Eye Magazine

The Type Directors Club annual competition captures a portrait of design in our time through the lens of typography, writes Doug Clouse.

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.

‘Goodvertising’ is one of those hard to love, cut’n’shut words that the advertising industry seems to specialise in constructing. The kind of word that you’d have to steel yourself to employ without the protection of a sturdy pair of inverted commas, writes Andrew Missingham.

The submission deadline for the 2013 European Design Awards in Belgrade is fast approaching – it’s Thursday 28 February 2013.  

Athens-based EDA founder Demetrios Fakinos speaks to Eye magazine about an emerging ‘new Europe’, humanism and what makes the European Design Awards so different … so appealing.

Here are a few links to sites, articles and videos that grabbed our attention over the past week.

Awards ceremonies tend to follow a familiar pattern, writes Eye editor John L. Walters. Plenty of alcohol, fast-emptying plates of tiny canapés, long speeches – from sponsors, organisers and judges – followed by lots of individual categories, speeches, photo-opportunities and engraved Perspex trophies.

In 1884, Ottmar Anschütz made his now famous studies of storks, writes Wayne Ford. The following year, R. B. Lodge successfully recorded a brooding Lapwing, while in 1899, brothers Cherry and Richard Kearton, who had travelled the width and breadth of the United Kingdom in search of their subjects, published With Nature and a Camera (Cassell & Co). The work of these early pioneers, and others, would form the basis of what today we term wildlife and nature photography.

London’s Design Museum announced the shortlist for this year’s Brit Insurance Design awards this morning. Eye readers will spot some familiar work among the nominees – not least two beautiful books featured in Eye 77: Visual Edition’s Tristam Shandy (below) and Marian Bantjes’ decorative feast I Wonder (pictured top; see also ‘A sense of wonder’ on the Eye blog).

‘Playing for Peace’ – one of our Peace by Design projects – has evolved as part of my new life at M.A.D. (Making A Difference) for Peace, which I set up to communicate the importance of our individual responsibility in creating a world in which extreme conflict is ended, writes Gill Hicks.