May 1968: A Graphic Uprising

“The police post themselves at the School of Fine Arts – the Fine Arts’ students poster
the streets.” An anonymous poster from the Paris student uprisings of May 1968
40 years ago next month, the streets of the French capital saw workers and students protesting against the increasing levels of unemployment and poverty that were all too apparent under Charles de Gaulle’s conservative government. As a reminder of the power of self-initiated protest, May 68: Street Posters from the Paris Rebellion, launches this Thursday at the Hayward Project Space in London and brings together a range of handmade posters that were used to convey the protestors’ grievances during the uprisings. Before the show opens, we talked to the exhibition’s organiser and curator, Johan Kugelberg, about how this vibrant and uncompromising graphic art came about and what it means today…

Dream Big

Isles of Scilly film part 1 for adidas ‘Dream Big’ campaign by 180 Amsterdam
As UEFA Euro 2008 rapidly approaches, the footie-related advertising cometh. This latest football fare comes from 180 Amsterdam for adidas, and consists of a series of films shown online based around the theme ‘Dream Big’. The films’ twist is that rather than concentrating on the big teams that are vying to win Euro 2008, they look instead at some of the world’s smallest teams, and stresses that they too can dream big, no matter how tiny they might be.

Central Station: 24 Hour Arty People

In design terms, what do we think of first when we think of Factory Records? Perhaps it’s the impact of Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film, 24 Hour Party People and, more recently, that of Anton Corbijn’s Control, that steers our thoughts towards Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, or that famously costly New Order sleeve for Blue Monday. Or the yellow and black striped columns in the Haçienda… But wait, there is another chapter to the Factory design story, one that often gets overlooked…

Nike 1/1 Art Prize

Nike 1/1 film, by AKQA. Creatives: Davor Krvavac, Greg Mullen, Nick Bailey
Art and football become unlikely bedfellows in a new competition launched by Nike, which offers the chance for artists to exhibit during the Basel Art Fair and design a limited edition series of Nike Dunks.

Spiritualized and Farrow: made for each other

Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce cut several minutes off his album Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space just so that the running time looked better typographically on the packaging. His partnership with designer Mark Farrow has produced some of the finest sleeve design of recent times. CR interviewed the pair of them on the eve of the release of Spiritualized’s new album

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The Strange Art of Misery Lit

Borders bookshop has a “Real Lives” section. Waterstones ups the ante with “Painful Lives”. Amazon’s catch-all is the more enigmatic “True Endurance and Survival”. But earlier this week I found myself in the “Tragic Life Stories” aisle of WHSmiths. After taking in that, yes, a whole section of shelving had actually been given over to this subject, it struck me that while each book pertained to be a traumatic tale of an individual, they were marketed in such a way as to look entirely the same. Unlike the covers within the nearby Crime section, where even the most conventional might feature a gun, a knife, or something vaguely noir-ish; within Tragic Life Stories there is, apparently, no need to differentiate details. Each one is a tragic tale; each one has the same cover: a child’s face and a scrawled, handwritten title.

A New Wave of New Wave

Sleeve for Sebastien Tellier’s album, Sexuality, artwork by Manu Cassu. Layout by Olivia Jourde
Here at CR towers we’ve recently received some record sleeve designs that transported us back to the early eighties…

Designing Dante

Cover of Dante’s Inferno by Nicole Peterson
Nicole Peterson, a recent graphic design graduate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, designed these book covers for Dante’s Divine Comedy. “I wanted to create a set of covers that didn’t use images from the [Hieronymus] Bosch Hell painting, or any images of Dante and Virgil that are normally found on covers for the Divine Comedy,” writes Peterson on her Flickr page. “I was inspired by Dante’s use of mathematics and architecture in describing Hell, Heaven and Purgatory [and] employed simple geometric shapes and color to represent these places, while still keeping the design simple and allowing the reader to use their imagination when reading these vivid poems.” Click through to see how the design was carried through to Purgatory and Paradise…

Blek le Rat: The New Banksy?

Ha – only joking. While Banksy is a relative newcomer to the graffiti scene, Blek le Rat has been stencilling, pasting and daubing his way around the world for nearly thirty years. But the perception of Banksy as the pioneer of street art is certainly the one favoured by the media and the art world. As a result, Banksy’s artistic reputation – no doubt helped by his anonymity – has been elevated to near mythical status. While Blek’s reputation, at least beyond the world of street art, is far less well known, a new book of his work looks certain to bring his art to a wider audience and throw up a few more questions on just how influential he’s been.

Designed to Help

Ever noticed that the packaging of headache remedies isn’t exactly easy on the eye? Ironic, really, that when you want something soothing to ail your pounding skull, the products available sit on the chemist’s shelf and SHOUT their MESSAGES OF URGENT HELP in bold, bright colours, seemingly without a care for your poor tired eyes and head. Now this (above), from Help Remedies, is a nice idea that turns down the volume on medicine packaging. Their packets of pills and plasters not only look great but are also made of 100% recycled paper pulp. And at $6 for 12 headache pills (or 8 plasters), that’s not much more than most of the more well-known brands, so these are no vanity purchase. Plus you’ll get to look just that little bit cooler when you’re ill.

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