Follow the Yellow

good stuff

Sound artist and experimental musician Christopher Gladwin has an exhibition opening at the Chapman Gallery this Saturday from 6.00pm. Paramusical Sound Studies with Video will include works which explore our perceptions of noise by generating amplified sound from ‘everyday’ objects such as… erm… sausages. Or maybe celery. There will probably be balloons and polystyrene making loud and surprising noises. It will be great.

The exhibition launch will be followed by a ‘paramusical’ live performance at Islington Mill from 8.00pm which will also include electro-acoustic performances from guest artists including Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke. Expect the unexpected and bring your own earplugs.

In other good arts-related news, Maeve Rendle has been longlisted for the Northern Art Prize. You can check out some of Maeve’s work here. Also on the list are lots of other fine folk including Simon Blackmore (who is also a member of the Owl Project), Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, and Suki Chan.

in praise of the penguin

‘Good design costs no more than bad design’ – Penguin founder Sir Allen Lane

Most people know the now-legendary story of how Penguin Books founder, the publisher Allen Lane, on returning to London from a weekend at the Devon home of Agatha Christie in 1934, having tried unsuccessfully to find something to read at Exeter station, suddenly realised there was a significant gap in the market for good quality but affordable paperback books. It was in fact Lane’s secretary who initially suggested Penguin as a “dignified but flippant” name for the new publishing company: Lane himself, who emphasised the critical importance of cover design from the start, devised an early version of the famous three-panel cover, and the office junior was sent to sketch the penguins at London Zoo for a logotype. Over the years, Penguin’s design was developed and refined under the direction of the German typographer Jan Tschichold during the 1940s and the Italian art director Germano Facetti in the 1960s.

Of course, today, we recognise Penguin as being synonymous with iconic design: Penguin mugs and tote bags can be purchased from the Tate Gallery; a Penguin exhibition was shown at the Design Museum in 2006; and in 2007 the company launched the inaugural Penguin Design Awards dedicated to supporting the very best in emerging book design talent. And personally I’m coveting these two beautiful new books all about the very best of Penguin book design:

Penguin by Design: A Cover Story (Allan Lane, 2005) is a comprehensive design history of seventy years of Penguin paperbacks. Author Phil Baines charts the development of Penguin’s distinctive design through an investigation of individual titles, artists and designers as well as typography (got to love that Gill Sans), and the famous Penguin logo itself. Lavishly illustrated, the book reveals not only how Penguin has established its identity through its cover design, but also how it has become a constantly-evolving part of the history of British visual culture, influencing the wider development of graphic design, typography, typesetting and illustration. Filled with intriguing snippets of information (apparently back in the day a Penguin paperback would set you back a mere sixpence – that’s 2.5p – which was then the price of a packet of 10 cigarettes) the book is also strangely evocative: perhaps because of the special place Penguin books (not to mention childhood Puffins) occupy in most of our hearts, flipping through these beautifully designed pages is a uniquely nostalgic and moving experience. Find out more here.


Seven Hundred Penguins (Penguin, 2007) makes an intriguing companion volume: a fascinating selection of seven hundred of Penguin’s most important and influential covers, ranging from the publisher’s earliest days to the end of the twentieth century. Selected by Penguin’s staff, the collection brings together everything from well-known design classics to unexpected and quirky treats – perfect coffee-table fodder. Find out more here.

Perhaps inspired in part by the popularity of these two titles, Penguin have recently published Penguin Celebrations, a selection of 36 of “the best books of their kind to be published in recent years” issued in covers inspired by the original, now iconic three-panel design. As with Penguin books of old, the series takes in fiction (orange), science (blue), mystery & crime (green), travel (pink), biography (blue) and essays (purple) – they are pretty hard to resist, even though they aren’t quite as nice as the originals.

And as if this wasn’t enough, other recent Penguin projects have included My Penguin, a series of classic Penguin titles ranging from Alice in Wonderland through to Crime and Punishment with blank, “design it yourself” covers. Six bands(Razorlight, Goldspot, Dragonette, Johnny Flynn and Mr Hudson & The Library, in case you’re wondering) got the ball rolling by designing their own unique covers, which you can view on the My Penguin website. There is also a gallery of reader’s own cover designs (sadly, submissions are now closed) which you can browse here.

And you’ve got to love the recently-issued series of classic adventures with Boy’s Own-inspired covers designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, like the cover for John Buchan’s Greenmantle above. You can check the full set out here on the excellent Première de couverture blog – a must-read for anyone with an interest in book design.

Given all this it’s perhaps unsurprising that Penguin books have become a key source of inspiration for artist Harland Miller. His recent monograph International Lonely Guy (Rizzoli, 2007) brings together a series of works inspired by literature, and by Penguin cover designs in particular, together with a series of essays and interviews with the artist by both fans and critics including Jarvis Cocker, Sophie Fiennes, Gordon Burn and Ed Ruscha. Nostalgic, bitter and witty by turns, Miller’s book is a million miles away from the Penguin mugs in the Tate Gallery bookshop, but what remains evident throughout is the artist’s intense interest in language and literature: paintings are rife with play-on-words, puns and textual experimentations combined with reappropriations of cover and author images (Ernest Hemingway, featuring in a painting entitled I’m So Fucking Hard is perhaps especially memorable) in a contemporary riff on Pop art.

The Penguin: as they say, there really is “no other book like it”!

rob bailey @ rogue studios

The most excellent Rob Bailey had a special “for one night only” exhibition at Rogue Artists Studios & Project Space on Friday night to show work created during 10 weeks at Rogue as their first artist-in-residence.

The new works developed during the residency make good use of Rogue’s project space, with unexpected things to see everywhere, from a delicate paper butterfly casting a pink shadow on a white wall, to a rainbow of coloured beetles parading along the windowsill and an orange bird peeping in from the ceiling. Rob’s time at Rogue has clearly provided him with a valuable opportunity to develop his practice and experiment with new approaches, extending his illustrative work to explore 3D sculptural forms. However the new work remains very much the product of his own very distinctive visual aesthetic, influenced by 1950s design and animation, his characteristic use of colour and the keen sense of playfulness which is always evident in his work.

The new work also marks a logical development from the wonderful Hello World exhibition earlier this year, in which Rob transformed Common bar into a fantasy rainbow-coloured encyclopedia-come-to-life, featuring dinosaur bones, a giant piano keyboard and a cross-section of the earth to name but a few highlights. I couldn’t resist the temptation to post a couple of my favourite images below…


Look out for more exciting things to come from Mr Bailey – future projects include co-producing a short film commissioned by North West Vision and a group exhibition at Cornerhouse later this year exploring drawing and animation.

les vacances

As promised here are some pictures of my holiday.

I suppose there’s probably something very boring, and perhaps even rather egotistical about posting one’s holiday photos on one’s blog, somewhat “ooh, look at me and my fascinating life”.

My holiday photos are sadly, not very fascinating, but I make no apologies. I was hoping to use my time away to write stories and other wonderful and interesting things which I could have posted here; however somehow I didn’t quite get round to it (possibly because I spent so much of my time eating and sleeping instead) so you’ll just have to put up with photographs.

Actually, I’m quite proud that I managed to take any at all given it rained for most of the holiday. The sky is even blue in some of them.

Excellent wellington boots. Essential for walks in soggy French woods.

Mmmmm, tasty vegetables – a present from our friendly neighbours from their garden.

Dinner – a very important part of the holiday. This is a picture of some boeuf bourginonne which was extremely nice. It is a slightly blurry picture, but possibly I had already had a glass of wine at this point.

Spooky ruined tower – la tour du rochefoucauld.

Flowers from the garden.

back home

I’m back home now.

I had a lovely holiday. It rained every day, but that was very good practice for coming back home to Manchester. Later I will post some photographs which I took in spite of the fact that it was raining, and maybe even write something about what I did.

Today I am back and I have been to work, also in the rain. My kitchen ceiling is leaking.

In other news, I seemingly now have a surname! How novel.

Also, this blog has been mentioned here on the Manchizzle. I suppose this means I am now a proper, official, grown-up blogger. Greetings to anyone wandering here from the Manchizzle. Thanks so much for visiting, especially given the many other fine new blogs there are out there to tempt you (even a blog written by a cat !) and I hope you’ll come again soon.