Wallpaper* Re-Made

As sustainability stands firmly at the top of design agenda, Wallpaper* have launched their latest flagship project: Wallpaper* Re-Made. An evolution of Wallpaper* Handmade, the publication’s decade-long initiative connecting designers, creatives, makers and manufacturers, Re-Made focuses more on design and creation that can enrich and endure. In an effort to move away from simply creating beautiful things, and re-focus on understanding how, what and why we make and consume, the publication will invite leading creatives to share their research and creative processes. Including research on problems of BAME representation within urban spaces and sustainability issues facing the fashion industry, Wallpaper Re-Made* seeks to affirm the belief that design is a problem-solving tool for the world’s environmental and social challenges.

The Future is Paper

The race to create the world’s first paper-based spirits bottle has finally been won. Alcohol powerhouse Diageo has unveiled a bottle made from sustainably sourced wood which will debut with the Johnny Walker whisky brand next year. 100% plastic-free, the bottle is a first of its kind and heralds a new era for sustainable packaging. Diageo partnered with Pilot Lite to create Pulpex Limited, a “world-leading sustainable packaging technology company” that will roll out paper-based bottles for more alcohol brands within their network. Look forward to paper-based Guinness and Smirnoff in the future.

The Promise

For creative students around the country, the lack of access to their usual studio spaces or tutors has meant they have had to look far more introspectively to find inspiration, as this gorgeous comic project from the BA & MA Illustration students at Falmouth University proves.

Titled ‘The Promise’, the project began gestating before lockdown in January but was quickly accelerated by the enforced quarantine, taking the form of a free digital comics platform hosting a collection compiled by the students. The Promise team says that many of the works "inevitably reflect lockdown life while other works offer either pure imaginative fictional escapism or recollections of a pre-Covid 19 world." The site is built to be responsive to the platform it’s viewed on, integrating a sequential reading format, which both offered an interesting creative challenge for the students submitting work as well as an insight into the future of illustration in relation to the digital format. "It was exciting to make a comic that responded to the device it was being viewed on and a challenge to think about how the reader would experience the narrative and whether they would see multiple frames at once or just one at a time on desktop or mobile," says contributing illustrator Georgia Haywood.

With so much uncertainty still looming over us, it’s of the utmost importance we look to escape for a moment or two, whether it be to a strange, sci-fi world or to simply laugh at how a trip to the hairdressers can be truly life changing.

My World and Your World

Irish artist Eva Rothschild is known for her sculptures which employ a broad range of materials and constructed with irregular geometry and this week the Royal Academician has unveiled her first permanent London piece. The candy striped, upside down tree in Kings Cross is not intended to be a comment on the upturned world we now live in but has been created to be part and parcel of the public realm and to enhance outdoor social space. This launch comes at a time when outdoor spaces are so essential to the way we can meet with friends and family. The hope for this new structure is that “open canopies”, created where each branch meets the ground, functions as a meeting place ‘where people can be present’ without blocking out the surrounding landscape. Public sculptures like these have always been important and in a densely populated and built up city like London these structures can become a destination or a landmark through which to help navigate or gather around. The name of the piece is ‘My World and Your World’ which for public art couldn’t be more apt.