Super Contemporary

A new exhibition opens at the Design Museum on Wednesday looking at design in London over the last 50 years. Designed by Bibliothèque with special contributions from members of the industry this is a really interesting exhibition that will definitely be worth checking out.

03 June – 04 October

Design Museum has joined forces with Beefeater 24 to celebrate the fearlessly progressive spirit of London’s greatest creative minds, past and present. London thinks, designs and makes like no other city; it creates and the world follows. A magnet for mavericks and freethinkers, London has nurtured a creative community that continues to rival all other design capitals.

These creative networks have spurred each other on. This exhibition will illustrate London’s pursuit of new, better and braver, across architecture, industrial design, graphics, fashion and communications alike. Endlessly pushing at the forefront of design and constantly inventing for new worlds, London’s design output is continually Super Contemporary.

At the heart of the exhibition are fifteen commissions from some of London’s most dynamic creatives, as a group they demonstrate the diverse approaches to design in London:

Bus Shelter by David Adjaye. Gone with the Wind by Ron Arad. Listening Station by BarberOsgerby. Freedom Space by Neville Brody. Batterseum by Nigel Coates. Rain It In by Paul Cocksedge. London Transport by Tom Dixon. Horatio’s Garden by El Ultimo Grito with Urban Salon. Thames Pin by Kit Grover. Vision for the city of London by Zaha Hadid. K9 Post Office Kiosk by Industrial Facility. Lamp Post Chandelier by Thomas Heatherwick. KiosKiosk by Wayne Hemingway. Head to Toe by Ross Phillips. New London Rubbish Bin by Paul Smith.

Gallery Talks
Get right under the skin of all things Super Contemporary by joining one of our free gallery talks. A Design Museum curator or design specialist will be on hand to guide you round the show in one of our 30 minute talks. No pre-booking but spaces are limited.

Sunday 14 June, 12 noon
Sunday 19 July, 12 noon
Sunday 9 August, 12 noon
Sunday 13 September, 12 noon

Standard Papers

The Evening Standard launched a new paper design on Monday as part of a larger shake up trying to increase its readership of 500,000. The sales of the paper have been declining ever since the free papers, London Paper and London Lite started appearing in the afternoons. Since the paper was bought from the Mail the new editor Geordie Greig has been trying to distance the paper from its old right-wing, negative stance. The first step as mentioned in Evening Standard was this advertising campaign, designed to get us talking about the Evening Standard.

The next step launched on Monday when London was invaded with orange Evening Standard distributors, who for one day only were, handing the paper out for free, an obvious gimmick but perhaps a great way for people to see what they’re missing, only time will tell.

So let’s jump in and compare the old ES to the new. The first difference you notice is the banner no longer stretches across the top of the paper, going for more of a London Lite look, I’m not sure I agree with this decision and I definitely don’t like the way the London is placed in between the ascenders of ‘Evening’. Of course it’s good to see London appear on the front page, this was after all THE London paper. Apart from the banner there is a much better use of colour and the typography is more modern and less stuffy looking. The colour palette led with orange is much more positive, headings in capitals creates tighter leading and use of negative space is much improved.

The paper is bigger than it used to be 72 pages on Monday and 64 on Tuesday compared to only 56 in the previous week. However, when you open the paper up it seems lighter, the type size is bigger and there are more generous margins, although seemingly based on the same grid. I think the affect of larger type actually makes the paper seem less in-depth and more like the at-a-glance stories of the other afternoon papers. Headings are better though opting, like The Guardian, for one typeface in multiple weights to differentiate stories.

Is it enough though in an age when even an afternoon paper isn’t as up-to-date as the internet or even evening news and the radio? I’m not so sure. The London Lite and London Paper are awful papers, filled with celebrity gossip and bite-size news. The Evening Standard is better, with much more news and better writing, it’s a thicker paper too, about the twice the size, which is great for some analysis of the days’ news on the evening commute. However I think the ES needed to go further to differentiate, adopt the much better berliner format and truly make it an evening paper for the broadsheet readers.

Tweet

Twitter has really taken off in the last few months so I have decided noclichés will join most of the writers on this blog and the general trend of the world by launching a twitter feed. This feed will automatically post new articles from this blog and will have shorter featurettes (perhaps tweets would be a better word) as well. You can find us at twitter.com/noncliches.

Enjoy.

Ed.

Evening Standard

The Evening Standard launched a new advertising campaign today, daringly apologising for its previous behaviour, to try and increase its readership which has been declining since the appearance of the afternoon free papers. Next-week (May 11) the Evening Standard will launch its new design for the paper. The campaign was created by McCann Erickson.

I’ve not seen any of the adverts but if you do please upload to our flickr group, noclichés.

Happy Easter

Hello to all the readers of noclichés. Just a quick word, Happy Easter. Thank you for your support and stay tuned for lots more to come over the coming months.

Just My Type

Jacob Nylund from Formconspiracy has launched a side project for typefaces he has created in illustrator. For those of you who like contemporary typefaces, this is well worth a look, all of the work is available as a download, mostly as an ai file and you can use the type for free modifying as you wish, his only request is that you send him pictures of the finished work. The project is called Just My Type, Jacob’s portfolio Formconspiracy is worth checking out too.

DaisyDisk

I have just spotted an application available for your Mac which displays your file structure in a diagrammatic way, and let’s you navigate through the different hierarchies. I’m not sure how useful this is on a day to day basis, although it does integrate with the finder, offering QuickLook. It’s certainly some nice information design, worth downloading to experience the interactive navigation. You can check out the application here, it costs $19.95 if you feel so inclined but you can try it out for two weeks for free.

Nick Bell Design

While working as an intern at Nick Bell Design one of my projects was working on the studios website refresh. The new design has now been published to the web, albeit with a limited amount of content. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.

AplusB Studio

I have crossed paths with the guys at AplusB studio a few times recently, at the D&AD mentoring event and more recently at the very interesting lecture by Peter Saville, part of the new D&AD President’s Lectures series. Benji and Alex are both lovely guys who have got some great work but also have a really healthy philosophy. Check out their website here. Below is a screenshot of some of the lovely photography of Marian Sell whose website was designed by the guys.

Information, Visualisation, Communication

The Guardian have a potentially very interesting blog, Data Blog, consisting of information graphics of selected sections their vast data store.

I say potentially, as not all posts yet have graphics for the supplied data; and the blog is on the lookout for graphic contributions; so if you feel like having a go at some delicious info graphics or visualisations, go hither and contribute!