A Mystery to Finish

After iconic painters and TV series we are now working on a third group of iconic posters, Iconic Cartoons. We’ve had this idea for a while (actually, it was suggested by one of our commenters – thank you, Ammon) and we made sketches a long time ago, but only got down to it now, prompted by a friend’s request to make a game for children. More on that some other time and we’ll show you all the posters when we finish them. Today just a preview: the first show to guess.

It’s as much a classic series as they come, started in 1969 and still popular. And yes, we do realize it’s a tad obvious but you’re probably older than the target audience will be.

We got some work to do now.

Spring Cleaning

Unfortunately, no real post today due to an attack of vicious dust bunnies. We’ll be back next week, hopefully posting from a freshly cleaned place.

Domino, but with Dogs

For R’s birthday last week I wanted to get him something homemade to add to our board game collection and realized that we did not have a single game of domino. I loved those as a child and particularly when they had pictures of something else than dots so that’s what I picked (bonus: there’s probably not a single simpler game to make).

I designed six canines on a geometric grid, in a limited number of colors, printed them out of home printer and then realized that it wasn’t the simplest game to make after all, when I had to cut the tiles out (or carve them out, more like) of three-millimeter-thick cardboard. Long and painful story short, I only ruined about eight and had to run a small reprint of those.

Compared to the tiles, the box was a piece of cake (or a piece of pre-made packaging, to be precise): I used a gift box and only designed the cover to put onto it.

A Peace-maker in Progress

We’re currently working on merchandise designs for a festival and this is the initial project to be printed on T-shirts, mugs and tote bags. We chose to use handwritten custom lettering to practice our new-found love for calligraphy, decorated with leafy ornaments and peace-loving doves. The pattern is shaped as a circle, which makes it easily to apply on all sorts of objects. It’s very much in progress but we hope to share final results as soon as they are complete.

Fourteen Books to Love for February 14th

Here at re:design we heart many things – LEGO blocks, huskies, bacon, The Good Wife, Christmas Eve and I could really go on – but books are definitely in our top three. And now that Valentine’s Day is upon us again we profess our love for literature with a series of (literally) heart-centered covers.

Heart is a fun shape to work with and surprisingly versatile. Each cover uses the shape as the center of the composition around which a symbolic illustration and typography are arranged. The books range from pulp romances through venerable classics to postmodernist experiments but all feature some version of the eternal love theme.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, an ambitious and rather pervy, if read literally, take on love.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, a decidedly unambitious take.

The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler (a more physiological interpretation of the theme).

Fatalistic view of love and life in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo.

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz.

In Search of Lost Time or in love with the past, by Marcel Proust.

Cider House Rules by John Irving.

Ireland by Frank Delaney.

A Good Year by Peter Mayle.

Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves.

Nana by Emile Zola, a socially critical anti-love story.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Another classic, The Gambler by Dostoyevsky.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, love in Japan.

Title page for Lolita, with the logo for the series.

Series of spines. For typography we chose a combination of Scala and Stag. We picked a limited color palette of reds and grays with some greens and yellows.

The logo of the series, consisting – predictably – of 14 hearts.

And we wish all of you a happy Valentine’s Day (either spent with your beloved person or with your beloved book).

Our Prints on Sale

We are happy to announce that our posters are now becoming available as prints here. The shipping options are much more affordable than we were able to offer from our neck of the woods so we hope those of you who asked for prints will be pleased with this solution.

Right now we have put up a selection of Disney classic posters but early next week selections of Iconic TV Shows and Iconic Painters will also be up. If your favorite poster is not among the initially selected or you wish for a different size, please let us know and we’ll be happy to add it to the store.

Hopefully these will be in time for Christmas presents.

Sort of Board Farmville, but Not Quite

As kids my brother and I were sent every year to the countryside for a part of holidays and boy, did we hate it. Probably this experience led us to create a sort of absurd board game about the chores and trials of living on a farm, which was nowhere near balanced or fair but gave us tons of fun. Over the years we created one board after another, usually sketching them with a pencil on tattered pieces of paper. We excitedly role-played drunk, lazy countryside crooks, exchanging money cut of old newspapers. We loved that game more than any store-bought shiny ones.

Two years ago R and I re-created the game as a Christmas gift for my brother and for the first time Farmer became designed. We had fun with all the icons and elements and today proudly present the results. (For the record, obviously we don’t think the game is in any way a realistic representation of farm life, nor was it meant to be, so hold off the pitchforks.)

Set of elements: the game board, tokens indicating possession, die and pawns, money and debt markers.

Game in progress, for four players.

Money: heads of animals indicate the value.

Box cover with game elements.

Close-up of the board (from the top left it says: Seeds, Dead Cow, Stealing Horses, Church Help).

Board field: Dead Cow event, you gain $1500 if you bought insurance.

Isotype re:visited

Among other projects we are working on right now is a book that will teach basic ideas of economy to children. However, when we worked on the first layout and concept because of regrettable communication difficulties we were informed that the book is for ages 13-15 while in fact it will be for ages 10-12. This means that most of this project will join the Salon des Refusés and we may only share it with you, not with hordes of children starved for economic knowledge.

The idea was to organize spreads as infographics so that information would be visualized in a graphically simple, easily accessible manner. We used two inspirations additionally to tons of wonderful infographics we collect on our hard drives: Mr Gerd Arntz and FF Dingbats. If you don’t know Gerd Arntz and Isotype be sure to check them out because they were pioneers of our today’s visual language and lots of their work remains exciting and surprisingly current (while, interestingly, also smacks of its own time). And FF Dingbats is a useful dingbats font that we drew from to develop a module of human form.

And here are the drafts. The first spread is about proportions of workers to non-working groups of people and the other about costs of running a small business and the concept of profit.

Even though it’s disappointing we won’t get to work on the project, at least the language is universal enough and we hope to use it as a starting point for some future design.