It’s that time of year again, the festive season is upon us. For those of you with ‘typographic’ loving friends, family or colleagues, (mustn’t forget the secret santa) a solution is at hand! Below are a few items we have stumbled across that may appeal to the discerning graphic design lover or you may even want to add to your own wish-list.

Checking the time just got interesting. The font clock designed by Sebastian Wrong is a 21st century take on the British 24 hour clock design icon. Twelve different fonts are printed within the mechanism of the clock providing a random, mixed display of graphic language within a single time piece. Available in three sizes.

These typographic pillows would look great in any type lover’s interior. The eclectic designs that make up the collection of Bonjour Mon Coussin are inspired by found vintage documents, postcards or drawn from the creators’ own world.

The latest in the popular series of typography based calendars from Japan. The new Typeface calendar 2010 edition features the Calson 540 typeface, a 1902 variation of the original William Caslon design, considered to be one of the first English typefaces.

If design isn’t your cup of tea, (excuse the pun) this mug might not be for you! The kerning mug is an ideal gift if you want to impress your colleagues on your return from the christmas break, at least for a day or so.

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Masters Allen are pleased to read of Leicester’s “potential to be one of the most creative places in the UK.”. With so much focus on London to forge the way forward in design, we are delighted to find that the City and surrounding areas have the opportunity to become a hive of creativity. With some of the larger design agencies based in Leicestershire taking advantage in these uncertain financial times and actively targeting London agency clients, hopefully they can prove that you can get big ideas and good solid design outside of London. Let’s hope it’s the start of a creative revolution!

Full feature story below. Original source Design Week.

Hive of creativity

Designer-maker Andrew Tanner was born and bred in Leicester, but, like 1960s dramatist Joe Orton, he escaped. Tanner ended up in Brighton for 12 years, where he studied and set up his studio.

Unlike Orton, however, Tanner came back. ‘As my work was manufactured more and more in the UK, it was difficult to get to the factories in the Midlands from Brighton.’ At the moment, he’s spending three days a week in Stoke-on-Trent, where his new range for Poole Pottery is being made. What’s more, he claims that the creative industries community in Leicester beats that of Brighton.

He cites the agency Creative Leicestershire, which supports 1500 arts, media and design businesses of up to five people, many of which are based in the city’s West End.

For the past 18 months, Tanner, whose designs are stocked by Selfridges, has been working out of Leicester’s LCB Depot. This collection of 55 studios for creative businesses in an old bus depot was designed by Ash Sakula Architects and branded by Newenglish.

Carl Bebbington tells another side of the Leicester story. He moved from a job in London to Leicester 13 years ago, to set up Newenglish with his wife Wendy. Now six-strong, the consultancy can point out a host of local businesses that it has worked on, from Leicester Tourist Information, the National Space Centre and Leicester Libraries Services, to the Indian restaurant Mirch Masala and fair trade shop Just Fair Trade.

It was a conscious decision for Bebbington to focus increasingly on local clients. ‘It’s really nice to be able to walk around the city and see our work,’ he says. ‘We’re helping to change the cityscape.’

And this city of 300 000 people does seem to be changing. This autumn has seen the opening of Foreign Office Architects’ Highcross cinema and retail complex, Rafael Viñoly’s Curve theatre, and next year the Digital Media Centre by Marsh Grochowski will be ready.

These modern structures rub shoulders with some pleasing Victorian buildings. However, many period pieces have been left to deteriorate, or sit uncomfortably next to 1960s architectural mistakes.

The DMC will have 30 workspaces managed by the LCB Depot people. Peter Chandler, manager of LCB Depot, describes the difference the depot project and these other schemes in Leicester’s so-called Cultural Quarter are making. ‘They’re helping raise confidence in the city. Before the regeneration, this area was perceived to be unsafe, even during the day.’ Because, as Leicester Regeneration Company admits, the city has been suffering from a poor image. Indeed, some vestiges of its former self are still evident, even in the Cultural Quarter. Hence the adult entertainment venue, G Spot, located opposite the tasteful new Curve.

And despite these attempts at transformation, not everyone based there is keen to be associated with Leicester. Checkland Kindleysides, with a staff of 88, is one of the UK’s most high-profile retail design groups. But that’s despite, not because of, its location 20 minutes from the centre of Leicester.

‘We don’t see ourselves as Leicester people,’ says co-founder Jeff Kindleysides. ‘We don’t relate to any other businesses here, not because we’re arrogant, but we have done things our own way. Our work has always been national and global.’

Of course, there are the obvious advantages to being away from high-rent locations like London. While Newenglish occupies a capacious former Victorian Methodist Sunday school in town, Checkland Kindleysides resides in a 2400m2 studio, along with a 2300m2 workshop, where 15 people are employed to mock up furniture and shop environments.

Other developments in Leicester include the ethnic mix – it’s not just the architecture which is eclectic. According to the 2001 census, Leicester’s citizens includes 60 per cent white British, and more than 25 per cent of Indian origin. This second figure ranks Leicester as having the largest Indian population of any local authority area in England and Wales.

According to US economic regeneration expert Richard Florida, such an ethnic mix means Leicester has the potential to be one of the most creative places in the UK.

In his 2003 Demos survey, Boho Britain, the country’s 40 biggest cities were ranked using three creativity indicators: ethnic diversity, the proportion of gay residents, and the number of patent applications per head. While Manchester came out top, Leicester drew second with London.

So it’s not all shoe design and ‘contour fashion’ (meaning underwear design) in Leicester. As Clare Hudson, creative industries manager for Creative Leicestershire, points out: ‘De Montfort University is now strong in product design, and there are loads of printers here.’

And for Leicester-based designers, it’s worth bearing in mind that the city is a mere seventy minutes by train from London.

Steve Jobs recently unveiled Apple’s new iPod Nano. The forth generation Nano is supposed to be the thinnest yet, with clever new functions such as ’shake to shuffle’ which basically shuffles your songs at the flick of a wrist. It also boasts a ‘genius’ feature which claims to be able to find similar songs in your music library that sound great together. Perhaps these machines really are becoming self aware, although I’m guessing that if you think Cliff and The Ting Tings sit well together your going to be disappointed!

These modifications and tweaks are a world away from the original idea behind a portable digital audio player. Who would have thought that the vision of a 23 year old Kane Kramer would go on to sell over 160 million units for Apple alone. The British inventors’ designs back in 1979 set out to revolutionise the music industry and went on to become the blue print for what we now know as the MP3 player.

The original idea involved using telephone lines to distribute the music, naturally this would have resulted in an analog sound as this was many years before the internet was available. The device stored just 3.5 minutes of music onto a chip. However, in 1988 with the patents not being renewed the technology became public property and the rest, as they say, is history.

Apple recently recognised Kane Kramer for his inventorship and now he now acts as an expert consultant. Small change considering Apple have made billions of dollars from iPod sales.

The sketch for Kramer’s music player bares a striking resemblance to the original iPod. Next week drawings of flying cars!

The notion of digital onscreen graphics (web) replacing printed media is not a new one. However, the idea of books making way for digital readers sends a shiver down your spine. Although there are other models on the market, the Sony Reader seems to have drawn a considerable amount of media attention of late.

There are obvious benefits to owning a digital ‘reader’ not least the fact that they can hold up to 160 eBooks. Imagine all of those empty bookshelves up and down the country. Although we can’t see this happening over night, especially as the Sony Reader is priced at a not very inviting £199.00.

The main drawback to these ‘readers’ is the lack of presence. A book remains a physical object, tangible and personal to it’s owner. A great cover design can draw our attention and add character to a book. We can become immersed in a book, picking it up everyday, creasing the cover and folding the corners when we can’t find a bookmark, oh and the battery never runs out on a book! The battery on the Sony Reader is rumored to last up to 7,000 page turns, although this appears to be a considerable amount you can guarantee that it will run out just when you don’t want it to.

Each eBook purchased is rights managed, in a similar way to tracks downloaded from the iTunes Store. The software is Windows based and not geared towards Mac OS (getting a thumbs down from us), but apparently with a bit of  jiggery pokery it can be hooked up to a Mac. You can also view PDF’s… in monotone (oh the joy, whoop whoop), but we all have iPods for that, don’t we?

It appears that Waterstones are the official re-seller of the Sony Reader. For more info, check out this link. www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/navigate.do?pPageID=1576

For those of you that share our love of all things Mac. You may find this post quite enlightening, we did!

The year 2008 marks the 10th Anniversary of the iMac, the computer that changed everything at Apple, hailing a new design era spearheaded by design genius Jonathan Ive. What most people don’t know is that there’s another man whose products are at the heart of Ive’s design philosophy, an influence that permeates every single product at Apple, from hardware to user-interface design. That man is Dieter Rams, and his old designs for Braun during the ’50s and ’60s hold all the clues not only for past and present Apple products, but their future as well:

When you look at the Braun products by Dieter Rams—many of them at New York’s MoMA—and compare them to Ive’s work at Apple, you can clearly see the similarities in their philosophies way beyond the sparse use of color, the selection of materials and how the products are shaped around the function with no artificial design, keeping the design “honest.”

This passion for “simplicity” and “honest design” that is always declared by Ive whenever he’s interviewed or appears in a promo video, is at the core of Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

Ive’s inspiration on Rams’ design principles goes beyond the philosophy and gets straight into a direct homage to real products created decades ago. Amazing pieces of industrial design that still today remain fresh, true classics that have survived the test of time.

The similarities between products from Braun and Apple are sometimes uncanny, others more subtle, but there’s always a common root that provides the new Apple objects not only with a beautiful simplicity but also with a close familiarity.

For more information visit;
http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to-apples-future