Tove Jansson’s Moomins on the Riviera

The new animated film retells a 60-year-old story of the curious characters that's still relevant today

100 years ago Finnish novelist, illustrator and painter Tove Jansson—creator of cult comic strip family the Moomins—was born. Since the first Moomin strip was published in 1945, their stories have been filmed for TV plenty of times, but it’s only now that one of the comic strips has been adapted into a film. “Moomins on the Riviera” (which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival …

The Infographic Guide to Series

Illustrated, informative and lighthearted, the hardcover series packs a wealth of knowledge into playful graphics

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an infographic is surely worth 10,000. Where words would surely fail, the infographic takes a complicated bounty of data and, in the best cases, succinctly and aesthetically transforms it into an appealing, encapsulating and (of course) informative image. Far from delving into the design process of the field, London-based Octopus Book Group’s upcoming series (out 21 …

A History of Toy and Novelty Cameras

"Camera Crazy" looks back on decades of unusual and unique designs

With a tiny computer equipped with a more than capable camera in our pocket, it’s difficult to consider a time when such image-capturing devices were a luxury—one generally uninvolved with daily life at that. In fact it wasn’t until the 1960s, when a small Hong Kong-based company introduced the Diana, did the era of inexpensive cameras begin. This plastic, lightweight camera shot 120 film and …