Archive for the ‘inspiration’ Category
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
I wrote on this blog some while back that I feared we were losing the art of decoration, in passing referring to Marian Bantjes as bucking that trend. With the publication of I Wonder she has singlehandedly rescued ornament & craft from untimely demise at the hands of modernist graphic design.
For those unfamiliar, Marian Bantjes is a Canadian illustrator/typographer/designer (there is no appropriate single word) living near Vancouver who after a decade in book typography and production reinvented her career to a extraordinary degree. She is a kind of missing link between contemporary design and the rich decorative craft traditions of the religious world(s). Her work is entirely secular but there is a strong sense of devotion in it, and she has a gift for creating something something truly extraordinary—spiritual even—from the most unpromising materials or observations.
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Tags: communication, creativity, decorative tradition, decorative type, graphic design, I Wonder, illustration, inspiration, Marian Bantjes, ornament, typography, visual culture, words
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Friday, September 17th, 2010
How often do you feel really gripped by a piece of contemporary art? I don’t know much about art and am often unsure about what I like, but I like Fiona Banner’s ‘Harrier and Jaguar’ a lot. I wonder why?
Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries are a special context. Tate Britain is so much more approachable than its Modern big sister which, much as I like the building, seems to engulf the ideas it holds, the gazillions of tourists pouring through not helping matters. Tate Britain has less space but the bigger picture – the broader context of art tradition a foil for the limited amount of contemporary works.
The sheer improbability of this 20th century hardware robbed of motion is enhanced by the neoclassical architecture. The Harrier is strung up like a hung gamebird, the Jaguar an impossible accident. The planes could not be more surreally out of context. We can experience their spectacular physicality up close and you can’t help but wonder ‘how did they get them in here’?
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Tags: art, communication, creativity, design, Fiona Banner, Harrier and Jaguar, inspiration, Tate Britain, visual culture
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Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Take a break from the pursuit of high quality and savour the historic charm of 1960s art direction and photography…
From a small collection of postcards on sale in Italy in the 70s, a dozen examples of imagery created before the term art direction was coined. You would think Italy’s obvious scenic charm a sufficient lure for tourist cash, but free-thinking Italian marketeers of the time had other ideas: from low-grade sleaze involving aircraft wreckage to bad weather boating and armed forces recruitment, to 1960s US TV stars and a series of unfortunate animals in varying degrees of discomfort and shame. The images beg many questions: Did a perceived lack of virility in the Leaning Tower prompt the use of the Eiffel? Why three embossed gold stars to censor the boat girl? Are the washing instructions for the cat or the quilt? Was the early use of a lenticular coating (to make the army/airforce girls wink – sadly not evident here) the interactive spark that eventually led to the development of the iPad? We may never know…
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Tags: art direction, collecting, image-making, photography, postcards, visual culture, visualisation
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Friday, June 25th, 2010
An illustrator, teacher and member of the editorial board of award-winning contemporary illustration magazine Varoom, Anna Steinberg creates beautifully drawn, witty and thoughtful images, some of which were recently selected for Images – Best of British Illustration and the London Transport Museum/AOI Cycling in London competitions. In this email interview she reveals the significance to her work of ingenuity, mountains, biscuits & old Bidies…
How do you work?
With professional commissions I usually problem-solve in words first and then develop through doodles into resolved pictures. With personal work I do visual experiments and it emerges more spontaneously.
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Tags: Anna Steinberg, communication, creativity, illustration, image-making, inspiration, language, visualisation, words
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Artwork, print and cheap uncoated paper – 1950s/60s comics’ matchless charm (pic via Half-man Half-static).
Forty years back (in the Life on Mars era) the fashionable aesthetic is an informal, natural look. There is lingering hippy talk of ‘getting back to nature’. These are lean years for the high street hairdresser, ‘male grooming’ is a laughable concept and clothes are mostly cheap and nasty or homemade. Design is still a cottage industry but it is looking to the future: Michael English’s Hyper-real airbrush illustrations seem new and extraordinary. Robert Moog’s synthesizer is the future of music (although he hasn’t yet worked out how to keep it in tune)…
March 2010, Farringdon. I’m in a tube carriage near an extraordinary-looking young woman who appears in no way real. Her hair, nails, makeup seem somehow beyond human and her high brow and flawless surface reminds me of the actor/digital hybrid as the Red Queen from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Blankly shiny, expressionlessly ‘perfect’, she is the HD-ready paradigm of contemporary beauty. Music seeping from headphones is also soullessly bright, sampled, virtual, autotuned. All of this is in sharp contrast to the immediate noise and grubby texture of London, where illustrators, designers and musicians, bored with software slickness are increasingly going ‘wonky’ (surely the most irritating/overused phrase of 2009), working with the look and feel of handwork, crafts, ‘outsider art’ and forgotten technologies to rediscover ‘charm’….
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Tags: brand design, charm, communication, creativity, decoration, decorative type, graphic design, packaging, typography, visual culture, visualisation
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Monday, April 26th, 2010
Multidisciplinary designer, musician and teacher David Keech was an Associate with architects Foster and Partners, the first non-Japanese designer at Yamaha Design in Japan, and now runs his own product and interior design practise, Keechdesign.
Kumu chair by David Keech with James Johnson. A Japanese word meaning to join together or assemble, Kumu has only five components, no screws or mechanical fixings and is cut from a single sheet of plywood.
What inspires you? Everything. That’s a serious answer – not just design. Only a small percentage of my inspiration comes from that world, a very congested one, everyone following each other – I think it’s good not to be too involved in that. I probably get more of my inspiration from sculpture, fine art, music, popular culture, than design per se. I spend a lot of time and energy pursuing inspiration, it’s a big part of what I do. In teaching I kick off with slides about inspiration to surprise students a bit, not work by Phillippe Starck or Arne Jacobsen (much as I love them both)… I was at the National Gallery yesterday looking mainly at pre-17th century religious paintings, and I just thought to myself ‘this is fuel’. It’s profound, the human energy involved – let alone the skill. If you could get to half that level, you’d be going some…
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Tags: creativity, David Keech, design, drawing, Duke Ellington, furniture, industrial design, innovation, integrity, interior design, jazz, Louis Armstrong, music, product design, RCA, sustainability, Yamaha
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Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Award-winning illustrator and creator of book covers for novels by William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Isabel Allende and Alice Walker, Cathie Felstead has illustrated numerous childrens’ books and worked for big-name clients like British Airways, Channel 4, Ballet Rambert and Oxfam. An RCA graduate, she also teaches final year Illustration at University of Hertfordshire. She talks here about inspiration, deadlines, Angela Carter, Industrial design, Cheryl Cole and Arsenal Football Club…
Do you think you have a particular approach to illustration? There is a difference between the work I do for clients and my own work. My approach to work for clients is quite businesslike: I get a script, look through it and see if there is something interesting about it… (a good fee can make the dullest script more interesting!). The starting point of an advertising job can be less engaging, and more of a challenge. Books and editorial work are generally more inspirational and better suited to my approach…
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Tags: Cathie Felstead, creativity, illustration, image-making, inspiration, RCA, University of Hertfordshire, visualisation
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Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
Functionality, clarity and rationality reign supreme in contemporary design. The Bauhaus casts a long shadow and analysis of function, distillation of meaning and removal of the inessential gives us the calm spaces, ordered structures and clear interfaces that we need to navigate our complex modern lives. It could be argued that decoration is anti-design. Style is inevitable, but ‘decoration’ is just for cakes and wallpaper, no?
There are areas of design where indulgent visual richness remains desirable and appropriate, a signifier of value and/or emotion. Decoration blooms sporadically now – our rapid cultural turnover often rendering it ‘tired’ before it can establish itself. It may not be a dirty word any more but beyond the confines of fashion and interior design, decoration often coexists uneasily with cool minimalism and rational typography. Are we are in danger of losing the art of decoration?
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Tags: creativity, decoration, decorative arts, decorative tradition, decorative type, design, graphic design, ornament, packaging, packaging design, St Germain packaging, traditional typography
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
© DC Thompson
Hats off to RCA graduate Min-kyu Choi, who has won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award.
The award – a slightly weird exercise in comparing apples with oranges (if not bananas, guava, macadamia nuts and kiwi fruit) – last year favoured Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster and this year pitted the late great Alexander McQueen’s spring/summer collection, a light aircraft and a social housing project against Mr Choi’s clever folding plug design. Anyone travelling any distance with a thin laptop will appreciate the value of his elegant solution to the problem of the ugly bulk of the UK plug when travelling. The new plug, which folds to 1cm or less, may not save lives but solves a daily irritation for potentially millions of people. Amazing a) that no-one did this sooner and b) that it is not in production already. We may now have to put up with endless ‘plugging the market gap’ headlines, but Min-kyu Choi deserves the success that will surely result from his clarity of thought and keen eye for a missed opportunity. Demos here and here.
Tags: creativity, design of the year, industrial design, innovation, Min-kyu Choi, plug, product design, RCA
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Over the past year or two one side effect of the Global Banking Brouhaha has been a lot of high street retail refitting, briefly uncovering glimpses of signage and typography hidden for many years. If not quite as revelatory as Tutenkhamun’s tomb, these archaeological micro-events on the high street nonetheless show fascinating traces of old graphic design, rendered more intriguing by incompleteness.
Without nightvision cameras, bogus paranormal experts, or suggestible members of the public these glimpses reveal eerie traces of the past lives of type. In most cases the letters’ physical presence is long departed, their spirit inferred by shadows, fixing holes and accumulated detritus. Like some new kind of Kirlian photography the remaining traces hint at life and energy absent from the image.
Such marks are usually revealed fleetingly and soon cleaned up or built over. The above delicately shaded façade of a former Sketchleys branch is now sadly as pristine as its former customers’ shirts and suits. So keep your eyes peeled. The truth is out there, but not for long. Further evidence may be revealed from time to time here.
Tags: ghost typography, retail, shop fascia, signage, signs, traditional typography, typography
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