Table of contents for July 2018 in Computer Arts

When we began brainstorming our cover, we knew that Emily Gosling’s feature on book design (p62) would include practical insights into the processes behind their creation – golden rules of grids, templates, typographical hierarchies and what goes on behind the cover for it to work. With this is in mind, we thought it would be fun to have a blank book printed on our magazine cover, with a second, clear acetate cover sheet that could be lifted back and forth to show the grids, rules and coverlines, emphasising the process. However, once Emily’s copy arrived, along with a wealth of beautiful images, we decided to change strategy. It suddenly seemed criminal to feature so many gorgeous books inside the magazine but not on the cover itself. Sara De Bondt’s startlingly…

JULIA SAGAR E-COMS EDITOR, CREATIVE BLOQ Last month was the first time in almost 10 years that Julia didn’t attend OFFF Barcelona. Sad times, indeed, but she did build a patio just in time for summer, so every cloud… TOM MAY FREELANCE WRITER Tom visited Leipzig along with 20,000 goths; went to see gigs by Phill Jupitus and The Rutles; and attended Pixel Pioneers, a web design conference in Bristol, where he saw a drone lose a fight with a seagull. NICK CARSON FREELANCE WRITER Having written this month’s feature on the secrets of diversifying skills to make more money, Nick flew off to Canada for a month’s trek in the Rockies. An effective feature if ever we’ve seen one.…

Calling herself “a brightly-coloured illustrator and designer from just outside Oxford in the UK”, Sam Osborne has turned her home studio into a busy creative hub, where she tackles projects such as branding and brochures, illustration and surface pattern design. She describes her work as “a mixture of pure vector, digital art drawn on my iPad and getting messy with paint markers!” Osborne uses Instagram to collate and curate images that pique her interest. “I take thousands of photos of random things that I find inspiring, from plants and trees to buildings and sunsets! If I’ve got images that don’t fit on my grid, I’ll often add them to my Instagram stories, which I use more like a daily journal.” Instagram is also a way for Osborne to network with…

BEN O’BRIEN Illustrator www.bentheillustrator.com “Working alone in my studio, I listen to a lot of podcasts: they’re perfect company. Some of my favourites, including Arrest All Mimics and Andy J Pizza’s Creative Pep Talk, have become hugely popular and rightly so. Another one I love is North V South with Rob Turpin and Jonathan Elliman. It’s very relaxed. They’ll cover design, illustration and tech, but they’ll also stray into other areas, and always come back to the most important topic… pies. (Full disclosure: I’m going to be a guest on this show soon). Another podcast that takes a slightly different angle is Michelle Kondrich’s Creative Playdate, which focuses on creative professionals working on the hardest job of all: parenting.” SAVANNA RAWSON Art director, designer and illustrator www.savannarawson.co.uk “I’m a creative…

1 FIND INDIRECT BENEFITS “I’ve had to explain to folks over and over again that you don’t make lots of money on the creative conference circuit, but it does amazing things for your career, solidifying you as an expert,” insists Jessica Hische. “The amount I make public speaking comes nowhere close to what I can make doing commercial lettering and design projects, but it’s through that kind of design leadership that I’m able to demand higher budgets, and get higher-profile clients.” 2 BE PATIENT “Stick with it,” advises Armin Vit, based on the gradual growth of Brand New over several years. “Sometimes I get frustrated when something we make or launch isn’t an instant hit, but if you stick with something and see it through then great things can happen.”…

For those who’ve never designed a book, there’s only one way to start: design one. Learning on the job is invaluable: that personal project might land you your first professional one. Early in his career, Mauracher built up an impressive portfolio through founding his own small publishing house, Pool Publishing, and collaborating with illustrators and photographers he already knew. “I got a lot of requests to do artist books or exhibition catalogues – it totally paid off to start that side project,” he says. “Just do it.” Conrad agrees: “In terms of making art books, bump up your portfolio by collaborating with as many other creatives as you find. Make a book or a zine for your photographer friend, talk your artist friend into doing a catalogue for their next…

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE This discipline has definitely made me better at making things. It takes a lot of trial and error to find the techniques that work for you, so be patient and persevere. IT’S GOOD TO TALK Communication is incredibly important, so make sure you understand the brief fully and the deadline. Never assume anything – if you’re not sure about something give the client a call and ask. VALUE YOURSELF I’ve always been bad at this but it’s important to remember that the client has commissioned you for your unique skills, experience and individuality… which is definitely worth paying for!…

We all want to be paid fairly for the work we do, and no one should work for free – unless there’s an exceptionally good reason for it. So it may seem counter-intuitive to discover all the leading creatives we spoke to for our feature on diversifying skills to earn extra income were initially a little nonplussed to talk about the top earning creative avenues outside of their main work. It’s not that they hadn’t all successfully carved out an additional earner. It’s that their primary aim for doing so – whether selling merch, entering book publishing, or starting online teaching – was the love of it. If money followed, that was a bonus. It’s an approach that also crops up in our interview with Timothy Goodman, as the muralist…

Sustainability has previously focused on reducing consumption, but the growing acknowledgement that the hunger for ‘new’ is far from satiated is causing a shift in the way that designers conceive high-volume, low-cost items. Innovations include designs with built-in easy end-of-life recycling, in addition to products that are created to serve a function, then harmlessly disappear. "We make perishableness valuable," says Vlasta Kubušová and Miroslav Král, the duo behind Crafting Plastics! Studio, a Berlin and Bratislava-based studio that works with plant-based bioplastics. The studio aims to keep full control of each product’s lifespan, from its origin as unrefined material, through its useful life, until it finally decays, thus taking responsibility not only for the design and function that any designer would consider, but also for decommissioning or disposal. Collection 1 is…

Designer and music collector Yevgeniy Anfalov conceived and designed Rotary in its entirety, creating a comprehensive look at the Cologne’s WDR music studio (Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio/Studio für elektronische Musik des Westdeutschen Rundfunks), where one of the most important avantgarde composers of 20th century, Karlheinz Stockhausen, worked. The book was partly informed by Anfalov’s research project into Swiss advertising agency GGK, founded in 1958 by Karl Gerstner, Paul Gredinger and Markus Kutter in Basel. “For a while, Gredinger was working with Stockhausen at the studio for electronic music,” Anfalov explains. “In my opinion, their serial and sine-tone music shared similar intellectual basis with the rulebased art of Gerstner or Vasarely.” His main challenge was in communicating the WDR story in an accessible way, while still…

INTRODUCTION Nicola Strada My journey in the 3D world started a couple of years ago when my brother told me to try ZBrush. Since then I’ve got to know amazing people and talented artists to learn from and to collaborate with. I’ve always been passionate about drawing and wanted to be able to bring an idea to life. This passion led me to become a 3D artist, turning ideas and illustrations into captivating 3D models REFERENCE The first thing I do is to search for references to build a 3D model, or I draw one myself. I was lucky to collaborate with the amazing French artist Marylou Faure for this piece. Marylou wanted to see how her illustrations would look in 3D and I was looking for an opportunity to…

THE BEGINNINGS Nancy Liang I come from a very traditional art background, so from a young age I was trained in drawing and painting. My mentor, Qi Wei Chen, often immersed me in the expressive Australian styles of artists like David Fairbairn, Ben Quilty and Fred Williams. Art created with the hand was the only thing I believed in, and I held on to this belief when I started my design degree at university. I had trouble with the digital programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, but with persistence I’ve learned a few things! There are still things the handmade can do that the digital can’t, but this goes both ways. As my university tutor once said: “The hand can capture the heart, but the digital can accentuate it”. THE TECHNIQUE…

DONNA WEST Over on page 22, creative director at Interbrand London, Donna West, examines how today’s increasingly fluid gender identities are affecting design and how it can be even more diverse. www.interbrand.com RADIM MALINIC We managed to pry Radim Malinic away from his award-winning, keynote-speaking design activities to produce artwork for our feature on page 38, ably aided in the task by Tamás Árpádi. www.brandnu.co.uk TIMOTHY GOODMAN Illustrator and muralist Timothy Goodman talks to us about tackling the personal in art, getting political with projects, and exactly what he has against white space. It all starts on page 52. www.tgoodman.com MARK STRINGER Mark is the managing director of web design and brand agency Ahoy, and on page 82 he takes us behind the scenes of creating the rebrand project for…

OFFF Barcelona www.offf.barcelona ‘Design nomads’ was the name of the game at OFFF Barcelona, an event which has done its fair share of travelling over the last 12 months. The term sums up what it’s like to be a creative, to be restless, always pushing boundaries. “Don’t get too comfortable” warned illustrator Petra Eriksson in an opening talk. “If you’re able to put aside time to do what you love, chances are people will eventually pay you.” The flip side is the toll this approach can take on designers. Mindfulness was another theme, with a screening of Stefan Sagmeister’s The Happy Film underlining how everyone in the industry can struggle to find a work/life balance. All of this can produce amazing results, Gavin Strange insists. “Creativity is a compromise, you…

DONNA WEST CREATIVE DIRECTORINTERBRAND www.interbrand.com West joined global brand consultancy Interbrand in 2017, to manage the consumer team, overlooking creative outout and ensuring the growth of the consumer section of the company. She works with clients as part of Interbrand London and its global network, such as Hertz, Virgin and ASOS. MAT HEINL CEOMOVING BRANDS www.movingbrands.com Heinl became part of Moving Brands in 2013, an independent creative company specialising in brands, digital products and services, interactive spaces and business design. He is also advisor to the board for Jean Abreu Dance Ltd, in addition to contributing to various media outlets. DESIGN MATTERS: Which design podcasts would you recommend and why? – page 24 PLUS: Three creatives assess the rebranding of the National Gallery in Prague – page 26 www.annahiggie.co.uk…

MICHAL NANORU Creative director, Studio Najbrt www.najbrt.cz/en “The idea of our new logotype for the National Gallery in Prague stems from the mission of the Gallery as a space for many centuries of art. It outlines the context for visual information within the three letters, NGP, creating a variable logo that’s as simple as possible, while recognisable at the same time. This ‘free space’ offers a range of uses – from presenting artworks across the NGP collections, through short-term exhibitions, to events. It allows for radically different content to become a part of the logo, be it still image, text or video. The open visual style system also enables great variability in poster creation; a necessary feature given the wide array of artist styles and approaches housed by the NGP.…

Originally just a spin-off from graphic design firm UnderConsideration’s Speak Up blog, Brand New has since rocketed in popularity to such a level that it now manages to deliver around half of the studio’s annual income through its successful conference. “We didn’t see it as a big ordeal at the time; we just programmed the site, lined up some content, and launched it,” shrugs co-founder Armin Vit. “It had a decent 60,000 page views a month for the first year or two, then grew to 100,000 for the next two-three years. It now gets 1.6 million. I’m so surprised by how much it has grown, given the extreme niche we occupy: one dude, critiquing logos.” At first, potential content was sparse – a couple of posts a week. But branding…

1. GUTTER TALK Make the gutter wide enough, to avoid text bleeding into the inner right side of a left-hand page (‘verso’) or inner left side of a right-hand page (‘recto’). A perfect bound book should, as a general rule, have left and right inner gutters no smaller than 25mm on each side. 2. RUNNING NAVIGATION To aid reader navigation, add a ‘running head’ showing the book title on each left-hand page, and another showing the chapter title on the right page. Use clear, simple numbering (if in doubt, Arabic numerals, 0-9, etc) on each page. They might seem obvious things to mention, but such little touches are important for a clear, easy reading experience. 3. WORD SPACING Careful consideration of word spacing (or justification) is vital for presenting text.…

The Book Designer website provides a comprehensive online article (www.thebookdesigner.com/book-design/) explaining cover design, interior book design, designing e-books and more, as well as providing links to articles on costing, self publishing, binding and case studies. Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop: A Layout Design Workshop, by Timothy Samara, outlines the basics of grid-based design in order to help designers break them. It also showcases top designers’ processes and rationales, comparing projects and how they’re structured. “Please read Derek Birdsall’s Notes on Book Design,” De Bondt implores. She also recommends Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, and looking at the work of designers including Julia Born, Irma Boom or Mevis & Van Deursen. “The results of the book design competition The Most Beautiful Swiss Books are always…