From old to new.

A preview of a new typeface inspired by type in Manchester

Designer Simon Page has a rich portfolio of great posters ranging from films to celebrating the official year of chemistry. I love the simplicity of his designs yet they still connect on many levels with the audience. The chemistry posters I feel are especially clever in the way that they use symbols from chemistry and display them in a contemporary way that alters their meaning enough that it conveys a message yet still has the connection with the subject.

Amazing! I want one of these.

I love the creative use of the T by the New York Times. Every now and again I stumble across some great imagary by them. I love the way they create amazing visuals just by using the logo, they always relate to the themes of the articles yet maintain their visual identity.

Santa Monica Posters

I stumbled across these very cool posters by Mark Brooks for Santa Monica Legitimate Wear. Initially I thought they were just halftone images but when I saw that they were made up of the Santa Monica logo it changed my perception of them, the idea and execution of these is brilliant and I cant imagine how long they must have took.

On a Sailors Grave

On a Sailors Grave (no roses grow) is a paper tattoo made by Jacob Dahlstrup Jensen. He used a tattoo machine like a pen on heavy watercolorpaper to create a three-dimensional line by disordering the paper structure. I love the use of printing technique in this work and gives it such a personal feel to it.

Renault Megane Advert

I absolutley love this guy from the new Renault advert. Makes me laugh every time it's on.

Dissertation

Whilst I have been writing my dissertation based around design in politics I have been lucky enough to contact and speak to some of my favourite designers. My essay is about how design can help change the world that we live in looking at branding of parties to how typography can influence a whole campaign. Here is just some of the work from the designers I have spoke to.

Erik Spiekermann

Lance Wyman

Milton Glaser

Nick Sambrato

I came across this article on the website Grain and Gram about printer Nick Sambrato, he runs an Orlando Florida based printing company called Mamma's Sauce. The work that they produce is really high quality and brilliantly designed. the article itself is brilliant, it gives an insight into what it means to be a traditional printer and something that I would love to do. The whole process is so fascinating and adds such a personal touch that you cannot get in modern digital printing.

http://grainandgram.com/nicksambrato/

Anthony Burrill

'Anthony Burrill has made a new series of limited-edition posters, printed in BP oil from the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Profits go to the ‘Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana’. The oil was collected direct from the polluted beaches of Grand Isle, Louisiana.' I found this article on designer Antony Burrill on the Eye Magazine blog, it immediately stood out as it was taking the idea of designing for a cause to another level. There have been numerous design campaigns critisizing the BP oil spill, most notably the re-designs of the BP logo which produced a very varied responses. Yet this adds another dimension to the designs that have been coming out of the disaster, actually using the oil from the spill makes it so much more realistic to the general public, I also like the fact that using the oil says that they are physically helping to clean up the oil and that is essentially what the posters are for.

Studio On Fire

This is a print from Studio on Fire, an American letterpress design and printers, it talks of the art of printing in the mechanical age and the downfalls of digital printing. The poster is in the style of the Rifleman's Creed (made famous in Full Metal Jacket) I love this poster, everything from the design, the content and the printing of it is carefully handcrafted to create a great pice of work.

Ian Anderson Workshop

For our latest Ian Anderson workshop we were given the daunting task of re-branding God. I started by thinking of god in a visual sense that people may think of him as and looking back at religious iconography. After spending some time in a church on Oxford road I realised that it was all slightly depressing and morbid. Then I further realised that whatever people want from got it essentially comes down to being happy or wishing happiness upon other people, this led to me using the smile as his new 'brand' image. It is one of the most basic forms of human communication and is instantly recognisable across the world so it would be perfect to reach out to everybody and create the same message.

Founded in 1998, Exergian is a Vienna-based design consultancy specialised in Art Direction, Identity and Design for a multitude of applications, media and environments. They have created these amazing posters for popular TV shows using a simplistic approach. They are instantly recognisable for each show which is such a hard thing to do.

Paul Gorman

Paul Gorman, writer, journalist and visual commentator has dedicated the last 3 years of his life to Barney Bubbles. His latest book, Reasons to be Cheerful, is a tribute to the late and great illustrator and designer Barney Bubbles. Although it has taken Paul 3 years to compile and produce the book he has been a fan of his work since the early 1970's.

Barney Bubbles was an extremely private person and often did not sign his own work which led to him being not very well known although his work was. He onl

y gave one interview in his life in November 1981 to The Face and even for this he gave a collage portrait of himself as to avoid recognition. He produced ground breaking work for artists such as Ian Drury, Elvis Costello and The Damned and his work has inspired the likes of Peter Saville and Malcom Garret. However due to him being so private and un-wanting of public attention he became invisible after his death and his name was forgotten. This private nature was in fact what eventually led to his death, after having rejected by some musicians he began to go around to music agencies with his portfolio however because he never signed any of his work, many people has copied it and tried to pass it off as their own and he began to become depressed and eventually took his own life.

In 2007 Gorman wanted to bring back his work into public at

tention and give Bubbles the credit that he so rightly deserved. The book is a tribute to one of the great, forgotten music cover designers and I feel that it is a fitting publication and for me the lecture emphasised the importance of being proud of your work and making sure that you sign it so that yo

u gain the recognition deserved and that nobody can copy it, especially now that work is so accessible through the use of the internet.

This is my ultimate favorite of Bubbles' work. The cover was designed to look as if the printers has offset it wrongly and shows all of the registration marks used.

Teal Triggs

Teal Triggs, MA, MA, PhD, FiSTD is Professor of Graphic Design and Head of Research, School of Graphic Design, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. As a graphic design historian, critic and educator she has lectured widely and her writings have appeared in numerous edited books and international design publications. She came in to talk to us about the subject of her latest book, Fanzines.

She started by showing us a selection of her favorite work throughout the time that she has been collecting them and then moved on to explaining what a fanzine actually is. A fanzine covers such a broad range of publications but it is essentially a magazine/publication produced by amateurs and in an independent style. The idea of a Fanzine is that it an amateur producing it so there were issues raised about whether designers producing them could ever be truly a Fanzine as the design style that they would put into the publication would take away the essential feel of a Fanzine.

This interested me as at the time of Teal's lecture I was in the middle of producing a publication based on North Korea and felt that this felt into the category of a Zine. I thought that the lecture raised some interesting points and created the sense of anti-design within publications.

Movember

In the spirit of Movember, where men have to grow their mustache throughout November to raise awareness of prostate cancer.

Johnny Selman

Designer Johnny Selman is telling the news in a very different way. He is taking a headline from the BBC news everyday and creating a piece of design based on it.

The purpose of this project is to promote the awareness of global current events with the American public. ”American citizens know little about current events in general and even less about overseas events” according to The Washington Post in 2006. The article further explains that the reasons for the “unwillingness of American citizens to live up to their civic responsibilities” are due to the supply and content of our news. In the article titled “Mind the Gap,” an explanation is given as such: “Driven by market pressures, news organizations across the globe are turning to more entertainment-centered forms of reporting, making it more difficult for lazy citizens to encounter substantive political information as a matter of course. An important consequence of the shift to “soft news” has been the scaling back of international bureaus and staff.”

Heavily “domesticated” news programming creates fewer opportunities for people to learn about overseas events. Even at the height of the Cold War, when international issues were front-page news, the American public displayed only superficial awareness of overseas events and foreign policy. In the post-Cold War era, despite massive increases in education and access to information, Americans continued to lag behind citizens of other industrialized democracies on measures of international affairs information. In 1994, for example, an eight nation survey found that citizens of Mexico, Spain, Italy, Canada, Germany, Britain and France were more able than Americans to provide correct answers to a series of questions tapping foreign affairs. Whereas thirty-seven percent of the American sample was unable to answer a single question, the comparable level of ignorance (averaged) for Italy,France, Britain, Germany and Canada was 19% (Iyengar).

We often see this style of headline news design used in newspapers or weekly magazines but this undertaking of producing a new piece of design everyday for a year is taking it to a new level. I admit that not all of the designs that he has produced are of high standard but the majority are, he conveys headlines in a powerful and sometimes humorous way so that the public can become more engaged and enlightened about the issues in the news that they sometimes may not have been aware of or interested in.

SOMALI PIRATES RECEIVE RECORD RANSOM FOR SHIPS’ RELEASE

BLAST ROCKS SWISS EMBASSY IN GREEK CAPITAL ATHENS

NORTH KOREA’S KIM PAVESWAY FOR FAMILY SUCCESSION

CONCERNS MOUNT OVER DELHI GAMES AS ATHLETES PULL OUT

Static

What is Static? This was essentially our brief for the first studio project of 3rd year. At first I found the project quite daunting as there was no direction or restrictions at all on the project and, as long as we could relate it to static, had complete creative freedom. I started looking at the obvious, static objects, statues, and of course, static caravans. After a discussion with Liz in which I showed her some of my experiments I mentioned that I had been thinking of communism and how it is a static state of leadership for so many years. From this my project was born, I started looking at all of the different leaders of the US and Britain since North Korea became a Communist state, I produced some typographic and image based experiments using overlaying to create some intriguing visuals.

Further looking into the subject I realised that North Korea gave off a certain ‘static’ in the way that they are so isolated from the rest of the world and don’t let anybody know what they are doing. Taking this into visuals I started looking at blocking out information and ways of coding. I created a way of coding that took the ascent line of the typeface Eastern Bloc and extended it up to create a type of barcode, each word had its own different pattern and created strong links with the idea of blocking out information. This code was good for patterned visuals but I wanted to create some propaganda posters using the idea of codes and blocked information, to do this I used a different code that you could decipher with the use of the information. This became the main copy in my propaganda posters, I used existing quotes from Kim Jong-Il and designed a series of posters and banners around them. The central poster was an image of all the US presidents since North Korea became communist overlayed on top of each other, this created a very haunting image, accompanying the image was the quote “lets take revenge a thousand times on the US imperialist wolves’. The quote was in the code as to emphasis the privacy of the state. The central poster was flanked by two red banners, one containing the quote ‘ the US is the axis of all evil’ and the other listing all of the US presidents but so that it made it hard to real and created a falling image.

Looking further into the project I found out that some people were executed for passing out anti government propaganda in North Korea. This was such a strong piece of information that I felt needed to be incorporated in my design. I decided to create a publication containing information from the latest amnesty international report. All of the information inside was in the code however the page was split into two halves and so to get the right information then you had to match up the ascent line code on each of the halves. The whole process of having to figure out the information and work to get it was to reflect the amount of effort that it took for the information to be extracted from North Korea. The cover was an image of a korean man printed black on black, once again to emphasis the point of hidden information. There was also a belly band that went around the mans mouth and was joined into the cover so the only way to open the book was to rip it open. This was to create the idea of taking off his gag and all of the information that he is not allowed to share is there for all to see. The design style of the book is the same of that of the pro government propaganda posters as to try and fit in with it and be camouflaged as pro government propaganda and therefore allow ease of distribution among a culture where it would be prohibited.

I enjoyed working on this project and felt that I really pushed myself in terms of creative thinking. I wanted to steer away from any cliche ideas and create a body of work that looked at the word static in a completely different way. I feel that the subject matter allowed me to do this and I was very pleased with the final outcomes.