Posts Tagged ‘inspiration’
Wednesday, December 12th, 2012
Monotoype UK recently staged Pencil to Pixel: a small-but-perfectly-formed exhibition about the development of typeface production—well worth the minor trek to its slightly off-grid Wapping location.
The decades of change between hot metal and digital production could easily make you overlook the extent of labour and craft that is still involved in bringing type to use. Type may be surface design but it has more in common with furniture or other product design in its mix of essential functional and aesthetic requirements than with most of the graphic design it serves. The sheer beauty of the pencil-drawn curves of pre-digital type masters is something I had seen before but almost forgotten. In the exhibition the evidence of mid-20th century type impressed most, the physically less present display of digital era work on show suffering by comparison: pencils 1, pixels 0. Anyhoo—all of it is better seen than waffled on about. Below are some snaps of things that caught my eye:
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Tags: graphic design, inspiration, legibility, product design, typography
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Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
Don’t mean a thang if it ain’t got that twang… © Alembic
Most designers enjoy music for mood-management or constructive distraction and many also grapple with an instrument in their spare time. Finding significance in detail is another inextricable part of design activity—A History of the World in 100 Objects and the Boring Conference attest to the the wider appeal looking for big stuff in minutiæ.
I enjoyed Boring 2011 hugely but could not attend this time—so an invitation to contribute to Keechdesign / Yamaha Design Studio’s Something Like A Musical Instrument event was timely consolation. For it, contributors were asked to speak for a minute or two on an object with some connection to music. Talks ranged from a concise presentation of the flosspick as “the world’s smallest stringed instrument” to a demonstration of trombone mute development by David Keech (not only a fine designer but an actual proper musician as well). A fuller selection of contributions can be found on Johnson Banks’ ‘Thought For the Week’ blog. My effort was something like the following:
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, inspiration, music
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Wednesday, May 30th, 2012
© not London 2012 – flagrant violation of 2012 brand parameters. So sue me.
There is plenty in the London 2012 Olympics for us to get angry about: The magical / mythical ticket chaos; sponsorship & brand fascism from Union Carbide to intimidation of cornershops; the rooftop missiles; the world’s least-engaging Olympic mascots Hemlock & Mandible – and no-one is without an opinion on that logo.
I remain alone in feeling that – whilst no thing of beauty – the 2012 logo did an effective job of what it set out to do: signal a fresh Olympic spirit to humans under 30 not engaged in sport. But the typeface is hideous, most applications of the identity weak (Otl Aicher it ain’t), and the enforcement zeal of Seb Coe’s brand police defies belief. My mother is helping to organize a sport-themed village flower-arranging competition this summer (‘The Blooming Olympics’) and I fully expect a LOCOG-ordered SWAT team ambush with helicopter gunships and a bloody showdown in the tea tent. (more…)
Tags: branding, communication, graphic design, inspiration, London 2012, sport, visual culture
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Saturday, April 28th, 2012
Image via Flickr user Nullalux
A five-star furore erupted a couple of weeks ago in the US as the AIGA added ‘justified’ (effectiveness) criteria to its its established graphic design awards. Stoked by a passionate plea from Pentagram’s Paula Scher the dust is still in the air. Crudely reduced, the argument is about art vs. commerce. Beauty, exploration and inspiration vs. quantifiable outcomes and the somewhat true suggestion that the two are forever opposed.
Product designs must function yet fashion design takes liberties with practicality. Graphic designers – working on apps & apple juice, brands & bus timetables, ebooks & exhibitions, websites & wayfinding – juggle widely varying blends of function and aesthestics. Some good graphic design contributes enduringly to our visual culture, but a great deal of it has a mayfly lifespan shifting sandwiches before being binned. Really good graphic design looks upliftingly great and fulfils an useful function. (more…)
Tags: awards, creativity, graphic design, innovation, inspiration
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Saturday, March 31st, 2012
Art School culture is fading in the thrusting modern world of cost-effective business-facing academia. Design students often have meagre studio facilities, thin access to staff / peers, so learning good work habits takes longer. Students are often found frozen in the headlights of an oncoming deadline and need help coralling their thoughts. I need to actively manage my own remaining brain cells more these days – general decrepitude, plus the distractions that are part of How We Do Stuff Now. Our unfocussed floundering brains need coaxing now and again.
Creativity was more taken for granted than taught in art schools when I attended St. Martins (as much to be with musicians as designers). I found it disappointing: despite being within spitting distance of Denmark Street the muso thing never took off (blessing in disguise #243618b) and my portfolio was ‘mixed’. Fortunately my first job was with Wolff Olins, then more like art school than art school. It was populated with eccentrics from burnt-out 60s casualties to clever inspirational people, applying a wide range of approaches to creative stimulation from Heroin to The Times crossword. It was instructive to compare the the appalling consequences of the former with the more manageable virtues of the latter (still can’t complete that crossword, though). WO was producing some of the most innovative work of that time and it came from those with the more sustainable attitude to creativity.
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Tags: art school, creativity, design, innovation, inspiration, problem-solving
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Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
No Phillumenist I, nor proper collector of anything, but like most graphic designers I love a nice bit of printed ephemera. I bought these matchbox labels in Thailand, and as far as I can tell they are mostly (all?) Japanese, made for the Chinese market and stone lithography printed. I can’t read the text (which might explain much) but the use of flags in some puts them in the second and third decades of the 20th century – beyond that my ignorance is complete, not that that hinders my enjoyment of them. What is going on in the example above for instance? A diminutive husband and wife extending hospitality to an outsized westerner? or two smartly-dressed children welcoming Daddy home (wondering why he could not afford a full-sized house)? Either way – the drawing, pattern, texture and colours are beautiful.
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Tags: decoration, decorative tradition, graphic design, inspiration, matchbox labels, ornament, packaging, phillumeny, printed ephemera, visual culture
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Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
York Hall: terrible drawing, great venue
Taking time out from the everyday for mental refreshment is usually sound advice, as is “Don’t sweat the small stuff”. Conferences usually trade in comfortable & exotic locations and the promise of rest and revelation. Getting away from it all is supposed to help you get back into it all – an appealing (if often costly) idea. An alternative is to take Art & Science’s great lesson: Everything Is Interesting If You Look At It In The Right Way – and step in to the everyday.
This weekend (parted from a hard-earned tenner) I made my way to Bethnal Green’s York Hall, venue for the second Boring conference, founded/organised by James Ward, whose business card should surely read Chairman of the Bored had not Insurance Salesman James Osterberg got to that title first in 1979. This year’s expanded event was alluringly titled Boring 2011…
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Tags: Boring2011, communication, conferences, creativity, detail, inspiration, words
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Saturday, November 5th, 2011
Back in nineteen-seventy-when? a young me wrote to the Astra Fireworks Company for some samples of their firework labels – the examples here are from the collectionette I received by return. Within a few years, the postwar explosion of richly decorated British firework packaging had suddenly fizzled out and most firework production had reverted to its original source, China.
Now our fireworks are designed to appeal to the Michael Bay generation, named ‘Street Legal’, ‘Air Strike’, ‘Big Bad Dangerez’ (whatever that means) and so on, their packaging fit only to be viewed in the dark. UK ‘Bonfire Night’ never went away but got transformed into two weeks of shock & awe nervously monitored by the Noise Abatement and Dead Pets’ Societies. Thanks to Health & Safety we must now ‘stand well back and be well amazed’. As if looking at the TV, watching Baghdad burn.
Remember Remember is a wonderful exhibition in conjunction with The Museum of British Folklore at stately Warwickshire art gallery Compton Verney (past events include The Tulse Luper Suitcases) that vividly reminded me of what we have lost. Revisiting fire festivals going back centuries, the exhibition also focuses in delightful detail on post-war packaging & presentation of fireworks in Britain. Names like ‘Martian Ray’, ‘Barrel of Imps’ and ‘Mine of Serpents’ evoke a more innocent time. Simple designs, largely by semi-skilled employees rather than designers, printed in limited colour have all the character, wit and fun of what used to be a thrilling, intimate and accessible celebration of darkness, fire & sausage rolls.
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Tags: charm, collections, communication, creativity, decorative tradition, fireworks, graphic design, illustration, inspiration, visual culture
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Thursday, September 8th, 2011
An awful lot of very good graphic designers celebrate their success in the profession by leaving it. Is this because they cannot wait to get away from design? Surely not…
A recent blog post by Steven Heller concerned one Kent Hunter, a gifted designer I met briefly in the 80s whilst working for a transatlantic corporate graphics concern. Kent is a very talented chap indeed who amongst other things I remember art directed some ground-breaking annual report work for Time-Warner. Having had a very successful career with Franfurt Balkind, Kent and his partner have now opened an antique store in Millerton, NY.
Around the same time, in our London office Suzi Godson was a highly talented, clear-thinking designer I enjoyed working with. She bailed out of a very promising design career to become a successful Author and Times Columnist.
John Larkin was co-founder (with Tim May) of Design House Consultants, which was (and still is as far as I know) a very successful business, although John has long since departed both design and the UK to St Tropez for a new life as a hotelier.
There are plenty of other and higher-profile Poachers-turned-Gamekeeper: For Ben Schott (of Original Miscellany fame) and Dave Eggers (of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What, McSweeney’s and-much-more fame), graphic design activity was just step on the road to greater things.
What makes these escapees so keen to leave design? A desperate desire to never work for the man again? (understandable); a fundamental hatred of hard work? (not likely); A sudden need to assume a new identity for tax purposes? (possibly)…
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, graphic design, innovation, inspiration, problem-solving, service design, words
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Thursday, May 19th, 2011
That nice Professor Cox was on TV recently (atop some picturesque mountain, waving around the Hubble’s holiday snaps) banging on about space-time being a Woonder o’ t’ Universe™. That’s true enough but down here in office/studio space, time and/or space are scarcer – time to reflect in particular. What with lunch being for wimps and none of us having an attention span any more, non-essential reflection has become so widely discouraged that it’s a woonder the world is not full of humans behaving like headless chickens plunging civilisation headlong into chaos. Oh, hang on a minute…
It’s all too easy for busy designers to get burned out, stuck in a rut, demotivated or disillusioned with a profession that will always consume more mental energy than is strictly available (that probably contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics but I’m no Prof. Cox). To be the best designer you can be requires the cultivation of a continually positive and optimistic outlook. A tangible sense of possibility is required to fruitfully inhabit the mental zone where problems get solved and ideas get off the ground. Pressure directs us away from that zone like never before. For many an old fart like myself starting out decades ago in boom times, the urgent need to eat and provide a roof over one’s head was never more than a faint rumour. Now it looms intimidatingly large over one and all, and sustainable creativity is under threat like never before.
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Tags: creativity, design, design process, graphic design, inspiration, problem-solving, sabbatical
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