Things

Making up the illustrative corner of Things this week are two wonderful works of colour and narrative from Rob Hunter and Isabelle Greenberg. While design and art direction is exemplified by Useful in their inaugural magazine Used, and in Esopus 16 which includes an excellent spectrum of unique features. Finally, Peckham’s poetic delights in an anthology put together by Sofia Stevi.

The New Ghost Robert Hunter, NoBrow Press

Using NoBrow Press’ springboard short story project, 17X23, Rob Hunter has created a remarkable comic and a great example for the potential for the format. It tells the story of a benign ghost getting to grips with its new purpose in afterlife and the earthly obstacles it meets. It has been beautifully composed, individual frames devised with a quite brilliant colour scheme and pages arranged for the utmost narrative potential. Wonderful stuff.
www.rob-hunter.co.uk
www.nobrow.net

Rain Dance Isabelle Greenberg

Out of a very nice looking package that Isabelle kindly delivered, we selected this great looking screen print poster to gush about. Seems like this Brighton graduate has a fine grasp of story telling even in the simplest of forms. Really lovely characters, colour and line, it went straight up on our wall.
www.isabelnecessary.com

Esopus 16 Tod Lippy, Editor

This is brilliant. A huge level of curation has gone into making Esopus, a biannual arts magazine that prides itself on an impartial perspective, published by the non-profit Esopus Foundation. With individual features being designed specifically for it’s content, different stocks, fold outs, removable inserts etc. It makes it a pretty immersive experience to read as each change in section feels like a completely new magazine. The content is great and a fantastic collection of unseen mail art from Ray Johnson absolutely nails it, I’m certain this couldn’t appear in any other magazine and be done justice.
www.esopusmag.com

Used: Issue One Alex Geoffrey, Brendan Freeman, Brendan Peer editors. Useful, design

Very excited by the quality in the first issue of Used. It’s a large format magazine with a selection of work and features that blends pretty seamlessly from the abstract (the wonderful Winnie Troung) to the logical (Dan Eatock, the impossible conceiver of “answers to questions that haven’t been posed”), with a sleek design that looks like fashion but sounds like art. Well worth checking out.
www.usedmagazine.co.uk
www.weareuseful.com

New Poetry Anthology Sofia Stevi, design

Off the back of a number of poetry readings in South London that included contributors such as Hannah Barry, Louis Eastwood and Octavia Lamb, the designer/collator, Sofia Stevi, decided to have it printed under the name of her own publishing house, Friary Road House Editions. In “aspiring to create a community through collaboration and free creative flow of new information and ideas”, she is up against no mean feat, but creating this really nicely designed, printed and illustrated volume of poems is a good and meaningful way to go about it.
www.cargocollective.com/friaryroadhouse