Just finished reading the rather great How to Run a Successful Design Business by Shan Preddy. It’s quite a chunky and comprehensive read but would highly recommend it to any design business owners or freelancers. While there are a million and one books available aiming, with varying degrees of success, to define the creative process or provide design inspiration, very few deal with the day to day business side of things with creatives in mind.
This book takes nuggets of business know how from a large number of contributors and focuses essentially on the nuts and bolts of running a design business, whether big or small. At around £30 and over 440 pages it’s not the cheapest or quickest read but the tips on financial planning and pitching/ potential client management are well worth the cover price. Unlike many broader business ‘How to’ guides it cuts the cheesy ‘Go Get ‘Em’ crap and focuses on real insights from successful design businesses.
Next on the reading list is Just My Type by Simon Garfield, having heard excerpts from the book serialised on Radio 4 a while back I’m quite looking forward to it.
Great looking Campaign launch materials for Mulberry’s SS2012 collection. The campaign’s beside the seaside theme, featuring oversized brightly coloured seaside confectionery, has been cleverly carried through into a beautifully designed behind the scenes newspaper disguised as a stick of rock by Construct.
Getting quite a bit of exposure, but rightly so, are these fantastic images of instruments interiors shot for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The clever marco shots and great lighting help make the images look beautifully architectural and vast in size.
Haven’t taken a look at Slinkachu’s site for a while and there are some great new additions to the blog including a nice little video showing the the set up ‘Wet & Wild’. Little People in the City is one of my favourite (for want of a better word) ‘coffee table’ books and always raises a smile, under £7 on amazon bargain.
Many a music artist has dabbled with the increasing potential of multimedia and the power of the visual to enhance their sound, but the ever pioneering Bjork looks set to take it to a new level. Her latest project Biophilia, is being touted as a full on multimedia event Art Directed by long standing collaborators M/M Paris.
The as well as the standard album release Biophilia will be released as an ‘app album’ with each of the 10 songs having it’s own mini application. Detailed features of these apps at current are quite sketchy but judging by the fact it’s being developed by interactive artist Scott Snibbe it looks set to include interactive games and remix capabilities.
The first tease comes from the newly launched Bjork.com website, built in HTML5, users can use gestures on an iPad (or arrow keys on your keyboard), to float around the website’s galaxy. It has to be said currently you can’t do a lot else, but once the content from the new new project gradually gets released, new constellations will appear leading you to the various online content. Whilst the navigation is a bit clunky with a mouse and keyboard it’s cleared designed for touch screen navigation, and offers an interesting glimpse at the immersive possibilities of HTML 5 and tablets.
Hopefully with prominent forward thinking artists such as Bjork and Arcade Fire (look at The Wilderness Downtown if you haven’t seen it already) we can get over the be-moaning of digital music being the death of album art begin to see the possibilities ahead.
