Category Archives: Graphic Design

From the Archive; Mysterious Absence at the Cutting Edge

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Screen Shot from Women’s March on Washington webpage of downloadable graphics.

Screen Shot from Women’s March on Washington webpage of downloadable graphics.

Last weekend women the world over took to the streets to protest, making themselves visible and their voices heard, as they waved an array of protest signs. Hand-made, humorous, strident and strong, the signs were seen in Instagram feeds, shared via Twitter, broadcast on television and pictured in newspapers. The importance of graphic design to protest cannot be over stressed; multiples of engaging graphics will communicate and amplify your message. To that end the Women’s March on Washington website contains a page of downloadable graphics offering slogans and images to be used for free as posters, placards, t-shirt graphics, wherever and however.

That vision of graphic protest was anticipated in a recent a seminar text read with Level 4 Graphic Design and Illustration students at University of Brighton. Teal Trigg’s chapter on “Graphic Design” in Feminist Visual Culture (edited by Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska) contained a quote from Eye magazine about the activist group she co-founded: “They [WD+RU] aim to talk to women in all walks of life, but the first step is to initiate a debate that will politicise designers and prompt them to address gender issues through their work’ (p.157).
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Imaging New Tate Modern

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2016-03-23 15.14.01

From digital to analogue, consider this a signpost to a printed, published article in Blueprint, issue 345. After interviewing Peter Saville, reading Tate Modern press releases, navigating official webpages and searching the media coverage, I wrote a review of an image created by Saville and team that was commissioned to accompany communications about the extension and renovation of Tate Modern, aka “New Tate Modern”. Eventually the image will be incorporated into a revamped identity for the entire Tate empire.
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From the Archive (and now); Destroy, punk and DIY

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So an email arrived inviting me to the launch of Punk.London at Oxford Street’s 100 Club, and I have to admit it didn’t totally intrigue me. Instead in gushed cloudy memories of a dark, sweaty cellar and an uncomfortable din, which I must have endured (it feels like) a hundred times over a couple of decades. But a closer look at the invite revealed this to be an occasion for nostalgia, a celebration of a 40-year anniversary marking London’s punk moment and the start of a movement, a subculture in fact, the long-tail of which has affected both attire and attitude.

Screen Shot from Punk.London website, designed by Brody Associates, inviting D-I-Y participation in a city-wide cultural event

Screen Shot from Punk.London website, designed by Brody Associates, inviting D-I-Y participation in a city-wide cultural event

“Subversive Culture” is the strapline (pardon the bondage-tinged pun), which it is claimed has fuelled creativity (now the Creative Industries) ever since. Over the coming year a host of venues will stage events big and small, backed by the Greater London Authority (GLA); shouting about London’s past punk credentials must have tourist-attracting potential. With an identity and online hub branded by Neville Brody (still demonstrating punk attitude by being “notoriously abrasive”, according to Digital Arts), for me the most innovative element is an prompt to organise your own event; tagged “D.I.Y.” the page offers links to branding and fundraising advice, via the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

Regardless of designated anniversaries punk is perennial, and it doesn’t need much of an excuse to hit the headlines. In 1998 I reviewed an exhibition, Destroy: Punk Graphic Design in Britain, and because it isn’t available on the magazine’s website I’m re-posting it, see below. Yes it was cheeky of me to declare punk to be the only “memorable cultural event in the 1970s”, but that’s a clue to my age. I may have been “witness” to the “heyday of punk” but only just; the article is unapologetically London-centric, too, hardly surprising as I was still at school and London was home. What isn’t mentioned is that I was a lender to the show too, having amassed a substantial collection of vinyl due to a fascination with indie record shops. I sold most of the best bits (the vultures were already circling at the Private View) as I became nomadic, leaving London in April 1998, and had neither the means (no turntable) nor inclination (changing musical tastes) to listen again.
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Sound Design UK Music and Graphic Design; reconstructing an exhibition

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Welcome to Sound Design: UK Music and Graphic Design, an exhibition from 2000. Staged on the cusp of the digital communications revolution it has no online presence and is therefore “invisible”. This post is an attempt at digital reparation, an experiment in creating a “trace” for a long-gone temporary exhibition by providing details of the exhibition-making process. The idea for an exhibition on the graphic design of popular music came from David Elliott, then Head of Arts at the British Council in Japan and a keen vinyl collector. I was asked to pitch a concept that would fit the brief and then employed as curator. The exhibition was designed and organised in the UK by the British Council and toured Asia and Australia. Sometimes in a venue for just a few days, it proved extremely popular, surpassed all expectations and toured for nearly three years; before opening in Tokyo it was already booked into venues in Sydney, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. However, there is no British press coverage, probably because the exhibition wasn’t shown in the UK. Masses of media was generated in Asian and a pile of clippings probably resides in the Tokyo office; I saw the fast-growing folder, and recently found a review in The Japan Times (“The cutting edge of sound and vision”, by Jennifer Purvis, 3/12/2000). (Eventually the British Council realised it was missing a trick and started to give touring shows a short run in the UK, with a Press and Private View to provoke media interest).

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This is the poster, in situ, displayed at the entrance to the Tokyo venue, The Ground. Instead of installing the exhibition at the British Council headquarters, it opened in this concrete-lined bunker (not the easiest place to hang a show) close to the epicentre of Japanese trendiness (between Harajuku and Meiji-Dori). However, in some correspondence The Spiral is named as venue, which would have been an even bigger deal! David’s brief called for an exhibition of UK music graphics; from the golden years of vinyl when British designers helped to invent the genre of “album sleeve art”, to recent annexation of the aesthetic high ground by indie labels and various subcultures. The aim was to come right up to date with examples of ingenious CD packaging.
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Manchester, old and new; accessible history in a city of museums

Gallery

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This gallery contains 26 photos.

Manchester is a city well provisioned with museums run by Manchester City Council, University of Manchester, independent charitable trusts, and national museum groups that receive government funding. Courses in Curating and Museum Studies are taught at University of Manchester and … Continue reading →

From the Archive; Paul Davis spreads joy

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On the occasion of Paul Davis’s latest exhibition reviewed on the Eye blog, here’s a reminder of an earlier show that I was privileged enough to stumble across…

…and if you’re in Tokyo, you’ll find Paul drawing a…
Line in the Sand
at
Ginza Graphic Gallery (ggg)
DNP Ginza Building, 7-2, Ginza 7-chome, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061
Until 28 February 2015

Paul Davis on Eye Blog

Monday 12:47pm, 1 June 2009
“Paul Davis wakes up in Brighton”
by Liz Farrelly
Eye Blog

On first viewing, Paul Davis’s exhibition of word drawings felt a tad bleak, on a sunny Friday afternoon wind-up to a Bank Holiday weekend, during the Castor + Pollux Private View right there on Brighton’s holiday-making seafront, with pleasure jostling business for attention. A few days later I revisited the work to discover more light among the shade.
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From the Archive; Pop Panel at Pick Me Up (version three)

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Pick Me Up: Contemporary Graphic Arts Fair
Somerset House, London WC1
24 April to 5 May 2014
Review of Music x The Graphic Arts panel discussion at Pick Me Up 2012
23 March 2012

Over the years at Pick Me Up, the importance of getting visitors involved in workshops and events has become more and more central to the whole project. By Pick Me Up 2010, Somerset House Curator, Sarah Mann, had responsibility for programming the vast and varied offering, from academic conference to kid’s weekend. She invited me to co-organise and chair a panel discussion examining the role of Illustration and Graphic Design in the music industry, tackling such issues as how the packaging and branding of music and bands has changed as digital delivery rocks the edifice of corporate control and a DIY spirit emerges. The speakers brought a range of expertise to the discussion, drawing on their experience working with music, from the late-1970s to now. The review below first appeared on Eye Blog.

Screen shot 2014-05-02 at 08.18.09

Wednesday 7:48am, 28 March 2012
Pop panel
Originally published on Eye Blog

Music design session at Pick Me Up with Malcolm Garrett & Kate Moross

On Friday night, as part of a “packed programme” of events, talks and workshops at Pick Me Up (the graphic arts fair at London’s Somerset House, now in its third year), I chaired a “Music x The Graphic Arts” panel discussion. Since the digital revolution of the 1980s, the music industry has undergone radical changes in formats, distribution, style and substance.

The panel: designer Malcolm Garrett (Buzzcocks, Duran Duran); critic (and Varoom editor) John O’Reilly; the prolific Kate Moross; and Tom Oldham (label boss at No Pain in Pop and Berserker, an online music/comics magazine).

Malcolm kicked off with his schoolboy Hawkwind obsession, which led him to Barney Bubbles. Highlighting the polarised nature of Britain’s tribal counter-cultures in the 1960s and 70s (naming IT and Oz magazines as “the birth of blogging”), he suggested that with Punk, “it all changed”. Later, in the 1980s, the zeitgeist was celebratory; the music industry sold lifestyles, with video and “merch” paramount, and the first sponsored tour was by Duran Duran, brought to you by Coca-Cola.
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Guest blogger; revisiting Pick Me Up (version one)

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Pick Me Up: Contemporary Graphic Arts Fair
Somerset House, London WC1
24 April to 5 May 2014

Five years in and Pick Me Up is now a headline event in London’s creative calendar; undoubtedly it’s evolved and mutated, and much discussion has been generated about how it reflects and influences the graphic arts in London, the UK and beyond. But more of that later, when I visit this year’s PMU. Also, watch this space for an archival re-post of a PMU debate that I chaired in 2012, here.

Meanwhile, here’s guest blogger John O’Reilly, editor of Varoom, the magazine of the Association of Illustrators, with a long-form review of the very first Pick Me Up, back in 2010. I commissioned this for étapes magazine; it was published in “issue zero”, an experimental, white-cover experiment intended to rehearse the redesign/relaunch in the form of a quarterly “bookazine”. John explored the widest implications of PMU, as an expression of zeitgeist and as a reinvention of the exhibition/artfair.

Nobrow’s nook, Pick Me Up, 2010

Nobrow’s nook, Pick Me Up, 2010

Peepshow Collective’s DIY installation, Pick Me Up, 2010

Peepshow Collective’s DIY installation, Pick Me Up, 2010

Photography: © Sylvain Deleu
Courtesy: Somerset House

Review of Pick Me Up 2010 by John O’Reilly
23 April to 3 May 2010

Two exhibitions bookend transition moments in recent British visual culture. Back in the late 1980s a young art student took over an empty building in London’s docklands and put on an exhibition that would shape the Art World over the next two decades. Born in a recession, Damien Hirst’s show, “Freeze”, introduced the general public to a type of brash, spectacular art, and over time these Young British Artists (YBAs) combined the two-fingered, anti-establishment sensibility of their roots with a growing awareness of big-budget, Art World thrills. It evolved into brash, boom-time art, and whereas artist Robert Patterson described the YBA tag as “a kind of licence to show tits and arse more than anything”, with this second exhibition, the invitation implied in the informality of “Pick Me Up”, of a cultural cheap date, is ideologically, temperamentally and aesthetically very different.
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Voting for Design; Designs of the Year

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For its annual Designs of the Year award, London’s Design Museum employs social media, an email campaign and a micro-site to engage with its audience and entice it to judge the exhibits. It also suggests that talent-spotting curation offers a glimpse into the future.

For its annual Designs of the Year award, London’s Design Museum employs social media, an email campaign and a micro-site to engage with its audience and entice it to judge the exhibits. It also suggests that talent-spotting curation offers a glimpse into the future.

Designs of the Year 2014
Design Museum
Shad Thames, London SE1
26 March to 25 August 2014
Nominees’ Party
25 March 2014

An exercise in engagement, a sure-fire media event, and a comprehensive round-up of the best design launched in a year, the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year award and exhibition is now in its seventh year, showcasing design across a range of categories; Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphic, Product and Transport. Designs of the Year was instigated by the current Director, Deyan Sudjic, to replace the “Designer of the Year” award, when a winner was picked from just four nominated individuals whose careers and recent achievements were being judged rather than any particular outcomes. Increasingly, that competition attracted criticism for pitting star-designers against rank outsiders, and for some controversial decisions. Opening up the nomination and judging process to a wider panel, Designs of the Year provides the public with an annual, international round-up of headline-grabbing ideas, solutions and products.

The selection process for this new format has also generated a worldwide network of judges and nominatee from across the design industry — the museum’s extended “family” — who are now known to curators, with both parties mutually benefitting from the association. For the past three years, I’ve been asked to nominate, and each year had a couple of my choices make it through to the “exhibition” round. Proof of how much designers and their clients appreciate this opportunity to exhibit at the Design Museum may be judged by the massive amount of social media and personal thanks generated on the “shortlist” day, when the selection is announced; and by the packed, riotous party on the eve of opening. I’m writing this after attending the nominees party, so excuse the lack of focus on particular exhibits; this show demands repeat viewing as there’s so much to see.
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Conference; Drawing the Future

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4th International Illustration Symposium
Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH)
Parks Road, Oxford
7-8 November 2013

At this symposium, not only did I hear Johnny Hardstaff deliver a keynote address, which prompted me to request an interview (we talked about imagining a graphic language of the future), but I also delivered a paper. Here’s a summary, and some slides.

“Drawing the Future: Exhibiting Illustration”

In the Spring semester I deliver a series of lectures on the “future” to Graphic Design and Illustration students (Level 5/2nd Year) at University of Brighton, and start with a couple of definitions so as to debunk such notions as, the future isn’t really anything to do with us right now, and, it’s all just science-fiction anyway.

“The ‘Future’ is everything that happens from [beat] now (…as they say in the movies…)” …is my playful opener; then I hit them with Tony Fry’s definition (from Design Futuring: sustainability, ethics and new practice, 2009); “The future is not presented here as an objective reality independent of our existence, but rather, and anthropocentrically, as what divides ‘now’ from our finitude. In other words, we exist in the medium of time as finite beings (individually and as a species) in a finite world; how long we now exist — the event of our being — is determined by either an unexpected cataclysmic event (like our plant being hit by a massive meteorite) or by our finding ways to curb our currently auto-destructive, world-destroying nature and conduct.”
…and that’s how I began this talk too.

I set out to show that perhaps by way of a heightened familiarity with drawn and animated futures peopled with cute and cuddly characters, used to entertain and promote (everything from breakfast cereals to banking services), a more positive, friendly, utopian version of the future is being proliferated. In comparison, the “scary”, sci-fi, dystopia future of apocalyptic blockbuster movies seems worn out; not so much because we can “see the wires”, but because we’ve developed “explosion fatigue”; such gargantuan, special-effects-driven destruction just doesn’t “feel real” anymore.
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