graphic design magazine—Vol ume #1 2011— £12 . 50
#189—featuring Non-Format / Church of London / James Goggin / Visual Editions / Tony Forster / David Pearson / Universal Everything / Manual / Amelia Noble / Tom Muller / Anthony Burrill / Mind Design and Magnus Voll Mathiassen in Profile / plus Publishing is Dead, Long Live Publishing
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G189—Editors’ Letter
Welcome to the second issue of your new-look Grafik. We’ve been quite overwhelmed with the positive response to our launch issue and the many messages of support—it’s really nice to know that there’s still a Grafik-shaped hole out there waiting to be filled every two months. Feedback is always a good thing and Grafik readers are not backwards in coming forwards. A few years ago, working in publishing often felt like you were working in a bit of a vacuum—you just put a magazine out every month and hoped for the best. You might receive the occasional snooty letter, but it would have to be about something really bad. Of course, these days there are so many different and comparatively effortless ways to make your opinions about something heard without having to visit the postbox. It does make you reminisce for those happy days, pre-email, forums, Twitter and Facebook, when things were discussed over a few drinks at the pub rather than online. It seemed a much healthier way (in the philosophical sense at least) to carry on. That brings us nicely to this issue’s Live Brief, which was set by tutors Andrew Howard and Susanna Edwards of ESAD in Porto, Portugal. The brief was centred on the idea of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, which also happens to be the title of the latest book by the philosopher Alain de Botton, who has provided his own critique of the five chosen students’ work. If you are a tutor and are interested in your students taking part in one of our Live Briefs, please drop us a line at h e l l o @ g r a f i k m a g . c o m . This issue’s special feature is all about a subject that’s very close to our hearts. With opinions from a whole host of industry experts and enthusiasts, Publishing Is Dead. Long Live Publishing looks at some of the defining moments in publishing, talks to a new breed of publisher, the force of nature that is the Church of London and, for those who still love the smell of ink on paper in the morning, we give you—without having a personal fortune or making a pact with the Devil—eight different ways to get into print. This month’s Profiles are the very talented Mind Design and Magnus Voll Mathiassen, and there are features on Paris’s new digital hub La Gaîté Lyrique and the ACC’s Design Series, as well as Non-Format’s seminal work for The Wire in Future Classics. As well as the usual Letterform, Logoform and Pictoform, we have a very special graphic design hero, chosen by Trevor Johnson. Tony Forster might not be a name that’s familiar to many people, but his influence has spread way beyond the amazing body of typographic work that he left behind. Incredibly talented but extremely modest, he made a huge impact on everyone he taught and worked with. Another hugely influential designer that’s in town this month is Mr Gridnik himself: Wim Crouwel. The more eagle-eyed among you might have spotted that Grafik’s new HQ is part of the Woodbridge & Rees Gallery, and we are very excited about our forthcoming exhibition showing some of the best and rarest Crouwel posters from the Nijhof & Lee collection. The show opens on 2 April and is in two parts (showcasing first his early work and then his work for the Stedelijk Museum), and all of the posters will be for sale. It’s time to raid those piggy banks—it’s a rare chance to purchase your very own piece of graphic design history. Caroline Roberts and Angharad Lewis Co-Editors
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G189—Contents
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aleidoscope K Essential new stuff to do, see, buy, visit and add to your diary
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eitgeist Z The spirit of the moment – this month Cut and Paste frenzy
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etterform L The woodcut initials of Christophe Plantin by Amelia Noble ictoform P The Biohazard sign by Tom Muller
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alent T The most inspiring upcoming designers, illustrators and photographers
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Live Brief Andrew Howard and Susanna Edwards brief the Year One Communication students on the MA Communication Design the Escola Superior de Artes e Design in Portugal
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Six Books Essential design reading
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iewpoint V Are all designers control freaks?
Feature Series Link The ACC’s Diminutive Design Series
Feature French Revolution The Gaîté Lyrique opens its doors Profile Mind Design
ont Book F Our regular round-up of what’s new in typeface design
Graphic Design Heroes The late, great Tony Forster Future Classics The Wire by Non-Format pecial Feature S Publishing is Dead. Long Live Publishing.
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Illustration Profile Magnus Voll Mathiassen
Feature GraphicDesign& An intriguing new project by Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright
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Talking Shop Do You Read Me?!, Berlin esign Industry People D Introducing Mr John Haslam of GFSmith and Ms Olivia Triggs of Breed
Feature Opportunity Knocks We catch up with James Goggin
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over Shot C Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back By Tom Crabtree
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Logoform Mind by Marc&Anna
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G188—Zeitgeist This issue we bring you the weird world of Cut & Paste
This page, clockwise from top left— Clarke Curtis, Haute Helping Hands, 2009 –10; Gordon Magnin, untitled, 2009; Gordon Magnin, Partyface, 2011; Gordon Magnin, Hirst, 2008; Oliver Wiegner, Ice Cream for Free, 2011; Gordon Magnin, untitled, 2011
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Feature
This page, clockwise from top left— John Stezaker, Pair IV, Private Collection, 2007; Ma + Chr, interior of Xème Bar, Paris, 2010; Ma + Chr, Chat Sans Nom 4, 2010; Stephen Eichhorn, Redeyes, 2010; Philippe Jusforges, Série Rose, 2008; Philippe Jusforges, Série Noire, 2008; Julien Pacaud, When You Sleep, 2010
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G189—Profile
portrait by Ivan jones
ivan-jones.co.uk
From Tom Dixon to a Hula-Hoop performer, this studio comprising an Irishman, an Anglo-Egyptian and a German does work for a giddying range of clients. Robert Urquhart visited Mind Design and found a hard-working, have-a-go team nurturing a touch of eccentricity.
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Mind Design in their studio in East London. Left to right: Claire Huss, Craig Sinnamon and Holger Jacobs.
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G189—Graphic Design Heroes Tony Forster by Trevor Johnson
In this instalment of Graphic Design Heroes, Trevor Johnson remembers one of the lettering world’s most colourful and best-loved protagonists. As well as leaving an amazing body of work that has made stood the test of time, a big impression on everyone who came across him. Here Trevor and a few of Tony Forster’s friends and admirers remember the man and his letters.
When I was asked to write about my own personal graphic design hero, Tony Forster was an obvious choice. People don’t really associate contemporary graphics with Manchester pre-Factory Records—it’s naturally assumed that the North of England’s reputation was established by the high-profile Factory designers and their peers. This amazing body of work was started in the 1970s, when Manchester really didn’t do things like this. And it wasn’t from a ‘superstar designer’, but from a normal, humble, approachable and very funny man. I started work as an apprentice commercial artist
in 1974 (some years before I started working with Factory) and it was some time after that when I first came across Tony Forster’s work, probably through some work colleagues who either knew him or were taught by him. As soon as I first saw Tony’s work, I was captivated by both its brilliance and its consistency across such a diverse range of styles. We regularly describe type as ‘nice’ or sometimes ‘clever’, but it’s not often that lettering can be described as ‘voluptuous’. Put simply, Tony created some staggeringly beautiful work. Thirty years on and I still get just as excited when I look at this work. The
youngest members of my studio team are just as enthusiastic as I was when I first saw it—so I know from their reaction that it is still very relevant today. I really wanted Tony’s work to be seen by a new generation. It’s important to remember that all of this work is hand-rendered. There are no system tricks, just paper and a pen. Tony was from a generation that didn’t use computers, and didn’t need or want one—his email was soddincomputers@ yahoo.co.uk. The detailing in some of the calligraphic pieces he did is extraordinary, and there are so many outstanding examples of crafted type.
I think my personal favourite is still the clever simplicity of the 1973 Leigh Arts Festival design, which was one of the first pieces of work of his I ever came across. It’s a cliché to say you have to know the rules to break them, but he threw the rulebook out of the window. I admire designers who operate without fear and make contradictions work without you even noticing. The ‘7’ and the ‘3’ in this really shouldn’t go together, for instance. And then to effortlessly make it into a 3D effect is just stunning. After he died I was lucky enough to have been given one of the original Festival posters from his studio by his son Daniel.
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Tony Forster (1941–2008) Tony Forster was born in 1941 in Warrington, Lancashire. He didn’t have any formal design education, but started work at sixteen as a junior designer at Artel Studios in Manchester. He had a long association with Keith Murgatroyd, forming FC & M Design Partnership with him and Wendy Conibear in 1976 and becoming a director of Royle/Murgatroyd Design Associates in 1980. He went on to work as creative director at Drawing Board in Manchester until 1995, and was also very committed to education and taught at many colleges including Bolton (where he taught for many years), Newcastle, Doncaster and Stockport. In 1997 he reformed his design practice, working from a studio in his house in Tyldesley, Manchester.
This page— Tony Forster in 1978, wearing a Royle/Murgatroyd Design Associates shirt; Tony Forster TF logo; Cat Whiskers—selfpromotional ornamentation (sent to people Forster thought were “the cat’s whiskers”)
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G189—Special Feature
Church of London: ”We didn’t plan to be publishers, to form a company, to do other things. We just wanted to make a magazine.”
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On the day I visit Church of London at their crowded studio off Rivington Street in East London, the twenty-orso-strong team is about to hit four simultaneous deadlines: for their two in-house magazines Little White Lies (a film magazine unlike any other) and Huck (a board-sports lifestyle magazine), and for two contract magazines they produce. One of the latter is POC, for a Swedish sports protection gear company (making helmets, gloves, goggles etc), and the other is the first issue of an ultra-highend publication for a global company we all know and use every day. There is secrecy surrounding the latter, and the job is quite a coup for Church of London—the team never imagined, when they started out publishing Little White Lies six years ago, that they would land such a massive project as this. But more of that later… Today I’m here to find out what makes Church of London tick—what is the secret of success for an independent magazine publisher in today’s risky climate? This small venture is growing in size, success and reputation. Its in-house magazines are well respected and, on the back of this status, Church of London has picked up not only contract-publishing clients but also design and branding work and a name for organising kick-ass events and parties.
Chapter one begins with two schoolboys in Chester who are obsessed by film. Danny Miller (now Church of London’s managing director) and Matt Bochenski (editorial director) kept their moviecentred friendship alive when they went their separate ways after school, Bochenski studying Classics at Queens’ College, Cambridge and Miller studying graphic design at the University of Northumbria—where he met Rob Longworth, who would become Church of London’s creative director. All three soon found themselves working together on erstwhile surf, skate and snow magazine Adrenalin. Here they met Paul Willoughby, the fourth plinth, who today is Little White Lies’ creative director, responsible for the magazine’s series of distinctive illustrated covers. When Adrenalin magazine folded in 2005, the team saw an opportunity to keep the publication alive by changing its name and taking their loyal readership and advertisers with them. By now they had already started publishing film magazine Little White Lies as a side project, off the back of a nascent issue that Miller had made for his degree show. Both Huck (which now has a print run of over 45,000 and is published in four languages) and Little White Lies (a more UK-centric title, with a print run of about 17,000) are rooted in the team’s passion for their subjects. “The heart of our publishing business is our own magazines,” says Longworth.
“They say what we want them to say and they look how we want them to look. It’s the best shop window any agency could have and all the rest of the stuff has happened from that.” “We weren’t being super-smart,” Miller adds, recalling the company’s growth, “We didn’t plan to be publishers, to form a company, to do other things. We just wanted to make a magazine. We wanted to make Little White Lies, then we wanted to make Huck, and then other things happened around it and it gathered its own momentum.” Despite Miller’s ‘it all just happened’ brand of modesty, it is no coincidence that Little White Lies has proved such a successful springboard for Church of London. It is a magazine built on the strong foundations of a meticulously well-thought-out structure, a sharp editorial philosophy and the priceless shared vision of its founders. Bochenski is lyrical about the latter: “The thing I remember that really changed stuff was just after Dan had finished his final year at university and made this very early version of Little White Lies. We went to America for five weeks, travelling around. I had this moment of clarity—everything we saw and talked about was in relation to film. We’d be standing at the Grand Canyon, not thinking how amazing it was but how much it reminded us of Thelma and Louise.
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This page— Self portrait, 2011 Opposite page— Detail from MVM illustration on inlay for The Island by Lars Myrvoll, Safe As Milk Records, 2009.
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G189—Illustration Profile
After a meteoric rise to fame as one part of Norwegian trio Grandpeople, Magnus Voll Mathiassen went solo to form The MVM. Anna Lisa Reynolds caught up with the reclusive illustrator as he emerged from a year of self-imposed isolation from design, and discovered a man with a lot on his mind.
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Fontbook
Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman 1— Frank
There is a positive side and a negative side, at each moment you decide 2—p22 casual script pro
Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed 3—Founders Grotesk Condensed
Maybe we are less than our dreams, but that less would make us more than some Gods would dream of 4—Eames Century Modern 100
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Not all of us are painters but we are all artists
Autumn Leaves, 6—We love nature
5—Capucine
A Painting is a Symbol for the Universe. Inside it,
Each Piece Relates to the Other 7—Expletive Script slanted
Love the moment and the energy of the moment will spread beyond all boundaries All quotes are by Sister Corita, everyone's favourite screenprinting Nun. Find out more about this amazing woman at c o r i t a . o r g , or through the excellent Four Corners book Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita by Julie Ault, available from fourcornersbooks.co.uk
4—Ano Black
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