Eye Magazine

Last Wednesday saw a rare gathering of some of the UK’s most senior designers (David Gentleman, Sean Perkins, Margaret Calvert, Henrik Kubel), and design educators, crammed into a small room at the Design Museum to announce an event at London’s Barbican Centre on 26-27 September – AGI Open.

Future Everything, just opened in Manchester, is tackling the issue of ‘public space’ in the digital realm.

A few books, videos, zines and events that caught our eye …

Earlier this month, a collaboration between the V&A and Visual Communication students from the Royal College of Art sought to prove that the poster has not been killed off by the introduction of digital media in communication and advertising. Their findings, displayed in two rooms of the Sackler Centre, argued that the poster remains a long-serving example of print doing what it does best – mass communication.

The Type Tuesday event at St Bride Library in London is a chance to hear art director Mark Porter talk about the challenges of adapting newspaper and magazine contents to new platforms, including the iPad and other tablets. Other participants include Mark Wilson and Alex Breuer.

‘Goodvertising’ is one of those hard to love, cut’n’shut words that the advertising industry seems to specialise in constructing. The kind of word that you’d have to steel yourself to employ without the protection of a sturdy pair of inverted commas, writes Andrew Missingham.

For more than two centuries the poster has occupied public space on hoardings, building sites, the sides of buses and commercial vehicles, plus every conceivable spot where these images might be caught within the public eye, write Naomi and Daniel Games.

On 5 March 2013, the Design Museum shop will launch a collection of illustrated rugs produced by Node, a non-profit social business working with Nepalese carpet weavers, writes Sarah Snaith. Founded by children’s book author / illustrator Chris Haughton and Kathmandu-based entrepreneur Akshay Sthapit, Node (from the Latin for knot) aims to connect fair trade with design.

Designers have been engaged in sex since neolithic times. Well, maybe those neolithics were not designers per se, but they were designing sexual representations, such as Venus (9500-8700BC), found in Lake Bracciano in Italy, writes Steven Heller.