Design Week
26 April 2007
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2007 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
26 April 2007
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen have unveiled designs for the 2007 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion. The timber-clad structure resembles a spinning top and brings a new vertical dimension to the traditional single-level Pavilion. A wide, spiralling ramp makes two complete turns, culminating at the highest point with a view across London's Kensington Gardens.
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A flexible friend
26 April 2007
A chemist invented the first plastic in 1907 and the material has been in and out of fashion ever since, but Clare Dowdy finds it still very much in demand, for everything from food packaging to recyclable chairs
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A rocky road to market
26 April 2007
Designers must invest in intellectual property if they want to retain control of their ideas and see them through to production
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Architect called in to build Visa 'virtual' HQ
26 April 2007
Visa Europe, one of the latest brand owners to commission premises in the fast-growing, Web-based 'virtual' world Second Life, is using a 'real life' architect to work on the designs.Rambir Lal, a consultant architect with Web and 3D design group Clusta, has been working on a prototype building based on the shape of a spiralling pack of cards which may form the basis of Visa's presence in the virtual reality game.It's the first time Lal has designed a building for a virtual ...
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Carbon Trust scheme has incentives for reduction
26 April 2007
Regarding the Carbon Trust's carbon reduction label, I would like to clarify a couple of points. We believe this label to be the first of its kind. The scheme is intended to drive companies to invest in lowering the carbon content of their products. The key point about the label is that it not only measures a product's carbon impact but also has an in-built incentive for the manufacturer to reduce the 'footprint' of that product. Companies that use the label sign up to ...
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Design Museum to host Barnbrook show
26 April 2007
Graphic designer Jonathan Barnbook, renowned for his experimental typefaces and political projects, is to unveil the first UK exhibition of his work at the Design Museum in June.The Friendly Fire exhibition, designed by Barnbrook and his studio, will feature examples from his portfolio, from experiments in typography and motion graphics in the early 1990s to his latest projects with collaborators such as anti-corporate collective Adbusters.With in-depth descriptions accompanying ...
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Digest
26 April 2007
Architect Kengo Kuma continues to lead the design work on Alan Yau's forthcoming Japanese restaurant Cha Cha No Hana. The company explains that Kengo Kuma has not been replaced by the architect Denton Corker Marshall, but that DCM is acting as executive architect on the project.
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Edward Barber
26 April 2007
Photographic artist Edward Barber is set to unveil his latest exhibition, Visual Athletics Club, this Friday, with branding and promotional material by Sampson May. The exhibition will run from 5-25 May at The Horse Hospital, Colonnade, London WC1.
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Enterprise IG growth bankrolls five senior posts
26 April 2007
Enterprise IG is experiencing robust business growth from a 'very buoyant market', resulting in the announcement of five director-level appointments within its UK design and production teams.According to UK chief executive John Mathers (pictured), the business is seeing growth from existing clients, as well as new opportunities, although he declines to reveal any new work at present.'It is important to broaden our base of skills and experience in order for the organisation ...
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Guidelines are just for guidance - give creativity a chance
26 April 2007
It's everywhere, it's alive and it's kicking. The Pacman of the design world - corporate guidelines - continue to gobble up creative design and innovation at every opportunity. To the purist, corporate guidelines are a necessary standard to a brand foundation; to creative designers, they are a barrier to audience engagement. I often question the rationale behind corporate guidelines as, in many cases, they create more problems than they solve. Guidelines are usually contrived ...
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Hot chocolate
26 April 2007
The first design museum in the Japanese capital is opening with an event called Chocolate, but there are no Mars bars in sight. Richard Clayton nevertheless develops a taste for this mouth-watering exhibition and its host venue
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Ideal Standard
26 April 2007
Bath and kitchen company Ideal Standard has been previewing a range of innovative bathroom designs by in-house designer Marc Sadler. These include the Soft Bath, made from a new material which retains heat, and WWW (pictured), a luxury hydro-massage bath.
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Inspired
26 April 2007
Aziz Cami The Partners
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Liberty
26 April 2007
Department store Liberty is set to appoint a new chief executive to replace Iain Renwick, who left suddenly last week.
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Looking back
26 April 2007
Some things we just can't get out of our heads. Like pop tunes, objects often trigger memories of times and places. Artefacts of an era, personal or cultural, become loaded with significance. It's a pretty esoteric process, as other people may or may not share those associations, but it's one that Andrew Renton aims to explore. The curator has chosen diverse work by 11 artists 'to connote feelings of nostalgia' at the South London Gallery. Maarten Baas (ex-Design Academy Eindhoven) makes ...
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Motorway musings
26 April 2007
Wordless instructions can have a beauty all their own - especially when they work as well as our road signs. But beware of sloppy coding, says Scott Billings
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News in Pictures
26 April 2007
Graphic designer and photographer Den Cops is launching his first UK solo exhibition, Phantasmagorics Photographs.
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Olive awards
26 April 2007
The Association of Publishing Agencies is calling for entries for its newly created Olive awards, which showcase the best in customer magazine creativity and design. The awards will include categories for best cover, illustration, typography and photography.
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Parker Williams reworks packaging for Gaymer ciders
26 April 2007
The Gaymer Cider Company is set to unveil a packaging redesign for its Olde English and Gaymers Original cider brands, created by consultancy Parker Williams.The Olde English packaging redesign launches this week on bottles and cans, and aims to add a 'contemporary twist' to the brand.It features a subtle redesign of the core logo with fresh typography, and the plastic bottle has been given a darker colour in order to modernise the brand.Parker Williams, which was ...
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Profile: Johanna Basford
26 April 2007
Working from a fish farm in Aberdeenshire, Johanna Basford designs textiles and wallpapers for companies such as Heal's, exploring botanical motifs, insects and evolution. Fiona Nicolson speaks to her
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Qatar cries out for good design
26 April 2007
The big media companies are there already, and designers should follow suit, given Qatar’s growing need for creative and branding skills
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Radio interviews can be turned to your advantage
26 April 2007
In Hugh Pearman’s excellent Private View on radio, the imaginary researcher was said to have asked, ‘Can’t you give up your afternoon to get down there for a 45-second interview for which we shall pay you something insultingly small?’
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Skills development plan now ready for implementation
26 April 2007
It was an important moment for design last Wednesday, though it may have slipped by unnoticed in the outside world. At Westminster, MP Barry Sheerman stood up bright and early in a packed committee room to announce his Early Day Motion for the House which was the result of more than a year's hard graft looking at skills within the creative industries.Graft is the operative word. The very fact that the design industry consultation had finally reached its climax probably felt like ...
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Sprout and PLI go Green with Playstation chair
26 April 2007
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has come up with an inventive way to reuse discarded Playstation consoles, as a result of collaboration with furniture manufacturer PLI Design and sustainable consultancy Sprout Design.A stackable chair called Recycled Plastic Chair Number Two, or RPC2, designed by Sprout, uses post-consumer polycarbonate plastic found in PS consoles as its main component. It launches on 10 MayPLI founder Christopher Pett explains he had the idea after ...
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Sunday Times Rich List
26 April 2007
Inventor Sir James Dyson ranks number 59 in the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated fortune of £1.08bn, moving down 11 places from last year. Lord Foster, founder architect at Foster & Partners, appears as a new entry, ranked 249th, with £295m.
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Super size me
26 April 2007
Giant graphics, such as billboards and pavement-embedded messages so large you have to stand back to take them all in, cannot fail to impress through their sheer scale. Big writing in the public domain can only enhance our cityscapes
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The Campana brothers
26 April 2007
The Campana brothers will show a series of single- and multi-seat chairs, lamps, and 'illuminated meteors' made from various plastics and apuí, a traditional Brazilian fibre that is extracted by hand from the trees on which it grows and suffocates. The exhibition will explore the relationship between synthetic and natural materials. Transplastic opens to the public on 5 June at the Albion Gallery in south London and runs until 17 August.
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The Children's Society
26 April 2007
The Children's Society is set to launch sponsored walking event Footsteps for Childhood on 18 May, with a logo devised by Bulletproof Design. The charity works with more than 50 000 underprivileged children in the UK.
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The Lovebytes Festival
26 April 2007
The Lovebytes Festival of Digital Art in Sheffield is revealing furry monster idents for the 2007 event, designed by Universal Everything. Consultancy director Matt Pyke wanted to highlight the festival's theme of 'process' with a forward-thinking design, and came up with the idea of a population of 'unique, friendly furry faces that would appear across all festival literature', he says.
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There's no need to fear the democratisation of design
26 April 2007
Since calligraphers winced at the impact the printing press might have on their trade, generations of designers have been cowed by a technological development.In the early 1990s, the Apple Macintosh was perceived as a threat in most areas of design. Fears for traditional craft skills were aired regularly by folk who had yet to appreciate the amazing things they could achieve through emerging technology. Few had the foresight then to appreciate that great design is a combination ...
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Voxpop
26 April 2007
How significant is Imagination's decision to become the first design group to join advertising trade association the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising?It makes sense for Imagination to be a member of the IPA and benefit from its resources, because in several ...
