Hasta La Ideas

Hand-cut lettering by Australian artist Bianca Chang

By Nestor Bailly

Transforming stacks of paper into something beautiful, Australian designer and paper artist Bianca Chang hand-cuts typographic designs into thick chunks of blank sheets. As she films the process in stop-motion, beautiful patterns emerge in a simple but quite fascinating story of each letter’s creation.

Inspired by tone-on-tone signage and the shadow play of three-dimensional letterforms, the paper sculptures manipulate the medium’s unique properties while exploring purity of form. Chang hand-plots and cuts hundreds of sheets of 80gsm 100% recycled paper using only a pencil, ruler, compass point and blade. Her back-to-basics technique creates work that speaks for itself and turns a normally disposable medium into enduring works of art. We caught up with the artist to learn more about her process.

Why did you decide to work with paper? What motivated you to work exclusively by hand?

Paper is a material that I’ve always worked with since a young age—I think almost everyones’ first experiences of creating images and objects would be with paper—drawing, painting, folding, cutting, pasting. So it wasn’t so much an active decision to use paper, I just never grew out of working with it. My work is a continuation and evolution of very basic techniques. I also loved the idea of transforming something as ubiquitous as paper into something different—by cutting and stacking paper I can manipulate the materiality of the medium and explore form in a very refined way. The push to work exclusively by hand is a product of being a graphic designer. I work all day in front of a screen so it is really therapeutic to practice my fine motor skills for a change. I like slowly working towards a finished artwork—it certainly isn’t an activity of instant gratification and personally it it makes the completion of a piece that much more rewarding.

What do you love about typography? Who/what are your biggest influences, what are you passionate about in the field?

In terms of graphic design, I’m quite interested in the management of type. The work I enjoy most is publication design—using type effectively in a book is quite detail-oriented and rewarding work. I like to look to the work of designers like Bruno Monguzzi, Jost Hochuli, Helmut Schmid and Willi Kunz. In terms of my works in paper, typography is a means to an end. For me, type offers a system by which I can generate new forms. My album cover for Nuojuva’s Valot Kaukaa is an example of this—I created an abstracted alphabet to determine the design. In this way, a typeface offers a set of interrelated forms with elements of repetition, subtle variation and rhythms of positive and negative space.

Chang, who works for Mark Gowing Design in Sydney, showcased recent work at the 2011 A4 Paper Festival there, and we can only hope to see her work travel in the near future. Check out The making of A to see the process play out on video.

Collages of cauliflower sunsets, horse gibberish and bikini babes

Piecing together scenes from dreams and reruns of Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone, Welsh collage and mixed-media artist Laura Redburn creates vibrant vignettes on paper under the moniker Cardboard Cities. Her portfolio flows like a nostalgic scrapbook tinted with just the slightest hint of patina, but pierced with bright colors to enhance the otherworldly scenes.

Part of the appeal of collage work lies in its reconfiguration of the banal, and Redburn’s process speaks to her ability to shift reality into something a bit more magical. “Often when I’m watching something,” she says, “I have trouble focusing on what’s happening because I’m so distracted by the scenery, or the colors in the shot, or just the way the shot has been composed.” As a result, we’re introduced to aerial cityscapes overlaid with geometric patterns, sunbathers with fried-egg heads, poshly dressed partygoers watching a cauliflower sunset over a mountain range, lavender horses rolled out in rows and chopped-up text spelling out an alien abduction.

Cardboard Cities prints are available online from $18. To see more of Redburn’s work and follow her blog, visit her website.

Illustrazione in carta pensata dall’agenzia colombiana LOWE per lo swap party book dal tema ‘Come with a story and leave with another’.
{Via}

For good or bad, people make assumptions about you based on the appearance of your office. If they see a framed picture on your desk of you standing on a beach with two children, they instantly assume you like going to the beach on vacation, you have two kids, and you enjoy being reminded of this vacation while you’re at work. If you have a law school diploma and a state bar association certificate framed and hanging on your office walls, people seeing these items assume you’re a lawyer, who graduated from a specific school, who is legal to practice law in your state.

The previously mentioned examples of the family photo and the diploma both resulted in positive assumptions about you and these items were likely placed in the office to elicit the exact responses they received. The bad side of assumptions based solely on appearances is that people can also come to negative conclusions about you. For example, a consistently messy desk (not one that is disrupted for a few hours each day as you plow through a project, but one that is disorganized, dirty, and cluttered over a prolonged period of time) can hurt you professionally because it gives the impression to your coworkers you’re not a good employee, even if your work product proves otherwise.

On April 13, Businessweek published the article “Clean Your Messy Desk, Lest Ye Be Judged.” The article, as you probably assume based on its title, explains the downsides of having a perpetually messy office. From the article:

… according to a survey of U.S. workers by hiring firm Adecco, 57 percent of people have judged a co-worker based on the state of his or her workspace. A clean desk sends the message that you’re organized and accomplished, while a disheveled one implies that the rest of your life is in a similar state.

Katherine Trezise, the president of the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (you may know ICD by its former name, the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization) comments on the survey’s findings in the Businessweek article:

Trezise says that a little mess is OK, but that “the problem comes in when it affects other people. Can you do your job? Maintain relationships with colleagues?” If the answer is no, you might need to rethink your habits.

To keep your coworkers from making negative, and probably inaccurate, judgments about your job performance, spend five to ten minutes each day cleaning and straightening your workspace before heading home. Return dirty dishes to the break room, wipe up any spills, process the papers in your inbox, throw away trash, put away current projects to their active file boxes, and set your desk so it is ready for you to work from it immediately when you arrive to your office the next morning. Not only will these simple steps send a positive message to your coworkers, but they will also help you to be more productive. For larger projects, such as waist-high stacks of papers and towers of boxes cluttering up your office, schedule 30 minutes each day to chip away at these piles. Your coworkers will notice your efforts and start to reassess their negative assumptions.

For the rare few of you who work for bosses who believe a messy desk is proof of your competency, I recommend keeping a fake stack of papers on your desk for the purpose of looking disorganized. To create your fake mess: assemble five inches of papers from the office recycling bin and wrap a large rubber band around the stack. The bundling will make the stack of papers simple to pull out of a drawer when you need it to influence your boss, and it will also make sure you don’t get any important papers mixed in with the decoy stack. Think of the stack of papers similar to a potted plant (which, oddly enough, researchers have discovered gives the impression to your coworkers that you’re a team player, so put a single plant in your office if you don’t already have one).

Like most of you, I don’t love that assumptions about job performance are influenced by the appearance of one’s office, but feelings about assumptions aren’t important. If you want a promotion and/or raise, if you want your coworkers and boss to have positive opinions about your work, and you want to give the accurate impression that you value your job and place of employment, then keeping your office organized and clean can’t hurt you in your pursuit of these goals. My opinion is that in this economy you do what you can to keep a job you love, so it’s a good idea to spend the five or ten minutes each day helping yourself in a positive way.

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This inkjet printer has been adapted by Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) student Christophe Guberan to print patterns that contort pieces of paper into specific 3D forms.  Watch this movie on Dezeen Screen »

The machine prints a mixture of water and ink that causes the paper to fold automatically along wet lines and humid areas.

It’s hooked up to a computer that can be used to generate patterns for different fold configurations.

There will be a live presentation of the project at the Salone Satellite at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan next week. See all our stories about Milan 2012 here.

Watch another popular series abut folding paper by hand on Dezeen Screen here.

Here are some more details from ECAL:

Hydro-Fold by ECAL/Christophe Guberan

The ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne is very pleased and honoured to be invited on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Salone Satellite in 2012.

Under the given topic «Design-Technology» we decided to present a very innovative yet extremely straight-forward project: Hydro-Fold.

Christophe Guberan, 3rd year Product Design student at the ECAL conceived and developed the Hydro-Fold project. It is a project combining modern technology (ink-jet printer) and a very well known and accessible material (paper).

Hydro-Fold is a project that aims to explore the properties of paper or how a liquid may bend its structure.

The project consists on bringing modifications on a simple contemporary desktop ink-jet printer by replacing the regular ink contained in the cartridge by a very specific mixture of ink and water.

Different patterns, grids and shapes can be printed on paper using this specific liquid. While drying, the paper contorts, folds and retracts around the printed and humid areas, transforming it self from a 2-dimensional paper sheet to a 3-dimensional structure where lines become edges and surfaces become volumes.]

We aim to present this project through and installation bringing together 3 functional ink-jet printers, each on a separate display table as a live happening.

A video presenting the process and various possibilities of this concept will be presented on the available screen. The public will be able to see the paper sheets being printed and then take home with them as a souvenir.

Material: paper, ink + water
Process: customised water printing machine