Eye Magazine

In March this year, the Australian government’s ‘de-branded’ cigarette packaging design was one of fourteen nominated entries – in the Graphics category – in the Design Museum’s ‘Designs of the Year 2013’ awards / exhibition, writes Alex Cameron.

Whatever the headlines say, the streets of Nicosia are still purring with BMWs and SUVs, the designer store windows are lit and the town is mostly clean and free from beggars, writes Mark Barratt.

Conference themes are often loosely interpreted by speakers and the themes themselves leave space for interpretation, writes Sarah Snaith in the second of two reports from the conference (see John O’Reilly’s ‘Talking about the A-word’ on the Eye blog).

Next week’s Type Tuesday event at St Bride Library in London features designer Henrik Kubel talking about his work as a type designer, including his collaboration with Margaret Calvert on New Rail Alphabet and New Transport, and his ongoing partnership with Scott Williams in the design practice A2/SW/HK. Other participants include Ben Terrett and Simon Esterson.

They say that an exhibition should never be a book on a wall, but ‘On-Type’ is exactly that. The entire exhibition is made up of many books and texts all over the walls at Berlin’s Bauhaus Archive, writes Jessica Jenkins.

Thomas E. Rinaldi’s New York Neon documents a cityscape sprawling with the remnants of illuminated signage. Rinaldi shies away from ‘spectaculars’ in familiar places such as Times Square in favour of the ‘open-air museum’ of on-premise storefronts across Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, writes Sarah Snaith.

Design criticism, the act of reflecting on and evaluating design work, has not kept pace with the rapidly expanding field of professional practice. Some say we are experiencing a dearth of critical discourse, writes Aggie Toppins. Others say that criticism is out there but you have to know where to look.

On Wednesday evening there’s an opportunity to see designer and typographer Alan Kitching (of The Typography Workshop) giving a talk at the Skyline Studios in Tribeca.

Early next week, On Monday 6 May 2013, we will be in New York, where we’re inviting a number of local designers and writers to present a ‘Desert Island Discs’ selection of items from Monotype’s rich archive of typographic history – some of which is on show at the company’s ‘Pencil to Pixel’ exhibition in Tribeca, which opens tonight.

A few awards, books and images that caught our attention in recent weeks.