Neville Brody recently unveiled Vortext a unique piece of work for Converse and their Off Canvas Project which formed part of the first Beijing design week.

Off Canvas was the brand’s inspiring street-level exhibition of typography in areas of Beijing that have a strong connection with China’s thriving creative subcultures such as 751, Dashilar, Wudaoying Hutong, Da Wei Lang Ying Hutong and Gulou East Street. The project pulled together five other typographic talents from both Europe and China; Benny Luk, Ying Yonghui, Nod Young, Neils Shoe Meulman and Ben Eine to each create site specific installations in their chosen media.

Brody’s Vortext piece was installed at 751 D-Park part of the iconic 798 Art Centre in North East Beijing. Vortext has grown out of Brody’s Antimatter font produced for Fuse 20, his magazine publication dedicated to experimental typography, being published later this year by Taschen – you can find out more about the book here.

During Beijing design week Brody also gave a talk at CAFA (China Central Academy of Fine Arts) in partnership with the British Council’s Smart Talk series and joined a Financial Times and Baccarat discussion panel at Capital M.

Images in this story are copyright of Jonathan Leijonhuvud you can find out more about his work here

To find out more about the Off Canvas Project and respective artists follow the links below:

For Converse’s Off Canvas Project click here

For Benny Luk click here

For Nod Young click here

For Neils Shoe Meulman click here

For Ben Eine click here
-

Neville Brody has designed the front cover of the forthcoming V&A Magazine dedicated to its new Postmodernism exhibition. Editor in Chief Thomas Phongsathorn commented “Neville Brody is a designer whose extraordinary body of work has significantly informed my idea of what a magazine should be – and the power of a great cover. The cover that Neville has created for us encapsulates the spirit, dynamism and energy of the V&A’s Postmodernism exhibition, but succeeds in being what Postmodern design, famously,
rarely is – beautiful, balanced and appropriate.”

On his front cover and the postmodernist movement in general Brody notes “For me, Post Modernism felt like a kind of facade built to cover over the cracks of a divided world, a surface of plucked effects and stylistic devices emptied of meaning, an extrusion of hollow traces and flat outlines forcing 2D into apparent depth. I was never a Post Modernist, rather a Modernist exploring humanist lines of enquiry in the collapsing world behind a wall of decoration.” The issue also includes an insightful article on the movement by acclaimed academic and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell

The Magazine is due to land on the doormats of V&A magazine subscribers this coming Friday 7th of October and on the shelves of magazine stores from Monday 10th October 2011.
-

Research Studios are delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of ‘Fuse 1-20′ a celebration of 20 years of our internationally renowned platform for experimental design and typography.

Neville Brody, Creative Director of the Research Studios Network commented;

“FUSE was a project ahead of its time and is now even more vital in informing our understanding of our new digital communications space. It shows how important the need is for a constant state of experimental language. Its amazing to have this chance to re-view this vital collection of creative work for which we are delighted to partner with Tachen books.”

The publication, scheduled for release Autumn/Winter 2011, will include introduction texts by series Editor and long time FUSE collaborator Jon Wozencroft and design writer Adrian Shaughnessy. The book will contain stunning content from FUSE 1-18 and two exciting new issues of FUSE 19 (produced but not published) and FUSE 20 (a brand new commission by the FUSE team from some of the most exciting designers and typographers working today). An online resource will allow readers to access more content and have a richer experience around the book.

More about the project will be coming here soon alongside details or where and when you can pre-order your copies.

Research Studios are delighted to announce that our project Double Dip has been selected for the 2011 Creative Review Type Annual.

To find our more about the Creative Review Type Annual issue click here

You can find out more about the Double Dip project here

Neville Brody’s Blur font has been chosen to be admitted to the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) architecture and design collection. Blur was selected alongside 22 other digital typefaces which included Carter’s Verdana, Speikermann’s FF Meta, Pool’s FF Din, Frere-Jones and Hoefler’s Retina, Crouwel’s New Alphabet and Barnbrook’s Manson fonts too.

In its official gallery label MoMA writes “The letterforms of FF Blur—fuzzy around the edges like an out-of-focus photograph—seem to celebrate their own imperfection, speaking to his unique background. FF Blur resembles type that has been reproduced cheaply on a Xerox machine—degenerated through copying and recopying.” You can find out more about MoMa (New York) or search their collection here

To read an official design journalist Alice Rawsthorn’s piece on MoMA’s selection of new digital fonts in The New York Times click here

The Research Studios’ 2011 calendar has gone to print and should be delivered to our clients, contacts and friends between now and the New Year.

The theme for the calendar was inspired by the idea of typographic distortion: taking a Research Studios’ typeface and morphing it into something else through further design or a hands-on process. In many ways, it reflects our naturally inquisitive approach and habit of thinking about things differently; pushing boundaries and using ordinary elements to create something extraordinary.

For those of you who can’t wait, there are a couple of months to sample here!! We will post the full calendar on the blog in January and, as with last year’s, (if you don’t think you will get one and want to), we’ll be posting give-away details then too.

–

–

–

Research Studios were asked to be part of the Anti Design Festival by hosting a one day workshop which we entitled ANARCHY/apathy. Core to our day were the 6 questions we asked to the visitors who came to the space on Redchurch Street, Shoreditch (London) to gauge whether people were anarchic or apathetic…

01- What do you own that you could not live without?
02- What is more interesting (show them a tabloid/celebrity image and a news/story)
03- Who is your hero?
04- Why? (in 1 or 2 sentences please)
05- If you could change anything what would it be?
06- How do you rate this event with 1 being apathetic and 10 being anarchic

…the answers were designed, printed and displayed on our answer wall in the space. You can download a PDF of a selection of the answers from here
–

We also had an iPad installed with Research Studios’ Granimator pack were visitors could create their own message creations which were projected during the event.

–

You can view the messages and illustrations the visitors made on our Flickr account.

–

Are we anarchic or are we apathetic?

That’s the question that Research Studios asked on Sunday 26th of September during our one day workshop at the Anti Design Festival. There were questionnaires, stickers, pens, laptops, printers and ipads to help us explore the statement with visitors to the space. It wasn’t scientific but we had a lot of fun engaging and interacting with people to create a vibrant output of opinion.

The Research Studios event was broken down into several core elements:

We had 6 simple questions for the public to respond to about things that matter, people who are important and their motivation to be apathetic or anarchic. Once people had completed the questions we added their answers to our low-fi yet highly graphic ‘Poll Wall’ to create a visual representation of the answers.

Question wall

01- What do you own that you could not live without?
02- What is more interesting (show them a tabloid/celebrity image and a news/story)
03- Who is your hero?
04- Why? (in 1 or 2 sentences please)
05- If you could change anything what would it be?
06- How do you rate this event with 1 being apathetic and 10 being anarchic

We created a huge world map and another massive timeline for people to sticker, comment on and add too.

A few weeks before the event we put out an open submission statement to ask people to submit posters exploring the themes of Anarchy and Apathy. The ‘Poster Wall’ in the space displayed and for those that didn’t have time to do it before, asked people to add to this collection by creating new posters using the materials provided.

You can see some more photographs of the day on our Flickr account

There is also a second post where you can see the results of the questions, and also the Granimator screens that were created on the iPad during our ANARCHY/apathy workshop.

Answers Wall

Poster Submissions

Data Processing

Data Processing

Data Output

–

–

Answers Wall

Map Wall

Timeline

RS ‘Double Dip’ Granimator pack in action (hyperspeed version)
–

Think you might be bored over the bank holiday weekend?! To celebrate the launch of ‘Double Dip’ on the Granimator iPad app we are offering our clients, friends and contacts the opportunity to get our pack for free.

From 6pm today (Friday 28th August) till 9am on Tuesday 31st August you can download the pack for free. After that its £1.19, not much we know, but its a small gift we wanted to give you.

It’s your chance to get creative and we would love to see what you design by uploading your artworks and posting them on granimator.com (you can also find out more about the app here too).

Enjoy!!

–

You can check out the original post here and also find out more about the Granimator Creators talk at London’s Apple store too.
–

Composing a message
–

iPad mashing
–

Home Page

–

–

–

Double Dip compositions
–