Judging a book by its covers
I’ve always admired the work of James Marsh, another artist/designer whose work came to prominence through its use in music related ephemera, most notably for material commissioned by the band Talk Talk. The incredible detail in his work was sadly diminished by the reduction from the 12″ square record format to CD and is now all but gone in the digital era. I’ve whined on about this in a previous blog post, so won’t repeat myself.
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Blood & Glitter
Most of the work I design is for public sector or health related causes so it’s nice to do something a bit different. Above is a poster/flyer for a film night at a gallery in London celebrating the work of Philip Ridley. I like the surreal image I was asked to use and the paucity of words. The ‘less is more’ dictum is almost always applicable to graphic design and as a principle is employed by the most celebrated of designers. Often, I feel my design work risks being seen as cluttered with written content because space is erroneously considered something that must be filled.
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100 in Liverpool
NOTICE (from the official promotional material)
100 is a new book by Bill Drummond
It has a sole print run of 1,000 copies
Once they have been sold, there will be no other physical edition of the book
These 1,000 books also form a sculpture
The sculpture is entitled ONE THOUSAND BOOKS #1
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It’s nice to be nice
There’s a lot of horrible design out there. Walk down any high street, look in any magazine or visit your doctor and look on the wall in the waiting room. There are a lot of things that have made it to print that are a crime to aesthetics and good taste. Sometimes this is down to people not caring. Sometimes it’s down to people thinking they can just ‘cobble it together’ themselves. And sometimes because, whilst people know it needs to look good, they can’t afford to have it designed professionally. There are times when I get requests from people in this situation.
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Life’s a pitch
For those that don’t know, a ‘pitch’ in the design world is a submission of an idea or concept to a client in order to gain work. It works like this; the client approaches you and says something like “we need to get ideas from x amount of companies to see which we like best”. There’s always a lot of discussion about this in the design press as it’s something you don’t generally receive any payment for and doesn’t happen in other industries. Try going to multiple restaurants and asking them to cook you a meal to see if you like it and will come back in the future to buy a meal if you do!
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I could be happy
I curate a website about a short lived art collective called The Cloth. They consisted of four people and only lasted for about three years but were incredibly prolific in the mid-1980s. Do check out the website for examples of their creativity. Sadly one of the members, David Band died last year – aged 51, and last weekend I was invited to an event at Glasgow School of Art to celebrate his life and work. His family, friends and many artists from all sorts of fields of creativity were in attendance and it was lovely to get to speak to people whose work I have admired since my days of being an art student.
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Back to the future
I’m a geek, it goes with the territory really. One can’t be a designer with an interest in photography, music composition and sci-fi without getting excited when Apple comes along with the latest and greatest new iThing. This company brings us the future today, sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, or even make much sense at the time, but resistance is futile (I did say I was interested in sci-fi).
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Right Royal Rubbish
It’s been a while since the last blog entry. This is due to all sorts of things: work got in the way with a couple of new clients, I updated my website, was really poorly with a virus that knocked me out for nearly two weeks, a visitor from a distant shore arrived and Eurovision of course happened. All these things have now passed and the country is now firmly in the grip of Jubilee and Olympic frenzy – christened the ‘Jubilympics’ by some heretics.
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The vinyl countdown
Record Store Day 2012 is almost upon us. Just like last year, there’s a lot of publicity about how people love vinyl more than ever – the smell of it, our visceral connection with the object’s shape, packaging, design and even warmth of sound. This can only come from listening to music in its full audiophile format, apparently. To a certain degree I concur, a digital download really can’t offer the same satisfaction of owning a real object that has been manufactured and distributed in its own lovingly crafted sleeve that can be pored over and analysed while your music of choice fills the room.
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It’s a dog’s life
Myself and Ruby the beagle were intrigued to learn that a recent study has shown that bringing pet dogs to work can reduce stress and make the job more satisfying for other employees.
US researchers found that those with access to dogs were less stressed as the day went on than those who had none.
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