Friday, July 30, 2010

Intelligence in Lifestyle Magazine

Intelligence in Lifestyle or IL is a relatively young Italian magazine about contemporary passions and consumptions. It premiered in September of 2008, and like T Magazine, the style supplement of The New York Times, IL is the supplement to the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 ORE. The design takes inspiration from Swiss formalism, fashion magazines, and popular Italian & Northern European periodicals from the 70s. As for the content, I only wish I could read Italian. For now, I’ll just pore over the layout, typography, and infographics—oh my, the infographics—I’m a huge fan of Feltron—but egad, these ones are amazing.

Francesco Franchi, one of the art directors for IL, archives all the covers and various interiors on his Flickr feed, and you can view them in much higher resolutions. I couldn’t quite figure out the serif font used throughout the magazine, and Francesco was kind enough to identify it for me: Publico, released under the foundry Commercial Type and designed by Paul Barnes, Christian Schwartz, Kai Bernau, and Ross Milne. It’s sexy and elegant and not nearly as ubiquitous as say, Helvetica or more recently, Archer.

Other things I love about IL:

  • Cover design consistency
  • The cutout of the IL logotype on the cover
  • The perfect combination of serif and sans serif type
  • The use of color as part of a theme, complementary to the content

I just want to dismantle the whole thing and hang the pages up as framed art.

Found Here: http://colorcubic.com/2010/04/21/intelligence-in-lifestyle-magazine/

Intelligence in Lifestyle magazine is the new holy grail of infographic greatness. It is a high-end Italian magazine aimed at men. The magazine is equipped with a beautiful design by the art director Francesco Franchi and the creative director Luca Pitoni.

For some of us, getting ahold of the magazine could be difficult. However, several several of the layouts from the interiors spreads and covers are archived on Flickr. Check out the larger sizes, they may compliment your desktop nicely. If in case you’re wondering, the magazine utilizes Publico, a serif face that fits perfectly into the design is much less ubiquitous than say Helvetica or Archer.

On another note prior to being introduced to this magazine via Colorcubic, I was starting to become overwhelmed by the amount of infographics being pumped into the designosphere. Infographics about infographics were being designed for crying out loud. It just seems like it has become trendy very quickly. It’s not to say its a bad thing, but it sure makes me appreciate great design like in this magazine or Nicholas Felton’s works more than ever before.

I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are on this topic.
Do you feel there is an influx of infographics and is it a good or bad thing?

Found Here: http://blog.iso50.com/2010/06/01/intelligence-in-lifestyle-magazine/

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Rider Prints by Gianmarco Magnani








Phenomenal Rider Prints by Gianmarco Magnani, a Illustrator from the USA.

Found Here: http://lookslikegooddesign.com/prints-gianmarco-magnani/

The Work
Silence Television, Gianmarco Magnani's Portfolio. The works are digital illustrations printed on premium matte 270 gm photo paper.
For better care, printjobs are covered with a clear film that protects and gives them a matte tone.
Each series are composed by 4 prints and the title of each print is the corresponding number.

Found Here: http://www.silencetv.com/info.html

John Paul Thurlow - Cover Drawings










'One more hipster contributing to the end of western civilization'

Yes that's me! It's the end of the world, one magazine at a time... I'm part of the generation that never made anything new. Supposedly.

This is an attempt to recreate cover art for every great magazine and record I own. And with each Cover I take a perfect mass-produced object and turn it into a fucked up one-off, full of my thoughts and feelings.

From time to time this blog will feature work outside the Covers series - commissions, fashion illustrations, scamps, type, random shit - drop me a line if you'd like to collaborate on something special.

What is Lyric Type? Song lyrics that get stuck in my brain rerendered in hand drawn type.



John Paul Thurlow Cover Illustrations

Check out these awesome cover illustrations by artist John Paul Thurlow.


Found Here: http://vectroave.com/2009/12/cover-illustrations-by-john-paul-thurlow/

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Annie French






French Style

Annie French had a lovely style, creating delightful jewel-like pen and ink watercolors.

Found Here: http://mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com/2009/11/french-style.html

The daughter of a metallurgist, Annie French was born in Glasgow and studied at the Glasgow School of Art under Fra Newbery and the Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1896-1902).Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley and Jessie M King, she developed a style combining vivid colours, curvilinearity of form and almost confetti-like textures. While still a student, she contributed an illustration to The Book of the Jubilee of the University of Glasgow (1901), and later illustrated one book, a selection of Heine?s poems for Foulis (1908). However, her watercolours (often on vellum) and drawings are mainly in the form of illustrations, and she designed a number of postcards and greetings cards. In 1906, she began to share a studio with Bessie Innes Young and Jane Younger and, three years later, became Tutor in Ceramic Decoration at Glasgow School of Art as successor to JESSIE M KING. But following her marriage to the artist George Woolliscroft Rhead (1854-1920), she settled in London, and became a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy, until the mid nineteen-twenties. She died in Jersey.

Found Here: http://www.lochgallery.com/component/option,com_art/action,artist/id,125/Itemid,30/



Walter Crane

Magnificense

Walter Crane was a magnificent book illustrator who also was a master in the decorative arts, collaborating now and then with William Morris. Here is a wall hanging that is pretty magnificent in its own right.

Found Here: http://mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com/2009/11/magnificense.html

Walter Crane (1845 - 1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the latter 19th century. His work featured some of the more colorful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come. He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and produced an array of paintings, illustrations, children's books, ceramic tiles and other decorative arts.

Early life and influences

Walter Crane was born in Liverpool, England on 15 August 1845, the second son of Thomas Crane, a portrait painter and miniaturist. He was a fluent follower of the newer art movements and he came to study and appreciate the detailed senses of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was also a diligent student of the renowned artist and critic John Ruskin. A set of coloured page designs to illustrate Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" gained the approval of wood-engraver William James Linton to whom Walter Crane was apprenticed for three years (1859-1862). As a wood-engraver he had abundant opportunity for the minute study of the contemporary artists whose work passed through his hands, of Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, as well as Alice in Wonderland illustrator Sir John Tenniel and Frederick Sandys. He was a student who admired the masters of the Italian Renaissance, however he was more influenced by the Elgin marbles in the British Museum. A further and important element in the development of his talent was the study of Japanese colour-prints, the methods of which he imitated in a series of toy-books, which started a new fashion.

[edit] Political activity

From the early 1880s, initially under Morris's influence, Crane was closely associated with the Socialist movement. He did as much as Morris himself to bring art into the daily life of all classes. With this object in view he devoted much attention to designs for textiles and wallpapers, and to house decoration; but he also used his art for the direct advancement of the Socialist cause. For a long time he provided the weekly cartoons for the Socialist organs Justice, The Commonweal and The Clarion. Many of these were collected as Cartoons for the Cause. He devoted much time and energy to the work of the Art Workers Guild, and to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded by him in 1888.

Although not himself an anarchist, Crane contributed to several libertarian publishers, including Liberty Press and Freedom Press. Following the Haymarket bombing, Crane made multiple trips to America where he spoke in defense of the eight anarchists accused of murder.[1]

[edit] Death, and legacy

Walter Crane died on 14 March 1915 in Horsham Hospital, West Sussex. His body was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium, where his ashes remain.

[edit]

Paintings and illustrations

In 1862 his picture "The Lady of Shalott" was exhibited at the Royal Academy, but the Academy steadily refused his maturer work and after the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, he ceased to send pictures to Burlington House. In 1863 the printer Edmund Evans employed Crane to illustrate yellowbacks, and in 1865 they began to collaborate on toy books of nursery rhymes and fairy tales.[2] From 1865 to 1876 Crane and Evans produced two to three toybooks each year.[3]

In 1864 he began to illustrate a series of sixpenny toy-books of nursery rhymes in three colours for Edmund Evans. He was allowed more freedom in a series beginning with The Frog PrinceJapanese art, and of a long visit to Italy following on his marriage in 1871. (1874) which showed markedly the influence of

The Baby's Opera was a book of English nursery songs planned in 1877 with Evans, and a third series of children's books with the collective title Romance of the Three R's provided a regular course of instruction in art for the nursery. In his early "Lady of Shalott", the artist had shown his preoccupation with unity of design in book illustration by printing in the words of the poem himself, in the view that this union of the calligrapher's and the decorator's art was one secret of the beauty of the old illuminated books.

He followed the same course in The First of May: A Fairy Masque by his friend John Wise, text and decoration being in this case reproduced by photogravure. The Goose Girl illustration taken from his beautiful Household Stories from Grimm (1882) was reproduced in tapestry by William Morris.

Flora's Feast, A Masque of Flowers had lithographic reproductions of Crane's line drawings washed in with water colour; he also decorated in colour The Wonder Book of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Deland's Old Garden. In 1894 he collaborated with William Morris in the page decoration of The Story of the Glittering Plain, published at the Kelmscott Press, which was executed in the style of 16th century Italian and German woodcuts. Crane also illustrated editions of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (12 pts., 1894-1896) and The Shepheard's Calendar.

Crane wrote and illustrated three books of poetry, Queen Summer (1891), Renascence (1891), and The Sirens Three (1886). Walter Crane illustrated Nellie Dale's books on Teaching English Reading: Steps to Reading, First Primer, Second Primer, Infant Reader, Book I, and Book II. These were most probably completed between 1898 and 1907.

[edit]

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Crane

Walter Crane was born in Liverpool on 15th August, 1845. Walter's father, Thomas Crane, was a moderately successful artist. In 1851 the family moved to London with the hope that this would provide Crane with more clients. Unfortunately, just as business was improving, Thomas Crane died.

Soon after his father's death Walter Crane obtained an apprenticeship at William Linton's engraving shop. William Linton had been a member of the Chartist movement in the 1840s and his stories of the struggle for parliamentary reform, had an important influence on Crane's early political development.

Linton was impressed by the quality of Crane's work and helped to find him commissions. This included providing the illustrations for J. R. Wise's book on the New Forest. Crane went to live with Wise for six weeks while he was working on the pictures. J. R. Wise had radical political and religious opinions and introduced Crane to the work of John Stuart Mill, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Ruskin.

In 1865 Walter Crane saw Work, a painting by Ford Madox Brown, at an art gallery in Piccadilly. The picture, shows the historian, Thomas Carlyle, and the leader of the Christian Socialist movement, F. D. Maurice, observing a group of men working. The painting marked an important development in British art because for the first time an artist had decided that a working man was a subject worth painting. Although Brown's painting did not immediately influence Crane's work, it had a profound impact on his long-term career.

In the 1860s Crane began to take an active interest in politics. He was a supporter of the Liberal Party and some of their more radical politicians such as John Bright, Henry Fawcett and William Gladstone and campaigned for the 1867 Reform Act. Crane gradually developed socialistic views and spoke out in favour of the Communards who attempted to overthrow the French government in 1871.


Found Here: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jcrane.htm