Hasta La Ideas

The Central Saint Martins BA graphic design degree show displayed an impressive range of ideas and approaches, and more than a few references to its relatively new home in King’s Cross…

The new CSM site is still proving new enough to provide inspiration for several students’ projects. The BA Fine Art catalogue, designed by graphic design students Masaki Miwa and Adam Hutchinson, for example, references the space the department occupies – the only course to have a presence on all four floors of the building.

The typeface used, Granary Complex, is by Matt Taylor who based his design on the shapes of various architectural aspects of the new campus. (Images taken from Miwa’s CSM page.)

This hand-cut print of Westminster Abbey (below) comes from Jason Pearsall‘s series, A – Z of London (Royal Albert Hall shown, top of post). More on the book, here.

This is a close-up of part of Rebecca Wood‘s ‘typeface network’, Infini-Tea. Here, two faces are printed onto two separate sheets of tracing paper; one made up of tea leaves, the other railway tracks.

The project “communicates a story of how tea connects two seemingly random people on opposite sides of the world,” says Wood. More details on the work at rlawood.com/Infini-Tea.

I couldn’t find a name attached to this piece Employing a huge piece of paper, Stephanie Byttebier investigated the frequency of letters used in the English language, with the most commonly used words clustering at the centre of the sheet. (If anyone can credit the work, let me know via the comments below and I’ll add them in here).

These clever origami designs for a new tea brand, Fortune Tea, were by Yi Guo.

I also enjoyed Joseph Townshend‘s Weaving Liminality project. Townshend says he took the concept of ‘data-bending’ as his starting point; “a term used to describe the act of intentionally corrupting digital files in a bid to create ‘artefacts'”.

He then opened up a series of image files as text files, editing and rewriting them in the process (two shown). The result is a series of glitch-heavy distortions and Townshend then applied this aesthetic to create a series of hand-woven textiles (learning how to weave in the process).

Yizi Zheng‘s series of five 3D posters, in which a coloured area grows from the centre of each piece of paper, was impressive, too. “Looking into ways to give life to paper,” Zheng says.

Edward Carvalho-Monaghan‘s work was certainly hard to miss (El Topo poster shown above). Some of his brightly-coloured sequential art reminded me in places of comic book artist Jim Woodring’s work, but Carvalho-Monaghan’s style is very much his own.

He also seems happy to work in a purely pictorial manner when constructing a graphic narrative, too – see detail from The Trip, below – which is much harder to do than it looks. Read the rest of The Trip on his website, which contains a host of other great (and strange) pieces.

Mina Pile had a great space to show a range of her work – and it was a pleasant surprise to see so much of it hanging up rather than encased in glass. She also displayed some of the lino she used to create the prints (see below, in light blue). And frankly, who doesn’t like a piece of lino.

And linocut was also used by Cai Lunn to striking effect in a series of illustrations for The Wind in the Willow (two shown).

I also liked the deranged, claustrophobic quality of Clio Isadora‘s Anxiety Portraits – if I recall, they were made using the most unattractive colours she could find. More here.

My camera-work doesn’t do Celia Colantonio‘s Nostradamus print justice (above), so here it is is red, minus reflections, taken from her page on the CSM graphic design 2013 site.

Matt Gardner‘s prints were also really interesting and I would have liked to have seen more going by the range of great examples of both design and illustration on his site, dirtwizzarrd.tumblr.com.

Finally, while I couldn’t see a credit for these posters written in Turkish (above), on display in the publications room, Natalie Braune‘s collection of elegant printed works impressed (below). Image taken from her CSM page; more of her work at her Cargo page, here.

The Central Saint Martins BA graphic design degree show closed last weekend, but the students’ work is well documented on csmgraphicdesign.com.

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