Stack: August

It's taken me a while to sit down and write something about IdN, this month's Stack delivery. Usually I try and read about 75% of the magazine before I post something, but with IdN every time I open it I get completely overwhelmed, flick through it for a bit and then close it without making any progress.

It's a design magazine, although compared to Printed Pages it's such a different beast that it seems strange to put them in the same category. IdN is a blur of product design, street art, graphic design, and installations; images fill the pages, swamping the tiny paragraphs of tiny text. As a reading experience it's pretty terrible, but as a design showcase it's great.

My favourite part of IdN is that it also showcases animation. Apparently it used to come with a DVD, but this material has now moved online and is accessed with a password provided by the magazine. This issue's theme is Geometry in Motion Graphics Design and there's a lot of fantastic videos to watch, although my favourite is a music video that can also be seen here.

Would I buy it again? No. But I recommend it as a source of inspiration to designers and animators everywhere.

Life-drawing at Candid Arts, Islington

It's been almost a year since I last went to Candid Arts. My favourite drawing from this set is the eighth one.

Stack: July

This month's Stack is Intern, the magazine by interns for interns!

In all seriousness, this is actually pretty good. There's been a lot of focus in the US and the UK recently on unpaid internships and their value to the individual and the economy. Intern explores that debate, interviewing people in the creative industries about internships. There's a variety of voices in this issue: young people in internships; creative professionals who have done internships; creative professionals strongly opposed to unpaid interns. Interestingly, it's not just focused on social debate; the magazine also includes photography, fiction and poetry, making it a creative outlet as well as a platform for political/social discussion.

Overall, it was an engaging read. It's a very polite magazine though; there are no polemics about social injustice to be found here, just well-articulated thoughts about how things could be improved. I'm not sure if you really start a labour movement that way, but I don't think Intern is looking to mobilise anyone so much as make them think.

Would I buy it again? This is yet another that I'd buy for someone else, but not for myself. If I had a younger friend or relative who had just graduated and was looking for or already in an internship it might be something I'd want to share with them.

T.Rex

This is going to be the last automata for the forseeable future! This one comes Flying Pig Ltd, the same company that made the Skiing Sheep. I didn't take any construction photographs this time, but it was very easy to put together.

Battling Knights

A superior product to the Executioner! The pieces for the Executioner had to be cut out by hand, while the pieces for this are pre-cut and just need to be pressed out of the sheets of card. Also, a thicker card is used for the horses and the mechanism, while a thinner card is used for the knights, making them much easier to bend into position. Construction photographs after the cut.

Comics Unmasked at the British Library

Entry: Between free and £10.50 depending on where you fit into the British Library's hierarchy of concessions

The British Library currently has an exhibition on British comic writers and artists called Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK. I went last weekend and have been grappling with this review for the last week. The experience was actually very reminiscent of the Barbican's animation exhibition: a high entry fee, material arranged thematically and a superficial look at the subject. Again, I went in with high expectations, (Dave McKean was the art director!), but overall I was a bit disappointed.

Stack: June

This month's Stack delivery was the dual-language magazine Perdiz. Perdiz is about happiness, or more accurately, some of the things that make some people happy: karaoke, drugs, shoelaces, photography and storm-chasing are some of the things covered by this issue alone.

Each Stack delivery arrives with a letter from the founder of Stack that introduces the magazine and tells you how great it is. I haven't really felt the need to mention them until now when this month's letter described Perdiz's content as "slightly unhinged", which is a pretty accurate summary of how I felt reading it. It skips between wildly disparate subjects with manic glee, perfectly capturing the fine line between enthusiast and obsessive. It even looks pretty strange. Check out the exposed spine:

All text is in both English and Spanish, with Spanish being the first language of the Perdiz staff. The occasionally clunky English translations just add to the general sense of delightful oddness. The whole experience was endearingly weird. Perdiz is definitely something very different.

Would I buy it again? It's quite expensive, so probably not. That said, I found myself thinking about it quite a bit afterwards. I mean, I learnt that I tie my shoes in the same way as the world's foremost expert on shoelaces! (We both favour the Over Under style of lacing, in case you wondered.) That made me pretty happy actually...