Hello, and welcome to this week’s Design Diary, a collection of five projects from across the world that have impressed us this week.
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Finally, design and sugar together at last. Here’s a sweet, sweet project from Nathan Stock, founder of the agency {fn NODE} and formerly a designer at VSA Partners in Chicago and AdamsMorioka in Beverly Hills. He’s taken it upon himself to unite his favorite paper and his favorite candy, pairing them and photographing them, then posting one photo a day for 12 days on his Instagram.
“It’s a bit tongue in cheek, especially since a few of them just look like white paper,” says Stock. “And even though I love these candies, many are weird cult ones that a lot of people hate. I’m obviously a nerd for both paper and candy, and the idea just popped in my head when I woke up one morning a few months ago.
“It’s a fun way for students especially to take more interest in paper, and the candy aspect allows this to even reach non-designers too.”
Over to Somerville, Massachusetts, now, where the noncommercial gallery Katherine Small is currently showing its inaugural exhibit, Ivan Chermayeff: Mostly Early Covers. As the name suggests, the show celebrates the early book covers of AIGA Medalist Chermayeff from the legendary firm Chermayeff and Geismar. While these designs appear in many monographs and have been selected in numerous AIGA competitions, they rarely get the attention that Chermayeff’s logo and branding projects do.
“Chermayeff’s best covers share qualities with his celebrated logos, posters, advertisements, and collages: they’re charming, clever, witty, and fun,” says the gallery. “Displayed alongside his firm’s intimately familiar logos for Mobil, Showtime, MoMA, and Chase, they tend to get lost. We’re inclined to notice and remember what we already know, and miss what’s less familiar to us: when in a crowd we seek out faces we recognize, the rest we barely register.”
The show features 41 such designs alongside a handful of Chermayeff’s logos for Boston institutions (MBTA, WGBH, the New England Aquarium) as well as designs for national and international companies, presented for context. It runs until August 4th.
Studio.Build, a creative agency based in Leeds, northern England, has worked with Nike’s brand team to create an updated look and feel to its 2018 Track and Field line, and we’re really digging that bold blue and monochrome palette. The project follows on from the original system created by the same team in 2016, which “took its graphic cue from the visual language of the track itself,” Build explains. Track line markings are used as a dynamic element within the system, paired with a strong typographic approach. The designs are to be used across ads, banners, apparel, and event collateral.
Studio.Build worked with Nike art director Rebecca Parker on the new work, which further explores the “authentic language of the track.” Michael C Place, creative director of Studio.Build, adds: “All of the compositions are created in a grid format. By creating these in a strict grid, the spirit and precision of Track and Field is accurately represented. This new element can be used to create compositions in its more complex form, a simplified form, or just used as a single graphic.
“It was really interesting and challenging to make something as simple as the acceleration graphic (which is essentially just a triangle) to not only convey speed and dynamism, but also to build a graphic system that can be used for all manner of applications without looking tired.”
Tallinn, Estonia-born installation artist Katja Novitskova has a superbly eerie and unsettling new show at east London’s Whitechapel Gallery entitled Invasion Curves. As with much of Novitskova’s oeuvre, the piece examines issues surrounding technology, evolutionary processes, and ecological realities. Invasion Curves is a particularly prescient piece, examining the circulation and constant re-contextualization of images.
The piece uses elements reconfigured from her piece at the Estonian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, taking sculptural cut-outs depicting figures alongside projections and mobile-like interventions. Imagery within the piece is captured from scanners, cameras, and satellites or created by image-processing algorithms.
“The work imagines a landscape overcome by a ‘biotic crisis’ ecologically impacted by humans, where imaging and technology are used in a process of mapping the exploitation of life,” says the gallery.
It adds: “Growth curves, derived from corporate culture, echoed in the forms of the worms and cables, offer a wry comment on humanity’s drive towards advancement in the name of profit.
“Throughout, the human body is eerily absent from the installation, replaced by stand-ins who attempt to lull the viewer into a false sense of security in the hands of technology.”
The show runs until September 2nd at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Maximilian Mauracher, who we’ve previously admired for his marvelous use of monochrome, has designed the sixth issue of New York and Berlin-based magazine Still. True to form, it’s a slick, black and white confection, with a striking cover that celebrates the printed form. The use of type is beautiful, delineating the mixture of writing styles across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and translations, which appear alongside fine art photography. Art direction for the mag is taken care of by Alexander Fuchs, with a cover image by Louis De Belle.
