Vernacular Typography

Paul set us the task a little while back to take some snaps of interesting type you see when wondering around London. After seeing quite a variety of printed, handwritten type and signage, I finally remembered to take my camera out with me and so I shall upload some of my findings. I'm going to carry on looking though, so it's a post in progress...

InDesign

Since working in InDesign isn't yet totally familiar, I thought I would have another go at it.
Yes, I'm procrastinating.

 

Good Design

Studio On Fire

One of the first companies I came across whilst looking for examples of design I really liked was Studio On Fire. As a company who dabble in both design services and letterpress printing, they compare themselves to 'having cream and sugar in your coffee. We bring a keen synergy of design sensitivity and production knowledge to our projects. We are backed by full, in-house modern letterpress printing capabilities.' Once I actually looked at their portfolio, I was spoiled for choice as to what example I should choose to put on here, they pretty much all inspired me. In the end I chose this simple CD cover design for Eric Brandt.

Erik Brandt "Sometimes" CD- Studio On Fire

The design uses illustration, watercolour and letterpress to create a simple yet for me, timeless piece of packaging. The title of the album 'Sometimes' blows in the wind around a tree that is a suitable choice of illustration, that makes you think and daydream a little. I also really like the use of colour of the splash of blue against the otherwise monochrome image, as everything works with each other and so the piece feels well balanced. Another thing I enjoy about this design is the texture, you can see it even on a computer screen, and it really makes you want to reach out and feel the product.

MyORB

MyORB or MyORangeBox are an art and design based company, located in New York City who have the aim of being curious, intriguing and playful in their work. I stumbled across their page by accident really, just by clicking away at random links on a design website, however I'm glad I did. The design I chose to share on here is a page taken from a beautiful book 'Tramnesia - Hotels', which is a collection of photographs showcasing the similarities and differences of a home away from home.

'Tramnesia-Hotels - MyORB'

 What I find so striking about this image is the simplicity of the content and the layout. I really liked the mirrored spherical photographic images, as this makes the pair work together, as a set. The white space around the centrally placed images makes the photographs stand out well, and gives it a good quality feel to the design. The colours used are quite subdued and don't jump out too much and I think this also adds to the quality of the image, and is used quite appropriately with the sleepy feel to the page.

 Sawdust

Sawdust is a London based company run by award-winning Rob Gonzalez and Jonathan Quainton who love to work 'with type and image across all platforms, and enjoy collaborating with other image-makers and people working in specialist areas.' One of the pieces of work I really enjoyed off their portfolio was their collaboration with Sam Green, promoting his illustration studio.

Sam Green- Limited edition A3 mail out- Sawdust

One of the main reasons I particularly admired this piece of work for was the layout of the image and the relationship between the image and the text. The basic colour scheme is matched well by the minimal text on the front cover, and I like that Sam Green's name hasn't been over-complicated to more than his initials. Even though this work would be folded in to a booklet, I think it works perfectly as a spread, like is shown above.

Inka Järvinen

I have chosen to share a piece of design by Inka Järvinen, who is actually part of the Finnish Graphic Design company 'Weklig.' However, this piece was designed solely by Inka, it is an EP cover for the artist Viisi.

Vieraalla Maalla-Viisi EP-Inka Järvinen

 The style of the CD cover is what drew my attention to this particular design. I think the earthy colours create an organic feel. I feel like the method Inka Järvinen has used also adds to this organic feel, by incorporating an antique look in to often modern collage work. The text is well-styled and just big enough for the information to be read easily, but does not detract from the artwork, which is of key importance in the promotion of a CD.

Hort

Hort is a creative design company from Berlin, in Germany. From looking at their website, you can sense their own fun, personal style, which seems very 'trendy', although navigating round their site was trickier than most. Hort often design more than one project for each client, as they come back to the design team for more merchandising. One of Hort's clients that I liked the design work for is 'Booka Shade', international stars of house and techno. Below is their record sleeve to their LP 'Movements.'

Movements-Booka Shade-Hort

The simplicity of this LP cover really works well as a design, as again, often music sleeves shouldn't distract from the information or the style of the music. The image really reflects the title of the LP too, 'Movement', as the tangled wires and the moving legs look like they are in a running action. I like the collage and cut-and-paste effect that the design uses too, it reminds me of the workshop we had with Darren (and the 100 postcards we had to complete.) Finally, I think the layout is very well thought out, and the text balances out the image perfectly.

Ideas & Industry

Tuesday was split in to two parts, where we took part in two entirely different activities. The morning session was our first group tutorial with Darren. To be honest, it was not at all what I expected, and speaking to other students, I realise a lot of people feel the same. The main point in the session was idea generation, using the technique we learnt in the idea workshop. This was helpful, especially talking to the other students in my group and gaining feedback from our ideas, however I had already put a lot of work in to my research and I though it would be more focused on showing what we had actually come up with.

In the afternoon, we had PPD with Catherine, where we learnt a bit about the industry and how to go about applying for internships and work placements. Our first task was to name as many design agencies as we could, and it was astonishing how few the whole class as a collective came up with. Obviously every group wrote down Pentagram. So, to widen our knowledge of perhaps less well know agencies, we were given the website www.designweek.co.uk , and the task to find three pieces of design we liked from three design agencies we had not heard of before.

Our group found these three images from 'Pearlfisher Designs', 'The Partners' and 'Purpose.'

Pearlfisher designed this for Jamie Olivers range of products. The unusual contrast of colours stood out to me, as well as the simplicity of the design and the simple but effective layout of the 'Jme' logo in the middle. Also, the layout of the three deisgns is clever, as it is how you would see cutlery set out on a table.

 

The Partners designed this piece for a hotel, and what is really effective is the image and colour use, as white gloves symbolise cleanliness, which is what you look for in a hotel. The simplicity and white-on-white use is also very eye-catching.

This magazine layout by 'Purpose' design caught my eye, because of the flowing layout, spreading the image over a number of pages. The quality and colour of the image next to the small block of text also made the magazine layout successful in my eyes.

After evaluating and talking about everyone else's work we managed to build up quite a collection of new design agencies including; Hulger, ImageNow, Font Fabric, N1, Lava, Paradise, Poke, OnedotZero, Nexush, Paula Troxler, G2Works, Rudd Studios, Proud Creative and 999. This will be helpful for our new task, as Catherine gave us the task to find 5 more images from design agencies we hadn't heard of to look at in our spare time. I shall blog my findings soon!

F U T U R E S H O R T S

Last night, we went to the screening of Future Shorts One, which is the next generation film festival, at Village Underground in Shoreditch. One of the interesting things about it was that it connected 12 countries and 50 cities in one night, and this also meant the variety of short films shown was excellent. The theme of the night was made to feel like we were on an aeroplane, and the attention to detail was fantastic. The staff team were all dressed up as air stewards (with a bit of a dodgy American accent) and pilots, paper planes were also flying everywhere.

 The films shown actually really inspired me, I thought they were well thought out and really captured the viewers interest, often resulting in a large amount of clapping and whooping at the end of the clips. The line up from the night can be seen on the website, but there were three videos that I really liked and wanted to share on here. The first was Temper Trap's new music video for their single 'Love Lost', directed by Dougal Wilson/2010/UK. The video features some boys cross-country running, and for such a simple idea, it's very effective. Here's the video..

The next video I also found very captivating, also it being hugely different to the 'Love Lost' Video made it stand out even more. It is an animated film using design and logos, typography and minimalism. What seems like quite a simple video is actually incredibly complicated, and I can only begin to imagine how long it took to animate the whole video. I really liked the music chosen to link the animation together also.

Although I really liked all the videos shown on the night, the final video I shall share is one called 'Words'  directed  by Everynone/2010/USA. This video really reminded me of the Narrative workshop we did with David, as the video links from frame to frame by the choice of sequences that we had when making our narrative image sequences. Enjoyyyy.