Derek’s Daily 45s

Derek See’s put together this collection of vintage 45 record company house sleeves over almost 30 years

BUG double bill

Jigsaw Falling Into Place, Radiohead, directed by Adam Buxton, produced by Garth Jennings
For music video fans,BUG, a bi-monthly event held at the BFI Southbank in London, has become a must-attend event. So much so that the show has a tendency to sell out long in advance, prompting the organisers to hold two nights in May, one on May 22 with regular host, Adam Buxton and another on May 27, with a special guest host, director Dougal Wilson. May 22 is already sold out but if you act fast you may be lucky enough to pick up some tickets for May 27. The event brings together the best of the latest music videos, alongside interviews with directors about their work.
CR talked to Adam Buxton about hosting the event and making his own videos, including a series of films for Radiohead’s New Year webcast, made in collaboration with director Garth Jennings.

Designs on Your Money

A few weeks ago, designer Matthew Dent’s latest project was unveiled. He’d won a competition where the winning entrant would get to see their design made up and eventually used by millions of people. Not bad going. But then Dent is lucky (and skilful) enough to have created the look of the UK’s new coinage, which is set to be put in circulation by the Royal Mint later in the year. The reverse of each coin will feature a section from the Royal Arms shield, which is then replicated in its entirety on the reverse of the £1 coin. The 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p coins can then be laid out to recreate the shield itself. Dent, 26, currently works at London studio Three Fish in a Tree having studied graphic design at the University of Brighton, and he talked to us about the design that lies behind this rather impressive project.

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…

1 … 1,343 1,344 1,345 1,346 1,347 1,348 1,349 1,350 1,351 … 1,408

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