Tuesday, 8:00pm
7 April 2020

Noted #97

Kitching’s letterpress lockdown, Gorilla returns, dogs in cars, quarantine fonts, colouring in and a pastel poster tribute to immigrants

Here is a selection of things that have caught our attention in recent (quarantined) weeks.

Alan Kitching – featured in Eye articles such as ‘Marks on paper’ (Eye 15), ‘The show must go on’ (Eye 74) and ‘Kitching on both sides of the Thames’ (Eye blog) – sends a reminder to everyone around the world from The Typography Workshop in south London. He made the letterpress print Stay the F*ck Home (above) at the suggestion of his assistant, Joana Paranhos.

Netherlands-based Gorilla Collective (part of What Design Can Do, see ‘Yes we can change’ in Eye 99, has recently launched a new platform dedicated to creativity during the global Coronavirus pandemic. The column ‘Visual relief’ offers just that – it is also on the Gorilla Instagram account.

An entry from Gorilla Collective’s new ‘Visual relief’ column.
Top. Alan Kitching in The Typography Workshop.

Hoxton Mini Press is offering a ‘virus discount’ of twenty per cent to everyone and a 70 per cent discount for NHS key workers (in the UK) on the publishing house’s range of photography books. Sign up to their newsletter for photographer and co-founder Martin Usborne’s funny and sometimes slightly deranged ‘Hoxton Corona Diaries’.

See ‘Who (didn’t) let the dogs out?’ on the Eye blog, about Usborne’s photographic series of dogs in cars, which are now compiled in The Silence of Dogs in Cars.

The Hoxton Mini Press’s ‘The Hoxton Corona Diaries’.

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Type designer Nadine Chahine recently released her new typeface Sawad, with a text entitled ‘On the outlines of grief’ that tells the story of losing both her parents, most recently her father. An extract from the text reads: ‘In that bleak time I decided to draw, to trace the outlines of my sorrow. I didn’t know what I would want to do with that design, or what it would look like. And so I drew the Alef, sharp like a knife. The rest of the letterforms followed and the only two conscious design decisions that I had made were how bold the typeface needs to be, and how tiny the counters are. I wanted to draw letterforms that fill my whole screen with black.’

See ‘Reputations: Nadine Chahine’ in Eye 94.

Sawad, designed by Nadine Chahine.

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Zetafonts has compiled ten typefaces – including Hopscotch, Sunshine and Campfire – in a collection called Quarantype. They are free to download and use for commercial and non-commercial projects, but donations to the Italian Red Cross are encouraged.

Zetafonts’ Quarantype collection designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Maria Chiara Fantini, Andrea Tartarelli and Francesco Canovaro with Debora Manetti.

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Designers such as Malika Favre, Kapitza and Supermundane are offering a selection of their work as line drawings (for free) to be coloured in.

One of eighteen colouring pages by Supermundane.

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One of 25 line drawings by Barcelona-based French graphic artist Malika Favre (to be featured in the forthcoming Eye 100), available to be coloured in.

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The charity poster Thank God For Immigrants has been a runaway success for artist Jeremy Deller and graphic designer Fraser Muggeridge (see the forthcoming Eye 100). They planned to do a short run, then 500 and swiftly upped the print run to 1500 when that many orders came in within three hours of posting the image on social media at lunchtime on Tuesday 7 April.

‘I designed it to be a bit like those posters you used to see outside churches, using condensed type,’ says Muggeridge. The graduated tint background might put you in mind of Colby posters from LA, except that this is ‘more 2020’, in rainbow pastels.

Half the money raised is for Refugee Action’s campaign to give out secondhand computers that isolated refugees and asylum-seekers can use to access friends, family and online resources. The other half will go the The Trussel Trust, which supports a network of food banks across the UK. Details via pleasedonotbend.co.uk. The price is £25 plus p&p of £8 (mainland Europe), £5 (UK) and £20 (rest of the world).

Thank God For Immigrants. A2 litho poster by Jeremy Deller and Fraser Muggeridge, 2020.

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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.