Month: November 2009

Illustration

Stamps to Help Kids Learn

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Every year since 1924, the Dutch Postal Service has worked together with the Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederland (SKN), or the Foundation for Children’s Welfare Stamps Netherland, to produce a series of stamps to help disadvantaged children both in and outside the Netherlands. The last campaign raised more than 9.3m euros to fund educational programs. The special edition stamps, which cost a little more than regular stamps, have been sold door-to-door by Dutch school children since 1948. Art director Christian Borstlap from Kessels Kramer Creative Collective designed this year’s playful worm-like creatures, which were featured both on the stamp series and on postcards. The little worm people were turned into an animated commercial by Paul Postma Motion Design.

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Publishing

Electronic Popable Books from MIT

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Pop-ups — or books with mechanical or movable parts – have been around since at least the 13th century. Designed so that images rise up from the page when the reader lifts a flap or moves a tab, pop-up books have been a special niche of publishing, partly because they are so labor intensive to produce. Once written and illustrated, the story has to go to a paper engineer to layout pages with nesting pieces so that the sheet can be run through a press. The nesting pieces then have to be die-cut, collated and assembled by hand. Dozens of workers are often needed to fold, insert paper tabs into slits, connect paper pivots, glue and tape, all to produce just one book. That was yesterday. Now thanks to students Jie Qi, Leah Buechley and Tschen Chew from MIT’s High-Low Tech Group, a few more specialists will need to be added to the production team. Electronic popables integrate paper-based electronic sensors that allow amazing interactivity — turning on lights and moving images at the touch of a finger. Will it catch on or will the line between printing on paper and electronic media become so blurred that consumers will opt to watch the story on a screen?

Posters

Geometry and Art Intersect in Outer Space

By Delphine Hirasuna |

page

Geometry, the mathematical study of shapes and their relative positions in space, lies at the heart of design and typography and the physical order of the universe. These posters by UK-based applied mathematician Simon C. Page for the International Year of Astronomy ’09 (IYA) depict the wonders of the universe through the use of simple geometric lines and circles. Page, a self-trained graphic designer, had originally created these images for a self-promotion piece, but the math-inspired art caught the attention of the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO, which asked to turn them into posters to promote the International Year of Astronomy’09, a global effort to raise awareness of astronomy. Retro in feel, Page’s posters aptly capture the beauty, dynamism, and mysterious orderliness of objects in space. They are available for sale from simoncpage.co.uk.

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Publishing

Approved by Good Housekeeping
and Ladies’ Home Journal

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Good Housekeeping

For the past century, the Good Housekeeping magazine Seal of Approval has been a hallmark of reliability for household goods. Run through a battery of performance tests by the Good Housekeeping Research Institute, each endorsed product has been backed by the magazine’s two-year limited warranty. Good Housekeeping’s oval-shaped Seal, which has gone through nine design updates since it first appeared in 1909, has been coveted by product manufacturers and proudly displayed on packaging. Now the magazine has rolled a Good Housekeeping Green Seal of Approval, based on metrics that evaluate a product’s composition, manufacturing, packaging and other attributes from an environmental standpoint.

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Motion Graphics

Inspiring New Zealanders to Read

By Delphine Hirasuna |

A national not-for-profit organization, the New Zealand Book Council promotes reading in general, but with a particular emphasis on New Zealand writing and writers – “our own artists, stories, and point of view.” In this video, the Council brings the printed page to life by turning the paper itself into stop action animation art to move the story forward. For the video, it chose one of the nation’s most celebrated books, Going West, by New Zealand literary giant Maurice Gee. The book, published in 1992, describes a steam train journey across the country, and the title was adopted as the name of the Auckland region’s first writers’ festival in 1996. The Going West festival now draws over 350 writers and performers to Waitakere City for the annual literary event. We couldn’t find anything on the Internet about the creative team behind this video. If anyone knows, please share it with us in the Comments box.