The organisers of the Design Indaba conference asked NY design studio Karlsson Wilker to spend ten days in South Africa, creating a new piece of work each day in reaction to what they saw on their travels…

situation 9, 2007

Strip a city street of all its commercial clutter and is it still identifiable? This is one of the questions posed by a series of artworks by Austrian artist Gregor Graf, currently on show at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London.

Graf mixes old technology with new in his work, using medium format photography to take the initial shots of a city before removing, via Photoshop, all traces of language and signage from the images, including commercials signs, street signs, people and traffic. The cities become virtually unrecognisable as a result, and oddly sinister. Graf has previously photographed Linz and Warsaw in this style, and turned his attention to London when commissioned to create some works by the Visual Arts Platform at the Austrian Cultural Forum. Shown above is a blissfully quiet Oxford Street…

London-based Moving Brands’ rebrand of Swiss telecom company Swisscom includes a three-dimensional graphic mark as well as a re-drawn wordmark…

OK, here we are at the Design Indaba in Cape Town attempting, internet connection willing, to blog live from the first session of the morning by Gert Dumbar and carrying on through the rest of the day

Everybody at Creative Review would like to wish Roger Beckett all the best as he leaves the magazine to pursue other interests.
Roger worked on the launch of Creative Review in 1980 and also on the launch of our sister title, Design Week, eventually becoming publisher of the latter. For the past few years he has been publishing director of both Creative Review and Design Week, helping us to launch The Annual and Monograph as well as overseeing our acquisition of the Creative Handbook.

“During my time at Centaur [publisher of CR] I have worked in many different markets but have always felt a great affinity to the creative sector. I have been fortunate enough to work alongside and do business with some fantastic people and hope that our paths will cross again in the future,” he says.

We will all miss Roger’s energy and enthusiasm as well as all the help he has given us in developing Creative Review and wish him every future success.

Patrick Burgoyne will be blogging from the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town this week

Design Indaba has often been referred to as the best design conference in the world: it certainly attracts the big names, this year being no exception as the event kicked off with a presentation by (and I think for once this term is genuinely applicable) a living legend of graphic design, Ivan Chermayeff.