed on our Creative Print Champagne 170gsm
Click on images to enlarge
The below image shows the set of posters for sale during the launch evening. Some of these posters are still available and you can buy them HERE. Each poster has been produced in a limited edition with all profits going to the St Bride Foundation.
The project would never have been possible if it were not for the support of Boss Print who donated the printing, which was no small thing. Also, I must mention Becky Chilcott, the organiser, without whom this event would never have happened and my thanks again to Alistair Hall for allowing me to use the images and copy from his blog.

During this crowdfunding campaign, what better way to remember why the St Bride Foundation is such a valuable resource? - right in the heart of London and worth YOUR support. At the time of writing, the crowdfunding campaign stands at £36,000 of a £50,000 total with 15 days to go ...so please pledge your support right now! ...and tell your friends - remember many £10 or £20 donations will all help get to the target.

Wednesday 2 October 2013

Jobs from the past - Number 48

Regular followers of this blog will know that my first post of every month is a "job from the past" so that I can show some of the really good work from years gone by and here's one from 2008.

Beat IV
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Beat is the regular publication produced by illustration agency Heart. This edition is a fully illustrated edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic seafaring poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Cover illustration by Jimmy Turrell
I've taken the following text from the Heart agency website: "Coleridge is thought to have been inspired to write his metaphysical masterpiece by the tales of the first maritime explorers. The underlying moral of the story is about the power and invisible laws of nature that man disregards at his peril. Whilst today the poem is considered a classic, an archetypal example of early English Romantic literature, when it was first published in 1798 the poem received less than complimentary reviews. Initial sales were put down to sailors, mistakenly thinking it was a book of sea shanties. The visual power of this poem has, however, proved an enduring inspiration for many artists such as Mervyn Peake, Alexander Calder and David Jones amongst others, with perhaps one of the most well known illustrated versions being Gustav Dore’s engravings of 1870. In Heart’s approach to the poem a contemporary rendition of a classic has been created, utilising a design inspired by the graphic language of old books". 


Illustrator: Barry Falls
Throughout the publication, each illustrator has produced a double-page spread to accompany sections of the poem. The whole publication is printed on our Omnia in the Natural shade. The material was chosen because of it's tactile nature and because the natural shade gave it an "aged" feel. The publication was printed CMYK but predominantly the colour used is blue and the Omnia will reproduce a beautifully solid blue.
Illustrator: Luke Best
Illustrator:Tom Gauld
The size of the publication is 330x235mm, portrait and is section sewn. It has a 4pp cover on Omnia Natural 320gsm, around which there is an 8pp "dust jacket" with 155mm flaps on Omnia Natural 150gsm. The 88pp text is printed on Omnia Natural 200gsm, which is very bulky and gives the book a 13mm spine.  
Illustrator: Lucinda Rogers
Illustrator: Adam Simpson

 
Illustrator: Aude Van Ryn
Beat IV is designed by Pentagram. Partner, Angus Hyland, is design director and designers on the project were Kyle Wheeler and Masumi Briozzo. Print and repro was handled by David Holyday.

Beat 4 was selected for the D&AD Annual, Creative Review’s ‘The Annual’ and won the DesignWeek award for Editorial Design. It is an inspired idea and amazingly well executed piece of literature.

Posted by Justin Hobson 02.10.2013