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Okay so I don’t have a website yet, but my Projects page is now up and running!

Having just about come to the end of my first academic year in graphic design, this would be a good point to take stock, sum-up what I’ve learnt and not learnt, consider the successes and otherwise. Perhaps a good way to start would be to look at the advice given by 5 professionals in a talk earlier this week. Matthew Wilson of web-solutions experts and designers’ best friends With Associates championed the benefits of collaborative ventures, while Sion Whellan of design and print cooperative Calverts took things a step further with a surely-its-too-good-to-be-true-? vision of harmony in the cooperative workplace. Sam Arthur of independent arts publisher Nobrow, and Kate Higginsonn of Dalston’s best screenprinting studio The Print Club and illustration agents Higginsonhurst, both agreed that its better to take a risk on setting up your own business instead of working or Coca-Cola, while Rob Perkins of global advertising heavyweights Weiden & Kennedy managed to make working for a advertising agency sound like a lot of fun, though a little bit sleazy (perhaps that’s just my preconceptions talking). What’s the conclusion? That graphic design is a broad profession, and the type of career designer has depends upon where they work and the choices they make about the kind of work they pursue.

Throughout the year I’ve done my best to keep up with various design commentators, leeching insights from Ben Terrett and Michael Johnson, enjoying amusing rants from Erik Spiekermann, and marvelling at the steady stream of excellent contemporary design selected by Alex and Will of It’s Nice That. My own blog has been invaluable as a way of prompting myself to keep looking for new stuff, and to have a proper think about that new stuff once I’ve found it.

Still, I’ve spent the last 8 months working non-stop, and have been surprised by how much I’ve managed to not learn yet. Web design seems just to be a case of applying familiar layout techniques to a different format, but until I’ve got beyond page 1 of the Dreamweaver manual I’ll remain blissfully ignorant of how much more I’m sure there is to it. Processing presents some exciting possibilities, but seems like a mountain worth climbing only once I’ve become comfortable with more fundamental aspects of the profession. While I feel confident with blogging now, there are many other online resources I’ve barely had a chance to glance at. Issuu, Blurb, and Fontifier remain in my to do file, while my Twitter account has been sadly neglected from day one.

Where I’ve perhaps not yet got to grips with the available online tools, I. Making type from polystyrene, ketchup, paint, glue has been a lot of fun, and has generally worked out pretty well (though I still need to get a real camera and learn to photograph work properly). I’ve learnt the importance of getting out from behind the laptop – to make stuff for real, see how things look printed-out, take a camera and go for a walk… I’ve been really surprised and a little intimidated at times by the high standard of work by other students on the course and elsewhere. I’ll make an effort to see all the degree shows this year, no excuses. I’ve learnt that working in a group can be difficult (you really have to trust your colleagues), but rewarding, and ultimately the only way to be successful.

I’m aware that the VCT content of the course hasn’t been everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve found that researching into the history and contextual writing about graphic design, particularly critical debate since the late 80s, has opened my eyes to many issues I was simply unaware of before. Last term’s timeline on Deconstructivist typography and the surrounding debate about the debasement of Modernist design values gave me a new appreciation of the work and designers from an era that I had previously dismissed for its nowadays unfashionable and dated aesthetic.

The picture above, by the way, is the first thing I ever posted on my old Blogger account, at the start of this wild adventure…

So, more yet to do. Here are some lists:

Projects in my to do list:
++ Design a proper font
++ Make a newspaper
++ Design some exhibition signage
++ Make more books

And things to investigate next year:
++ Creative processes and idea generation techniques
++ Processing, web design (all that stuff…)
++ Machine printing techniques and paper stock
++ Handprinting techniques – letterpress, screenprinting, lino, solar plate etc.

Personal goals:
++ cycle to Paris (or get further than I did last time – Brighton)
++ Learn to drive
++ Bake more

Neuland is a review of emerging German designers edited and designed by Barcelona-based German ex-pats Lupi Asensio and Martin Lorenz of Two Points.Net. The book features an interesting layout that involves overlapping images, and colour-coded post-its containing information about each designer. Text is set in TP Kurier, a quirky font with a 2-tiered upper case S, created especially for the book, though based upon a font designed in the 70s by Małgorzata Budyta. Overall a very tidy package indeed (and a similar size to our FMP books – ideas, ideas…), and that’s to say nothing of the work itself, which includes Bank Associates‘ versatile 3-dimensional letterform The Patent, some exquisite typography by Kerstin Finger, and Katrin Schacke’s excellent DIY science experiments for her thesis project Stanley Magazine.

Paul and Victoria of Blast were kind enough to welcome a group of us on a visit to their Islington studio yesterday. Operating mainly in the areas of Brand Identity and Strategy, Blast have produced innovative work for educational and cultural institutions such as the University of Sussex, the Arts Council, and the BBC, as well as many more commercial clients. Projects have included the substitution of conventional brand elements for a dog (an actual dog, complete with promotional frisbee accessories) for recruitment consultants Harrison Pursey, and an online fridge magnet game for French paper manufacturer Arjowiggins. Working with illustrator Damien Weighill on a recent campaign for Conqueror paper, Blast created Conqueror Possibilities, a book and website that function both as a promotional tool, and as a resource of free download illustrations for clients of the company to use to spice up their powerpoint presentations. Paul described the studio’s output as a well-balanced combination of ideas and aesthetics, with an emphasis on providing an alternative to the usual logo & website requested by many clients at the outset. With 14 years experience, and a successful mid-sized business that employs 5 designers, it’s a strategy that appears to be paying off.

One of my favourite headlines, this. Oh boy, what were they thinking? In the happy-go-lucky spirit of the haphazard shop signage that dominates most Hackney high streets, I decided to present this particular headline in a well and truly mashed-up hybrid font. Taking a fairly extreme approach more akin to P Scott Makela’s Dead History, than Otl Aicher’s Rotis, I used over 40 individual fonts and 20 different colours to create an appropriately Frankensteinish feel. Mmm. Below are some experiments with Illustrator’s Blend tool. So if Clarendon and Cooper Black ever have babies, we now have forewarning of how hideous they would be…

Combining the chicken shop aesthetic so thoroughly documented by Siaron Hughes in her excellent book Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie, with the back-of-the-Sunday-Times-Weekend-Magazine-hand-painted-souvenir-crockery aesthetic, here we have a genuine one of a kind Hackney Gazette souvenir plate, bearing the local culinary motto: Eat Out Hygiene Horror.

Talk about haphazard use of colour. My eyes hurt.

Jim’s Cafe, Chatsworth Road E5, uprooted and relocated to Spitalfields, next door to globe-straddling competitors Starbucks, who also appear to be opening a shop on Chatsworth road. Still a bit of a refurb to do there…
For Darren’s High Street Mash Up workshop last week we each brought in photos of London high streets divided into two broad areas – the more affluent areas frequented by tourists and lunching office workers, and the common local high street, home to Turkish and Bangladeshi mini supermarkets and wholesale handbag suppliers. The shops fronts, signage, and advertising in the more affluent areas is more considered – brand managed – with a restrained use of colour and discreet typography. The local high street on the other hand appears to have developed organically, without the benefit of an aesthetic strategy or the input of professional designers – visual clutter, haphazard use of type and colour, plastic signs and grubby shutters. We reached the consensus that from a designer’s point of view the local high streets are no only more visually interesting, but also more effectively convey the character of the area and its population. It’s an obvious point, but not untrue – the more affluent high streets have had much of their individuality stripped away by brand managers employed by anxious investors afraid to deviate from their timid market research findings.

Interestingly, Chatsworth Road falls into a third category of high street: the road has experienced so little consumer traffic over the last couple of decades that many of the shops (even some of those still trading) have retained the signs and frontages from the 60s and 70s*. Composed of real materials – wood and tile (none of the plastic laminate signage that prevails through the borough) - and in muted colours, these signs possess a quality that many shops in more upmarket areas aspire to – bespoke, vintage, unique.
*Note this surviving display of giant Wrigleys chewing gum packets in the window of A. E. Barrow, a long-since closed tobacconists on Chatsworth Road.

Katharine Harmon’s excellent book You Are Here features many different kinds of map, some very old, others brand new. The thing they all have in common is the subjectivity and unconventional approach of the designers. Some function as political or religious propaganda, others as explorations of social or scientific theories. One that caught my eye was this cover of the American Phrenological Journal. Phrenology is a pseudoscience developed in Europe in 18th century Germany that became very fashionable in Europe and America in the 19th Century. Believed at the time to hold the key to understanding the human brain, the technique involved mapping the areas of the brain responsible for different character traits. It was, of course, all bullshit. But hypothetically speaking, if Hackney was person, what would its mind look like? A borough of great contradiction, where crime, poverty, unemployment, and health issues are a problem for many, the influx of money and gentrification from projects such as the East London line and Olympic developments look set to improve the standard of living, yet also threaten to out-price many residents and jeopardise the ethnic and cultural diversity that defines the borough. Here is my brief and highly subjective representation of the Mind Of Hackney, presented in an appropriately childish style, somewhere along the lines of Chris Ware meets People Are Germs.

In hazard warning yellow and black, here’s is my stab at recreating a Hackney Gazette headline without the original words. I haven’t shown it to many people yet, so the jury is still out on the effectiveness of the symbols. In addition to the Isotype system, I’ve been looking at pictograms from Michael Evamy’s World Without Words, and Otl Aicher’s classic series for the 72 Olympic games. This is the first time I’ve tried making pictograms or info-symbols. It’s not easy! As a designer, you have to rely upon convention and the prior knowledge of the reader. Many of the symbols below don’t inherently resemble human forms (for example, the figure skater, centre) but given the appropriate context, and thanks to a common recognition of the basic stick figure, we can understand the symbols and interpret the actions represented by them. So there’s another thing I’ve learnt – pictograms are easier to design when you can use stick figures.

Friends Of Type is a Brooklyn-based blog dedicated to playful and illustrative type. Run by Aaron Carambula, Erik Marinovich, Dennis Payongayong, and Jason Wong, with contributions also coming from many other designers, there’s a post every day or so, and while the quality varies a bit, there’s real imagination and some interesting techniques at work here.

My first crack at linocutting: the Hackney Gazette coat of arms features elements from several headlines - native wildlife (snake and rat), traditional local weaponry, razor wire, and a toxic gas cloud. I haven’t used it to print yet, so fingers crossed…

Cardboard type takes a very long time to cut out. Polystyrene type, on the other hand, is pretty easy to make. So, retaining the spirit of 3D experimentation from the cardboard workshop, I went out to the park today with a camera and a bag full of Hackney Gazette headline type.

Okay, I’m new to processing, and this isn’t something I’m going to pick up within a couple of weeks, but here’s my first effort: Using a code that leaves a trail of ellipses behind the cursor, I created this vaguely mince-like type. I also experimented with codes that produce swarming ellipses, a bouncing ellipse that creates a kind of plaid pattern trail, and a random pattern of self-generating ellipses – very Brian Eno.

This thing took almost a whole day to make. My mouse fingers are raw. The type is based upon Zuzana Licko’s Oakland 6, of the Lo-Res family of fonts. I created a grid (see below), coloured the tiles, and applied an extrude and bevel effect to each colour group. That was the easy part. There are are over 2000 blocks, and I had to adjust the position of each of one to provide the correct spatial relationship to those around it. I’m not sure exactly what a “Vice Purge” involves, but it sounds pretty good. Don Johnson hits Dalston Lane!

I’ve been looking into the different options for folding the poster into a dust jacket, and have drawn diagrams to illustrate the construction process for three possible choices. The most straight forward would be a straight 3-fold wrap around (top), but I’d like to go with something more unusual if I can get it to work (no point making a jacket that gets torn when unfolded), such as the top and side-entry slipcases illustrated here. More experiments to come…

Hot off the chicken shop counter, another headline. This one is actually made from poster paint, not ketchup. I made the current blog banner from real ketchup, but discovered in the process that ketchup bottles have rather explosive nozzles: not conducive to neat handwriting.

Another hackney Gazette headline, this one created using a hot glue gun to give that “hospital-handwash” effect. I photographed the glue, then cut out the and applied a tint in Photoshop. I’m not sure yet how successful this is – the type looks weirdly synthetic, as though the whole thing had been made in photoshop. Hmm.

Here’s the type I produced in response to Katy’s Symbols and Icons workshop. Based upon an existing font, Edwardian Script, I hand drew the swashes, and refined the image in Illustrator, before tracing it again and adding shading. What does this have to do with Symbols and Icons? Well, we looked at heraldic imagery in the class, and I’ve produced a Hackney Gazette heraldic symbol, which I’m carving into a block of lino for printing later this week. The coat of arms will sit above the ribbon type on the poster. Previously I’ve looked into type of this kind by Craig Ward, Sean Freeman, and Alison Carmichael.

I’ve been photographing the headline boards of my local newspaper, the Hackney Gazette, for the past 3 years or so, compiling the images in a blog Grandma Jailed For Xmas, previously featured here. The brief for our final project this year – “explore London through the eyes of a designer” – presents the perfect opportunity to turn this mild preoccupation into an unhealthy obsession. Over the next 4 weeks I’ll produce 13 posters (one for each workshop this term), each with a different typographic interpretation of a headline from the collection. Look out for ripe gems such as Giant Hole Swallows Soccer Player, Voodoo Curse Mum In Fingers Horror, and Sex Beast Tears Off Victims False Arm.

Taking inspiration from NB: Studio’s London’s Kerning project we created our own London streetmap-without-the-streets in Jo’s workshop last week. I’ve taken the opposite approach for my poster for this chapter of the book – removing the street names, instead picking-out the Hackney Gazette headline “Judge Sticks Knife In Hackney” from the haphazard grid of the borough’s streets. Tracing the streets like this is an interesting way to get to know your neighbourhood… the lighbox hunch, the pen-grip claw…

Stefan Sagmeister is a sly one. Following an MA thesis project which featured a series of postcards that each performed a different trick – one folded-out into a sundial, while another made a hand-powered record player – Sagmeister has built a reputation as a master of gimmickery and one-liners, but also for innovation with materials and printing processes. He has often used self-promotional items to experiment – whoopee cushion fliers bearing his mantra Style = Fart, birthday party invitations with moveable stick figure penises, and of course THAT poster. A technique used for the front cover of his 2001 career retrospective book Made You Look presents contrasting images overprinted in two colours, so that when removed from its red plastic case, the cover image of a friendly looking German shepherd bears its teeth in a rabid bark: a neat summation of Sagmeister’s technique.

Ed Fella is widely acknowledged as the Godfather of vernacular type. Following a successful career as a commercial graphic artist in Detroit (at one point working with a young April Greiman), Fella enrolled on the MFA at Cranbrook in 1985. In his capacity as a student, and later a lecturer at Cranbrook and CalArts, Fella’s reputation for typographic innovation grew, and his work became a touchstone for a whole generation of designers hungry for an alternative to the Swiss Modernism that dominated the 70s. Exploring the vernacular type of commercial and amateur signage with the obsessive enthusiasm of a born again, and the knowledge of a seasoned insider (his is often quoted as saying of his own former career “I was the vernacular”) Fella united the “high” world of contemporary design criticism with “low” artefacts of middle America – restaurant and gas station signs, shop window displays, barber shop tariffs – a sample of which are featured in his book Letters On America.

The workshops have been coming thick and fast. After some rummaging in a skip for materials (where do those fees go, eh?) Dan and I made a cardboard ampersand – okay, so far so typographic and good. But then someone else decided to make a LIFE SIZE GRIZZLY BEAR WEARING A TIE. How do you compete with that?!