le:design – Part Deux

And today the slightly more varied selection of our Parisian finds.

People mourn the death of creative movie posters but French Canal+ actually does something about resuscitating that corpse (hey, we like posters. It’s not our fault billboards sneaked behind them and strangled them). Here’s we think the whole series of what was currently on when we visited: “Alice,” “Avatar,” and something called “Oceans.” Clean, smart, funny – and took a lot of going on and off the metro to shoot. Good thing those trains run so often.

Pictograms of the past from our Louvre trip…

…and those of today. Sadly, it’s a decline but the pictograms have a slightly surreal charm and we can only condone encouraging people to, well, love their quartier.

And finally a bunch of typographic photos. Apparently the French are not just into long scarves and overpriced smelly food but also into letters. Concorde metro station, typographic posters from metro tunnels (we did spend a lot of time around the metro, yes) and a close-up from a peace dedicated monument located – where else – by a military school.

le:design – Part Une

Today we want to show you a few things from our holiday trip to Paris. Feel warned: there’s not gonna be the Eiffel Tower (mostly because we didn’t climb it but also because this is going to be about design; and because we’re not really much of photo shooters when there are no letters involved).

We start today with a bunch of children’s books and will show the rest tomorrow. Please forgive the quality of photos but we’ll never post anything if we insist on showing only greatly shot and retouched photos.
When at Centre Pompidou we indulged ourselves to a stack of books – children books. This one, by Wouter Van Reek, was on the occasion of Mondrian’s exhibition in the said Centre (a very fine exhibition) and we bought it for a friend who’s into illustration. The idea, the humor and the execution are beyond excellent, with Mondrian’s not-so-accessible works transformed into a children’s story, and yet in a brilliant and surreal way full of Mondrianian philosophy. There should be a series on different painters.

And these are 3D books we bought for ourselves as they truly wowed us. The letter book is by Marion Bataille and the Calder-Mondrian-SesameStreet ones are by David E. Carter (nope, not French) and combine the impressiveness of neatly folded paper with fun of, say, searching for blue twos or 600 black spots. And with some cool design, too. We draw perverse pleasure from the fact that they are wonderfully abstract and don’t involve any cuddly animals.

Hevelius’ Desk and Book Calendars

We are as good as our word (only busy with preparing a holiday trip) so, as promised, here comes the rest of calendars designed for the year of Johannes Hevelius. First, a desktop calendar.

The calendar is 15×21 cm and every page sports a round opening which are aligned and grow smaller as months progress (creating a really cool progression of holes; and what could be more awesome). The design combines old etchings with vector starry ornaments in tasteful red, black and cream.

The calendar was distributed with a big national newspaper, which was very exciting (particularly for our moms).

And next, book calendar in two sizes. It includes even more etchings, this time illustrating texts about the exciting life of Hevelius. It has a hard canvas cover and plenty of space for your notes.