The magic of magazines
As one of our featured designers, Nicolas Bourquin, puts it: “It’s a hard time for magazines, but a fabulous period for editorial design.” To stave off the threat posed by digitalization, it seems that everyone in the print industry is being motivated to push the boundaries of this discipline to unprecedented heights of creativity. We talk to half a dozen experts in editorial design who are not only managing to survive but producing publications that can stand comparison with any that have come before them – about why they do it and how they see the future of “hard copy”.

Featuring:
Very Elle by Non-Format / Domus by onlab / Plastique Magazine / Is Not Magazine / Wooden Toy Quarterly / Little White Lies magazine by The Church of London Design

Surrealist approach still valid for modern motion artists
For more than a century, Surrealism has played a major part in almost all the arts, including theatre and film. But those who love to unleash their subconscious have so much more technology to play with now than when Dali and Co. had only brushes and paint to rely on. Brazilian designer and director Denis Kamioka, who works mainly out of Brazil under the pseudonym “CISMA”, and London-based Italian film-maker Enrico Lambiase love to let it all hang loose and neither of them believes in being too literal about anything.

Featuring:
Cisma Studio / Enrico Lambiase

Prada art on parade
Major fashion labels are becoming increasingly involved with ambitious art projects these days. Following Chanel’s splendid “Mobile Art” last year, and Louis Vuitton’s “A Passion For Creation”, another high-end household name has joined the creative fray. Prada invited world-renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, Principal of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), to build a remarkable installation for its six-month fashion-art crossover event “Prada Transformer” in Seoul, Korea. It combines the four sides of a tetrahedron – a hexagon, a cross, a rectangle and a circle — into one pavilion. If you stand there long enough, you can literally feel the ground shift beneath you!

Featuring:
Prada

Off the Wall
Most designers name music as their main inspiration and the art that holds most appeal for them outside what they do for a living. So for many, designing gig posters for their favourite bands and musicians would be a dream job. And with concert tours proliferating as album sales slump, there is plenty of work to go round for those with the requisite talent and passion. We talk to five of the best in the business and publish examples of the poster art they are proudest of.

Featuring:
Mard Pakyderms / Ghost-Town Studio / Methane Studios / Vahalla Studios / Clint Wilson

Let there be light! Part II
Lighting is becoming, in itself, an increasingly popular medium for artistic presentation. Not only is it being combined with performance art as an integral part of the show, but more and more stand-alone lighting installations are being accepted as a valid means of self-expression. In the second part of our attempt to shed more light on this exciting development, we cast the spotlight on five more international practitioners of this very 21st-century addition to the creative canon.

Featuring:
Easyweb / Universal Everything / Moment Factory / Haque / The Studio

Type Casting
Starting from this issue, we will be carrying a regular typography column in the magazine. Versch Ontwerp, a design studio from the Netherlands, kicks off this series with an unconventional attitude to fonts – believing that they should always be fun to design and experimental in nature, whatever their ultimate function.

Featuring:
Versch Ontwerp

For more information, please visit: http://idnworld.com/mags/?id=v16n5

IdN 15th Anniversary Edition
What do you love?

Contents
We love the remarkable
We love motion graphics
We love up close and personal
We love thinking big
We love challenge

Overview:
The IdN 15th Anniversary Edition: What do you love? is our biggest-ever publication to-date! A massive 452-page hardcover packaged with higher resolutions DVD-9 production! Featuring specially commissioned work from 250+ of the highly talented creators who have collaborated with us over the last decade and a half — sharing their thoughts on the past; and their visions of the future.

We love the remarkable
250+ creatives from around world pick their most remarkable work to celebrate our 15 years of creative voyaging.

We love motion graphics
If it moves, grab it! A selection of exclusive titling, shorts and animations.

We love up close and personal
Ever fancied spending a day with one of your favourite designers? Now you can via these intimate visual diaries, filmed specifically for this publication.

We love thinking big
Get a glimpse of what our creative scene might be like 15 years from now by viewing these tailor-made works by some of the world's most visionary artists.

We love challenge
How many ways can you intepret the themes Black+White, Fifteen and Universe? See what our featured artists have come up with — we think you'll be amazed.

For more information, please visit: http://idnworld.com/15

IdN v16n4: Self Promotion Issue
Hello, my name is...

Give it your best shot!
There are few professions for which self-promotion is more important then that of graphic designers, for it is on the material that they produce to sell their own services that they will be judged. And if designers can’t design a decent piece of self-promotional materials, what hope do they have of convincing a potential client that they could do a good job for them? Our biggest-ever feature, presenting the self-referential work of 25 artists and their views on how best to introduce yourself to the world.

Featuring:
Ashleign Barron / De Barbaren / Because Studio / Cmod / Dead Voltage Design / Dudley Wild / Echolab / Michael Fryers / G-Man / Ryan Hurley / Jekyll and Hyde / Kokoro and Joujou / Hello Millo / Kenn Munk / Ethan Park / Ps.2 / Red Design UK Ltd. / Helene Ryenbakken / Scale to Fit / Selfbruning / Kamikace Studio / Tangent Graphic / Turnstyle / Undoboy / Mirko Zarkovic

Special effects finally come of age?
Hollywood’s latest hit The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has taken special effects to a new level of complexity and if you are underwhelmed, that is as it should be according to specialist studio Digital Domain’s Ed Ulbrich – for it means that the technical wizardry is so good that you don’t even notice it. He explains how a 155-strong team of artists enabled Brad Pitt to age backwards, from old man to baby, so convincingly.

Featuring:
Digital Domain

A heathly obsession with ornament
Is it merely a decorative accoutrement to mainstream design or a laudable artistic aim in itself? The following creators share a passion for ornamental design that impels them to make it their main focus. In this feature, they explain what it is about ornament that they find so compelling.

Featuring:
Marian Bentjes / Linn Olofsdotter / Mike Perry / ContainerPLUS / Yehrin Tong / Leonor Morais / Vault49 / By Vault49

Let there be light!
Half our lives were lived in darkness or candlelight until Thomas Edison invented the light-bulb 130 years ago. Now we can all enjoy round-the-clock activity, including extra time in which to be creative. Result? Lighting is no longer just a utilitarian boon, it can be turned into an art form in itself. See what these innovative theatre, concert and fashion-show designers, installation and holography artists, movie and motion-graphics directors and photographers have done with it.

Featuring:
Patrick Rochon / Stefan Mylleager / Robert Seidel / Jennifer Steinkamp / United Visual Artists

Chairmen of the boards
Some art is made to be framed while some, like graffiti, is destined to have a very temporary existence. So why does the ephemeral act of making a skateboard look good – by drawing or painting on it or covering it with stickers – in the sure knowledge that your creation will eventually be degraded or even destroyed make such an appeal to certain artists? The following leading exponents of the genre attempt to explain the attraction.

Featuring:
Jim Phillips / Bob Kronbauer / Andy Mueller / Dan Funderburg / Marc Nardelli / Marc McKee / Max Vogel (Raza Uno) / Kimou Meyer (Zoo York) / Craig Metzger / Curated by We Are Plus

Is Fez the future?
|Award-winning Montreal studio Polytron’s latest video game Fez may just have opened the door to tomorrow for the whole industry. Will this mixture of 2D and 3D game-play, Escher-like optical illusion and environmental design become the next hot trend in gaming?

Featuring:|
Jim Phillips / Bob Kronbauer / Andy Mueller / Dan Funderburg / Marc Nardelli / Marc McKee / Max Vogel (Raza Uno) / Kimou Meyer (Zoo York) / Craig Metzger / Curated by We Are Plus

For more information, please visit: http://idnworld.com/mags/?id=v16n4

IdN v16n3: Typography Issue
In their own words

Addicted to type

It is said that every designer is in love with typography – but some are more so than others. These 11 exponents of the art of the alphabet simply live for letters. See what the big attraction is, how it all started for them, what keeps them interested and where they aim to go from here. And take a sip of the tasty alphabet soup that is their work.

Featuring:
Stefan Brüggemann / Andrew Byrom / Keetra dean Dixon / Hey Ho / Axel Peemöller / Kay Rosen / Corriette Schoenaerts / Strange Attractors Design / Toko / Andrew Townsend / Post Typography

Israel, where living on the edge can be inspirational
There is a soft, creative side to this tiny country that dominates the news headlines for all the wrong reasons. The number of talented designers it produces is out of all proportion to its size, but many of them have to go abroad to gain recognition, Immigrants or emigrants, there is a big future ahead for this dynamic creative community.

Monument to a fashion maverick
Cyprus-born fashion designer Hussein Chalayan thinks that almost anything can be worn – and he has proved it with shows featuring ‘portable architecture’ (furniture that he turned into garments), a dress made of aircraft-manufacturing materials, which changed shape by remote control, one consisting of crystals and more than 15,000 LED lights, and another comprising 200 lasers. His idiosyncratic contribution to haute couture over the last 15 years is celebrated in an exhibition at the London Design Museum called ‘Chalayan: A Retrospective Of His Monumental Works – From Fashion and Back’.

Fashioning an ID
While a logo represents the public face of a brand, its identity is more a matter of the attitudes it stands for. And those with the most pronounced personality tend to be in the fashion biz – a fertile field for those designers who can rise to the challenge. Two who certainly can are UK-based Neighbour and New York’s Li, Inc. They tell us how to cut it in the crazy world of clothing.

Exercise in character-building
When the story-line has faded from memory, it is the characters that stick in our minds. That is the case with the output of these three highly animated animators – French-Swiss duo Ben & Julia, Australian director Ben West and South Korean collective Sticky Monster Lab. They all specialize in creating remarkably appealing characters, using very different approaches. And don’t miss our exclusive interviews with them in this issue’s DVD.

It’s a Mad, Mad world
If you were blown away by the visual style of Sin City, then Platinum Games’ latest addition to the world of gung-ho games, MadWorld, should be right up your alley.

For more information, please visit: http://idnworld.com/mags/?id=v16n3

 

Contents:
The joys of being hands-on
Animate this!
A different kind of ‘Ideal Homes’ exhibition
I want my MTV!
More a curatorial collective than an old-fashioned agency
Paper, Scissors, Garment
A hard rain’s a-gonna fall

---

Animate this!Nexus Productions / Studio akaWhatever happened to the old-fashioned kids’ cartoon story told in a simple but engaging style? Have we all become overwhelmed and exhausted by the wizardry of animation in the 21st century? And is the use of animation to appeal to adult audiences a contradiction in terms, or a simple case of attempting to expand the target market? Two London-based studios – Nexus Productions and Studio aka – tell us where they think today’s animation is headed.

 

 

---

Feature: The joys of being hands-on

Most of us started out, as kids, with a love of drawing – remember that feeling of excitement when the teacher or your mum placed a piece of pristine paper in front of you and a box of coloured crayons? Despite the incredible advances in digital technology, enabling even those who are incapable of drawing a straight line or a recognisable human figure to be “artists”, this is a sensation that has stayed with some who have gone on to become professional designers, but still love to draw by hand, even if they continue to use the computer for some aspects of their work. We talk to 10 of them about the attraction of being hands-on: Scott Barry / Jeffrey Bowman / Mike Harrison / Bernardo Henning “Maybe” / Good Wives & Warriors / Lily Lin / Mike Perry / Danny Sangra / Supermundane

Anna Taratiel aka OVNI

 

 

 

 

---

A different kind of “Ideal Homes” exhibitionThe Corderie in the Arsenale / Roma Interrotta and Uneternal City / Padiglione ItaliaAaron Betsky is the director of both the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Cincinnati Art Museum and he believes that “most buildings are ugly, useless and wasteful – yet architecture is beautiful”. Given the gap between what architects aspire to and how things actually are in the real world, he decided to turn the 11th Architecture Exhibition at last year’s Venice Biennale into an examination of the central issues militating against perfection, called Out There: Architecture Beyond Building. It presented installations, manifestos and Utopian visions from some of today’s leading practitioners, experimenting with forms that could renew the space we live in.

---

For more information, please visit: http://idnworld.com/mags
Email: info@idnworld.com