Showing posts with label Alvar Aalto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alvar Aalto. Show all posts

Tuesday 27 October 2015

Cinnamon bun week on Colorset

Nordic Bakery is a Scandinavian-style café founded in London in 2007. There are now three beautifully designed cafés around London, offering simple Nordic bakery products in a peaceful, simple, well designed environment. Aside from the food, the Nordic Bakery pays attention to all aspects of design. As their website states: "We have selected timeless and authentic design pieces for serving our food and drink. The tableware and furniture are designed by iconic Nordic designers, such as Kaj Franck, Alvar Aalto and Ilmari Tapiovaara".

I've written about their simple and effective use of our Colorset before on this blog, but they have recently produced these new posters on Colorset Deep Orange 270gsm, for this month's Cinnamon Bun Week - sounds yummy!

The superbly executed typographic design is by Supergroup Studios, based in Helsinki and London. Creative directors are Jaakko Tuomivaara and Roy Haapakoski. Supergroup have worked with Nordic Bakery since the beginning and have developed their brand in all areas, including packaging for their retail products.   
Photography: Marianna Wahlsten

The previous A2 prints on our Colorset 100% Recycled 270gsm, have been one colour for each café. Dorset Street is on Tuscan Brown, New Cavendish Street on Crimson and Golden Square on Indigo.

The prints are silkscreen printed in two colours by Dan Holliday at The Mangle Press (known locally as "Dan the Mangle"!)

www.nordicbakery.com
www.supergroupstudios.com
www.danholliday.com
Posted by Justin Hobson 27.10..2015

Thursday 24 January 2013

...from paper to data!

Below is a picture of a paper mill or rather, it's a picture of what was once a paper mill.
In what seems like a strange twist of fate with a healthy dollop of irony, Google acquired Stora Enso’s Summa paper mill in Hamina, Finland, in 2009. The paper mill which used to produce 350,000 tonnes of newsprint and magazine paper, had suffered persistent losses and with a downturn in demand, the  long-term profitability prospects were poor.
Using the pre-existing infrastructure of the mill, Google bought the site to estabish a state of the art data center. The large site sits on the beautiful Baltic Sea and is able to use untreated sea water, piped through a pre-existing tunnel, to cool the servers naturally. This natural cooling, together with large volumes of cheap electricity and green energy sources makes this former paper mill an ideal place to convert into a server farm.
With the paper machines removed, rows upon rows of servers - data is the product now.
Last summer, Google announced Phase II with a further €150 million investment. This will involve the restoration and conversion of an Alvar Aalto-designed machine hall. Interestingly, Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) is the Finish born architect and designer who ranks alongside Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright in the modernist movement, so an important piece of Architectural history is also being preserved.

So what can we make of this? Well one thing it highlights is that just because something appears on the internet, it doesn't mean that there is no cost and no impact on the environment.

Ironically Google have just launched a "Go Paperless" campaign in 2013: http://www.paperless2013.org/
and perhaps unsurprisingly, there's been a bit of an anti Google backlash:
http://www.twosides.info/UK/Verdigris-urges-print-and-paper-industries-to-Go-Google-less

So if you have a client that says "Oh, I'll put it on my website because it saves paper and that's better for the environment" maybe get them to think again and look at these articles.

http://www.google.co.uk/about/datacenters/locations/hamina/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvar_Aalto
http://www.storaenso.com/
http://www.twosides.info/
Posted by Justin Hobson 24.01.2013