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.

New Sony ad

Foam City, Sony ad, agency: Fallon London. Production company: HLA. Director: Simon Ratigan
Fallon in London has come over all foamy for its latest spot for Sony, directed by Simon Ratigan, which sees white bubbles released over a city, whose people seem remarkably happy to receive them.
With it’s slow-motion feel and sparse soundtrack, the ad has strong echoes of the Fallon’s earlier Balls spot for Sony Bravia, but this time without all the colour.

Obey George Orwell

Penguin Books has commissioned Shepard Fairey of Obey to create two new book covers – for two George Orwell classics: Animal Farm and 1984.

Corbis Readymech cameras

Peyote pinhole camera
For those of you who are fans of both old-fashioned camera techniques and origami, Corbis have created a website that might have just the thing for you.
The website has a number of camera designs that can be downloaded as pdfs and then printed off, with full instructions how to turn them into the workable pinhole cameras. Here is a selection of the designs, which were created by Fwis design studio especially for Corbis – we think they’re rather nice. Visit corbis.com/readycam to join in the fun.

An independent Eye

Last year Tony Chambers went from creative director to editor-in-chief at Wallpaper*, but now art director Simon Esterson’s gone one better and is the new co-proprietor of design magazine Eye, after a decision by Haymarket to release the magazine to its editor, John L Walters.
Eye will now be managed through new company Eye Magazine Ltd, established by Walters, Esterson and Hannah Tyson (business director at Esterson Associates and now managing director of Eye), and will be run out of offices adjacent to Esterson’s studio in Hoxton.

Jon Burgerman show at Concrete Hermit

If you thought the doodling of illustrator Jon Burgerman was just confined to two dimensions, then think again. His first series of multi-coloured sculptural pieces can be seen in a new exhibition at the Concrete Hermit Gallery in London. Pop Idle opened last week and follows on from Burgerman’s shows at the ROJO Artspaces in Barcelona and Milan.

The Aeron Chair: Office Design Icon

The Aeron chair – a triumph of empiricism over aestheticism? No design studio is complete without one: Daniel West traces its history

Alexander Scriabin: Multimedia Artist c.1910

Of the fourteen composers whose work was played out during Marina Frolova-Walker’s talk at the British Library last month, only one warranted the garish accompanying graphic to help describe his peculiar artistic condition. In A Revolution in Sound: Russian Avant-Garde Music of the 1910s and 1920s, Frolova-Walker described the work of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and played a section from his Prometheus Opus 60 (written in 1910). It began, as we heard, with a very mysterious chord; one that Scriabin could have no doubt described in some of the vivid colours featured on the keyboard above. Having a form of synaesthesia, what Scriabin wrote in sound, he saw in colour. It was this that drove him to try and create what would have been one of the most adventurous multimedia experiences ever performed…

Design Conferences: Isn’t it time we demanded more? asks Rick Poynor

For anyone who loves going to design conferences, we live in remarkable times. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of them. A design conference always seems to be just starting or finishing somewhere in the world. It would be quite possible to make going to conferences into a full-time job and some of the more in-demand and tireless design conference speakers appear to be doing just that. When do they get their real work done, you might wonder? The answer is that they do a lot of their thinking in transit, at 30,000 feet, or in the away-from-it-all, vacation atmosphere of distant hotel rooms paid for by conference organisers who are thrilled they are willing to appear.

Up Above The Streets And Houses

Artist and illustrator Jonathan Farr spent much of last year perched on various balconies and fire escapes at some of London’s landmark buildings – in order to draw city scenes using various implements from dipping ink pens to charcoals and acrylic paint…

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