Friday, 12:00pm
16 May 2014
Noted #60
Maya pictoglyphs, Comics Unmasked, The Believer film issue with John and Faith Hubley, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards, Chermayeff & Geismar, Office
Here are some links to a few exhibitions, books and magazines that caught our attention in recent weeks.
Frida Larios, The Village that was Buried by an Erupting Volcano.
Top: spread from The Believer featuring original storyboard panels from John and Faith Hubley’s 1961 film, Of Stars and Men.
Designer Frida Larios has published a trilingual children’s book in English, Spanish and ‘Maya pictoglyphs’ called The Village that was Buried by an Erupting Volcano. Larios’s ‘New Maya Language typo/graphics’ project began when she and her son moved to the mountainous town of Copán Ruinas in Honduras, near the Guatemalan border and ancient Mayan ruins.
Spread from Frida Larios’s trilingual children’s book.
The Village that was Buried by an Erupting Volcano [La Aldea que fue Sepultada por un Volcán en Erupción] is about a 1400-year-old archeological site in Joya de Cerén, El Salvador, which is buried under volcanic ash.
The Trials of Nasty Tales, 1973. Cover art by Dave Gibbons.
Adrian Edwards, John Harris Dunning and Paul Gravett introduce ‘Comics Unmasked’.
The exhibition ‘Comics Unmasked’ opened recently at the British Library in London. Curated by Adrian Edwards, John Harris Dunning and Paul Gravett, this thoroughly grown-up view of comics ‘explores the full anarchic range of the medium’, with work by Neil Gaiman, Jamie Hewlett, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Posy Simmonds and many more highly original creators.
Cover of The Believer, March / April 2014, illustrated by Kelsey Drake. Clockwise from top left: Christian Bale, Carrie Brownstein, Bettie Page, Bill Murray, Fred Armisen, Lindsay Lohan and Steve Martin visiting Jurassic Park.
The March / April film issue of The Believer magazine includes a DVD of short films made by John and Faith Hubley. Oscar-winning animated short Moonbird, 1959, is one of many animations featured on the disc which also includes the ‘mini-mockumentary Date with Dizzy (1958) featuring jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, some short, somewhat bizarre examples of client work, The Hole (1962) and Cockaboody (1973).
Moonbird is an animation that uses the voices of the couple’s two sons Mark and Ray ‘Hampy’ Hubley who go on an adventure to catch a mythical bird in the middle of the night. There are John and Faith Hubley Centennial screenings at Northwest Film Forum Cinemas in Seattle, US, 17-18 May 2014.
John and Faith Hubley, Moonbird, 1959.
At the Cooper-Hewitt 2014 National Design Awards, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar won the Lifetime Achievement Award. (‘Cut and Paste’ an exhibition of Ivan Chermayeff’s collages, will be at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, East Sussex, UK from 19 July to 14 Sep 2014. See ‘Symbols and survival’ in Eye 81.)
Poster to publicise Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, a television series sponsored by Mobil Oil Corporation, 1981. Photo: Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. Copyright:Photo: Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv.
San Francisco-based design studio Office won the communication design award. (Office’s typographic animal alphabet poster Wee Alphas was featured in ‘Type specific’ in Eye 86.)
Wee Alphas, a limited-edition screen-printed poster featuring 26 animal characters with a different letter hidden within each creature. Design: Office, San Francisco, US. Creative Direction: Rob Alexander, Jill Robertson and Jason Schulte. Client: Wee Society.
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.