Friend of FFF and all round good guy Kerr Vernon has launched his new updated KVGD site as part of a studio re-branding. With all new site design and a variety of new projects including some rather nice new studio note pads, edge painted, duplex business cards and a new self-promotional newspaper featuring new work created in the last year. Kerr is also a judge in this years Posterheroes competition taking place in Turin in April.

I randomly stumbled across the portfolio of Bedow, an award winning Swedish graphic design studio run by Perniclas Bedow and boy was I glad I did. Working with a wide range of businesses and organizations — many within the cultural sector Bedow has a selection of wonderfully simple,  clean, dare I say it Scandinavian style work across a varied range of clients. My particular favourites include the packaging work for Nostalgi – A classic rack system, corporate identity and stationery for Askeroths trappor och räcken — a small Swedish manufacturer specializing in custom built stairs and railings and the stunning packaging work for Mikkelle – A series of seasonal inspired beers with heat sensitive, beautifully illustrated labels. A real joy of a folio which has filled me with inspiration and renewed vigour on a cold winters day. Go warm up.

Semaphor Oblique are the product of a collaboration between Derek Welsh Studio and Graphical House.

The very best in materials and artisanship have combined to make something which will have a long and colourful life, to be both treasured and enjoyed.

These beautifully designed and crafted dominos are available in two variations; Semaphor are made from Birch Ply, reversed in laminate, and finished by hand. They are beautifully boxed and packaged with a cotton drawstring bag. Oblique are hand cut and drilled from Douglas Fir, and faced in laminate. The turned edge case has been hand stitched from bridle finished leather with a suede pigskin lining. Both sets have been beautifully shot by Photographer Gordon Burniston and are now available to purchase via the Graphical Shop so why not treat yourself.

In an effort to bring their Exclusive Faces range to a larger audience, HypeForType approached graphic designer Ryan Atkinson to produce their first magazine release Typographic Revolt. The brief was to produce a 16 page A2 magazine with a twist. Instead of following the traditional convention, Ryan designed a quick read through A2 magazine which also doubles up as a set of 4 Exclusive Faces posters. Each page folds out to create a double sided poster perfect for your studio or home wall space. Typographic Revolt is printed as a limited litho run on 90gsm wood free paper, giving everything a premium newspaper feel which absorbs the inks to create a beautiful desaturated look and feel. Typographic Revolt. is available now through Amazon.

A lovely looking little trailer for a new film on leading Canadian designer, educator and painter Burton Kramer by Greg Durrell of A Brief History Of. Also worth mentioning there is a lovely retrospective book available on a half century of identity work by Kramer.

Blast is a London based design studio with some lovely work. Particularly like the identity and brand work for Keaykolour a creative paper range from ArjoWiggins. The ‘Colourful life’ campaign created in collaboration with artist Ian Right is particularly good as is the University of Sussex identity. Well worth a look through.

The new low carbon D&AD Annual Looks like the first I would actually like to take a real good look at. Refreshing to see that it has not become a self indulgent plaything for the designer. D&AD Annuals should be about celebrating and showcasing the best of design and advertising. In my opinion the annual itself should merely facilitate the showcase of this work in a clean, organised, structured way rather than trying to grab all the attention itself. Harry Pearce and the team at Pentagram involved  look to have done an excellent job in both the lean design and choice of sustainable materials to create what they suggest is the most carbon friendly annual to date. See more images of the process and a video on the cover shot at the Pentagram post.

Nick Greenwood over at Creative Lynx got in touch to tell us about some lovely new identity/brand work they have recently completed for new fine dining restaurant Australasia based in Manchester. Lovely materials and nice details create a lovely suite of print, packaging and signage materials. Particularly like the typographic wine bottles.

RM Regular is a simple, clean and legible sans-serif type font designed to be used as alternative to Arial, Helvetica or Gotham and is a first foray into type design by London based agency Mash Creative. The Opentype font includes a full charcter and glyph set which supports 47 languages. A limited edition of 2 x 50 A2 type specimen posters have been made available absolutely FREE! for the first 100 people to purchase the font exclusively from HypeForType. The posters have been screen printed in silver and purple ink on 200gsm GF Smith Accent Smooth Glacier White stock – Available in 50 x silver on purple and 50 x purple on silver, each print is hand numbered and signed by Creative Director Mark Bloom from Mash Creative and can be posted worldwide. They will also be selling another limited edition of 50 purple A2 posters through Blanka shortly (Images below). These posters have been printed in white and silver ink on 270gsm GF Smith purple colorplan.

Lovely folio of work from Canadian based designer/art director Greg Durrell at his site A Brief History Of. Particular highlights are the Canadian Olympic team brand guidelines and the Terry Fox Award but all the work is well crafted, clean and beautifully presented.

Daniel from Graphical House got in touch to tell us about the new Scotland Can Make It initiative which they have designed the identity and website for. Initiated by Creative Scotland and inspired by London 2012 and Glasgow 2014, Scotland Can Make It! aims to celebrate Scottish creativity and stimulate the relationship between the country’s creative and manufacturing sectors. Against the backdrop of these two major sporting events, Scotland Can Make It! will present six new, limited edition souvenirs, designed and manufactured entirely in Scotland and leaving a lasting material legacy from Scotland’s dynamic and imaginative cultural landscape.

The project has been designed to enable relationships and collaborations between Scotland’s creative practitioners and our manufacturing industries. As the name suggests, all the souvenirs will be produced in Scotland and applicants are asked to suggest a manufacturing company they could work with. The six winning entrants will each work closely with Panel on the research and development of their designs. Each successful commission will receive a £1000 fee and a maximum budget of around £2000 will be allocated to the development and production of each souvenir prototype.

Scotland Can Make It! is not just open to designers and makers: music, textiles, accessories, books, stationery, clothing, prints and homewares are amongst the types of work the organisers would be interested in seeing submissions for, and proposals for inter-disciplinary collaborations involving writers, musicians, visual artists and designers are particularly welcome. Application packs can be downloaded at www.scotlandcanmakeit.com from Monday 6 June 2011, when the project will formally launch. Submissions are invited from established and emerging creative practitioners and will be judged by a panel of creative practitioners and industry experts, including current Turner Prize nominee Martin Boyce, leading design retailer Sheridan Coakley, Rob Young (Editor-at-large, The Wire), Christina Jansen (Curator, The Scottish Gallery), and Creative Scotland’s Leonie Bell (Creative Programmer: London 2012 and Glasgow 2014). All submissions must be received by 5pm on Monday 25 July.

In 2012, an exhibition featuring the souvenir prototypes and a behind-the-scenes look at all the design and manufacturing processes involved to date will tour Scotland.

Submission instructions Download application packs from www.scotlandcanmakeit.com

Glasgow based designer Kerr Vernon of KVGD has updated with some new projects, including a lovely letterpress promotional sample pack for Glasgow Letterpress and a variety of new projects for the SECC. he has also launched a new blog for news, inspiration and ramblings.

I’m sure you’re shocked by recent events in Japan as we all are here at FormFiftyFive. Daniel Freytag from Berg/Editions of 100 has been trying to think of a way to help and has designed a special limited edition print which will is now available for sale through the Editions of 100 website. 100% of all proceeds from sales will be donated to the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal. I have bought the first print to get the ball rolling so there is 99 editions of this left which will hopefully help to make some small difference to those whose property, homes and lives have been shattered by this disaster.

The poster is Litho printed and available in B2 size Justin Hobson from Fenner paper has very kindly donated the paper needed for the print.

Had the pleasure of meeting Edinburgh based photographer Victor Albrow this afternoon. He had one of the most stylish and unusual books I’ve ever seen and some fantastic images that I felt I had to share. Of special interest was his People, Hair and Things series of which some of my favourite images you can see here. A thoroughly nice chap, get over and check out the rest of his work.

Here at FormFiftyFive we have been very fortunate to have been given a copy of the new Open Projects application for iPad to review and we must say it has been a pleasure. Developed by étapes, a paris based graphic design magazine and publishing house, Open Projects is their first Interactive book release for the ipad.

The concept is simple, discover innovative design projects through a unique interactive experience: Open Projects, an e-book for iPad, outcome of an unprecedented editorial challenge. Throughout 51 projects by non-standard identities, Open Projects is a total immersion in the world of contemporary design. Provided to you in a simple to use grid based interface each individual identity project makes the most of the interactive and touch interface with various images, conference recordings, videos, embedded websites and 3D animations. Each project is showcased in great detail and is supported by a written rationale and background to the brief so you can really get a sense of the project and what the designers were trying to create whilst seeing the work alongside. Within each project you can scroll down through the content of that project and you can then either skip back to the initial grid menu or you can simply swipe left and right through the projects concurrently making for a very easy read. There is also, my favoured option of being able to see each project as a column like thumbnail and quickly view the content before delving down a level into the project. Once in a project you also hav the option of a project scrollbar which shows a small thumbnail and allows for quick access to a different project. Watch the video of the app in action here.

There is a great mix of projects contained, some of which you will be familiar with such as the Stefan Sagmeister Casa da Musica and Mevis & Van Deursen’s Rotterdam 2001 identity, although its nice to see and interact further with some of the content such as a 3D Casa da Musica logo which you can spin and rotate into different guises, as well as a whole host of interesting projects many of which I had never seen or explored before. The projects featured were chosen by Cristina Chiappini and Silvia Sfligiotti, reputed italian graphic designers and teachers, who take part in many publications, exhibitions and events about design. They selected the works presented by Open Projects and made an exhibition and a book in French out of them.

Overall Open Projects is a groundbreaking combination of support and content, the first in a series of high-quality projects from étapes and it will be interesting to see what they have up their sleeve in the future, perhaps specific editions based on specific types of projects would be interesting like Typographic Projects, Branding, Signage, Product, Architecture etc. I have to say that so far I have felt a lot of iPad ‘interactive’ magazines have always felt a little forced into a touch screen environment and although, at first look, they are interesting they soon lost out to their print counterparts in terms of a pickup and put down ability. Open Projects however, feels exactly like it should, it seems to just work the way that you would expect and brings together a wealth of information and media into a package which is as informative and educational as it is pleasing to use. Its one that you would go back to time and time again and use as a reference tool. Open Projects is now available from the App Store for the limited special price of $7.99.

Thanks to Juan David Estupinan and étapes