The Museum Für Gestaltung Zurich’s current show, This Side Up - Konstantin Grcic: Siebdruck, is promoted with this poster by Bonbon

Thanks to Tony Brook of Spin for alerting us to the wonders of the Museum Für Gestaltung Zurich’s rather cool poster subscription service.

Sign up for around £80 a year and, every other month, a lovely surprise will drop through your door – a 128 x 90.5 cm poster by a leading designer promoting the latest show at the Museum…

There suddenly seems to be loads of eye-catching record sleeves and CD packages pouring into Creative Review’s office. And hooray for that! THANK YOU to all those that send us stuff to look at (and listen to). Actually, there’s too many great sleeves to put in one post - SO have a look at these sleeves now, and we’ll post some more up next week. Favourites at the moment include the limited edition box that houses Fred Deakin’s triple CD, four hour mix extravaganza: The Triptych…

When you have a train-obsessed six (soon to be seven) year-old, your weekends can take you to some unlikely places. So it was that I spent yesterday at a depot in Acton, west London. But this was not just any old pre-fab shed in nondescript suburbia. This was The London Transport Museum Depot and I can recommend it almost as highly to anyone interested in design as I can to anyone with a child for whom the tube network is a source of endless wonder.

Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty, published in 1889, revealed that over a third
of Londoners lived in poverty. It was colour-coded to indicate the levels of poverty and prosperity
street by street. While the red colouring showed the habitat of the “well-to-do, middle class”, pale
blue and dark blue revealed the areas inhabited by the “poor” and “very poor” respectively. Here,
the black area in the centre (Bethnal Green) contained the “lowest class; vicious, semi-criminal.”

The British Library’s show, London: A Life in Maps, ends this weekend. If you haven’t been down (it’s free) we wholly recommend a trip over to Euston Road. The exhibition traces how the capital has been depicted since the earliest images of the walled City in the 1550s. On show are some of the earliest examples of wayfinding – the ancestry of the London A-Z if you like. While many of the cruder, hand drawn maps offer up a somewhat distorted vision of a growing city (often for political reasons), the large-scale, engraved depictions of the capital are astoundingly accurate and detailed.