D-Bros on the shelf

I am a little bit in love with Japanese illustration, books and stationery. A few items are slowly slipping out of Japan onto the shelves of select shops in London. Happily, I am working near the new-ish Magma 'product' shop at the moment, which sells paper nonsense, amongst other things. And on paper shelves, which is nice.

Magma is all a bit designery and knowing but they like their graphics. And I’ve (almost) given up pretending I’m not like that. I regularly check the shop for new things. Picking amongst their latest Japanese bits and pieces today - I bought myself a nice D-Bros Happy Birthday card. Need I mention it is going on the shelf, not actually to be used?

The D-Bros website is all fur coat and no knickers – as the saying goes. But they do really lovely work. And it is nice to finally see as well as buy some of it over here. Especially after spying it on various Japanese websites. But surfing those many, many Japanese sites is a Catch-22 mouth-watering and frustrating undertaking - don’t know what it says, can’t buy it easily, but want it all.

They do paper so well in Japan. From the country that invented Origami you expect it. But this isn’t about printing on paper; it’s about cutting and forming crisp paper, exquisitely. And it’s about small things, details, quirky illustrations, nods to historical graphics and winks to some of the great designers and illustrators of the mid-20th century: Calder, Girard, Eksell, Munari, Rand…

A journey of delight

Hmm, I am rarely caught off-guard when surfing the internet these days. So much, so many, so seen it. But last week I was looking at a great image of stacking chairs on the design site Mocoloco and clicked through to the exhibition at MoMA in New York: Design and the Elastic Mind. Great name and what looks to be an interesting show, with many familiar names and designs, some new ones, but all gutsily curated. An exhibition with something to say.

But, never mind the exhibition (did I say THAT?) just look at the website... So much thought has gone into this; it is dripping with content, layers and has an intriguing interface. Definitely one of the best exhibition websites I’ve seen in a long time. The credits show the site to be the work of Yugo Nakamura and THA Ltd. His name sounded very familiar and a little bit of searching took me back to an old haunt of mine - when I first discovered surfing the net in a big way - MONO*crafts. Simple, beautiful and at the time, to me, revelatory.

Clicking through THA’s current site it is evident that Nakamura’s work is still simple, extraordinary and then some. Interface design taken to the limits yet so spotlessly executed it becomes seamless and joyful to interact with.

The Elastic Mind site isn’t desperately easy to navigate, but so interesting that I didn’t mind. The search function is lovely, scrolling across the pages, linking results visually. And it feels like a real virtual, curated exhibit, developed alongside the exhibition. Not the usual afterthought - consisting of photographs and visiting information.

It made me feel that athough I won’t see the physical exhibition, I have participated in the experience.

Many happy returns

I started this blog on Friday 9 March 2007 so Happy Birthday to Shelf Appeal.

For me, blogging has been nothing other than interesting, fun and satisfying. It took me a long time to get this off the ground. Procrastination should be my middle name. I wanted it to look right. I wanted to write about things that inspired me, rather than things I was paid to write about. I wanted to write when it felt right and not tie myself down to the pressure of daily or even weekly posts. I wanted it to be ‘fit and proper’ as this birthday card for the Clarks shoes Lucky Two Club states. All in all I was, as the cliché goes, writing it to please myself.

But there has been a steady stream of visitors. Sudden spikes on Google Analytics let me know someone has found something they liked and linked through. It’s nice that only for a very few days has Shelf Appeal sat lonely, with no one reading it.

I have been happy for readers to stumble upon this blog. There is immense appeal in finding things on the internet from browsing random ideas and remembrances. Many visitors have come via Google images and I’m sure that is how I would have found it. It is constantly surprising to me that anyone wants to read this stuff. It’s mostly about obscure objects that get my visual antenna vibrating and my fingers typing. But if the internet does anything, it shows you how small the world is. That, no matter what it is you like, there is a website, blog or at the very least, a Flickr group out there about it.

At any point when I have been at a loss for something to blog - yet feeling I would like to - I have got distracted and overwhelmed by just how much there is out there. And I usually end up not posting after all. On two such occasions I searched Flickr for items ‘just to see’ if they might already be in there. Shows you how out of things I am. There they were, with a vengeance; search for cupcakes and start browsing some of the 178,565 images that come up. Or for coloured pencils and look through the 20,047 images that result. Scary yet reassuring stuff. So many people interested in and writing or photographing what might once have been thought of as obscure stuff. Andy Warhol would have loved it.

I'm a marionette

You expect advertising to make products look as good, if not better, than they do in real life. Despite knowing that, Uniqlo was a disappointment to me. A bit like a washed up Benetton, with some H&M chaos thrown in.

But their recent campaign, featuring 'puppets' made from various pieces of clothing from the shop, was a classic and had made me venture into the shop. Beautifully contrived and photographed, the images really stepped off the walls of the underground and shined in the pages of the free Uniqlo Paper magazine.

In fact, if you didn’t feel the need to buy a less than sumptuous cashmere jumper, you could do worse than pick up a copy of that free paper - far more inspiring than the clothes on sale. Of course, I find it hard to leave any free shop literature behind anyway, whether it's a tiny leaflet on washing your purchases (agnès b) or a more substantial catalogue (Habitat or Muji).

I have been meaning to post about this campaign for a while, it’s the only one that has caught my attention - and got my antenna twitching - for a good long time. But I always like to assimilate what I think about things. The puppets were made by Gary Card, set designer and model maker, who has collaborated with stylist Nicola Formichetti on previous Uniqlo projects. Those two seem to have one of those empathetic creative relationships (like Tim Walker and Shona Heath) that takes their work onto the next level.

Work like this is rooted in imagination and craftsmanship. But, like a lot of great fashion imagery, it dabbles with the hyperreal, too.

Fold in half lengthwise

Shopping centres are not what they might be. Usually nothing more than somewhere to stay out of the rain, or to find a seat. Not a nice places, really. The interiors are what they are - generic. It’s usually the ugly exteriors of these centres and their awkward, if not nihilistic, sitings that very often ruin the flow of towns. Everything under one roof meant the death knell of many regal high streets across the country.

I spotted these two lovelies in the window of M&S in Lewisham shopping centre. A real rainy day looking place that does the town no favours at all.

Poor things. They were not shown to advantage. Not nicely placed. The window display wasn’t harmonious in any way. And the clothing goods on sale in most M&S stores wouldn’t gladden anyone’s heart. But still I stopped and smiled and snapped. Someone, somewhere, had tried to put some wit into their promotional campaign.

These particular perky paper hounds look to be Scottish Terriers. Better known as ‘Southport dogs’ to my friends as they seem to be the dog of choice in the seaside town. Perhaps because they fit so well under all those old-fashioned tea room tables?

Britain Can Make It

The Visual Arts Data Service is keeping me happy in-between times. It’s such a nice place to surf. Image after cracking image, taking you through seminal exhibitions like Britain Can Make It, past the London College of Fashion online archive and into the filing cabinets of the Design Council. I like it because it has lots of great pictures of historical designs. Some information accompanies the images (often not quite enough) but it’s really about looking at nice things.

The image here is the 'Working Model Diver' by Dixon Plastics of Northampton and was shown in the Children's Section of the Britain Can Make It exhibition of 1946. The many images from the exhibition on VADS include everything from installation shots to shots of individual items like egg cups and toasters.

What a great image this is, photographed like a piece of sculpture. The bizarre photographic face inside the helmet just adds a surreal icing.

Held in 1946 at the V&A, Britain Can Make It was a huge undertaking, extending to about half the museum footprint. On display were 5000 of the latest Council of Industrial Design approved products, intended for export rather than the home market. And the public were hungry for the positivist message relayed by this excess of commercialism. 1, 432, 369 visitors passed through the exhibition between September and November 1946.

Never let it be said that blockbuster exhibitions are a new thing.

Russian dolls

I was really pleased to come upon another online repository of images of vintage children’s books this week. So much so it means the unheard of excitement of two posts in one week!

I blogged a website in March 2007 that featured beautiful images from a vintage Japanese magazine called Kodomo no kuni. This time it is Russian children’s books and how gorgeous they are. Not a poor illustration amongst them. They were part of an exhibition in the McGill University Library, Quebec and wouldn’t I have liked to have seen that?

The library apparently has over 350 Soviet children's books published in the 20s and 30s. From this selection I particularly like the paper cut-out instruction book Iz Bumagi Bez Kleia (deliciously translated as Made of Paper Without Glue) from 1931. As you can see from the picture of the cover above, it has a bright and witty illustration of traditionally dressed woman on its cover, pushing a rather abstract wheelbarrow and happy in her work.

In the same section of the website Women as Partners is my second favourite book: Mamin Most (apparently Mother's Bridge). Its chromolithographed illustrations are very nice indeed. Seeing women depicted as architectural engineers is unusual enough, but in 1933? Vive la Révolution.

And as I was clicking through the site I had a ‘whatdoyouknow’ moment. I wrote about one of my favourite contemporary illustrated books Ton in July last year. And you can’t help feeling the illustrator of that book, Taro Miura, had seen this book as the characters are look so very similar, down to the outfits, colours and trouser turn-ups. Its nice, though, to see that what goes around, comes around.