Hasta La Ideas

Chip Kidd and Neville Brody at Typo London. Photo:Thorsten Wulff

Three days of top speakers from around the world playing to a (largely full) venue: in Typo London does the UK capital finally have the design conference it deserves?

Late on Saturday night, Chip Kidd rounded off the first Typo London conference with a manic Joker’s laugh, but it’s the organisers who should be happy after seemingly pulling off the immensely difficult task of staging a major design conference in London. This team has huge experience, gained from running Typo Berlin over so many years, but even they must have thought twice about running an event in London when co-organisers Tim Fendley and Robin Richmond proposed the idea.

Why is it so difficult? Primarily because London is a very expensive city to put an event on in. Venue hire, hotels, catering – everything is costly compared to many other European centres. And because things are so costly, the ticket prices have to be high: £650 full-price or £290 for students. That’s an awful lot of money to find, particularly these days and particularly given that most UK design businesses are very small operations without large training budgets. But even at that price, and with (I was told by one of the organisers) 800 delegates, Typo London may well lose money in its first year.

Nevertheless congratulations to all involved and let’s hope the event becomes a regular fixture. A word too for everyone who dug deep and bought a ticket: it’s a great tribute to the UK design industry that so many people cared so much for their professional development that they were prepared, in these much-straightened times, to make such an investment.

Did they get their money’s worth? From what we saw (CR dipped in and out over the three days, you can read Mark’s day one report here) and heard via Twitter (@typo11) the reaction’s been very positive. If you went, let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Matt Judge from Design Assembly has comprehensive coverage.

Michael Bierut. Photo: Gerhard Kassner

Themes/highlights? Personally I really enjoyed Tony Brook’s tongue-in-cheek thesis on Northerners in Graphic Design and It’s Nice That had a lot of interesting and intelligent things to say about design publishing. Michael Bierut, as ever, was witty and hugely entertaining and Jonathan Ellery drew some interesting comparisons between art and design as did Lawrence Wiener. I’m sorry to have missed Morag Myerscough as, by all reports, her talk was brilliant.

Morag Myerscough. Photo: Gerhard Kassner

Lawrence Weiner. Photo: Thorsten Wulff

Neville Brody closed things on Friday night. I’ve seen Brody talk a number of times and haven’t always enjoyed the experience but Friday was a vibrant mix of thought-provoking comment and visual treats. A Taschen book documenting Brody’s Fuse project is imminent and so he took the opportunity to run through some of its highlights. Beginning in 1991, Brody invested both his time and a great deal of his own money in this hugely ambitious experimental typographic project, producing both a regular publication and conference. Seeing the work again in his talk underlined just what an incredible array of exciting work Fuse produced as it probed the limits of what type design could engage with.

Neville Brody. Photo: Gerhard Kassner

Say what you like about Brody but he has always been prepared to invest a considerable portion of his time and his earnings back into projects that give others a platform to push the boundaries of his profession – whether Fuse or CD-Rom publishing or last year’s Anti-Design Festival. How many other design ‘stars’ have done likewise?

And now, of course, he is ‘putting something back’ by his involvement at the RCA and D&AD, where, next year, he will be president. Brody gave an intriguing hint of what that might mean by suggesting that he wanted future D&AD award winners to support the next generation. How might this work? Are entrants going to be asked to commit to some kind of educational involvement in order to receive their pencils if they win? Could be interesting.

Tom Uglow. Photo: Gerhard Kassner

As for themes, both Brody and Google’s Tom Uglow who preceded him on stage touched on the dominant one – data and what we might do with it in the future. Uglow urged us to remember that data is not spreadsheets – it’s everything we do. And now, of course, because we share so much of that and because we have the means to record it, that data is available and waiting for creative people to do interesting things with. Data visualisation has made a start but as Uglow and Brody and other speakers stressed, that’s just scratching the surface. As Brody said, we are not experiencing a ‘digital’ revolution, we are experiencing a revolution in knowledge, just one that is enabled digitally. And the outcome could be spectacular.

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you’re not also reading the magazine in print, you’re really missing out. Our October issue includes the story of Blackpool’s Comedy Carpet, a profile of Jake Barton whose studio is currently working on the 9/11 Memorial Museum, plus pieces on branding and the art world, guerilla advertising coming of age, Google’s Android logo, Ars Electronica, adland and the riots, and loads more.

And, if you subscribe to CR, you also receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month for free.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Pentagram’s signage graphics for The New York Times’ headquarters

At London’s first TYPO conference yesterday, the three afternoon speakers highlighted the benefits of having a good theme in place to anchor the talks. Designers Jonathan Ellery, Tony Brook and Michael Bierut tackled the wide-ranging term “places” in very different ways and it made for an encouraging start to TYPO’s London run…

Ellery conceded that his talk was, if anything, un-themed, but as he spoke it became apparent that perhaps the approach he’d taken was to look at how he places himself and his work in the world.

This is pertinent as Ellery now works successfully in both design and art: his agency, Browns, was founded in 1998 and since 2005 he has exhibited his own work in five gallery shows. How he handles this double life – and indeed how the two spheres of work are handled by different audiences – was in the background of each of the projects he showed.

Counter to the prevailing trend of many design conferences (a run through of classic and/or recent commissioned work) Ellery showed just his art, aside from one project with the Mulberry brand which moved it into a commerical setting.

From Unrest by Jonathan Ellery

Ellery’s art is highly autobiographical and often involves a process of ‘fixing’ things into permanence i.e. words, phrases or memories machined-in to brass plate; and numbers, influences, even relationships turned into book form. His reasoning is personal, too, but it was interesting to look only at his output as an artist, freed from the requirements of a brief.

From The Human Condition by Jonathan Ellery

Like Ellery, Tony Brook of design studio Spin also dispensed with the familiar for his talk and took TYPO’s “places” theme on to explore the notion of ‘northerness’. Like his hero, Wim Crouwel – from Groningen, in the north of his own country – Brook’s connection to his birth place of Halifax in West Yorkshire was explored through an analysis of language and identity – how where we’re from shapes what we do.

For designers, this can mean how a particular aesthetic take on the world, aspects of taste, or style, are developing well before one is even aware of them.

Haunch of Venison identity by Spin

Again the idea of fixity, the sense of getting to the kernel of something seems vital to Brook’s work and was made evident in one of the few pieces of work by Spin that he showed; the clever, minimalist identity for the Haunch of Venison gallery, which whittles the name (the ‘haunch’ of a deer) into three thick lines.

As with Brooks’ own influences, from Peter Saville album sleeves to the cricket chants of his home county – “Yooorkshire / Yooorkshire / Yooorkshire (repeat)” – he suggested how being immersed in a culture of minimalism and economy had transferred into his design sensibility. Hence the title of his talk, Bred in the Bone.

Typeface design for Celebration, Florida by Pentagram

For Michael Bierut, the notion of “places” meant looking at what designers can do to create a sense of place for different clients; often within the same city, New York. He strode through a series of typographic projects, each of which hung on a particular decisive moment, or what he referred to as The Only Important Decision.

Bierut is something of a seasoned conference speaker but to say that doesn’t do justice to how stimulating his quick-fire presentations can be. His design pedigree aside (ten years at Vignelli Associates; 21 at Pentagram), Bierut simply has great stories and great timing.

He spoke of his formative years, creating posters for school plays that were seen with more frequency than the productions, and of the influence of three library books by S Neil Fujita, Armin Hoffman and Milton Glaser, that gradually cemented his desire to become a graphic designer.

Bierut then went through his typographic and identity work on ten very different projects. There was upbeat type created for the Disney town of Celebration in Florida; and the not-so-friendly wayfinding system for Manhattan that shies away from bright, potentially helpful colourways. (“This is New York… we’re not that glad you’re here, just move along!” he joked.)

Brochure for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival by Pentagram

Bierut also showed how on an ad for the BAM Next Wave Festival, cutting into text set in News Gothic would ‘hint’ at the fuller size of the letterforms, just as when a square of King Kong’s face, pressed up against a high-rise window in the classic movie, ‘conveyed’ his enormity to the terrified people inside. (Brochure for BAM shown, above.)

Lever House typography by Pentagram

Then there were the projects for the Lever Brothers’ Lever House building; General Dynamics’s offices; Harley Davidson; the New York Jets; the Musuem of Arts and Design; the New World Symphony Orchestra and, finally, The New York Times’s new Renzo Piano-designed headquarters.

Like Bierut said at the beginning of his talk, it was largely New York work he was showing. But it was great New York work – bold, confident and, ultimately, borne from a real sense of place.

TYPO London continues today and tomorrow (Saturday). A full schedule for the remaining TYPO London talks is here.

Those against spec work have been fighting an unlikely target of late: President Obama. In case you missed any of the anger, the story goes is that Obama for America organization recently launched a poster design competition called “Art Works,” which would help promote the President’s jobs bill. The irony, of course, is that the winners of said contest won’t be paid, i.e. like a real “job” would traditionally provide. Instead, the three winners picked by the campaign will receive a print of their poster signed by Obama. This caught the ire of vocal designers like Mike Monteiro, recently made all the more famous for his “F%& You, Pay Me” video, and the AntiSpec organization who writes that “using creatives for free work isn’t supporting your ‘create jobs’ campaign.” In the Huffington Post‘s conversation with cartoonist Matt Bors, he calls the contest “the opposite of jobs” and says not only does it take advantage of the designers who choose to enter, but per the usual complaint about spec work, hurts the entire industry as a whole. “You don’t have contests with your plumber,” he tells the site. The story just yesterday was picked up by Rolling Stone who dug into the legality of the contest, wondering if it might violate campaign contribution rules. In speaking to a lawyer familiar with election law, they find that it all seems on the up-and-up, that technically the winning entries will be viewed as donations to the cause, so long as they aren’t designed by corporations, unions, et al. The contest closes on November 4th, but following such a negative response, we’ll have to wait and see if it actually reaches the finish line in the end.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Coinciding with the Rugby World Cup final on Saturday, creative agency Rosie Lee and photographer John Ross take a close-up look at the sport

Into The Fray is a self-initiated project “to visualise the power and strength of rugby players, and freeze-frame it” say the agency. To this end, they built a giant glass tank and paccked in as many rugby boys as the space would allow.

Ross then photographed the results

This video completes the project (music by Scanner)

John Ross has also created the cover images for the November issue of CR, using his camera’s digital back to create a modern take on the photogram. Here’s a hint of what he came up with:

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you’re not also reading the magazine in print, you’re really missing out. Our October issue includes the story of Blackpool’s Comedy Carpet, a profile of Jake Barton whose studio is currently working on the 9/11 Memorial Museum, plus pieces on branding and the art world, guerilla advertising coming of age, Google’s Android logo, Ars Electronica, adland and the riots, and loads more.

And, if you subscribe to CR, you also receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month for free.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in  the UK,   you can  search for your nearest stockist here.     Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your     nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and  save yourself almost 30% on the printed    magazine.

Art galleries are rarely the place to find comedy, yet a new exhibition at the V&A in London offers giggles aplenty, as it looks back at the first 50 years of satirical magazine, Private Eye…

The exhibition, which opens tomorrow, focuses especially on the cartoon art within the magazine, a key element of the publication from the beginning. “It’s one of the things about Private Eye that is often overlooked,” said editor Ian Hislop at the press view this morning. “In all the talk about the journalism, the trouble and the courts and the writs, people often forget that every fortnight Private Eye presents about 25 beautifully drawn jokes, and the cartoonists will tell you that, essentially, is why people buy Private Eye.”

Cluff, 1990

Michael Heath

Hislop sees the Private Eye cartoonists as part of a great history of British satirical art stretching back to Hogarth. Since its beginning, the magazine has promoted and published the work of more than 90 artists, including Willie Rushton, Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman, Michael Heath and Nick Newman. One wall of the exhibition celebrates this with a display of work by 50 Private Eye cartoonists, each represented by one drawing. There is also a short documentary showing Ken Pyne creating a cartoon for the magazine.

James Hunter, 2002

Simon Key, 2008

Elsewhere, the cartoons are split into themes, covering cartoon strips, political cartoons, and a wall of drawings that demonstrate Private Eye’s ability to superbly sum up, and send up, the fashions and trends of the times. Shown above are two more recent cartoons, mocking our obsessions with the internet and London’s bendy buses, respectively.

No. 75, 30 October 1964

No. 594, 21 September, 1984

No. 1147, 9-22 December, 2005

Opening the exhibition is a wall of Private Eye’s trademark front covers (detail of the wall, shown top). Hislop has picked one cover for each of the last 50 years, and the display demonstrates how little the magazine’s design strategy and production techniques have changed over the years.

Display of notes and pages from the magazine, revealing the design techniques once employed by art director Tony Rushton, before he switched to using a Mac

The editor’s office

Other displays offer deeper insights into the working life at the magazine. In one, art director Tony Rushton’s early design methods are revealed, while another corner hosts a recreation of the Private Eye editor’s office, the place where the main joke-writing team at the mag get together to bash out their collective spoofs.

Current issue of the mag, featured on the editor’s desk

Notes for the current issue cover

Notes for a story that appears inside the current issue of the mag

The first ideas and sketches for the stories are written out in longhand on pink paper, and delightfully, the editor’s desk in the exhibition contains the notes for the latest issue, which focuses on the travails of Dr Liam Fox and his travelling companion Adam Werrity (described in the notes above as ‘Twitty’). I am assuming these are the genuine notes, and it would certainly be a nice touch if these were updated in the exhibition with each issue.

Detail from the editor’s office

Detail from a display of Private Eye memorabilia, much of which is focused on legal letters and court judgements. The cartoon above reads. “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a superinjunction!”

The exhibition pays homage both to Private Eye’s comic and artistic brilliance, but also its resolute devotion to print. “We hear a lot now about how print is dying, it’s on its way out,” said Hislop at the opening. “I refuse to believe that, obviously. One of the reasons is whoever got that pleasure of seeing a pen and ink drawing on a screen? It doesn’t happen… it’s about the material and it’s about the craft and it’s about the skill. That’s why I think it will continue to be important to have print on print. That’s partly what this is a celebration of.”

Private Eye: The First 50 Years opens at the V&A tomorrow and continues until January 8. Admission to the exhibition is free. More info is at vam.ac.uk.