Birthday Exhibition

Here's the latest project from artist Sam Winston...

Birthday Exhibition - Southbank Centre
27 January 2012, 10am - 29 January 2012, 11pm
Royal Festival Hall - Cloakroom Lobby - Level 1

The installation forms part of The Southbank Centre’s ‘Death - A Festival For The Living’ in which The Southbank Centre takes a look at how culture can provide an essential role in helping us under- stand and come to terms with this unknowable certainty.

  Photography Andy Sewell

Here's a description about the installation:
Try bringing to mind four friends, simultaneously, within the space of a second. If you managed that then you’re getting close to imagining how many people are being born onto the planet right now.

So why is it when we hear such information we are usually awed by the scale at which it’s happening yet somehow that very information soon becomes another piece of trivia?  It’s a question artist Sam Winston has been working on for a few years and in collaboration with The Southbank Centre he’s proposing an experiment.

“What if we took certain statistics - like the ones close to our hearts , say our birth and death rates - and literally tried recording each birth or death with a drawn circle - how long would it take to portray 12 hours of life on our planet?
For the work I am inviting people to the Royal Festival Hall to register a birth or death by drawing a circle to celebrate one of the 1/4 of a million lives that come and go every day. This in turn sits beside a wall of names registering these birth and deaths.

  Photography Andy Sewell

The effect is a transformation of a seemingly incomprehensible statistic into a very real sea of 260,082 brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers. And this is an invitation for people to partake in that.”
Sam Winston is creating a pop up registry office in Royal Festival Hall commemorating the quarter of a million lives that are born and die in the space of 12 hours around the world.
http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/hayward-gallery-and-visual-arts/tickets/birthday-1000190

Here's a short film that he's made:
http://youtu.be/GycPPNtRy9U?hd=1

There's no plug for our paper here as he's not using our Colorset (well not as far as I know!) although I have worked with Sam before and he's an interesting artist producing these thought provoking works.
www.samwinston.com

Posted by Justin Hobson 17.01.2012

UCA Graphics 2011

This is a piece of literature produced for the BA (Hons) Graphic Communication 2011 course at UCA Farnham. The finished size is an oversize A5 size at 150x215mm size and is saddle stitched. The reason for the slightly larger size is because of the multi size/section approach, the (smallest) outer 16pp section being 130x185mm, the middle 16pp section being 200x140mm and the inner 32pp section being the full 150x215mm, so the stepped effect works like so...

The 64pp publication is a self cover piece printed on StarFine White 100gsm. It is printed in three special colours including a Fluorescent Orange. From a size/production and print point of view, it's made an interesting job and still quite economical to produce.

The Art Direction and book coordination is by Maria da Gandra who is a part time lecturer at UCA and also a partner in the design company MWM Creative.

Designers were Michal Polak, Giorgio del Buono and Alex Sokolov. Print is by Pureprint.
...and thanks to Maria for the file copies and the lovely note:

www.ucreative.ac.uk
www.mwmcreative.co.uk
www.pureprint.com

Posted by Justin Hobson 16.01.2012

Blush Publishing

It's lovely when you come across something that's so interesting that you really want to share it with others and this is one such occasion!

I was recently contacted by a company called Blush who describe themselves as a "modern letterpress printing studio working in an old paper mill in North Wales"

They have a lovely website and a seriously impressive blog - please have a look, it's brilliant:

http://www.blog.blushpublishing.co.uk/

Although you won't see any of our materials used in the case studies ...yet (I hope to be able to change that!) it is really beautiful work.

www.blushpublishing.co.uk

Posted by Justin Hobson 12.01.2012

Toujouri - Xanadu Collection

This is a beautiful lookbook for fashion house Toujouri produced for the launch of their Xanadu collection.

The size is 174x230mm Portrait, section sewn with an 8pp cover and 48pp text. The text is are printed on Omnia 150gsm and the result is just simply stunning - especially with the amazing embroidery on the evening gowns. The photography (by Thomas Cooksey) is superb and the colours are really vibrant ...see for yourselves

All images on the right hand page with the description on left hand page. Lots of space. Thumbnail images on final spread, below.

Brand Marketing and design is by In+Addition.

Creative Director is Paul Hetherington and production was dealt with by Annalyn King ...and thank you for the lovely note and the file copies.

Print is by Fulmar Colour.

 

This is a fabulous example of print on Omnia - this job does truly have the tactile feel of an uncoated with the reproduction of a coated - it does look amazing. 

http://www.toujouri.com/

www.in-addition.com

http://www.fulmarcolour.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson10.01.2012

Jobs from the past - Number 27

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...

V&A Zoomorphic Exhibition Literature

2003/2004

Personally, I think this is one of those projects which will be written about in design books and blogs for many years to come as it is a beautifully clever idea, simply executed.

Johnson Banks designed the campaign to promote this exhibition which is on architecture inspired by animal forms that imagined what animals would look like if drawn as architectural pieces. The project is based around a series of three main posters, with the other event literature using elements from each of the posters.

 Click on the images above and below to get the full effect.

...and the exhibition blurb is as follows:

Zoomorphic looks at the emerging trend towards buildings that emulate nature, presenting leading contemporary architecture inspired by animal form.

The exhibition shows an eclectic mix of architects’ models and preserved animal specimens to illustrate the zoomorphic analogy, with works by leading British and international architects including Santiago Calatrava, Renzo Piano and Wilkinson Eyre. Some of the architects featured employ animal metaphors quite explicitly to create iconic signature buildings, for others the animal likeness emerges as the design evolves.

Zoomorphic documents a highly significant new trend that will extend and enrich the language of modern architecture and asks: What will it be like to live in zoomorphic buildings and walk around zoomorphic cities? and: How might the buildings of the future be transformed as architects continue to explore the lessons of biology in more depth?

The exhibition was curated by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

The main posters (above) are 760x515mm. Other literature includes the A5 leaflet, below, which folds out like so:

...and down again

to reveal the 594x420mm poster:

a different version of the armadillo poster as 394x594mm folding down to 197x297mm:

Simple A6 invitation/reply card:

Design is by Johnson Banks. Creative director on the project was Michael Johnson and the designer (and, most importantly, the illustrator as well) was Sarah Fullerton (now Dezille).

The posters were all printed on our Redeem 100% Recycled 130gsm with the cards on 315gsm. Redeem 100% Recycled was chosen because a blueprinty/dyeline paper feel was required and this was the paper that did it! Interestingly, it might look like that it is just the natural/neutral shade of the Redeem coming through but although it was just printed one colour offset litho in a bluey/purple pantone colour, it was further enhanced by having a very small percentage tint of the colour printed all over the sheet, thereby reducing the hardness of the edges, especially on the "pencil type" lines.

It was printed by a west London printer called Fernedge who were a very progressive printer and one favoured by many design companies at that time. Sadly they have since ceased trading. Pippa Redmond (Mustoe) who was MD at Fernedge, now runs the Norwich Kall Kwik franchise.(http://www.kallkwik.co.uk/norwich/aboutus.cfm). - and I'm dead sure it was printed by them, because as you can see from the label, my file copies are still in the original job bag!

http://www.vam.ac.uk/

http://www.johnsonbanks.co.uk/

Posted by Justin Hobson 06.01.2012

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone and especially those that are regular readers of this blog. I hope 2012 will be a peaceful year. In the UK, it should be an exciting one with the Olympics being hosted in London and various locations around the whole country. Whatever some people's misgivings, I think that it will be a great event that will be held in the public consciousness for years to come.

Last year, at the DesignWeek awards, I bumped into Bryan Edmondson from SEA. He was kind enough to give some encouraging words about this blog and mentioned that it would be a great idea if I invited other people to occasionally write for it as well.

www.seadesign.co.uk

Having mulled it over (for some considerable time!) I've decided to introduce a "SOAPBOX" piece. Written by an invited contributor, it will be published on the blog at the end of the month (in the same way that "Jobs from the past" is the first post of every month). The piece doesn't have to be about any particular subject, other than it should be of relevance to the type of designers who are interested to read this blog (...also, it can't be libelous, slanderous or defamatory!)

Anyway, that's my new year resolution, so as the idea was his I'll ask Bryan if he'd like to write the first one, otherwise I might have to start ringing around!
Happy 2012.
Justin

Posted by Justin Hobson 04.01.2012 

M&S Invitation - A/W 2011 Collection

This is a very luxurious looking invitation to the launch of the Autumn/Winter collection for Marks & Spencer.

The size of the job is 154x218mm portrait. It uses Flockage Colours 400gsm in Navy.  For those of you which are not familiar with this product, it is a flocked board which feels like a velvety cloth/material to the touch but which remarkably you can actually "flatten" the pile by use of a  "heat de-boss". In this case the square pattern is "heat de-bossed" and it is then hot foil blocked in silver.

Flockage is an expensive material, but because of the small quantity used and the fact that only two similar processes are being used on it (and waste is therefore minimal) a luxury, high impact impression can be achieved for a relatively low cost.

To give these invitations extra weight (and gravitas), they have been duplexed together with a chocolate brown board ( ...from the other well know Hull based paper merchant!) The total thickness is just over 1mm and the edge is edge in silver.

Design and Art Direction is by Iain White at Pure Design. Print is by Push.

 

www.marksandspencer.com

www.pure-design.co.uk

www.push-print.com

Posted by Justin Hobson 29.12.2011