Illustrators Peskimo and Chris Dickason have teamed up to put on a tea-time themed exhibition opening this Friday March 19 at Start - a new shop and exhibition space in the heart of Bristol...

The exhibition, entitled Tease Made, will celebrate, Peskimo tells us, "the social rituals, history, iconography and biscuit-dunking goodness of enjoying a cup of tea." There will be prints, paintings, sketches and sculptural pieces on show. Here are a few images that will be on display...

Start is a new art space and shop which will look to exhibit work by both established and up and coming artists working in the South West region across the mediums of illustration, graphic design, photography, painting and printmaking. The shop will look to stock and sell work by local artists and musicians, and stock a small range of art magazines, prints, cards, jewellery, CDs, T-shirts and vinyl and plush toys. There will also be an area to sit and have a mug of tea. Start's website should be up and running this Friday. wearestart.co.uk

Tease Made runs from March 19 through to April 9 at Start (above Start The Bus), 7-9 Baldwin St, Bristol, BS1 1RU. 

peskimo.com
chrisdickason.co.uk

Designer and art director David James has steadfastly refused to step into the limelight, until now.  An online exhibition presents his 20-year portfolio for the first time

Born just outside Manchester, originally made his name designing record sleeves, worked with the late great Trevor Key and Nick Knight before moving to fashion and establishing himself as one of the leading art directors of his generation: no, not Peter Saville but a designer with a somewhat less developed public persona, David James.

James has resolutely shunned the public eye. He routinely refuses interview requests, there's no glossy monograph and he has never set foot on a conference stage.

But his career has reached a point where it is about to make a major change of direction and James has decided to say a public goodbye to his work in print. As we mentioned in our March issue, James's work for Prada is shifting toward moving image, with even the print ad campaigns being stills taken from the moving image footage. Over the next year, James will reposition his studio toward working in this way and away from print.

David James: Out of Print is an online exhibition of highlights from James's career to date. Beginning with his first solo project (a catalogue for clothes brand Moto printed on plastic, shown top) it charts his early career designing record sleeves for the likes of Soul II Soul and, notably, System 7, the electronic outfit named after the Apple Mac operating system for whom James created a series of memorable sleeves with photographer Trevor Key (Limited Addition shown below).

In 1995 James moved into editorial with A Be Sea, a large format newsprint 'visual paper' which he designed with long-term collaborator Gareth Hague. Each issue was named after a consecutive letter of the alphabet: for Issue I (below) all the headlines were shot on Super 8 film then re-photographed

While Issue G featured a series of abstract forms

James is probably best-known for his work for Prada for whom he has been art director since 1997. He first got involved with the brand at the invitation of photographer Glen Luchford. The pair pitched some ideas which became the Spring Summer 97 ad campaign (below).

For each Prada show James produces exquisite invitations, mixing materials to create lavish pieces of communication.

While, under his creative directorship, Another and AnotherMan magazines have been notable for their typographic experimentation

Because he has shunned the 'celebrity designer' route, James has become almost the forgotten man of British graphic design. This online exhibition, which will come down on 15 May, is a welcome opportunity to view a beautiful body of work.

David James: Out of Print

David James will be profiled in the April issue of Creative Review, out March 24

Richard Murray, co-founder of design consultancy Williams Murray Hamm, has died of skin cancer. He was 44.

Along with his partners, Richard Williams and Garrick Hamm, Richard Murray built Williams Murray Hamm into one of the UK's leading design consultancies, renowned for its ability to create witty, challenging work for major consumer brands.

Richard was intelligent, funny, warm and tremendous company. His wit shone through his work. He could be outspoken, but he was always worth listening to. Needless to say, he will be greatly missed, not just by those who knew him personally but by the design industry as a whole.

Donations in his memory can be made to Hatherop Castle School via Cowley and Son Ltd, Cirencester, on 01285 653298.

We would like to offer this space to all those who knew Richard to express their thoughts and tributes to him.

Maybe it's the ungainly shadow cast by Jeremy Clarkson but the world of motorsport wouldn't be the first place we would look for stylish graphic design. A new site for F1 team McLaren Mercedes proves us wrong

The site was created by Work Club and Pirata. According to Work-Club's Andy Sandoz, the idea is that the site is "designed as if a computer compiled it, with the pit lane race screens in mind. You see what they see."

So, during today's practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix, the first race in the new F1 season, live data was streamed to the site providing the running dialogue between drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button and the team

Elsewhere, the site carries through the style to pages on the team's drivers

During the race itself on Sunday, the site will carry more live stats and commentary giving users some idea of the race experience. Mclaren.com

Dog Days Are Over by Florence and the Machine; director: Legs; prod co: Rokkit

Directing team Legs channels the fashionable shamanic vibe in this video for Florence and the Machine's Dog Days Are Over...

"Florence is the shamanic leader of a surreal orchestra where spiritual elation explodes into smokey psychedelic anarchy," says Legs. "Each musical element of the song is personified by a group of colourful characters that combine 60s girl groups, Hinduism, gospel choirs, drum circles, paganism and pyrotechnics. Florence is a painted primal force of nature that whips a religious experience into a riot."

Golly.

It seems pop stars are all about tribalism these days though - check out MGMT and Friendly Fires for previous examples of the genre.

It was never too soon for little Serge to learn the dulcet tones of his namesake

Unhappy Hipsters is a tumblr blog that's kept us highly amused for the last few days. Featuring imagery culled from various interiors magazines, it suggests that concrete floors, Eames chairs and moustaches don't always equate with personal well-being...

(Above photo: Dean Kaufman; Dwell, July/August 2006)

You know the types of houses and loft spaces that regularly appear in the high-end lifestyle press? The compiler of Unhappy Hipsters makes regular use of photography from magazines like Dwell and Wallpaper* but with biting reinterpretation.

Where they feature, the kids and fashionable pets add a particularly sad note to the existential proceedings.

Check out the blog at unhappyhipsters.com. Here are some recent favourites:

"Nutmeg sat stoically atop the cushions. Yet her internal dialogue was a cacophony of discordant thoughts, mostly centered on the absurdity of the double Nelson clocks." (Photo: Joao Canziani; Dwell)

"This time it was 'Mondrian: From Naturalism to Abstraction', but at least the TV was finally on." (Photo: Chad Holder; Dwell, April/May 2005)

"The stools huddled together, braced for another one of his incoherent solo poetry slams." (Photo: Noah Webb; Dwell)

We've seen tilt-shift photography projects aplenty over the last few years, but The Sandpit – a time lapse, tilt-shift film of New York life by Sam O'Hare (who shot over 35,000 stills over five days to make it) – caught our eye this week...

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

The music was composed by Human, co-written by Rosi Golan and Alex Wong

O'Hare's production company, Aéro Film has posted an interview with the director about the making of the film which you can read at aerofilm.blogspot.com

The last time we wrote about tilt-shift photography on the CR blog was when we featured the work of Melbourne-based photographer Ben Thomas back in October 2008. You can read that post here.

Above: From an Olympus Pen camera commercial by German agency DSG, ‘inspired’ by Taijin Takeuchi’s A wolf loves pork film, something the agency only acknowledged after a flood of accusatory YouTube comments. But we could have picked any number of other examples...

In 1937, just as technology was gathering momentum, George Orwell identified one of its fundamental truths. “No one draws water from the well,” he wrote, “when he can run the tap.” As soon as science gives us an easy way of doing something, doing it the old way instantly becomes a hopeless waste of time, in other words, a hobby. Once you can buy factory-built furniture the only reason to fashion a table for yourself is the arts and crafts impulse, and this, he observed, was the preserve of the “bearded fruit juice drinker”. The effect on craftsmanship is permanent. “In such circumstances,” he said, “it is nonsense to talk of ‘creative work’.”

So what is advertising going to do, now that ideas are available on tap,
in every office? Much has been written about the ethics of purloining ideas from YouTube [notably by CR here]. No one has stopped doing it. This isn’t surprising for anyone who’s worked on a nightmare brief. The one that’s been through the agency eight times, the one that comes with an apology from the head of planning, the brief that won’t flush.

The first day is OK, you deflect your partner’s ideas, eliminating the obvious. Even the second day has a kind of hysterical calm, like a test match at gunpoint. It’s the third day, when you’re in the desert, the place where careers are really made or broken, and the review appears at 4pm. Suddenly that clip of a poodle playing a bassoon starts to look so very very right.

It doesn’t just make sense for spineless creatives either. It’s an economic imperative. The problem is there in Orwell’s oxymoron: ‘creative work’. Work that is play. On the one hand advertising is an exercise in waste, an opportunity for brands to engage in that most inefficient of behaviours, entertainment. On the other it’s an industry, a multi-million pound concern, a tough market that promises its clients efficiency. Yes it would be lovely if we could all sit round having ideas, maybe playing a sitar, but if you can get it quicker from the net, you better do it alright?

And this will be fine until clients wise up. The net is accessible to all, so why is a brand going to pay an agency millions of pounds to trawl it for them? That there’s an art to the selection of content is the agency’s last claim to legitimacy. But it’s threadbare. Ditch the agency and how will the brand manager know which clip to choose? He won’t need to. As Bernbach said, research can’t have ideas, but it can certainly help select them. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s us or the computers and for the money men that’s a no-brainer. We don’t have to embrace the future, it’s coming for us like a septic great-aunt.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CR. ‘Gordon Comstock’ (a pseudonym) is a London-based ad creative who blogs at advertanon.blogspot.com

This delightful music video comes from new director Tom Kingsley, and was directed for Barcelona-based band Mujeres as part of the Diesel:U:Music project, which supports new talent in music and filmmaking...

Kingsley is currently working at Blink as a runner/in-house showreel maker/website guru/technical support, but will no doubt be edging his way onto the production house's director's roster soon by the looks of this promo. He has also recently completed a short film, and is currently working on his second music video, also through Blink. More of Kingsley's work is here.

The British Journal of Photography relaunched last week with an extensive redesign. It's much improved but does it rise to the editor's own challenge of becoming a beautiful photographic magazine?

The relaunch issue is the BJP's 7,774th edition – the magazine started as a monthly title in 1854, changing to a weekly in 1864. 146 years later it reverts to its original monthly format. One reason given for the recent change is that its readers are apparently now more likely to seek out news stories on bjp-online.com, while longer features and analysis still find a more favourable home in print.

The relaunch pushes some new sections within the magazine, including Projects (above) – where series of works are displayed and discussed – and Portfolio, which examines the output of a single photographer. And over its considerable 100 pages, it's clear that the magazine has plenty to say: the content is extensive, with features on established photographers giving way to shorter pieces on new work and reviews.

The cover of the new issue features an arresting image by Reed + Rader, cover lines that work well as a list of contents, while a bold headline supports the main image as the lead story. But it does seem to suffer from a wealth of information fighting for space.

The BJP probably has one of the longest titles out there – 27 characters no less, hence the usual initialism. Coupled with taglines "A Different Take" and "The world's longest-running photography magazine, established 1854", another cover line, all in the upper fifth portion of the cover, it does make for a masthead that feels a little cramped.

The cover, as so many magazines do presently, echoes some of the key stylings that designer and art director Jop van Bennekom has created for titles such as Re- and Fantastic Man. The design of the short-lived Pictured magazine from a few years ago, perhaps also suggested a direction that the new BJP might take (its previous incarnation is shown below).

The BJP before the redesign

Under the creative direction of the BJP's art editor, Mick Moore, a selection of new fonts have also been brought in for the redesign: headings are set in Farnham Display from Font Bureau (currently also used by CR); body text in Skolar from TypeTogether (above – note the ligatures at 'ct' and 'st'); while nibs, captions and panels use the sans serif face, Gotham Narrow, from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

Interestingly, in his column editor Simon Bainbridge makes the point that "Architects and graphic designers have beautiful magazines to read, so why not professional photographers?"

It's a question that we've raised numerous times in the office ourselves. Despite the preponderance of fantastic photographic work out there, why are there so few devoted photography magazines that have risen to the challenge of being beautiful?

In line with Bainbridge's own questioning, the new issue of the BJP doffs its cap to a selection of magazines that already do photography really well: Amusement, Russian Esquire, Candy, Garden & Gun, Rouleur and The New York Times Magazine (with pages from Ryan McGinley's series of Winter Olympics pictures shown from the latter).

It's a timely feature and alludes to the kind of company that the BJP sees itself amongst, even if the best efforts of van Bennekom are perhaps conspicuously absent.

Looking through the new issue, however, it's clear that the redesign has refreshed the purpose and intent of one of the world's longest running creative titles. It's equally as impressive to see it assert the power of the printed photograph in such turbluent times for publishing.

The British Journal of Photography is on sale the first Wednesday of every month, priced at £6.99. More at bjp-online.com.