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Tag: kickstarter

Munich ’72: The Visual Output of Otl Aicher’s Dept. XI

Munich ’72. The Visual Output of Otl Aicher’s Dept. XI, a book about the design team for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, is currently on Kickstarter. The project is the result of three of years of research and it needs a little help to get it over the finish line, so maybe go take a look?  

(via Under Consideration)

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Design Canada Documentary

Greg Durrell of Canadian design firm Hulse&Durrell, and Jessica Edwards and Gary Hustwit of Film First are putting together a documentary about Canadian graphic design:

The project is currently on Kickstarter. There are a couple of weeks to go and they are still a few thousand dollars shy of their goal. Please help out if you can. 

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The Bolted Book Now on Kickstarter

The Designers & Books Kickstarter to publish a facsimile of Fortunato Depero’s 1927 ‘Bolted Book’ (mentioned previously here) is now live:

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The Bolted Book

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Designers & Books, in collaboration with the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York and the Mart, the Museum of modern and contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy, is launching a Kickstarter campaign on October 18 to publish a new facsimile edition of Depero Futurista, the 1927 monograph of Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero. Famously bound by two industrial aluminum bolts, “The Bolted Book” is full of typographic experimentation and widely recognized as a masterpiece of avant-garde book-making.

At the project’s website you can see each of the book’s (amazing) 240 pages in detail, read translations from the original Italian and annotations of selected texts, and learn more about Depero’s life and work.

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RAMS: The First Feature Documentary About Dieter Rams

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Gary Hustwit, the director of the documentaries Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized, is making a feature-length documentary about the life and work of designer Dieter Rams:

You can support the production on Kickstarter.

RAMS

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Lustig Elements Font Revival on Kickstarter

Lustig Elements

Working with the legendary Elaine Lustig Cohen, designer Craig Welsh has launched Kickstarter campaign to revive a font originally designed by Alvin Lustig in the 1930s that they’re calling ‘Lustig Elements’. The project is about halfway to its funding goal, but there are only a couple more weeks to back it, so maybe give them a boost if you are fan of the Lustig’s work (and I know you are!):

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Yellow: The Collected Book by OFF LIFE

 

Front and Back cover

Back in November 2014, the team behind free bi-monthly comic anthology OFF LIFE asked 52 artists to illustrate 52 weeks of news. Now, with the 52 weeks nearly up, editor Daniel Humphry, art director Steve Leard, and production manager Sarah Hamilton are Kickstarting Yellow, a hardback collection of every piece from the year with additional interviews and commentary. Contributors include Jean Jullien, Hattie Stewart, Supermundane, Stanley Chow, and a whole host of other talented illustrators. OFF LIFE’s goal is £10,000. You can support the project here.

 

Supermundane in Yellow
Supermundane for Yellow
Neasden Control Centre for Yellow
Neasden Control Centre for Yellow
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50 Books / 50 Covers Kickstarter

50-50 kickstarter

I should have mentioned in my 50 / 50 post yesterday, that Design Observer has launched a Kickstarter campaign to create catalogue of this year’s winners:

As others have noted, it is a little odd that the project is being announced now when the winners have been chosen rather than when the competition opened (why wasn’t the cost of the catalogue factored into the entry fee?), and I wonder if a traditional publisher could not be found to partner on this project, but even if it feels like something of an afterthought, a well-designed catalogue would still be a lovely thing to have.

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Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action — Facsimile Edition

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I don’t post too many crowd-funded publishing projects here on the Casual Optimist — there are so many of them, and so few seem really significant — but I’m more than happy to support the Designers and Books

campaign to create a facsimile reprint of Visual Design in Action by modernist graphic designer Ladislav Sutnar. First published in 1961, and out of print for decades, it looks very worthy of a revival:

You can read more about the book and the campaign here.

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NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual Reissue

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If you’ve been on Twitter for past couple of days you’ll have no doubt noticed that the design community (or the sizeable type-obsessed segment of it) is very excited that designers Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth, founders of thestandardsmanual.com, have started a Kickstarter project to reissue the 1970 NYC Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual by Unimark’s Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda as a full-size, limited edition book:

Every single day, millions of New Yorkers rely on the subway to get around the city, and you can’t use the subway without encountering the signage designed by Unimark. Over the years many changes have taken place (such as the switch from Standard Medium to Helvetica), but it is a testament to the quality of the work that, 44 years later, the signage holds up.

And perhaps on a deeper level, the signage has given the subway a voice. When a lot of people think of New York City, these signs pop into their head. We feel a tremendous responsibility to publish not only an important piece of design history, but an important part of New York City’s history.

Even if you can’t afford the book itself — it starts at $133USD if you live in Canada, more if you are in the EU —  you can back the project for as little as $3, and the project’s video featuring Pentagram‘s Michael Bierut on the graphic standards manual is well worth watching:

You can also see scans from a copy of the manual discovered the basement of design firm Pentagram in 2012 on thestandardsmanual.com.

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Alan Moore: The Revolution Will Be Crowd-Funded


photo: Leo Williams

Alan Moore discusses his short films, crowd-funding, the Occupy movement, The Prisoner, and zombies (amongst other things) at Salon:

While the revolution will be certainly televised, it strikes me that there is a strong possibility that the revolution will also be crowd-funded. If Kickstarter and other enterprises are giving projects like Occupy Comics a chance, then it does suggest there are imaginative ideas out there with incredible use and application across the board. Not just in the arts, but in the sciences as well. It’s an exciting concept, and I look forward to seeing what emerges from it.

Moore talks more about his Lynchian short film Jimmy’s End — created with Mitch Jenkins — in this short ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentary for Motherboard TV (worth watching just for the interior of the actual Jimmy’s End Working Men’s Club around the 10 minute mark):

He also discusses crowd-funding and ‘The Jimmy’s End Cycle’ of films — the last of which, Heavy Heart, you can still support on Kickstarter —  in an interview with Bleeding Cool from earlier this month.

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Midweek Miscellany

I was locked a conference room last week looking at books coming out in the fall, so tI have a lot of catching up to do…

At the Financial Times, Andrew O’Hagan on the influence of other art forms on writers:

Writing novels is quiet work: it can reveal astonishments but it doesn’t usually proceed from them. Maybe that is why novelists are so often attached to second art forms that wear their physicality or their beauty outwardly. Ernest Hemingway considered bullfighting an art form and, indeed, he thought writers should be more like toreadors, brave and defiant in the face of death. For Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima it was the art of the samurai – he loved the poise, the nobility, the control, tradition, all things you would say of good prose – and he died in a ritual self-killing. But most novelists take their influence seriously without letting it take over. They are emboldened by a love of opera, as were Willa Cather and the French novelist George Sand, or by modernist painters, as Gertrude Stein was, each of these brilliant women finding in the spaciousness and drama of the other art form an enlarged sense of what they themselves were setting out to deal with on the little blank page.

And at The Guardian, O’Hagan talks to six novelists, including Kazuo Ishiguro and Sarah Hall, about their passion for a second art forms.

And on a somewhat related subject… Charlotte Higgins profiles painter Leon Kossoff for The Guardian:

His father, a first-generation immigrant from Ukraine, owned a bakery round the corner in Calvert Road; he was one of seven siblings. It was “absolutely not”, he says, an artistic household. “Painting didn’t exist in my family.” What drew him to art as a boy was finding himself, almost without knowing how he had got there, in the National Gallery. “At first the pictures were frightening for me – the first rooms were hung with religious paintings whose subjects were unfamiliar to me.” Later they became old friends: Kossoff spent a long period visiting the National Gallery before opening hours, working from the old masters, making not copies but what you might call translations.

An exhibition of Kossoff’s drawings and paintings of London opens at the Annely Juda Gallery May 8th.

Shuffle — At the Center for Fiction, Dawn Raffell interviews Renata Adler:

I always shuffle. And there, the computer is just a disaster because the only thing I’ve ever been compulsively neat about is typing. I type with two fingers, and so I would always make a mistake near the end of the page, and since White Out is no use, I would throw the thing out and start again at the beginning. Then along came the computer and I thought it was going to help because you can move everything around all the time and you can change every sentence 50 different ways in seconds. But that’s exactly what I don’t want, because then what was I doing? If the computer can shift everything in a split-second, then what am I doing here? That’s what I used to do so carefully. One of the things that’s almost comically a problem is AutoCorrect, and what AutoCorrect thinks I’m saying.

The Amanda Palmer Problem‘ — Nitsuh Abebe at Vulture:

The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren’t available before. Here’s the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one’s fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties… Telling the world all about your life can look generous to fans and like a barrage of narcissism to everyone else.

Also from New York Magazine, the faintly ridiculous ‘At Home with With Claire Messud and James Wood‘:

“There’s been a great deal of closely spaced difficulty to sort through,” she says. “You know that Katherine Mansfield story, ‘The Fly’?” It’s about a fly being slowly drowned in ink. “Well, I am the fly. Every time I hope that things will get better, somebody drops another inkblot on me. So it seems to me if there were a divine lesson it would be to stop hoping that the blots will cease, and instead to come to terms with it … At some point you have to think, All right, it’s not as if someone is promising you something easier or better. You have to be grateful to get it done at all.”

Wood talks about his recent collection of essays, The Fun Stuff, at The Spectator, and Messud’s new novel The Woman Upstairs, was published by Knopf this week

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