The twelfth annual London Design Festival returns to the V&A for the sixth time until 21 September. Enjoy projects, exhibitions, talks, workshops and special weekend events around graphics and digital design all over the city.

Whether it’s entering Trajan’s Column to see James Rigler’s ceramics or seeing the the world’s first 4K Sculptural Video Art Triptych with video artist Vanessa Jane Hall’s Breathless Beauty Broken Beauty, there’s much to see. Don’t miss What I have always wanted is… which sees ten well-known designers pair up with ten new design talents to create something the mentors have always wanted but had never been able to find using American hardwood.

The entrance to the V&A’s Glass Galleries will play host to Human Nature – a site specific work created by the Paris based designer Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert for the duration of the festival. Watch the above video for a behind the scenes look at Wintrebert’s glass creations.

Graphics weekend (13 – 14 September) focuses on everything from typography to motion graphics, CGI and digital art. Hear about the creation of Penguin book covers over the last ten years (14 September) or learn how to create a portfolio and get started working in design. The following weekend, experience Digital Weekend (20 – 21 September) with events around fashion, design and more. See an interactive installation by design collective, The T-Shirt Issue or check out the Fashion Gallery for a display from THEUNSEEN’s team of chemists and fashion designers.

Cinephiles and fans of the digital be sure to explore the Design on Film events which feature screenings of well-known films, a selection of cutting-edge motion graphics, CGI environments and digital art shorts, talks and more. Finally a bit further afield, don’t miss the unveiling of Glasgow based studio Timorous Beasties‘ new wallpaper collaboration with Jonathan McCree.

The London Design Festival runs from 13 – 21 September. For more details and the full programme see the London Design Festival website.

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Find more events in our weekly bulletin here.

The Double Negative is an online magazine launched just over a year ago. Featuring the best and latest in arts, design, film and music coverage, their mission is to hold a mirror up to creative output and reflect it, uncovering and exposing the best – and sometimes the worst – of what’s out there. This is what they recommend for you to check out:

Event: Based in Liverpool, we’re really looking forward to this year’s photography festival, Look 13. Elsewhere, later this month, we’re very excited to see what the V&A have done with the David Bowie archive.

Artist: On the site, we have a monthly focus showcasing the work of an artist of our choosing, so this is tough. We love them all but the latest is Matthew Storrow, a trained architect turned graphic designer. He’s obsessed with imagery of derelict stuff, very post-apocalyptic – right up our street!

Video: We’re big fans of the work of abstract moving image artist Max Hattler. He’s worked on solo shows, music videos and short films. Most recently he made a video for Amnesty International which you can watch below.

Book: Editor Mike was recently given Play: The Nylon Book of Music for his birthday. Focusing on female artists in rock, it’s served as inspiration for a playlist we did as well as being something we just can’t stop leafing through.

In fiction, we’ve never really got over Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland. Filled with pre-millenial tensions (it was first published in 1998), at its heart, this is a book about love and friendship. But poet and critic Tom Paulin probably puts it best: “This is a millennial novel of a very subtle and interesting kind. It’s visually brilliant, full of extraordinary imagery, fresh like new paint. I was absolutely knocked over by it.”

Venue: Probably the best venue in Liverpool right now is Camp and Furnace. A renovated industrial building just off the dock road, its multi-space layout makes it great for gigs, screenings and exhibitions. The fact it has a really nice bar and that it has been thoroughly thought through design-wise doesn’t hurt at all!

The Double Negative’s co-founder, Mike Pinnington

The Double Negative’s co-founder, Laura Robertson

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This partnership has recently been able to announce the site – right next to the Discovery ship, on the Tay Estuary. Georgina said that the new museum would be built on an island in the Tay with sightlines throughout the city and even a beach area around it (which might bring the seals to this cultural attraction!)

The building is expected to cost in the region of £47million with one third of the money coming from each of the following sources: Scottish Government, partnership funding from Trusts and Lottery sources, and the final third from money raised by the University of Dundee through private sponsorship (one of Georgina’s responsibilities).

The interior of the building will total 7000 sq m, which, for reference, is about half the size of the Baltic in Gateshead. I found it good to hear that the V&A at Dundee would focus on contemporary art and design work, no earlier than the 1940s, ‘Not an outpost of V&A with decades old collections’. Georgina went on to say that the works on show would be ‘Post 1940s but very much focused on today, with 1200 sq m of the galleries given over to touring exhibitions from the V&A in London (similar to the famous V&A blockbuster with Kylie’s outfits).

The pattern for this would be for the first three years, one V&A blockbuster plus two smaller exhibitions, reduces after that point when exhibitions can be developed and toured from other international organisations that curate design.

Georgina said that she was using the term Design in its most inclusive sense and that the V&A at Dundee would also provide intellectual support for practitioners through its development as a professional centre for those practitioners which would have ownership by the practitioner body of Scotland. It would be looking at collaboration, introducing new thinking, exposing research agendas and drawing on a multidisciplinary pool including scientists and philosophers to deliver new products into the marketplace.

One of the key exhibition spaces will be the Designs On Scotland Gallery which will be about and for contemporary practitioners. This will focus on process as well as products of practice, where often the artwork is the end of one process and the start of the next. The selection mechanisms will always be based on the quality of work. There will also be a special collection from 1940s onwards looking at design.

Recent progress in the project has seen the steering group of the project move to being a charitable trust which will lead the project through to completion. The Chair Person for this trust is likely to be announced next month.

They have also recently called for notes of interest from architects and have been inundated with initial contacts from over 250 practices or individuals from ‘just about every country in the World’.

In March the project will see its most important meeting to date with the Culture Minister and Finance Minister which should be the ‘final pushing of the green button and enable us to fully go ahead with the Architectural Competition’.

Georgina said that she was looking forward to seeing the submissions, but glad that she wasn’t going to be short-listing. It is expected that the large number of applications would be shortlisted to 6-8 who would present their ideas on 3 A1 boards and 1-100 scale models that would be exhibited here and in London.

The project will develop an engagement strategy beginning in autumn 2011 and they expect to open a V&A exhibition in another venue in Dundee, as part of that, before the new building opens in September 2014.

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.