Wednesday, 4:09pm
1 December 2021
94: 8000 one-offs
Watch the award-winning short film about Eye 94
Adrian Harrison’s award-winning* short film about the variable-data covers for Eye no. 94 was something of a labour of love. Adie and his small team put the film together with the help of everyone at Eye team, designers MuirMcNeil and the management and staff of Eye’s regular printers Pureprint in Uckfield.
Happily, you can now watch the show via this Vimeo link, no password required.
Right. Hamish Muir talks about designing for the Mosaic software.
Top. Just a few of the 8000 individually numbered Eye 94 covers at Pureprint.
Up to now, it has only been possible to see the film at design festivals, events like Type Tuesday and on monitors at exhibitions, such Turin Graphic Days in 2019, and at the current show in Xi’an, China, which features work by Han Jiaying, Benny Au, Jiang Hua, Masayoshi Kodaira, Mann Lao, Noo Leong, Hamish Muir and Paul McNeil, and an extensive overview of Eye magazine itself.
Eye 94, a type special issue, included many article about typography and type design, including a Reputations interview with Nadine Chahine and Ferdinand P. Ulrich’s
From punch cutters to number crunchers’ about type’s long transition from craft to code. A section titled ‘Mightier than the pen: systems of type’, covered Mark van Wageningen, Rudolph Koch’s Kabel and ‘Pleasure in the process’, feature about MuirMcNeil … which led to Muir and McNeil designing the groundbreaking cover.
‘Hamish initially felt that we could have absolute control over each cover.’ Paul McNeil talks about the Mosaic algorithm.
Of all the issues in Eye’s back catalogue, 94 is probably the one that has attracted the most attention – press, blogs and social media. Eye 94 received multiple awards including a Stack Awards 2017 cover of the year; D&AD Awards 2018 wood pencil for magazine cover; and Society of Publication Designers (SPD) gold medal for independent magazine cover.
‘I couldn’t waste any copies at all.’ Warren Brown (Pureprint) talks about the challenge of binding 8000 different covers.
*Adrian Harrison’s film also won Awards of Excellence from The Best Shorts Film Competition and the Impact Docs Awards, and was a semi-finalist in the Blow-Up International Arthouse Filmfest Chicago.
Covers on the binding line.
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published 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.