Wednesday, 9:00am
7 September 2016

Noted #77

Beer cans, Dutch Alphabets, the Global Synthesizer Project, An Anthology of Decorated Papers and Chanced Arm no. 2

Here are a few things – beer cans, books, a sound installation and a magazine – that caught our attention in recent weeks.

Tate Modern’s Switch House Pale Ale.
Top: Plate by Bernd Volmer from Dutch Alphabets.

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Peter Saville’s artwork for Tate Modern’s new Switch House now appears on limited-edition beer cans for Fourpure Brewing Co.’s pale ale.

Dutch Alphabets: New Examples of Writing & Lettering, compiled by graphic design curator and author Mathieu Lommen and graphic and type designer Peter Verheul (De Buitenkant, €160). The book is dedicated to Gerrit Noordzij.

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Hansje van Halem.

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Mathieu Lommen’s Dutch Alphabets features 46 plates – from international type designers, calligraphers, sign painters and lettering artists – in the style of lettering model books dating back to the 1830s. These new partial or complete alphabets by Frank E. Blokland, Heidi Rand Sørensen and Gerard Unger, among many others, show the rich array of typographic practices of designers born or educated in The Netherlands.

Yuri Suzuki’s ‘Global Synthesizer Project’ made of Moog synth modules.

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The ‘Global Synthesizer Project’ debuted at Moogfest 2016 in Durham, North Carolina, May 19-22.

Yuri Suzuki’s ‘Global Synthesizer Project’ is seeking fresh contributions. The project, made in collaboration with synthesizer company Moog, employs an archive of field recordings from around the world. Suzuki is inviting ‘audio adventurers and sonic scouts from across the globe’ to contribute their local sounds. Send your field recordings to [email protected] in either .aiff or .wav format.

Spread from An Anthology of Decorated Papers showing nineteenth-century European moire marbling.

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Spread showing nineteenth-century brocade paper by Renner & Abel of Nuremburg ca. 1840 (left) and Nineteenth-century brocade paper (1800–50) by Renner & Abel of Nuremburg (right).

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Cover of An Anthology of Decorated Papers by P. J. M. Marks, Thames & Hudson, £38.

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P. J. M. Marks’s An Anthology of Decorated Papers (Thames & Hudson, £38) is a sourcebook made in association with the British Library. Examples range from the hand-made and marbled to the mass-produced and metallic.

Chanced Arm no. 2 is distributed for free across London, Manchester and Bristol, but can also be purchased for cost price from the Smallfury shop.

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Chanced Arm is a magazine that is edited and designed by design practice Smallfury in 24 hours using ‘content submitted via social media’. Now in its second issue, the folded, small-format publication uses a two-colour palette and features an eclectic, eccentric mix of texts and images. Contents include Christian Granados’s typographic piece reading ‘The world is going nuts’; Simon Hinde’s article ‘Twelve Yachts: A nautical history of late-period capitalism’; and ‘The Periodic Toilet’, by Smallfury founder Oswin Tickler, which looks at toilet signs and ‘the universal failure of pictographic signage’.

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Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.