Thoughts made visual

“Tough times have always called for creative problem solving and individual innovative genius...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:26:00 +0100

“Tough times have always called for creative problem solving and individual innovative genius to change seemingly futile situations, but what our present situation requires is not the work of a few brilliant men/women behind closed doors but instead, the movement of our entire culture toward an incorporation and an understanding of the importance of a more holistic and creative approach.”

- Willem Van Lancker

Full essay available at:

http://www.willemvanlancker.com/writing/collaborative-design-0

Challenge Society exhibition at DDC

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:50:00 +0100

I visited Challenge Society exhibition at Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen. The exhibition present some aspects of design thinking to wider audience through numerous examples and cases that have been undertaken recently mainly in Denmark. The exhibition underlines the importance of multidisciplinary cooperation and holistic approach in design, including the end users and stakeholders in the design process from early on and expanding design thinking to all possible sectors, not just the traditional creative ones.

Most of the case examples are available also online, although the presentations are fairly brief, as they were also in the exhibition itself. The exhibition was a nice to visit and gave some food for thought but from a designer’s point of view, it could have gotten deeper in the subject matter as it ended up being a collection of different cases.

To visit the DDC’s website: http://en.ddc.dk/exhibition/challenge-society.

A curious detail from a British point of view was a really brief description of UK’s “Big Society” idea which was presented next to British Design Council. The Source of the presentation was not even a British one but a Danish consultancy organization. Unfortunately this ate some credibility from the whole exhibition, at least for me, but judge for yourself: http://en.ddc.dk/page/innovation-public-sector.

On the second floor, at the same time with the Challenge Society was an exhibition about consumerism and where it all will take us if we keep going at the same rate as today. I came across with a straight forward, although slightly provocative and even propaganda like short film called “Story of Stuff” which is worth taking a look at. The graphics are brilliant in all their simplicity! www.storyofstuff.com

The contrast of the first and second floor exhibition spaces was something to note as well, which made me spend the little time I had to explore the space downstairs rather than upstairs:

Downstairs:

And the audience’s reactions were gathered quite nicely:

"Paper becomes less and less important as a space for carrying information, but more and more..."

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:23:00 +0100

“Paper becomes less and less important as a space for carrying information, but more and more important in being creative exploratory space. In a way, digital technology has liberated paper to become a much more radical space.”

- Neville Brody in The Blank Sheet Project

"There’s a reason why yoga studios don’t look like your grandmother’s attic: It ain’t zen."

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 12:52:00 +0100

“There’s a reason why yoga studios don’t look like your grandmother’s attic: It ain’t zen.”

- “On Keeping it Simple” by Jocelyn K. Glei

Source: http://the99percent.com/tips/7046/On-Keeping-It-Simple

Found out about the article through http://visualexploration.tumblr.com/

Artists' books

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 11:35:00 +0100

Some examples of the works from the panelists of “Text and the Hybrid Book” (see my previous post.)

Julie Chen www.flyingfishpress.com

View:

Panorama:

Robin Price www.robinpricepublisher.com

43, According to Robin Price, with Annotated Bibliography:

Incidential Directions by Robin Price and M. Jordan Tierney:

Language of Her Body by by Derek Dudek and Keiji Shinohara

Elysa Voshell www.elysavoshell.com

Dialogue by Elysa Voshell and Genevieve Coutroubis:

Biblio (1): Photographs of Greece 1995 - 2005 by Elysa Voshell

The Dream of Flying by Elysa Voshell:

The Hybrid Book conference

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 11:09:00 +0100

The Hybrid Book conference:

Book Arts Conference and Fair, which took place in June 2009 and was sponsored by the MFA Book Arts/Printmaking Program at the University of the Arts.

“Book arts represents a multi-arts forum: two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and time-based, one in which design, fine arts, craft, language, and new technologies combine, compete, and intersect. The focus of The Hybrid Book was on that aspect-—the book as a hybrid art form and book arts as multi-disciplinary.”

The conference recordings can be listened to on the website - unfortunately the quality is at points really low. Should you be listening with a headset, a word of warning: in the mid point of the panel discussion on “Text and the Hybrid Book” there’s a loud disturbing background sound too much for even the audience to take. http://www.hybridbook.org/conference.htm

Visual Editions book publisher

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 10:56:19 +0100

Interesting book designs from Visual Editions:

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer

Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta

To see more, read about the backgrounds, or purchase, visit: http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books

The dwindling importance of the makeshift organ that is our hand would not matter a great deal if...

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:56:35 +0100

The dwindling importance of the makeshift organ that is our hand would not matter a great deal if there were not overwhelming evidence to prove that its activity is closely related to the balance of the brain areas with which it is connected. ‘Being useless with one’s fingers’, ‘being ham-fisted,’ is not a very alarming thing at the level of the species as a whole; a good number of millennia will pass before so old an organ of our neuromotor apparatus actually regresses. But at the individual level the situation is very different. Not having to ‘think with one’s fingers’ is equivalent to lacking a part of one’s normally, phylogenetically human mind. Thus the problem of regression of the hand already exists today at the individual if not the species level.

André Leroi-Gourhan (1964/65) Gesture and Speech

Quoted from Sonja Neef’s Imprint and Trace - Handwriting in the Age of Technology (2011 London: Reaktion Books). True food for thought.

My current online portfolio

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:39:02 +0100

Got finally to update my online portfolio, which still needs some improving but is at least presentable in its current form. Any comments welcome!

www.seeinginslowmotion.co.uk

Designing with folds

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:00:00 +0100

Video of the process and more information about the campaign can be found here:

http://en.rsf.org/predators-campaign-ad-06-05-2010,37398.html

Film: Wim Wenders: Pina

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:47:00 +0100

Film: Wim Wenders: Pina:

“Dance, dance… otherwise we are lost.” Pina Bausch

For a real visual delight, I can highly recommend Wim Wender’s latest film about dancer choreographer Pina Bausch and her work. Beautiful compositions on stage and in urban surroundings, a joy of colours and painfullly clever contrasts loaded with a full scale of emotions.

See the trailer for a preview (clicking the heading takes you to the website of the Telegraph). I saw the film at Barbican Centre in 3D last Friday 22 April and still feel very emotional thinking about it.

Dubberly Design Office: The 892 unique ways to partition a 3 x 4 grid

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:26:01 +0100

Dubberly Design Office: The 892 unique ways to partition a 3 x 4 grid:

TED Talks: David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:34:00 +0100

TED Talks: David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization:

A well built interesting talk about information design with great examples of how information can be distorted, and how right relative figures can help to straighten the distortion. With the right question, or working the data in a certain way or with right approach, you’re able to make welcome clearings in the exhausting overload of information we receive every day. And we do receive a lot more than what we are conscious of - something this talk made me again realise and something I brought up already in my previous post.

In any case, taken down to its very simplest, information design is combining “the language of the eye”, meaning colours, shapes and patterns, with “the language of the mind” consisting of words, numbers and concepts. In order to be able to make the final outcome look good, you need to be aware of them both, simultaneously.

Update: Here’s a link to an article in the Guardian of the ways to distort data. It’s one of the good examples that was also brought up in the TED talk.

As reference to my post below, and the Easter time, this poster...

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 11:17:46 +0100

As reference to my post below, and the Easter time, this poster due to its type caught my attention from long distance. Having a closer look, the message turned out to be quite something the word “paid” didn’t first bring to my mind. Really strong poster that rose emotions, which I think was the aspect that made it so memorable. The used hairline slab serif typeface didn’t stay in my mind, though, but the use of the letter ‘i’ with its connotation was effective.

Typescape posters inspired originally by Wim Crouwel’s...

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 11:04:00 +0100

Typescape posters inspired originally by Wim Crouwel’s poster for Saura exhibition in Van Abbenmuseum in Eindhoven. I tried to express the three dimensional aspect of landscapes/cityscapes and how type usually can be seen in it - it’s there, you read it, but quite often you don’t pay too much attention to it or at least the formalities of it due to the amount of type you see all day long. Thus, there’s an aspect of type being there and not quite being there, seen but not seen, or at least not always read or understood or remembered. Something I’ve been thinking about recently when consciously trying to explore the type in my surroundings. What does it need for type to pop out, to really be paid attention to and to be remembered?

A quick visual response to the talk of fear in the modern...

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:15:53 +0100

A quick visual response to the talk of fear in the modern society today to celebrate the talk of some topics many are scared to face or speak about. It was again said that art is the form that connects to your deepest unconscious and one of its jobs is to raise feelings and thoughts that are normally pushed away in the background. From zombies and horror films to female suppression, Oreet Ashery, Patricia MacCormack and John Cussans weren’t afraid to talk of it all.

What are we scared of? What should we be scared of?

One direct answer that really made me think was from Patricia MacCormack: apathy.

Spill Festival of Performance at the Barbican Centre. The talk mentioned was on Thursday 22 April.

Wim Crouwel at the Design Museum

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:59:00 +0100

As I mentioned earlier, I finally went to see London Design Museum’s current exhibition “Wim Crouwel - a graphic odyssey” last Sunday. There seems to be a real Crouwel boom swiping over London at the moment, and I’m happy to join the crowd. I’ve been completely taken by Crouwel’s work, his grids and systematic approach to layouts and typography.

I joined the tour led by the visiting curator of the exhibition and Spin’s creative director Tony Brook, who according to his own words, has been a Crouwel collector for years now.

Crouwel studied to become an abstract painter but after the World War II found it difficult to find work as fine artist. He got a job as a designer building exhibition stands - work that he has continued at some level since, quite naturally, to be added, as architecture in its own right has been an inspiration for him since his early childhood. As part of the exhibition designs Crouwel was asked to design printed material related to the exhibitions, which marked the beginning of his journey as a graphic designer. Working with exhibition designs during the day and studying graphic design in the evening, his significant style started developing surprisingly quickly. After two years as an exhibition designer, he started his own studio in collaboration with an interior designer, Kho Liang Le.

Crouwel’s early graphic design work was influenced by modernism and Swiss International style, during a time when most poster design in the Neatherlands was dominated by expressive image based design. In the exhibition, the names and work of Karl Gerstner, Armin Hoffman and Josef Müller-Brockmann were brought up along with the magazine Neue Grafik, to whose publishers Müller-Brockmann belonged to. Talking about influences, Tony Brook put it nicely saying that it’s not where you get it from but where you take it to.

Starting his own studio now in 1956 with Kho Liang Le, Crouwel was influenced by his colleague’s “eastern sensibility” and “minimalist aesthetics” that had their impact particularly in Crouwel’s use of space. During the years 1952-1963 Crouwel developed his distinctive visual language with hand-rendered type and unique use of space and colour that could be seen in corporate identities and publications. In his collection of greeting cards he could test his ideas and techniques.

Crouwel could continue working on his ideas on typographic composition quite freely when he was hired as the sole designer for Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. The head of the museum, Edy de Wilde, was described by Crouwel as “the ideal client”. De Wilde’s idea was to hire a designer he appreciated and he believed in, and then give the designer freedom to work, and make mistakes - he never gave Crouwel feedback before the work was printed, and the feedback could end up being great, or not so great. Crouwel worked with De Wilde first during the Van Abbenmuseum period 1955-1963 and later during De Wilde’s directorship of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from 1963 to 1985, when De Wilde retired. Clearly taken by De Wilde’s style as a client, apparently Crouwel tends to use the same style when he commissions work these days - Brook told he hasn’t yet gotten Crouwel’s feedback of his work with the exhibition!

During his time as the principal designer for the Stedelijk Museum, Crouwel got involved in the first big design studio in the Neatherlands, Total Design. TD’s organisation was formed of different teams, model taken from Alan Fletcher’s studio in UK, and Crouwel was to be head of one of the teams. TD designed several successfull identities but met also resistance - at the time when graphic guidelines weren’t reality as they are today, the first attempts to set these guidelines weren’t always well received… TD’s poster presenting its work also presents the following thought: “Design in our view is a process of creating order.”

During his TD and Stedelijk Museum time 1963-1985, Crouwel, who is known to be highly organized, designed the grid. I’m tempted to write the grid with a capital first letter as a grid one works with for 22 years sounds more like a colleague than just a system to guide one’s design. To be precise, Crouwel designed two grids, one for all the posters and one for all the catalogues he made for SM during 1963-1985. Might he have been tempted not to follow his grid every now and then, he apparently never made an exception. If you build a system, you should then go by it, quite simply. The gift is to make a grid flexible enough so that the grid isn’t too obvious but it gives a coherent look to all work, even if you couldn’t quite explain or see why.

Something else you cannot quite see these days is the credits that the designers used to put in their poster designs, the ones I pointed out already in my previous post about Crouwel posters in Grafik magazine’s exhibition. I asked Tony Brooks about this, if it was a Crouwel thing or if it used to be a norm back in the days, and apparently it used to be a common thing to do both in the Neatherlands as well as here in UK. Apparently, for this exhibition, Spin included the credits of the designers in the poster as well, just to continue the habit that I personally find fair as well as curious detail in size. I haven’t seen the posters yet, but will keep my eye out for them.

All above images of this post have been borrowed from the website of the magazine Dezeen. See more: www.dezeen.com

Printers: F. E. Burman

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:43:31 +0100

Printers: F. E. Burman:

I think I found my printer today - friendly and professional customer service, good advice and keen interest in talking through your print plans, and on top of that, experience in printing on GF Smith papers.

Visited Design Museum on London marathon Sunday 17 April and was...

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:31:00 +0100

Visited Design Museum on London marathon Sunday 17 April and was lucky enough to enjoy the tour to the Wim Crouwel - A Graphic Odyssey exhibition lead by the visiting curator Tony Brook from Spin. Unfortunately it wasn’t allowed to take any photographs of the exhibition so here’s some photos of the catalogue, published by Tony Brook’s Unit Editions.

I haven’t yet been to Design Museum’s Wim Crouwel...

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:26:45 +0100

I haven’t yet been to Design Museum’s Wim Crouwel exhibition but I decided to start by visiting on 12/4/11 Grafik magazine’s small poster exhibition of Crouwel’s early work 1957 - 1963. All posters were also on sale but unfortunately out of my price range…

Not having seen Crouwel’s work live before, I was particularly fasinated by the way he used to put down his own name in the posters he designed - small enough not to be seen from far but big enough to be readable close by.

One of my favourite was Kunstenaars uit Barbant -poster, 4/11 - 4/12/1961. With its black, red and white colour combination and big all caps type combined with smaller small caps, it’s simple and effective, strong even. The style appealed to me also particularly because, I’ve changed by colour theme and style of my PAC project recently to this direction (photos coming soon).

Also: the gallery had some publications of Crouwel and one of them was a japanese “idea” magazine from 7/2007 (nro 323) dedicated entirelly to Wim Crouwel. Had only a quick flick through but shall set on a search in hoping to find one.