Perspectives: Photographs of Colmore Business District, Birmingham / Photo: ©Jas Sansi

Perspectives presents photographs taken in the commercial heart of Birmingham. Working with world renowned Magnum photographer, Chris Steele-Perkins, students, graduates and staff from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University, created a series of work offering a unique and inquisitive reflection of the people, businesses, spaces and events in Birmingham’s Colmore Business District.

The Perspectives book, stacked after the foil blocking and hard covers are attached.

Creative Director at Empty, Mark Townsend said, “These types of jobs don’t come along very often and we feel privileged to have worked on such an amazing and prestigious design project.  We are thrilled with the final result and hope that everyone who purchases the book really enjoys it.”

The book was launched to much acclaim at Hotel Du Vin, Birmingham with many contributing photographers, supporters and business leaders in attendance. The evening gave people the opportunity to purchase the book as well as bid on limited-edition framed prints of some of the more iconic images used for the project.

All proceeds from book sales and the auction will be going direct to The Prince’s Trust. The book, priced at £60 can be bought by emailing Colmore Business District at kirsten-h@colmorebusinessdistrict.com or at selected retail outlets soon.

You can see some of the launch night images here. Images by Jas Sansi.

The new book - available soon!

No, the title has nothing to do with the Blu-ray Star Wars mega-boxset coming out today, but is reference to a new book that’s about to go to print. The book, designed by Empty Creative, shows street photography shot in Birmingham and will be available in October.

We’ll be posting more on this in the coming weeks, but as we’re really excited, we thought we’d show a work in progress shot of the pagination being finalised.

The Empty team were delighted to be selected to produce the design for the Magnum exhibition, Take to the Streets which ran earlier this year.

Working with the project team and taking inspiration from the original branding we designed all of the printed materials as well as the design and build of the exhibition website.

Produced in partnership with FORMAT International Photography Festival and the Photography Archive of Birmingham Central Library, Take to the Streets presents a selection of work from seven of Magnum’s leading photographers, including Bruno Bareby and Costa Manos.

This fantastic exhibition took place in Birmingham’s Colmore Business District, for full details visit www.taketothestreetsbirmingham.co.uk

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes is a book adaption like no other we’ve seen. Taking inspiration from his favourite book Street of Crocodiles, Johnathan has created a new short story from the original and presented it by die-cutting the new story out of the existing one. They initially got turned down by every printer they approached claiming “the book you want to make just cannot be made”, eventually getting a Belgium company on-board who managed to make a book, which features a different die-cut on every page which ‘carves’ the new story out of the original.

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer – Public Reactions from Visual Editions on Vimeo.

And the making of the book…

Knowing the effort and care that goes into creating print, we can only imagine the lengths that the designers and printers would have had to go to in getting this one right. Great result though!

More information here

It’s been a busy few weeks in the office, but you may have seen the news recently about the art work proposed for the Wirral coastline, which has been chosen as one of the first countdown events to the 2012 Olympics. The premise is that it will be created by gently rotating the water on the surface of the Mersey and then adding heat which will make it lift into the air like a water spout, extending upwards as far as the eye can see, and visible on a clear day from up to 100 km away! We can’t wait to see this in reality, and it got us thinking about some other pretty impressive pieces.

A few years old, but still love this one. Troika’s Cloud,  a piece for the entrance of the British Airways luxury lounges in Heathrow Terminal 5, which Troika describe as: ‘Cloud’, a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture. Flip-dots were conventionally used in the 70s and 80s to create signs in train-stations and airports. By audibly flipping between black and silver, the flip-dots create mesmerizing waves as they chase across the surface of ‘Cloud’. Reflecting its surrounding colours, the mechanical mass is transformed into an organic form that appears to come alive’.

You may have seen this on a BMW advert a while back, and it’s another oldy (but a goody) is Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculpture, which walk using the windpower.

One more BMW related installation for you, by Art & Com, which currently sits in the BMW Museum in Munich.

First up is the UK Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010, China, which makes the Selfridges building look fairly conservative in comparison.

©Heatherwick Studio

Designed by Heatherwick Studio’s, the ‘Seed Cathedral’ is a 20-meter high building which is home to the UK Pavilion and the Kew’s Millennium Seed Project. Constructed from 60,000 transparent 7.5-meter long optical strands, each of which contains a seed at its tip, which filter daylight that illuminates the building’s interior, and make the outside of the building glow at night.

Next up is “Homemade is best”, the IKEA cookbook which takes a very clever graphical approach to laying out the cooking ingredients, before seeing the resulting cake on the next page.

©IKEA - Homemade is best

In the interactive category (along with Angry Birds) is Reactable Mobile, a multi-touch synthesiser app based on the synth table used by Bjork on her Volta tour. The app has a really slick user interface, but on the iphone it does seem to suffer from limited screen size. (oh, it does have an ipad version too! Now we just need one of those!).

The product category is a strong area, featuring the Dyson, the ipad and Pavegen (below), which is a paving slab that stores the kinetic energy of people walking over them, and converts it into electricity.

source - www.pdesigni.com

…and finally, the coolest coffin we think we’ve ever seen, great for the fashion conscious, who wouldn’t be seen dead in anything else!

©Diamant Coffin