Eye Magazine

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).

Also nominated in the graphics category are John Morgan studio’s Four Corners Familiars series (see Derek Birdsall’s FOTB post about Dracula, above) and Unit Editions, whose publishing debut Studio Culture was reviewed in Eye 74. Other graphic design nominees include Irma Boom, Stephen Powers, Knife Party, Andreas Pohancenik, Forsman & Bodenfors and Morag Myerscough with Studio Myerscough’s design for the LCC’s ‘Power Of Ten’ Summer Shows 2010.

At the St Bride ‘Design for Music’ conference, Unit Editions co-founder Tony Brook presented a selection of Ronald Clyne’s record covers for the Folkways label (below), taken from their U:D/R 01 anthology showcasing his long-neglected work.

In Eye 77 we subjected some iPad apps to the ruthless scrutiny of a panel of experts (see ‘Human touch’). Three of these have been nominated in the Interactive category: the Guardian Eyewitness app (‘a trendsetter’, according to Alfredo Triviño), Flipboard (‘the first killer iPad app’, Brendan Dawes; ‘a crippled RSS feeder’, Tom Hartshorn) and Wired USA (‘intuitive but not innovative’, Camilla Grey).

Other Interactive projects include E.Chromi, Rock Band 3, Angry Birds, Cellscope, Mimosa
(Jason Bruges Studio), Paint, Reactable Mobile, Speed Of Light (by United Visual Artists), The Elements app and The Johnny Cash Project
 and Wallpaper* Custom Covers (we looked at Wallpaper*’s experiments with the printed form back in 2008 – see ‘Cutting crew’ on the Eye blog).

Below: Eye on Flipboard. See ‘Flip fantasia’.

For a list of all the nominees, see this article on the Design Museum’s blog.

16 February > 7 August
Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2011
Design Museum
Shad Thames
London SE1 2YD
designmuseum.org

Eye magazine is published for professional designers and students. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single copies. For a glimpse of the current one, no. 77, see Eye before you buy on Issuu. The new issue, Eye 78, is being bound.