I LOVE this A6 brochure for printing company Calverts. It’s a really accomplished and attractive piece of design that successfully marries vintage imagery and typography with a good old British sense of wit and some contemporary (green) printing methods;
For me, it successfully portrays Calverts as a technically skilled, yet creative and approachable company which stands out from the crowd and which is also committed to sustainability...Great work!
I found the Process Workshop really inspiring and useful for generating original, interesting ideas and releasing creative potential. In our Green AM group we were exploring concepts for a TV Advert for a Media company, which communicated the message of ‘Being Greener’ to people who have just moved to the UK. My particular group were considering the platform of the TV advert and how to re-imagine the format to better engage with the audience. Our dominant ideas about TV adverts included:
This got me thinking about bioplastics and biodegradable plastics, and so I did a little research into plastics made from corn and potato starch which usually degrade in water. I discovered that the reason bioplastics and biodegradable plastics are not commonly used at present is because they are more expensive that petroleum based plastics. So perhaps, at present, bioplastics would not be viable…? But then I set about thinking where else you could save costs, and started looking at the paper/card that would make the frames of the glasses…
One of the ways Thomas Matthews keep to their aim of sustainable design is by using waste ‘make-ready sheets’ (Make-ready is the paper that a printer puts through their printing press while they adjust it – i.e. ‘make-it- ready’ for printing a job. They run the same sheets through again and again, then eventually recycle them - TM asked the printer to save a few days’ worth rather than recycle them. Their publication could then be printed on the reverse (plain) side, using vegetable based inks that are kinder to the environment…
Of course it requires further research, but perhaps the costs saved in purchasing paper/card for the glasses/flyers would offset the slightly higher cost of the bioplastics…
Obviously the concept requires further development and research into just how financially viable bioplastics would be, but as an initial concept relatively successful in achieving the aims of communicating the message of ‘being greener’ for a Media Company, and making the viewer an active participant in the TV advert...
When I first moved to London a couple of years ago I took the first temp job I could get working as the admin monkey for ‘expedition’, an engineering firm headed up by Chris Wise (one of the Royal Designers for Industry), Sean Walsh and Ed McCann. Despite what I was expecting (the arts degree in me did not have a natural disposition toward rational, sciencey types), it actually turned out to be a really interesting place to work, and a place that would have a massive influence on me in the months to come… I ended up working as a part-graphic designer, part-art worker (part-admin monkey) and got to work on some pretty exciting projects and pitches (eg, the 2012 Olympic Velodrome, the Angel of the South) with some pretty exciting people, (eg, Chris Wise and sculptor Chris LeBrun). In fact it wasn’t until I left the company (exactly a year ago) that I realised how much I missed being part of a creative environment…to cut a long story short, I decided to abandon a place at dramaschool to pursue a career in design, where I could engage with, talk about and contribute to, the design scene on a daily basis... So yeah, a really important and inspirational place for me.
There were some really intriguing and charming features at the event, including an illuminated prism which invited people to engrave into the wax-coated plywood their own definitions of ‘Useful’, ‘Simple’ and ‘Beautiful’…
A short video explaining the ethos of the Trust was also shown on loop throughout the evening in the ‘Smallest Cinema in the World’ aka, a garden shed containing two deckchairs.
True to their mission, a delightfully useful, simple and beautiful evening which definitely lived up to the hype of the ‘Tremendous Beginning’…(although free champagne all night did not help in workshops the next day….)
(+) A pretty strong crop - captures the overall feel of the picture in that the angle of the wrist suggests the nonchalance of the subject, while the gun obviously carries the gang-culture connotations.
(+) Cropping to only a few of the riders makes the shot more personal and accessible.
(+) The relatively narrow crop manages to include both the artist and the sculpture.
(+) Pretty successful and simple depersonalisation, achieved by editing out the face of the model.
(+) Retains enough information from the source photo to capture the feel and mood of the original, but omits enough to abstract the image.
(+) Small square crop does away with unneccesary info - focusses the image as being political.
(+) A pretty intriguing/haunting crop.
(+) Effective use of circular crop to focus the viewer's attention intently on the laughing subject; scrapping all the unnecessary information has clarified the meaning/emotion behind the image.
(+) A really striking image that captures the viewer's attention immediately.
(+) Achieves its aim in that the partially included figure in the foreground looks like he's trying to avoid being in the shot and thus make himself discreet.
(+) Shape of the crop creates visual interest and excitement and also focuses attention on the most expressive of the faces in the shot.
OK, so I’ve been thinking about the ubiquitous ‘IHeartNY’ logo and why it has become such an iconic design and an enduring symbol of popular culture. This post might be a little long-winded, so apologies...And some of the ideas aren't referenced, or fully developed, but should be relatively interesting nonetheless!It was the mid-seventies, a terrible moment in the city. Morale was at the bottom of the pit…There was so much dog shit because people didn’t feel that they deserved anything else, right?...then suddenly the city simultaneously got fed up and said, “It’s our city, we’re going to take it back, we’re not going to allow this stuff to happen.” And part of that moment was this campaign.The typeface used is American Typewriter and it’s possible Glaser’s use of the now iconic ‘Heart’ was inspired by an earlier 1969 tourist campaign ‘Virginia is for Lovers', which featured a similar red heart, although not integrated into the text.
IHeartNY has become such an enduring icon of popular culture arguably because Glaser unwittingly anticipated in his design so many things that would come to define contemporary postmodern/postdigital culture, including sites like Facebook and Twitter and ‘netspeak’ and the use of icons and abbreviations in communication.
However, while pop-artist like Warhol were highly distinctive in style, Glaser’s IHeartNY seems to resist any sense of ‘authorship’, as Glaser himself admits;[IHeartNY] has an odd characteristic by now, that it doesn’t look like anybody designed it….It looks like a weird historical thing…Basically, you don’t have a concept, “Oh, this is something that was designed.” It just seems so…I guess, inevitable.By avoiding a strong and distinctive personal style, the IHeartNY logo is also arguably postmodern. I recently stumbled across an essay I wrote in a previous life as an English Lit student on postmodernism and Shakespeare, and while the subject matter is obviously not wildly relevant here, there were a few quotations which might be useful, for example:
What replaces [the notion of ‘author’] in postmodernist culture and theory is not the absolute absence of style, but its detachment from the concept of the powerful originating author’ (Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture, 198).So, in a sense the IHeartNY logo actually embodies the postmodern qualities of ‘transience and anonymity’ ... as a result it's unsurprising that it has been adopted by contemporary postmodern culture, a culture defined to a degree by a loss of personal style - a generation modelled on pop-icons:
Another aspect of IHeartNY's appeal is down to the ultra-subjective outlook of the postdigital age. Since the onset of modernism in the late 1800s, society has become increasingly ego-centric; Pre-modernism, we generally believed what the church told us to believe and were therefore governed by a ‘God thinks…’ sensibility. Once modernism had set in and iconoclasts such as Darwin and Einstein became more prominent and credible, we began to question our own beliefs and became more subjective, grouping ourselves accordingly, eg, the art world exploded into what would become the Naturalists, Impressionists, Surrealists, etc. And so, culture became governed by a ‘We think…’ outlook. Finally we have the postmodern, postdigital age, where the Myspace-Facebook-Twitter generation can communicate to the world instantly and easily their opinions, beliefs, likes, dislikes. It is finally the generation of ‘I think…’, or perhaps, ‘I Heart…’
Linked to this subjectivity in contemporary culture is the effect the postdigital age has had on communication, ie, ‘netspeak’. The last 10 years or so has seen distillation of language into icons (eg, emoticons) and abbreviations, (think omg, wtf, lol, etc) and conflations (think SuBo, RPatz, Jedward, etc). As such, perhaps IHeartNY has endured as an icon because it because the Myspace-Facebook-Twitter generation have adopted it as their own - it addresses them on their own terms, employing their familiar tools of communication, ie, a subjective viewpoint, and the use of the icon and the acronym/abbreviation.
Finally, I believe that IHeartNY has endured because it was never meant to. As Glaser himself admits, it was only ever meant to be part of a 3 month campaign. Transience and obsolescence seem to lie at the heart of the logo; typewritten copy was everywhere when Glaser designed the logo - a time before wordprocessors has become commonplace and widespread. So, the use of American Typewriter created a sense that the logo was something that was just thrown out there, typed out and chucked together as quickly as possible as a disposable and transient expression. Again, it is relatively easy to draw comparisons between this sense of disposability in IHeartNY and the throwaway essence of posts on sites like Facebook or Twitter.
Perhaps it is these tensions which have allowed IHeartNY to endure as a pop-icon – In his text 'Of Other Spaces' Michel Foucault explored the concept of the heterotopia, an idea of postmodern space which he described asThe will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages…While IHeartNY perhaps does not enclose 'all times, all epochs, all forms', etc, it is a site of various conradictions, which has, for one reason or another become a kind of place 'that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages...'
Of Other Spaces, 26
There are obviously a number other issues that could be explored in relation to IHeartNY, including the ironic reappropriations of the design, the development of the verb 'I Heart...' as a result of the logo or the idea of NYC as a luxury brand which people wish to buy into. However, one random fact I came across which struck me was the fact that in 2008 New York City spent nearly $1m on typewriters, mostly for use by New York Police Department...I thought it was an interesting fact to throw into the mix...
The poster for exhibition The Identity Project caught my eye on the tube today, and intrigued me enough to check the website out. The exhibition will explore what makes us unique and what shapes our personalities and beliefs; It has a really striking, bold, simple visual identity composed of a brown paper background, brown labels & string, and a bold black stencil typeface and silhouettes. Such a pared-down look is clearly a nod towards wartime evacuation labels, thereby immediately raising the question of who we are and what makes us 'us'. A really successful and striking campaign...might even check out the exhibition!
Really useful InDesign session with Jo yesterday. I’ve been using InDesign for a couple of years now, so am fairly comfortable using it, but nonetheless picked up some really useful tools and shortcuts which I think will really improve the way I use the software, including:
I saw this sign for restaurant/bar/exhibition space Favela Chic in Shoreditch the other day and completely fell in love with it! If my GCSE Geography serves me correctly, the favelas are Brazilian shanty towns that exist on the periphery, growing randomly, almost organically from found elements. As such, I guess the design concept for this bar is about bringing together a sense of Brazilian/Latin flair and a kind of retro patchwork aesthetic. I love how the sign itself looks like it was constructed from ‘found’ elements; letters reappropriated from other signs, and urban debris. It looks like a pretty intriguing place...according to their Design Manifesto (only visible on their French sister site - translated here if you don't speak French...!), 'the world of Favela presents itself as a joyous bric-a-brac where each object becomes a symbol reused. The assembly of various materials, juxtaposed and pasted is the geometry of urban chaos.' Such a poetic impetus behind design - awesome! (I might steal it to describe my collages...!). I Heart Favela Chic!
I'm loving the collage task - my plan so far has been to collect any images which jump out at me and then have a mammoth arranging/sticking session at some point in the near future. I'm thinking the collages will be most interesting if the images come from a range of sources, so I've been procuring images from; the free papers and magazines on the tube; some second-hand books, which cost me the princely sum of £2.30, including Diana for Girls - 1965 and Understanding Antiques; and some questionable magazines/flyers from bars in and around Soho... Unfortunately I now can't look through any printed material without first scanning the page for interesting images or text...
Here's my kitchen table is it stands at the moment......now I just need to source some A6 cards...
