One Plus One Equals Three

The Alphabet: Popped-up (& More)

Marion Bataille’s beautiful (and nicely engineered) pop-up book ABC3D. Thanks David Thompson. Oh-so-clever – and out in October.

Interpreting Treasured 'Trash'

Review
Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance
by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes
Princeton Architectural Press, 2007

When I first picked up this book and read the blurb on the rear cover I thought, well that sounds interesting - not! But upon reading Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance I find that it's a quietly amusing and interesting rumination on the personal power invested in objects, things and 'stuff'.

The relationships that people from the 'creative industries' have with everyday, mundane, found and recovered objects are uncovered and described in this appealling, 'confessional' and intriguing recent book by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes. As the saying goes: one man's trash is another's treasure – and there's certainly some treasured trash here.

Some of the weird and wonderful objects discussed include: a burnt bagel cooked (badly) by actor Christopher Walken; a pair of ceramic whippets; a loaf of bread from WW1; an industrial sized hairdo machine and a simple dashboard knob (and there's 70 more objects with their 'meanings' explained as well).

All too often within our commodity-based culture we are told of the importance of great, significant and desirable objects (that are often designed by design notables). Here the objects are anonymous and quite forgettable (a frozen tail of a turtle?) but they're imbued with meaning by their owners – not via our media, our culture nor 'important voices'. 

The best stories in Taking Things Seriously are wonderfully goofy yet simultaneously insightful, perhaps even poignant. A delightful 'summer book' (and a whole lot more interesting than I thought it would be).

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Keep your eye on Design Observer – they have been publishing occasional excerpts.

(And a big 'hi' to ex-Melbourne artist Maria Kozic, whose deep and meaningful relationship with a mangled 'green man' pencil eraser is described in the book).

Oz 2

This blog recently posted a piece on Oz magazine. Here are all the covers of the infamous and decidedly counter-cultural Oz. (It's a 65MB PDF to download – but worth it). Make a coffee, come back and read your download (relive the 60s/imagine the 60s depending on your age and haircut).

Brrrrr!

It does get cold in Europe. This is the redesign of The German IT magazine PC Professionell. It appears to have gone from one extreme to another. Readers of the magazine, relax. Summer will soon be in the northern hemisphere. You're going to need it. Lovely type, crisp layouts (in red and grey) with elegant, purposeful grids – but brrrrr. Brrrrr!

This is merely a superficial critique of the magazine via what I've seen on a couple of sites. This design approach may have been extensively user/reader tested, trialled via prototyping and has probably gone through a profoundly rigorous design process. It was also designed by a highly-regarded studio in red and grey (or did I mention that already). But brrrrr!

Oddest Book Titles of the Year

The six book titles nominated for the The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year are:

1. How Green Were the Nazis?
2. D. Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans
3. The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification 
4. Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan
5. Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium
6. Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence

Vote online. I had to go for the seaweed.

"The prize, founded in 1978, honours books from the fringes of publishing. The titles are found and submitted by publishers, booksellers and librarians from around the world. Last year's winner was People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It by Gary Leon Hill (Red Wheel)."

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead: Oz Magazine

Oz magazine bounded out of Sydney in the early sixties, turned up in London, helped define the counter-cultural 'underground press' movement, became the subject of two infamous obscenity trials (one being one of the longest in British legal history) and generally created a furore wherever it went. Oz was edited by Richard Neville, artist Martin Sharp and Richard Walsh (with others later) and featured contributions from Germaine Greer, Philipe Mora, Michael Leunig and Robert Hughes. Oz is now (becoming) available online. And what a visual treat and mind-boggling time capsule it is.

Graphically, Oz truly packed a KO-punch. Clicking through the Oz site reveals a plethora of wild ideas, some wild design and artwork and an outrageous mix of mind-altering commentary and image-making. The 'Oz-zies' exuberantly thumbed their noses at convention and the established norms of the day and all of their work was channelled to the public via some striking, iconoclastic publication design.

Oz, back then, was a wild, wild ride. (But wait, there's more).

Penguined

Some Penguin Books links:

+ A Flickr photoset of classic Penguin covers. Via SwissMiss.
+ An obsession with Penguin Modern Classic covers. Via Coudal.
+ Eye magazine's review of Phil Baines' recent book on Penguin covers.
+ More from Eye: Rick Poynor on Penguin Crime.
+ Penguin at the Design Museum (UK).
+ Old news but interesting nonetheless: comic artists do Penguin Modern Classic covers (and here's a couple more too).

Skull, Blood, Menstrual Cycle?

3 quick posts on some body-related topics:

Skull
Was driving along La Trobe Street on Saturday night when looming up out of the darkness was a gigantic human skull. It's the latest public artwork on Nonda Katsalidis' Republic Tower and it certainly gets one's attention. The 4-storey(?) high skull by German artist Mariele Neudecker is entitled Ambassador. Read more at The Age.

Blood
The Bonded by Blood limited edition poster made by Adidas for the All Blacks (the New Zealand rugby union team) features the team doing a traditional Maori Haka and the poster has been printed using traces of the players' blood!

The Haka, the All Blacks and the whole mystical Maori atmosphere that surrounds this sporting team seems to endow them with an almost supernatural quality. Plus they only ever wear black. Undoubtedly one of the most feared sporting teams around. Read more. Via the new CR-Blog, from the UK's Creative Review.

Menstrual cycle
The new Four Weeks Magazine is synchronized to the monthly menstrual cycle of women. There's even a Hormone Horoscope that 'forecasts' what lies ahead for you according to the ebb and flow of oestrogen, testosterone and progesterone in your body (if you're a woman that is). Via UnBeige.

Faith in I.D.

This post is blatantly promotional. ID (The International Design Magazine), which, no doubt, many designers will be familiar with, especially those of you in the US, is very often a most interesting read. I look forward to its arrival every month. The current thematically-based issue is quite exceptional and there's a mountain of insightful writing and commentary about design's interface with religion and 'faith' from around the world. And it's a very open, liberal and appealling exploration of the 'intertwingledness' of religion, myth, evolution and design amongst various cultures. A great issue—there's some wonderful content here (even for an avowed non-religious person such as myself).

Australians should note that a somewhat second-rate evolutionary theorist, around when Darwin was formulating his theory of evolution, postulated that a possible evolutionary sequence involved amoeba evolving to shark to dinosaur to platypus to kangaroo (looks like a big Red to me) to monkeys to man. He was of course completely wrong (or was he?)—but it's a nice idea that could be entertained by many Australians.

Drawing from Life: The Journal As Art

by Jennifer New 
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.

I never used to keep journals. As a student I was never a great drawer in the classical, figurative, realistic sense of drawing and thought 'why bother?'. I usually got good marks for my design projects, but my life drawings always drew snickers and snippets of muffled laughter from other students as we would wander around the drawing studio admiring our drawing efforts after class. My life drawings were vaguely anthropomorphic and somewhat reminiscent of the human form but the subtle sweeps of line and texture that help make a good drawing always seemed to elude me. My drawings always looked like thick stick figures with sinewy flesh embellishments. Or as a classmate put it: sticks'n tits or sticks'n dicks.

I now do keep journals, but they're not really what you would call drawing-based. They're more an amalgam of 'stuff': doodles, notes, scribbles, phone numbers, addresses, urls, photocopies and bits and pieces gathered from here and there. I find I often refer to them at the start of a new project, to get the creative 'juices' flowing. If there was ever a fire at my studio, they may not be the first thing I grab, but I would run the risk of singeing my rear-end to make sure they didn't go up in smoke.