Designing Heart Home

For the past seven months I have been working on a project with fellow bloggers Carole King and Arianna Trapani to create Britain’s first digital interiors magazine, Heart Home.

As Art editor, my role has been the look and feel of the magazine from the logo concept through to the page layouts, website business cards. I won’t go on. You get the idea.

Launched on 15 September at The Conran Shop, the magazine received 10,000 views within less than a week and is on course to hit the high targets that we set to make a big splash in the world of interiors publications.

With a full illustrated guide to the London Design Festival along with a rare interview on video with Habitat founder Sir Terence Conran, the magazine is filled with features for all design lovers. Yes, even you might like it.

Working with designer Helen O’Byrne we created a grid to build the layouts around, tested font-sizes that could be read on a standard 12″ screen, pull-quotes, titles, captions, introductions, page numbers and so on. These decisions took some time to ensure that each page flowed from one to another, that the pacing of the magazine worked and that each feature felt fresh and different from the feature before.

With these decisions in place, we needed to move on to the creative side of pulling the content together and making it an enjoyable read in a format that we all understand… a page-flipping magazine. As a quarterly publication promoting British design, we are working hard on issue 2 already but for now, enjoy issue 1…

Milton Glaser signed posters for Fab.com

Milton Glaser is no stranger to ATELIER TALLY. I have written about his super-famous I ♥ NY logo before but now I have cause to talk about him once more as Fab.com design writer Bradford Shellhammer took some time out with Mr Glaser to discuss his career… you can read the article at Dwell.com.

To further celebrate this icon of design, Fab.com are launching tomorrow offering up to 70% off some of the best design objects and starting with signed prints from Mr Glaser. They write “How can we best describe the cultural impact of Milton Glaser? The man who designed the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo is releasing a signed selection of iconic vintage posters from his own archives to Fab.com’s members, representing nearly six decades of revolutionary, striking and vibrant graphic design.”

Fab.com will be offering pieces like the Dylan Reproduction: An authorized reproduction of the famous poster that was included in the Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits album in 1967 and Glaser’s I heart NY More Than Ever, which was his visual reaction to the events of September 11, 2001.

Brooklyn’s Finest… enormouschampion

enormouschampion are Brooklyn-based printmakers, “drawing inspiration from childhood memories, nature, three lovely cats, ephemera, the places we go and the people we meet”.

Each item crafted is thoughtfully considered in terms of the marketplace and the environment and they only use recycled paper, sustainably harvested wood, and minimally treated fabrics in our products. Hurrah!

Everything they produce is designed and illustrated by enormouschampion, although occasionally, they do some nice collaborating with other artists. All good for the soul, I say. I am particularly fond of the houndstooth-esque prints that they do…

There are not many places in the UK that you can pick up their work, but you can buy some of their work from www.howkapow.com which is another great site to take a peek at sometime.

300×65 Ampersands

I am a big fan of ampersands. There are few characters in the English language which allow for such an elaborate design to express its meaning.

A character to mean ‘et’ or ‘and’ if translated from Latin, many people choose to design this character with the ‘e’ and ‘t’ obviously present as it was often written originally, although I am never against simply designing it as the shape it has become known to us as.

So, you can imagine my delight to discover one mans journey for one year through 365 ampersands. Known as 300×65 Ampersands, this Tumblr feed gave us a different ampersand for the entirety of 2010… with a link through to the font.

This is a fantastic idea for creating interest for a font, however it appeared to have no commercial reasoning to it but just one mans love for the ampersand.

It is also a great way to find interesting fonts, although don’t be too disappointed if you find that the ampersand is a misleading representation of the remainder of the font as I frequently did when browsing the collection.

I <3 Milton Glaser’s New York logo

Milton Glaser is among the most celebrated graphic designers in the United States. He has the distinction of one-man-shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou. In 2004 he received the lifetime achievement award from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. As a Fulbright scholar, Glaser studied with the painter, Giorgio Morandi. In 2010 Glaser was awarded the National Medal of Arts, he is the first graphic designer to receive this award.

Aside from this array of awards and accolades, Glaser is the man that brought us the globally famous ‘I heart New York’ logo.

Glaser worked on this project on a pro bono basis as it was originally supposed to run for a couple of months in the mid-1970s. However it proved so incredibly popular that the logo stayed and has now been appropriated across the world.

If you want to hear a little more about Milton Glaser, Debbie Millman interviewed the great designer for Design Matters. It is about 1 hour long, but if you really love Milton Glaser, it will be too short:

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Milton Glaser Podcast Interview: Observer Media: Design Observer.