Eye Magazine

We published this little Collection piece by Paul West of Form in Eye no. 47, the ‘Cool stuff’ issue, and printed colour pictures of them on the inside covers and subs card (above and below).

Last night saw the first ever performance of Eno’s Apollo, played live at the Science Museum to accompany a version of Al Reinert’s documentary For All Mankind, his painstaking edit of NASA film footage from the mission to put the first man on the Moon, 21 July 1969.

Sometime, stuff turns up at the Eye office that nobody knows what to do with. Such as this mysterious package. Seems a shame to open it, really. When we have a moment, we’ll let you know what’s in it.

In this article from Eye no. 14, Autumn 1994, designer J. Abbott Miller discusses the use of stock photography, ‘which makes up a kind of corporate vernacular that informs almost all levels of graphic design’. You can read an extract from ‘Pictures for rent’ on the Eye website.

If Lee and Dan’s fake suicide bomber ad* ‘for’ Volkswagen a few years back seemed to plumb the depths of tastelessness, the Tel Aviv branch of McCann Erickson has managed to plunge the medium into an even greater moral morass, writes Noel Douglas, with its new ad for the Israeli mobile phone operator Cellcom.

Here’s a short video item about the Zimbabwean’s multi-trillion dollar campaign. See Sean O’Toole’s article ‘Money’s worth less than paper’, also on the Eye blog.

Earlier this week, I had the chance to live out my boyhood fantasy of being a late-night jazz DJ, writes John L. Walters. Well, I was actually commissioned to write and present a short (16') feature about the relationship between jazz and graphic design. (So it wasn’t exactly Clint Eastwood in Play Misty For Me, or ‘Lester the Nightfly’.)

The ongoing and all-encompassing crisis in Zimbabwe, the ailing Southern African state presided over by Robert Mugabe, a former schoolteacher turned liberation patriarch, is easily visualised, writes Sean O’Toole. Imagine an unending queue of noughts, a retinue of zeros that wrap line after line. Money that is cheaper than wallpaper.

Publishers these days are all a-jitter at the prospect of a digital future, writes Robert Hanks, when people will download their books rather than buying old-fashioned paper. They’re probably overreacting – it will be hard for digital readers to compete with something as cheap, sturdy and easy to use as a paperback – but Penguin has been showing the right way to react to the supposed crisis: make the physical object much more desirable.