design

What is Universal Everything?

6 July 2019 in Books Comment

What is Universal Everything?
Editors: Adrian Shaughnessy, Tony Brook
Essays: Adrian Shaughnessy, Antonia Lee
Design: Spin

Limited Edition of 2000 – unique ‘tipped-in’ image on each cover

Matt Pyke, founder and creative director of Universal Everything, calls his studio a “digital art and design collective”. And after 15 years of revolutionary work in the digital realm, UE has its first book – What is Universal Everything?

Working closely with Pyke, the Spin design team of Tony Brook and Claudia Klat have designed a book that successfully brings Universal Everything’s vivid on-screen work to the printed page. The book is printed using a unique salmon pink fluoro colour that has been specially created and mixed for the project.

What is Universal Everything? examines 24 of the studio’s most exciting projects, from work for clients such as Microsoft, Hyundai and MTV, through to projects for Radiohead and the Science Museum in London. For each piece of work, Pyke collaborates with a pool of international creative talent from his base in Sheffield in the north of England.

The book also focuses on several of UE’s self-initiated projects that keep the studio pushing forward. These speculative explorations, says Pyke, are concerned with “trying to invent the future before we get there”.

The book also includes two essays and extensive interviews throughout, 90 pages of Pyke’s hand-drawn sketches, as well as detailed listings of the studio’s numerous sources of inspiration – from music to literature; from places to food.

In keeping with the book’s high production values, nearly all the work featured in the book has been re-rendered at high res, allowing the full majesty of Universal Everything’s screen-based work to be captured on the printed page.

Furthermore, every cover of What is Universal Everything? is unique: a different tipped-in image graces the cover of each edition. As Pyke notes: “We developed software to generate random combinations of shapes, colours and sizes with collision detection. Thousands of unique graphic compositions have been generated…. Everyone will own a one-off.”

About UE

“The company creates gorgeous visual spectacles on screen that, while they will never be attained in physical reality, reinterpret the nuances of natural human motion and seem to have a soul, a heartbeat, and the breath of life.”
The Creators Project, Vice

“Universal Everything proves how effective a flexible, collaboration-based agency model can be to deliver awe-inspiring projects on a global scale.”
Creative Bloq

“The studio’s desire to uncover new forms and aesthetic ideas produces profound experiences; often blurring the line between the art world and the commercial world of brands… as digital artists, their output is ahead of the rest.”
Highsnobiety

“Artists love to portray technology as the villain, as a force for evil that makes short work of our humanity… Matt Pyke isn’t one of them. The artist – who, it should be noted, works out of a log cabin in Sheffield, England – is an unabashed techno-optimist.”
Fast Company

Size: 240mm × 338mm
Pages: 384 (plus 4pp cover)
Format: Hardback, black foil-blocked type on cover
Printing: Litho
Colours: CYK + one special
Special colour: Salmon fluoro (THSX0339 Unit Ed. – Universal Fluoro Red
Inks: Toyo Ink LED-UV
Cover image: 2,000 unique tipped-in images; high gloss lamination
Colours: CYK + one special
Typeface(s): GT Cinetype by Grilli type
Printer: GöteborgsTryckeriet, Mölndal
ISBN: 978-1-9164573-3-1

Unit Editions

Nástupište 1-12 (Platform 1-12)

23 May 2019 in Art Comment

„Nástupište 1-12“ (Platform 1-12) is a civic association whose members are several artists, visual artists, graphic designers, psychologists, activists and cultural managers. The civic association Platform 1-12 was founded in April 2011. They specialize in conceiving and running projects aimed at art, culture and education, but also environment and sport. The aim of their activities is an overall improvement of the quality of life of the inhabitants of this region. They also cooperate intensively with other cultural and educational institutions inside and outside the region, particularly with secondary schools.

nastupiste.sk

Poster Town — Contemporary Poster Design from Lucerne

7 May 2019 in Books Comment

Poster Town
Contemporary Poster Design from Lucerne / Aktuelle Plakatgestaltung aus Luzern

Editors: Erich Brechbühl, Klaus Fromherz, Martin Geel, Michael Kryenbühl, Simon Rüegg, Raphael Schoen, Ivan Weiss, Megi Zumstein
Designer: Johnson / Kingston

Lucerne—Switzerland’s poster town—has a vibrant graphic design scene, which in recent years has become known for its sophisticated posters well beyond the country’s borders. Professional colleagues are in awe of how a relatively small city can produce so many well-designed posters. Lucerne posters can be found in many exhibitions. To give one example: in 2015 alone, twenty-six of the hundred best posters from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland came from Lucerne and the surrounding area—in other words, more than a quarter of all the awardwinning works. What’s behind this? Is it coincidence or a preponderance of designers of above-average talent in a comparatively small area? The book Poster Town tracks this phenomenon with a wealth of images and texts and creates a record of Lucerne’s poster designs for posterity. The content of the book is archived and showcased in an extended form on the website www.postertown.ch

Text: Bettina Richter, Pirmin Bossart, Martina Kammermann, Marc Schwegler

784 pp.
with 800 black-white and colour illustrations
thread-sewn softcover with plastic jacket
Leipzig September, 2017
ISBN: 9783959051781
Edition Number: 1
Width: 17 cm
Length: 22.5 cm
Language(s): German, English

Spector Books

Thonik: Why We Design

23 January 2019 in Design Comment

Thonik: Why We Design
Contributors Aaron Betsky, Adrian Shaughnessy, Gert Staal, Nikki Gonnissen, Thomas Widdershoven

Everybody is a designer! But why? Why do we color, organize, and form the world around us – and why do we call that a profession?

In this book, thonik, the Amsterdam-based studio led by lauded designers Nikki Gonnissen and Thomas Widdershoven, researches eleven personal reasons why they design – from the need to create impact to a constant search for independence; from the benefits of systems to the urgency of play. Additionally Why We Design looks back on twenty-five years of design practice and speculates on the future of graphic design.

thonik was founded in 1993 and specializes in visual communication, graphic identity, interaction, and motion design. To the studio it is important to create work that sets apart and differentiates, work that sparks discussions and initiates change – one design at a time.

Design: Thonik
17 × 24 cm, 6 ¾ × 9 ½ in
352 pages, 560 illustrations
paperback
2019, 978-3-03778-556-0, English

Lars Müller Publishers

VNIITE: Discovering Utopia: Lost Archives of Soviet Design

31 August 2018 in Books Comment

VNIITE: Discovering Utopia: Lost Archives of Soviet Design

Authors: Alexandra Sankova and Olga Druzhinina
Editor: Mark Sinclair
Design: Spin

Edition of 2000

We are delighted to announce that VNIITE – Discovering Utopia: Lost Archives of Soviet Design is now available to pre-order. Written by the Moscow Design Museum’s Alexandra Sankova and Olga Druzhinina, the book tells the previously untold story of the VNIITE – the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics.

Formed in Soviet Russia in 1962, by the design visionary Yuri Soloviev, this vast network contained Moscow’s most progressive designers. The ‘Vniitians’, as they were called, designed for the future and developed new theories and approaches to design in the USSR.

But more than ﬁfty years later, the organisation is all but forgotten. It’s hard to fathom how such an institution, dedicated to the promotion of utopian design, in theory and in practice, and the improvement of design standards within the Soviet Union, could have faded so far from view. After the disintegration of the USSR, the VNIITE and its library of images and prototypes were presumed lost.

Until now, that is. Thanks to the efforts of the Moscow Design Museum – and the discovery of the personal archives of some of the VNIITE designers – the story of this remarkable organisation is being pieced back together.

Alongside images of sketches, models and prototypes, the book also includes a selection of covers of one of the USSR’s hidden gems of graphic design – the VNIITE’s monthly journal, Technical Aesthetics. Showcased together for the first time, these covers chart Soviet graphic trends from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

In the pages of this book you can see some of the more compelling examples of utopian Soviet design. As the designer Paula Scher notes, the work offers a balance between ‘the communist desire for a perfectly-designed world against the real world of human competitiveness and inequality’.

Size: 240mm×170mm
Pages: 224
Print: Four colour litho
Cover: Foiled
ISBN: 978-1-9164573-0-0

Unit Editions

PH House — Norm Architects

19 August 2018 in Architecture Comment

PH House
Norm Architects

Norm Architects have restored and rebuilt a historic villa in Copenhagen after a devastating fire. The story goes that the house used to be inhabited by the renowned Danish architect, designer and cultural critic, Poul Henningsen.

The villa, located in Copenhagen, is said to have been the home of the famous, danish design-icon, Poul Henningsen. Today, a family of three resides in the historic house – a modern home that holds references to its original state – with beautiful high panels, parquet flooring, low, paned windows, teak furniture and – of course – retro PH lamps hanging over the kitchen island.

“The house being a former home – or summerhouse – of Poul Henningsen wasn’t my initial motivation to buy the house, but coincidentally I’ve been collecting his lamps for quite some time, so you’ll find them around the house.” says the owner.

Unfortunately not much of the original building was left after the fire in 2014, but while rebuilding the house it was possible, by increasing the height of the facades, to extend the top floor from approximately 40m2 to 100m2, which has made the house more suitable as a modern family home.

With a clean and minimal approach, the classic elements of the house have been restored and elegantly combined with contemporary details, making for timeless interiors and generally warm aesthetics. The dark mid-century teak furniture and minimal marble plinths create beautiful contrasts, boasting a clean and subtle elegance against the plain, white walls and dark inbuilt kitchen elements in sawcut smoaked oak.

With light coming in from different angles, every room of the house is bright, filled with daylight and comfortable to be in.

The ground floor of the house has been changed from small divided rooms into one big living area with windows on all sides, only subdivided centrally by bespoke elements; a large kitchen cabinet covered in dark stained oak separating the kitchen and the living room, and a central staircase, creating a dynamic, semi-open space with soft transitions.

The floating steps in solid oak create a flow between the basement, ground floor and top floor, connecting the house vertically in a harmonious and contemporary way with skylights flooding the staircase in natural daylight and increasing the sense of height in the house.

The minimal kitchen in smoked oak with bronzed brass handles, designed by Norm Architects for Danish kitchen manufacturer Reform is complimented by a sculptural kitchen island in a light grey ceramic stone, and both the kitchen and bathroom of the house sports slim brass faucets.

Norm Architects