Mina Bach

Last week & the End of the World

30-04-2012

I’m told all students feel the same weeks before their graduation. The feeling of impending Doom! Time goes so fast and despite my best efforts I know I will forget this… my last weeks as a student. So I’m going to try and post about everything Book & Design related I get up to.

MONDAY: April 23rd was World Book Night, finally! I was a giver this year and so had 24 copies of a novel of my choosing to give away. It’s a great campaign that encourages reading and celebrates the love of books and had the best time giving the books away in Elephant&Castle and Brixton.

I’d never made so many strangers happy!

TUESDAY: Visited GF Smith’s Beauty in the Making exhibition about the craft, skill, art and love that goes into producing paper & printed matter. Still in awe. Definitely deserves a post of its own.

& later went to a great talk by surface designer Christopher Pearson about his animated wallpapers and the fun of using technology for new purposes:

WEDNESDAY: Off to southbank to see one of my all time favourite authors Irvine Welsh presenting his new novel Skagboys, a prequel to Trainspotting. He signed my book and I somehow felt the need to mention the great choice of paper for the jacket (!?!).

THURSDAY: Spent the day out East and bumped into this building. That’s apparently the amount of clothes that go to landfill every 5 minutes (10,000 items). Shocking! Part of Marks&Spencers ‘Buy one, Give one’ Schwopping campaign. Very effective!

FRIDAY: New business cards in the post! 600gsm and blue edges. I was worried the design was a bit too much on the back but got good feedback on twitter so all’s well. Can’t wait to give the first one out!

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One flew over the cuckoo’s nest Penguin Awards 2012

By: mina

21-04-2012

Book Covers, Competitions

This is my entry for the Penguin Student Awards competition, a book cover design for ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’ by Ken Kesey:

The brief asked to come at it from a fresh angle: ’Try to design a new cover for a new generation of readers, avoiding the obvious clichés and steering clear of the film promotional graphics and looking at the many themes within the book – political, social, victim, antihero, madness, sanity, affection, violence etc.’

Such a powerful story told from the perspective of Chief Bromden. His voice as a narrator is so strong -ironically- that I started looking at native American prints (pinterest board) and its flat geometric shapes became the base for the graphic elements, almost pictograms. As for the colours I knew I wanted to use hospital green in conjunction with white, the colours of the asylum, and red for the cross and the contrasting elements. The clinical type is influenced by the great Lawrence Weiner that I saw in TypoLondon a few months ago.

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Don’t look now British Film Institute & Creative Review Competition

By: mina

03-04-2012

Competitions

Good news! I was joint runner-up in the British Film Institute & Creative Review competition to design a cover for Mark Sanderson’s book on horror classic ‘Don’t Look Now’ for the 20th anniversary of the BFI film classic series. Seeing my work on the Creative Review site (here) has been the highlight OF MY LIFE, pretty much. The panel of judges included Rebecca Barden, BFI Publishing senior publisher; Sophia Contento BFI Publishing senior production editor; Patrick Burgoyne, editor at Creative Review; Rob Winter, publisher at Sight &Sound and the original book’s author Mark Sanderson.

The film, based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, is set in England and Venice with water and the mysterious red coat playing a major role in both. What is seen and most importantly what is unseen create the tensions that fuel the story and I wanted to recreate that with the typography.

Some screencaps of the film:

Thanks to LCC for the nice words here.

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Publish & be Damned

By: mina

31-03-2012

Events

Feels like I’m spending a lot of time at the ICA lately, most recently for the Publish and be Damned fair. The highlight for me was ‘I don’t want to make a book’ a panel discussion with Lynn Harris of ANDpublishing, Marc Herbst from The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and Nick Thurston from Information as Material.

The title for the talk comes from this hilarious short by Ryan Siegan Smith HERE. I had to laugh as I’ve often felt the same way, even more now with graduation looming!

Lynn talked about The Piracy Project (that I contributed to with ‘Signed A.C.’) and their self-publishing platform ANDPublic. She argued that nowadays technology allows free tools (software, POD services, the Internet, etc) to be our own creators but content and context need to be delivered in an appropriate way. Nick mentioned his project in the Whitechapel Gallery: ‘DO or DIY’ on self-publishing and the importance of libraries (and guerrilla libraries!). “Don’t wait for others to validate your ideas. Do it yourself.” Can’t wait to go. We had a brief chat with Marc after the talk and bought the latest issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest which is free online here I’m blown away. “No other time than here, No other place than now”. Indeed.

Being still a poor art student I only picked up one book:

The fair was absolutely jam packed! 50 publishers and many many books:

The exhibition in the gallery space: In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists since 1955

Where I discovered SEMINA a hand-printed art and poetry journal published in nine issues from 1955 to 1964 by Wallace Berman, more here.

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D&AD Little White Lies Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy cover entry

By: mina

21-03-2012

Book Covers, Competitions

This is my entry to the D&AD + Little White Lies student awards. I went for ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ after considering ‘Drive’ and ‘Black Swan’. I liked them all but TTSS is the only out of the 3 that’s not a real LWL issue and the only based on a book.

Little White Lies is one of my favourite magazines, I even bought my brother a subscription for Christmas a couple years ago! I love how the layout and typography change with every issue to go with the themes and mood of the feature film. The covers are always, always spot on but one thing I have always wondered is why the LWL white dot logo is never incorporated in the illustration so I really wanted mine to.

I’m not going to spoil the story but basically George Smiley, the main character and Gary Oldman in the film, has to investigate and identify a Soviet mole in the MI6 from where he’s just retired. The white queen holds a special meaning (also the most powerful piece in chess) so I used it as the central image incorporating the LWL logo. The portrait(s) of Smiley are not revealed fully much like his personality and, well, his job as a secret agent. The colours also reference the union jack and the typography has a soviet feel to it (look at that ‘K’, niiice!).

Fingers crossed!

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Re-Design

By: mina

18-03-2012

Identity

With graduation round the corner it felt like the right time for a bit of a re-design.

I wanted a very clean look but didn’t want it to dilute my personality or look too removed from print, so I took inspiration from where it all starts: my sketchbook. I played with the lettering and texture inspired by the sketchbooks I always use: the traditional MiquelRius from Barcelona that even my grandfather used back in the day. Printing business-cards, stationery and self-promo stuff on the lovely Heidelberg litho press at college very soon.

This is the new look for the blog:

Twitter page:

And portfolio:

And there’s an actual photo of me in the About section!

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Terence Conran at the Design Museum: Good Design For All

By: mina

04-03-2012

Exhibitions

I went to the Terence Conran exhibition at the Design Museum with Vivi the other day and can’t recommend it enough. The tiny main gallery seemed to have multiplied with the clever distribution (by Conran Studio themselves, eh) and the playful display type was fun and related to the importance of craft and tools in Conran’s practice – Watch out for the massive cabinet packed full of lovely old woodworking tools in the last room!.

I hope I have remained true to my fundamental aim throughout my life – to produce useful things at a price that most people can afford. Such things may not win design prizes but neither do they go out of fashion. I have always believed that if products or buildings or interiors are intelligently designed they will help improve the quality of life of the users.

Hear! Hear!

Straight out of Uni – the Central School of Art and Design, now Central Saint Martins – and heavily influenced by the Bauhaus beliefs that “a good design should be available to the whole community, not just to a few” he went on to design for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and Midwinter in 1957 two of my main design inspirations.