I received the Sainsburys Own Brand book for Xmas and it’s a fascinating journey of the output of the Sainsbury’s design studio from 1962-1977. As well as being an exercise in nostalgia, it’s shows just how cutting-edge the design work was and how it set the Sainsburys own brand products apart from the competition. It also speaks volumes for the Sainsbury family in that they saw the value in letting Peter Dixon and his team push a striking modern aesthetic for such a long time. Click here to find out more.

The Lowry exhibition opened at Nottingham’s Lakeside last week – great paintings and drawings, very atmospheric portraits and a reminder of Manchester and Salford landscapes that have largely disappeared. It’s also free!

The catalogue was very well received and is a perfect example of the importance of correctly separating RGB to CMYK, according to the aim printing process. The press run was helped by use of neutral grey patches, enabling quick and visual checks to be made on colour balance. Combined with careful, measured control of TVI – tone value increase (or dot gain for those working with Imperial), the result was an excellent printed job.

ABC 3D Book from Aarni Heiskanen on Vimeo.

A charming pop-up 3D book by Marion Bataille, with some wonderfully playful animations and transitions from one letter to the next. And yes, she can teach you your numbers as well…

If I had kids, this is how I’d get them to learn their ABCs… I’m just not sure I’d trust a 3-year-old with such lovely books, all those flaps and folds just waiting to be ripped off…

The Shallows

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is an interesting look at how, in the era of Twitter, Facebook and blogs like this one, we process information, and even how our capacity to finish a whole book may soon be lost. Believing ‘old fashioned’ learning is being eroded by the internet, he argues that this new way of getting information (Wikipedia in particular comes in for a bit of a bashing) is somehow less worthy than in previous non-digitised generations. But are things really changing? The Victorians worried that the same thing was happening when magazines took off. But with the average Britain spending more than 5 hours a day behind a screen, taking in bite sized nuggets of information from across the globe, is War and Peace in jeopardy of being read by even fewer people? Have you struggled to get to the end of this post because it’s more than 140 characters? And how many other windows do you have open, right now, vying for your attention?

Life & Fate TVC from devilfish on Vimeo.

I’m a sucker for all things Saul Bass inspired, and this TV ad for BBC4’s dramatisation of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate is particularly good. Illustrations were by Ben Newman, the ad was produced by Wonky Films.

Illustrator Andrew Kolb has created this lovely children’s book based on David Bowie’s classic track ‘Space Oddity’. Some songs are just oozing with lyrical imagery, and this is no exception – Kolb has really captured the childlike simplicity of the melodies and the words, and the illustrations really come into their own, I feel, when the story takes a slightly darker turn towards the end: “Tell my wife I love her very much”… “SHE KNOWS!”. If I had kids, this is what they’d be reading!

More visuals can be found on Andrew Kolb’s website

Following on from JK’s comments here, here are a few images taken from Patrick Ness’ new book ‘A Monster Calls’, illustrated by Jim Kay. Using a mixture of relief printing, black pen and ink, and various printed textures digitally pieced together, Jim has created a wonderfully dark atmosphere. I’d love to see the original works; I imagine the textures would really bring these images to life. There’s a lovely german trailer for the book, and you can see more of Jim’s illustration work.