Johnston Works - Party time!

Last Thursday evening I was invited to a party at the Dining Rooms in Lots Road, Chelsea hosted by Johnston Works for friends and associates that work with them and it was a very jolly time.

Thank you to everyone at Johnston Works for making me feel so welcome and a special thank you to Kirsten Johnston (pic above) for inviting me.

Here are some very badly taken pictures of mine to record the event showing Remy Jauffret (below)

...and Stuart Simpson in thoughtful discussussion with Roy Killen from Push Print.

http://www.johnstonworks.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 11.10.2010

ISTD-Stammtisch 1: Talking Books

The International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD) is pleased to announce the first of its Stammtisch* events: Talking Books. It is to be held next Wednesday (13th October) at 7pm at the Russian Club Gallery, 340-344 Kingsland Road E8 4DA

* ‘Stammtisch’ = German for ‘Regulars’ Table’, ‘regular get-together’.

The event is hosted in conjunction with the Helvetic Centre on the occasion of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2009 exhibition organized by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture. (All awarded books will be accessible at the event.)

Talking Books will host a series of short presentations by speakers from a variety of backgrounds, each of them talking about a book of their choice and their personal and/or professional relation to it. We expect stories about form, format, layout, production, history, content, structure, editorial quality, imagery, and much more. Most books presented during the evening will be available for the audience to see and handle.

Speakers include
Gary Bird (Managing Director of Gavin Martin)
Justin Hobson (paper consultant, Fenner Paper)
Ken Hollings (writer, editor, lecturer)
Fraser Muggeridge (designer)
Caroline Roberts (co-owner of Grafik Magazine)
Lucienne Roberts (designer, writer)
Hana Tanimura (designer, student)
Gilmar Wendt (designer, writer)

Talking Books is an open and free event, but will operate on a guest list basis. For further information or reservations please send an email to stammtisch@istd.org.uk.

...and yes you did read correctly, I am speaking! - so no rotten eggs from the audience please!
http://www.istd.org.uk/,
http://www.helveticcentre.ch/

Posted by Justin Hobson 08.10.2010

GAP 2010

This is a lovely project produced for Gap this Summer. It consists of an invitation and an A5 lookbook.

The "private view" invitation is an A5 size folding out to A3 and is printed in one colour (silver) on our Astralux 90gsm. Astralux is a one sided "cast coated" substrate which means it is an extremely high gloss coated finish on one side with an uncoated reverse. Very nice for a folded invitation and the silver looks great on it.

The accompanying lookbook has a 4pp cover and a 32pp text, A5 portrait, which is saddle stitched with WHITE staples - an excellent detail. Another lovely feature is the cover being cut 25mm short from the foredge with the 2010 printed on the cover and page one of text, lining up. A really nice touch and relatively inexpensive to do...

It uses a combination of Astralux 115gsm for the cover and our Omnia 120gsm for the text which gives a great coated/uncoated contrast (especially with the cover as described above) but the advantage being that the images work really well on the Omnia - printing as well as if they were on a coated material, as you can see....

Printing is by Absolute Ink who are based in Clapton in London and who work directly with many of the large brands. Art director and designer on the project was Jonathan Baron working in conjunction with the in-house production team at Gap and below is his brand spanky new business card:

http://www.gap.com/

http://www.studio-baron.com/

http://www.theabsolute.co.uk/

Posted by Justin Hobson 06.10.2010

Future:Content

The guys at It's Nice That are very excited about the launch of their first ever one-day conference, Future:Content.  It's Nice That have always believed in doing things differently and I'm sure they'll follow this lead with Future:Content. The event looks at how people involved in design and communication engage with, define and present content across a number of platforms. It will be a chance to hear the opinions of carefully curated industry specialists on their areas of expertise.

The conference will take place at the intimate Shoreditch Studios on 10th November. Speakers include Deyan Sudjic (Design Museum), Russell Davies (Ogilvy & Mather and RIG London), Phil Clandillon & Steve Millbourne (Sony Music), Sanky (AllofUs), Francesca Panetta (The Guardian and Hackney Podcast) and Anna Gerber & Britt Iversen (Visual Editions) and more speakers to be announced soon.

For more information and to buy tickets, visit

http://www.itsnicethat.com/futurecontent

Posted by Justin Hobson 04.10.2010

Jobs from the past - Number 13

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 this one is my FIRST EVER piece of work at Fenner Paper that was in any way a "creative project"!

22 and Eye - LCPDT BA (Hons) Degree Show 1993

This job dates back to 1993. The design company was Pentagram and the designer on the project was Vince Frost. The project was the end of year show, poster and literature for the BA (Hons) Photography course at the London College of Printing and Distributive Trades (as it was then) and I still have a copy!

The poster is pictured above. Size is 580mm Square. It features a photograph by one of the graduating students. Clare Carnegie. The invitation was exactly as the poster but 180mm square. It was printed in two colours as a duotone with a black and a grey. I know this for a fact as I've still got an untrimmed press sheet! It was printed on a coated paper called Lightning Silk in 150gsm (although that particular sheet has now gone long ago). With the poster, goes an invitation, identical to the poster but 180mm square and printed on the same sheet as the poster.

The main pack to show each of the student's work is a 6pp folder containing 24 cards. The folder is very simply produced - more of a wrap around - as there are no flaps top/bottom with a tipped on label on the front. The 180mm square folder was produced on Chagall Nero 260gsm which has a slight texture. 

The 24 cards are one for each of the 23 graduates showing one image with their contact details plus an introduction by Jonathan Goddard, Director of Photographic Studies. The title "22 and Eye" comes from the use of the picture by Clare Carnegie, who's eye photograph is used as the lead image and 22 other graduates.

The cards were also printed on our Lightning Silk 250gsm. Print was by Penshurst Press (sadly no longer in existence).

This was a very "low budget" job which is why I was "cajoled" into sponsoring the piece with a good price on the paper - and that was back in 1993!

http://www.pentagram.co.uk/

http://www.frostdesign.com.au/

Posted by Justin Hobson 01.10.2010

Tom Jansz goes independent!

Some of you will know that Tom Jansz left Robert Horne a couple of months ago (having been there for over nineteen years!) following the whole re-sourcing of the Revive range debacle.

Anyway, as of October 1st (yes that's today!) he is now officially at Denmaur Independent paper (the publishing paper specialists), so this was just a quick post to say best of luck for the future.

 http://www.denmaur.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 01.10.2010

It's Gauguin Day ...today!

Only if you were a hermit living in a remote cave could you have possibly missed the amazing amount of media coverage of the Gauguin exhibition at Tate Modern ...and it opens today!

If you were wondering if this was just a pleasant public information announcement, you'd be wrong! I thought I would use it as an opportunity to show the lovely private view invitations which were printed on our Omnia 320gsm and which (as you can see) faithfully reproduces Paul Gauguin's work!

The invites are A5 size and 2pp. The above pic shows front and back. Designer at the Tate is Michael Windsor-Ungureanu and the print production is by Push.

Original exhibition graphics, catalogue design and typeface by Why Not Asscociates.
http://www.whynotassociates.com/en/tate_gauguin/08.php
...now go and see the exhibition, I am.

http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.push-print.com/
http://www.whynotassociates.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 30.09.2010