Archive for the 'Magazines/Editorial' Category

Team Girl Comic

Masters student Kat Sicard brought this project to our attention, which is looking for future collaborators, and also supporters/funders through a new kickstarter initiative they’ve set up:

“Team Girl Comic is an indie all-women comics anthology. We support and encourage women at all levels of experience to create and publish comics. A lot of our creators are new to comics in general. We love bringing new people to the medium and letting them discover their voice. It’s been great to see the number of contributes grow with every issue. So far, we’ve published 4 issues under our own steam, but want to be able to grow and become more sustainable. Right now, we’re running a kickstarter to fund our 5th issue. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/teamgirlcomic/team-girl-comic “

via Team Girl Comic Kickstarter | GSA Postgrad Comic Books Elective.

Undercurrents

Undercurrents is a collection of current 4th years dissertations, edited and compiled by Christopher MacInnes with layout and cover design by Seb Howell (vis-com-des person). All profits go back into future productions.

Yr1 ComDes Study Trip to London

Tuesday 24th January

11.00am
APFEL (A Practice for Everyday Life)
Contact / Emma Thomas  t 020 7739 9975

Former RCA students producing intelligent graphic design from a small but perfectly formed studio in Bethnal Green. Best quote of the week “We would never want to get too big that we wouldn’t be able to sit around one table”. Check out an article about them in Elephant Magazine Issue 9 (available from Analogue Books ).
APFEL can be found HERE
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1.00pm
GAIL ARMSTRONG Illustrator
Contact / Gail Armstrong  t 020 8291 9153

Busy former GSA student producing intricate paper illustrations for a varied London and American client base. A great example of how to maintain a thriving creative life, be a mother and a Photoshop guru.
Check out Gail’s work HERE
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4.30pm
BIG ORANGE ILLUSTRATION STUDIO
Contact / Ulla  t 020 7739 7765

Great to catch up with Dan Williams and a few old friends at this vibrant illustration studio. Great advice and insight from Paul Davis who let us see a sample of his published work. Former GSA student Emma Houlston was also generous with her advice for shaping a career after graduating.
See Emma’s work HERE
Check out Paul Davis HERE
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Wednesday 25th January

10.00am
OPX
Contact / David Bennett  t 020 7729 6295

Multi award winning design agency welcomed GSA for an hour of shared thoughts and ideas. Pleased to see that they fill a wall in their board room with inspiration (Post-it notes, ephemera, colour printouts, drawings and scribbles) to assist idea generation for each project. Their philosophy is to involve the client as early as possible in the design process – a blend of inspiring and interrogating them – asking who, what, why and when.
Check out some of their studio work HERE
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1.00pm
THE PARTNERS
Contact / Alex Woolley or Jess Harvey  t 020 7689 4625

Alex and Jess are younger designers at The Partners and took us on a creative journey through their favourite projects. Each team works with an ideas book or sketchbook before any refinement of a concept on the Mac. This approach means that the designers are less precious about the work and allows them to reflect on the qualities of communication and meaning.
Check out the award winning work HERE
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4.30pm
THE CHURCH OF LONDON
Little White Lies Magazine
Contact / Matt Bochenski  t 020 7729 3675

Thanks to Matt, Willo and Adam who gave us a unique insight into the ‘architecture’ of LWLies covering every aspect of its production. For students in the first year of a four year progression, this was invaluable. It was useful to see how they constructed their typefaces, the programmes used and where the inspiration comes from. Read some more HERE
GSA students might be interested in a LWLies creative brief HERE – great opportunity to work on a ‘real’ project.
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The Serving Library Media Archive

“You are sat in a pitch-black room. Your head is gently buzzed with whisky. Out of the darkness you hear a recording of my voice.”

Some interesting podcasts, via The Serving Library.

Present Ideas

This BBC Imagine programme - Books – The Last Chapter? – is available to view until Wed, 28 Dec (at 12:39 to be ultra precise about it). Highly recommended as an overview of a pertinent topic which is also covered here (Form of the Book Book) and here (The Unbound Book), and the subject of this book and this book which were recommended to me by Edwin. And also relates, if you’re really really interested, to the ramblings of an armchair enthusiast.

And as it’s nearly Christmas, if you’re looking for books to spend book tokens on, a quick reminder that the book of the week archive is here, for perusal.

Cover Looks (Strangely Familiar)

The latest print incarnation of the Serving Library is out.

Communicate & Circulate

Good Press (at Mono, Kings Court) are about to stage; An exhibition dedicated to print and publishing in the independent arts. On show and for sale are a collection of zines, posters and original works made newly available from self-publishers and small press producers from around the world.

via GOOD PRESS GALLERY.

Good Press

Good Press is a new outlet, based in Mono (temporarily, while they find a permanent space), from this Friday the 7th October, starting with the first exhibition, The Family Show.

The Family Show will be exhibiting 30 UK and International artists (two of which; Oliver Pitt and Jess Copsey, are recent GSA graduates) who mostly work with illustration and painting. It’s also a fundraiser for their permanent space, with all the original works being available for £30 for those who may wish to buy them!

In the bookshop there will be a large variation of different independent & self-published books, zines and other printed and handmade things. All Com Des people are invited to attend, more background info here. If you’re interested in selling zines etc, they’ve asked interested parties to get in touch directly, just via that web link, that one, back there.

OASE Journal for Architecture

OASE Journal for Architecture has a new website and better still, editions 1-81 are available as PDF’s to download to your non-brand-specific portable tablet device. OASE is/has been designed by Dutch designer and educator Karel Martens.

SiSi in CR

Vis Com person Lu SiSi features as one of 5 to watch in this month’s Creative Review Graduate Special. A nice wee feature on one of 2011′s top graduates.

(It’s obviously been a long time since I paid money for a magazine – five pounds and ninety pence it was!)

The Unbound Book

Loads of interesting reports now online from the Unbound Book conference. Some in Dutch, some in English. Dare-say video’s may follow.

Amsterdam Art/Book Fair

Manystuff offer some very comprehensive coverage of the first Amsterdam Art/Book Fair. The kind of place where I could bankrupt myself. They also do the animated gif meme.

It’s That

It’s Nice That have been in touch about 2 themes they’re running on their website; Student of the Month and Graduates of 2011. If you’re interested in having your work profiled on the site please get in touch with Bryony at ‘It’s Nice That’ [bryony -at- itsnicethat.com] with a folio of your work or link to your website.

Descargar, Download

(This blog post should be read aloud whilst listening to this).

This weekend I was looking through the highly impressive Ubuweb and stumbled upon this film, Production of Meaning, by Adbusters. I’m interested in this because while I broadly agree with the sentiment, I was really struck by how outdated and simplistic the analysis seemed to be. I used to buy and read Adbusters and have been away from it for a while, but wonder whether post Naomi Klein and No Logo, the arguments need to be more subversive and more sophisticated in equal measure.

The second benefit of roaming Ubuweb was that I came across a link to this download of the entire Ken Nordine album ‘Colors’, which wholeheartedly satisfied my jazz/colour analysis needs.

Design Does Not Solve The Darkness

As you know, I’m always excited to find new publications to spend my massive GSA salary on, and The National Grid is a recent discovery, attempting to ‘chart a path through the murky wasteland between the professional practice of graphic design and its troublesome academic manifestations’.

Already these two editions (#5 and #6) have thrown up some interesting links to this archive of online versions of the Architectural Association Newsletter of recent years (which in itself was trying to reprise some of the ad-hoc publications that institution has published over the years), and the cover of this ‘Good Design, Good Business’ report from the Scotland of yesteryear. The Commonwealth Games logo also gets a small critique, interesting given that the perspective is from almost exactly the other side of the world, (the magazine is produced in New Zealand).

Limited Liability

GmbH Shop is opening next friday, (vis com night out?), primarily an outlet for magazines and periodicals, and a great initiative. A great addition for Glasgow, alongside the lovely Aye Aye Books.

On Print

“Unlike a “pure” printing journal from the printing industry, what we describe here is the relationship between the graphic designer, the printer, and the printed matter. It is also an investigation of the similarities and differences in the viewpoints and attitudes towards printing, and to imagine new ways of collaboration.”

Highly Recommended.

via #15 PRINTING JOURNAL : GRAPHIC.

Apartamento

Apartamento Apartamento is an Interiors magaazine that looks for inspiration from everyday environments and the objects people choose to surround themselves with rather than an idealised aspirational model of traditional interiors magazines.

Apartamento_05_cover

Apartamento_05_04

Berlin

So we’re off to Berlin in a week or so, (and then 3rd/4th graphics next month), and coincidentally, the current issue of eye magazine has several special features on the city.

As an aside, the last few editions of eye magazine (72 and 73) have been full of interesting and useful stuff about illustration, graphics, graphic designers as illustrators, the changing world of photography, and generally stuff that asks lots of useful and interesting questions about these ‘distinctions’, their validity, and their place in the shifting world of visual communications. Strongly recommended.

(image by HORT).

Yellow River Delta, 1989 and 2009

NASA’s Earth Obsertvatory, and their amazing collection of free-to-use high-quality satellite photography, can prove a very fulfilling web-based distraction. It was brought to my attention via an article in Task Newsletter, an initiative which I think originates from the Werkplaats Typografie.

Also discussed a lot in that publication, which focuses on both design utopias and mundane science-fiction, is the Whole Earth Catalog — The product of Stewart Brand, some powerful drugs, and a left-over project from 1966 when he initiated a public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite photo of the sphere of Earth as seen from space, the first image of the “Whole Earth.”

It was Brands idea that the image of this “Whole Earth”, viewed as one, at once, might go someway towards creating greater global cooperation and understanding – a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny.