Tyne and Wear Metro passengers can choose station colour

Passengers on the Tyne and Wear Metro are being asked to choose the colour for the interiors of the new Central Station in Newcastle.

Visualisation of the new Central Station – before the application of coloured feature walls

German artist Lothar Goetz has compiled a palette of six colours, one of which will be used on feature walls in the station’s predominantly white interiors.
The colours up for the vote are: dark blue, orange, green, light blue, plum and pink. The palette was originally chosen for the refurbishment of the Haymarket station in 2009.
Nexus, which operates the Metro service, says it believes this is the first time passengers have had such a direct say on the design of a major station.

The colour palette commuters can choose from

Nexus director of rail and infrastructure Raymond Johnstone says: “We felt this was a great opportunity to involve the many people who use [the station] daily to help us create a distinctive new look.”
Staff from Nexus will be at Central station this week offering travellers the chance to vote by dropping counters in clear “ballot boxes” – allowing them to see how the poll is developing.
People can also vote via the Nexus website and the My_Metro Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Visualisation of the new Central Station – before the application of coloured feature walls

The Central Station is being refurbished as part of Nexus’s £389 million capital investment programme across the network.

(Tue, 20 Jan 2015 | By Angus Montgomery )

Google Glass goes back to the drawing board

Google is scrapping Glass in its current form but the company says it will work on a replacement.

Source: Max Braun

Google Glass: Titanium Collection

The Glass project was being developed at Google X, the research and development lab, which has birthed many of the company’s other products including its driverless car.
In a statement Google said it was moving the Glass team to become part of Google proper and added: “As part of this transition, we’re closing the Explorer Program so we can focus on what’s coming next.”
Glass will now be it its own entity within Google and it will be headed up by Ivy Ross, whose team will report into Tony Fadell – founder and chief executive of Nest Labs, which specialises in smart thermostat products and was acquired by Google last year.
Ross who has a background in jewellery design was appointed as head of Google Glass last year.
Google had tried to address aesthetic and desirability issues by investing in a partnership with eyewear company Luxottica group.
Today is the last day that the Glass Explorer Edition will be available but Google said that: “You’ll start to see future versions of Glass when they’re ready”.
The Explorer Programme has ben running since 2013 and has seen Glass owners work with Google to give feedback on the product in exchange for support.
The programme will be wound down and closed but “Explorers” will still be able to use their devices and access support under warranty.
Meanwhile the Glass at Work service, which sees Google work with enterprise developers and companies will still be continuing.

(Mon, 19 Jan 2015 | By Tom Banks )

Envelope-sized inspiration from Stefan Sagmeister, Ally Capellino and more…

Designers from around the world including Stefan Sagmeister, Ally Capellino and Tom Dixon have posted tiny items of inspiration in envelopes to Plymouth University, which will host a new exhibition showing what makes them all tick.

Around 100 designers have got involved, representing disciplines including illustration, product and graphic design.
It has been curated by Pete Davis, Programme Leader for MA Design and Design Culture at Plymouth University who says: “The public view of a designers’ work is so often confined to the finished product, but of course that does not tell the whole story.
“Envelope breaks down the barriers and it is fascinating for our students and the general public to get a small glimpse inside some of the planet’s most exciting creative minds.”
There’s a tangible and analogue quality to all of the items, which Davis says is a reminder that “traditional skills need not be lost with the transition to modern technologies”.
Other designers include British product designer Michael Marriott, German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic, Japanese furniture designer Tomoko Azumi, and Guardian cartoonist and illustrator Steven Appleby.
Envelope runs from 14 February – 26 March at the Peninsula Arts Gallery, Plymouth University, PL4 8AA.

Sylvia Llecha

Phil Cleaver

 

Ally Capellino 

Marijn Van Oosten 

Michael Marriott 

Peter May

Stefan Sagmeister

 

(Mon, 19 Jan 2015 | By Tom Banks )

Samsung’s new global design chief hails from Sir Jony Ive’s former studio

Samsung has hired Don tae Lee as its new global design team leader – Don was formerly co-president of Tangerine, the studio where Apple design chief Sir Jony Ive kick-started his career.

Samsung’s recently released Samsung Gear S watch

Ive joined Tangerine’s London studio in 1990, before leaving and subsequently joined Apple’s design team in California.
Don joined Tangerine in 1998 and among his key projects at Tangerine are the overhaul of British Airways’ business class seating.
Don worked on the original pitch to develop a “yin-inspired” lie-flat bed for the airline.
Between 2006 and 2012, Don worked part-time as design master to Samsung Construction & Trading, where he worked on projects including the redesign of Samsung’s Ramian apartment interiors in Seoul.
Don also headed up Tangerine’s Seoul office and is being replaced by Youngeun Choo, who becomes the new head of Tangerine Seoul.
Martin Darbyshire, chief executive and founder of Tangerine, says: “It is a credit to Young’s dedication and professionalism, managing Tangerine’s Korean clients, that she has now been appointed to head up our Seoul office.
“Naturally, we wish Don the best of luck in his new role.”

(Fri, 16 Jan 2015 | By Angus Montgomery )

Three reasons why £3.1bn is the magic number for design

Once in a while a statistic will come along that encapsulates how important the design industry is. This week we learned from Government figures that last year design contributed £3.1 billion to the UK economy.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport figures show that design’s financial contribution was up nearly 25 per cent from the previous year. As a sector, design is growing at more than twice the rate of the wider creative industries – while the creative sector is growing at three times the rate of the UK economy as a whole.
These figures not only provide a well-deserved boost to designers but also provide a compelling case for design’s value. Here are three reasons why the £3.1bn matters.

Source: William Warby

Hard facts about design’s value are hard to find
Unlike many other sectors, economic statistics around design are few and far between – which makes them even more valuable when you do get one. It’s worth noting though that while the £3.1 billion figure comes from no less an authority than Government, the way it is calculated leaves a fair bit to be desired.
For its statistics, DCMS has defined design as “product graphic and fashion design”. This means the output of UK fashion houses such as Paul Smith and Burberry will be placed alongside that of branding and product designers. And the £3.1 billion figure doesn’t take into account work by interactive designers, which is lumped into the £35 billion generated by the IT, software and computer services sector, or campaign work, which is counted in the £10.2 billion advertising and marketing figure.
So while the statistic is a great start – and the design industry should certainly be proud of its 25 per cent annual growth rate – there’s still a pressing need for more accurate figures in design.

Source: Ma´rcio Cabral de Moura

The £3.1bn figure doesn’t even tell the full story
The figures released by DCMS refer to the gross value added contribution from design. What this means in its simplest terms is the amount of revenue created by design businesses.
What this figure clearly doesn’t cover then is the wider financial contribution made by design and designers by the successful implementation of design projects that either make or save money for organisations. Look at, for example the DBA Effectiveness Award-winning Bear branding created by B&B Studio, which helped the start-up grow sales from £0 to £6.4 million in three years. Or The Allotment’s White Logistics and Storage rebrand – winner of the DW Awards Best of Show in 2012 – which contributed to £500,000-worth of new business in six months.
And this is before we even get to design’s contribution to society and general wellbeing – you can see some examples of this in the successful public sector service design projects picked out for us here by experts.

Pearson Lloyd's AE redesign – an example of successful public sector service design

It’s the growth that matters
Probably the most impressive figure released by DCMS this week was that design is growing by 25 per cent year-on-year – more double the rate of the wider creative industries and around eight times as fast as the UK economy as a whole.
In a bullish speech this week, Chancellor George Osborne said he believed Britain could become the richest country in the world by the 2030s. Although you could reasonably write off Osborne’s claim as bullish pre-election posturing, if you really did want to grow the UK economy at such a rapid rate wouldn’t it make sense to focus on and support its fastest-growing sectors?

(Fri, 16 Jan 2015 | By Angus Montgomery )

Royal Mail's Alice in Wonderland stamps

Royal Mail has launched a set of Alice in Wonderland-themed special stamps to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the story’s publication.

The set has been designed by Jason Godfrey of Godfrey Design in collaboration with illustrator Grahame Bakersmith, and comprises ten stamps (five pairs) depicting different scenes from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s novel. 

Godfrey was approached by the Royal Mail to undertake the project. Alongside the Royal Mail’s stamp advisory committee, he then gathered a roster of potential artists who could be commissioned for the project – illustrator Bakersmith was then selected.

Godfrey says that the project, which took the pair ten months to complete, posed challenges in terms of consistency and scale. “It’s quite tricky with a ten-stamp set to make them look coherent,” he says. “It was important to keep Alice a constant so that the character would work across the whole set – when drafting some illustrations, we thought ‘That’s not quite the same girl’.”
He adds: “Grahame has great skill as a children’s book illustrator on full-page, incredibly detailed illustration. Asking him to work on much smaller 35mm square images meant there were details in his books that wouldn’t show up on the stamps.”

Care also had to be taken with precision, Bakersmith says. “When redrafting, things would be moved by a pixel at a time,” he says. “The changes were so tiny, but they really make a difference to a picture of that size.”

The stamps were designed one or two at a time, rather than all ten in one go, Godfrey says. “It was an organic thing that was constantly evolving,” he says. “We had to try not to repeat layouts and figure out what would work well colour-wise.”

“You also have to make sure that the elbow of one figure isn’t butting into the face of another when you put the stamps side by side,” Bakersmith says. “It had to be carefully planned from the beginning.”
The illustrations are a modernised adaptation of the original John Tenniel illustrations, created through the use of acrylic paint, Photoshop editing and vector shapes. “Everything ended up in Photoshop,” Bakersmith says. “Clean shapes were good for that size, and they brought the illustrations up-to-date.”

Royal Mail has also expanded the brand of the stamp set, working with Walker Books to publish them in a book. Enamel badges are also available to buy, and interactive moving ‘vines’ of the stamps, created by Onlinefire, have been tweeted by the Royal Mail.
Louise Jackson, senior art director at Novelty Books (Walker Books) helped to conceptualise the book project, Bakersmith says: “She had a vision of creating a concertina-type pop-up book of the images: I couldn’t see how they were going to do that at first, but they’ve done something really inventive. It’s the first time the Royal Mail has collaborated with a publisher, so it’s new territory for them, and Walker Books has done a really lovely job on it.”

 

(Thu, 15 Jan 2015 | By Sarah Dawood )

Shining a spotlight on the “Cinderella" discipline of theatre design

“Theatre design tends to be a little bit of a Cinderella,” says curator Kate Burnett. “The difficulty is that we fall between the schools of architecture and fine art, and also fine art and craft and design – the whole process is collaborative, so it makes us quite hard to pigeonhole, and we’re never a priority.”  

Source: Zuleika Henry

Peter Pan, set designed by Colin Richmond

Burnett has been working on new exhibition Make:Believe, which looks at sets, costumes, puppets and installations created by more than 140 UK-based theatre designers between 2011 and 2015.
The exhibition is a collaboration between the Society of British Theatre Designers, Nottingham Trent University and the Victoria & Albert Museum. After its run at Nottingham Trent this month, selected work from Make: Believe will then be taken on an international tour, travelling to the Prague Quadrennial 2015 and the V&A Museum, among others.
Designs have been taken from sporting, music and theatre events – examples include Es Devlin’s design of the Olympic Games’ 2012 closing ceremony and Miley Cyrus’ performance set, Joanna Scotcher’s work on the State Apartments at Kensington Palace, and sets from Royal Shakespeare Company plays and Glastonbury festival.
The display was curated by Burnett, who is the UK national curator for the SBTD and the Prague Quadrennial 2015, an international theatre design competition. She is also currently a Reader in Theatre Design at Nottingham Trent university.

Gary McCann’s design of operetta Die Fledermaus

“It’s about bringing more designers out of the woodwork to submit work, whether it has been made in school or village halls or for international opera,” Burnett says. “In the exhibition, the public, students and practitioners can see a wealth of work that is otherwise invisible – normally, it’s only seen when a show is being performed, then it just disappears.”
Burnett also says that school education tends to focus on theatre design as a small project under wider umbrellas, rather than as a discipline of it’s own: “Neither drama, art or technology quite know what to do with theatre design,” she says. “Big national exhibitions are a good opportunity to show the ideas behind our work and the design processes.”
The exhibition contains images mounted onto wall-boards, with individually lit model boxes of displays and props, and interactive installations. One live installation sees two designers set up a mini proscenium theatre in a tent, where they perform as one of four possible characters whenever a visitor puts their head in to the tent.
A research project accompanies Make:Believe, which aims to look into the designers’ thought processes through a selection of interviews. “It’s not only a collection of work, but also commentary on their work, through a collection of statements on their own projects,” Burnett says.

Steptoe and Son, set designed by Neil Murray

Alongside the display, the university has commissioned a play by Michael Eaton and a debate about the arts and design education heritage of Nottingham Trent, which dates back to the 1800s, set to take place at Nottingham Castle.
“In the last 20 years, the growth in the number of theatre design university courses has been astonishing,” Burnett says. “Theatre design as a discipline itself is very strong, but incredibly badly paid and hard to get into. One of the reasons we’re holding the exhibition here at Nottingham Trent is our desire to make that link between industry and education stronger than ever.”
Make: Believe UK Design for Performance 2011-2015 will run from 14 January-31 January at the Newton building atrium, Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham, NG1 4BU.
Selected work will then be exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2015 from 17-28 June, and at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London from July 2015- January 2016. The work will then be shown in a selection of cities and music festivals, soon to be announced. 

(Wed, 14 Jan 2015 | By Sarah Dawood )