Tag: Magazines

Zinegapore is the Hilarious, Anti-travel Guide to Singapore’s Creative Scene

Order, efficiency, and cleanliness are probably not the first things most creatives look for in their ideal place to live. So when Singapore advertising and design agency Kinetic dreamt up a guide to introduce their country to the world, they went a little crazy.

Ultimately, they came up with Zinegapore, a zany alternative take on how Singapore’s corporate-like efficiency overshadows a burgeoning creative industry that has emerged over the last decade or so.

Eschewing conventional travel guides that simply list attractions, Kinetic’s free iPad-only guide offers a highly irreverent, yet refreshingly honest guide to everyday life in Singapore. Images of banks in this international finance capital are presented (literally) as “Places of Interest.” Singaporeans’ love for acronyms are expressed in a word search puzzle, and the city’s reputation for cleanliness is turned into a game of spotting the sheer number of trash bins on its streets.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design

A Maximalist Mag That Uses Clever Ad Speak for Social Good

Unleash creatives from around the world into a white cube gallery. Give them a single theme to respond to. Flatten the result to a thin, roughly 7” x 7” magazine. This is kult: an 80-page visual feast oozing with illustrations, graphics, and photographs of all shapes, colors, and styles.

From “AIDS” to “Fortune,” and its upcoming issue on “Cars,” kult has been using the visual language of advertising to sell messages on social issues since 2009. It all started when designer Steve Lawler wanted to share works from an exhibition he curated a decade prior. Once he quit his job at Ogilvy’s Singapore outpost after becoming disillusioned with the industry, the interactive designer with a truly international calling card (born in Iran, raised in Hong Kong, studied and worked in Europe, and now based in Singapore) turned to making prints and curating art shows. For a 2006 group exhibition, he invited artists like American illustrator Andy Rementer and Singaporean artist Andy Yang to respond visually to the theme of “Trust.”

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design

The Godfather of Singapore Graphic Design Makes Another Crazy Cool Magazine

Theseus Chan: the name may not inspire awe in the States, but in Singapore he’s known to many as the godfather of graphic design, a reputation he’s earned with a body of work that continues to challenge his peers and excite a younger generation. None of his projects shows this better than WERK, a self-published magazine Chan started in 2000 to experiment with design production. The covers are torn and spray painted, or patched together from the detritus of the production process itself. Pages are made out of cloth, laboriously die-cut, or stained with printer’s inks and oils to evoke the scent of printing. The result is more than a magazine; each issue is an object that echoes the postmodern, “New Wave” tradition, an expressive and anarchic response to Swiss modernism.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design