Books, Design and Culture
Here’s a short video showing the complex production of Jonathan Safran Foer’s innovative die-cut novel Tree of Codes, published by Visual Editions and printed by Die Keure in Belgium:
(via Creative Review)
Comments closedTim Minchin’s 9-minute beat poem Storm — a witty and f-bomb fuelled defense of science and critical thinking — is beautifully delivered in this animated movie directed by DC Turner and produced by Tracy King:
(via Quipsologies)
Comments closed
Alan Trotter entertainingly interviews Coralie Bickford-Smith about her new cover designs for the Penguin Great Food series:
The lettering on the covers is by the talented Stephen Raw, and you can see all the finished designs on the Penguin Books Flickr.
My interview with Coralie is here.
Comments closedIn a really fascinating 28 minute interview from last year, Louis Menand — Professor of English at Harvard University, critic and author most recently of The Marketplace of Ideas — discusses books, culture, criticism, science, education (and more in between) with the Big Think:
(via Mark Athitakis. I can’t quite believe I didn’t see this earlier!)
Comments closedA lovely short film about bookbinder Don Taylor made by Tate Young and Ian Daffern for the new online daily Toronto Standard:
Comments closedWith LCD Soundsystem playing their last show in New York last week, M ss ng P eces has just posted a really great interview with James Murphy from the band. Obviously this has nothing whatsoever to do with books as such, but Murphy does muse on how technology is affecting how we discover and create art, which is (needless to say) very relevant to readers and the book industry a like:
Comments closedThe New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott looks at the enduring appeal of The French Connection:
William Friedkin’s 1971 film was a fictionalized adaptation of the nonfiction book The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy by Robin Moore, first published in 1969.
“I was eager to be Judy’s model and to have the opportunity to work with a true artist. I felt protected in the atmosphere we created together. We had an inner narrative, producing our own unspoken film, with or without a camera.” — Patti Smith
Here’s a short promotional trailer for Patti Smith 1969-1976, Photographs by Judy Linn, mentioned briefly in this morning’s round-up:
(via @theBDR)
Comments closedGestaltenTV have posted an 16-minute interview with influential German typographer and graphic designer Kurt Weidemann who died at the age of 88 on March 31st, 2011:
Weidemann helped form the graphic identities companies such as Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, as well as designing books for the Büchergilde Gutenberg and the publishing houses Ullstein, Propyläen, Ernst Klett and Thieme.
Jürgen Siebert has written an obituary of Weidemann for FontFeed:
Comments closedWeidemann was a disputatious designer. He disseminated his knowledge in numerous specialized books and countless presentations and talks. Legendary are his 10 Thesen zur Typografie, published in 1994 in the book Wo der Buchstabe das Wort führt. Ansichten über Schrift und Typografie. This resulted in his appeal: “God protect us from the vagrant creativity of the typomaniacs.” Weidemann never could reconcile with the immense variety of different typefaces. During a discussion at Swiss Mediaforum in 2010 he literally said: “There are ten, maybe fifteen very good typefaces, which I can agree with at least. There are 30,000 on the market, of which 29,990 can be sunk in the Pacific Ocean without causing any cultural damage.”
Little Scraps of Paper is a lovely series of short documentary films about how creative people use notebooks to record their thoughts and develop their ideas. The series was created last year by director Tomas Leach, assisted by Nicolas Cambier and Daniel Diego Lincoln.
In this film, Norwegian product designer Oscar Narud talks about his process:
(Thanks Kate!)
Comments closedNew York Times movie critic A. O. Scott discusses Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 anime classic Akira and Japan’s pop culture obsession with apocalyptic disaster:
The film was based on Otomo’s original six-volume, 2182-page epic, which is thought to be one of the first works of manga to be translated into English in its entirety.
Comments closedGoing Solo is a neat (not entirely safe for work) stop frame animation by South African design boutique Studio Botes sharing advice from a range of international designers on starting your own business:
(via Quipsologies)
Comments closed