Hasta La Ideas

In their Terrible People, Good Design show, this year’s Visual Communication graduates from Dublin’s IADT explored a wide variety of engaging and topical subjects, including the country’s current economic crisis, gay rights, bio-engineering and mobile phone dependency. Our guest correspondent, Holly Brennan, visited the show.

The identity for the show, developed by Rory Bradley and Will Rice, sets the tone with a slick poster and website showcasing the students work and giving a great impression of the group’s personality.

terrible-people.com

There was a particular emphasis this year on digital design, with some impressive web and app projects, all supported by beautiful print pieces.

Strong examples of these include Peter McDonagh’s app Taste This for iOS, based on Niki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus, in which he used high-speed photography to generate stunning abstract visualizations of flavour pairings. These were then incorporated into an attractive, colourful interface which allows users to easily and intuitively navigate the information.
petermcdonagh.com

Sarah Fox’s Powow website and app provide an online platform for radio enthusiasts to share, explore and discuss a curated selection of quality podcasts. The impressive digital work is supported by bold, eycatching typographic posters, with the design for each new series of shows overprinted onto the last. She has also produced playful, illustrative motion pieces to explain and promote the site. Visit the beta version of the site here.
sarahjunefox.com

Anton Lebed’s Sonitus app allows music lovers and producers to find and purchase music using a colour coded genre indentification system, which he has incorporated into a complex infographic charting the genealogy of electronic music.
an-le.me

Rory Bradley’s work strongly demonstrates the multdisciplinary nature of the course, with elements of exhibition design, signage, web, print, motion and infographics incorporated into his project. His identity system for the Hucknell Clinic – For freckle-free living (a fictional clinic that ‘cures’ red-heads of their ginger hair and freckly skin) takes an absurd concept and executes it in a credible and realistic way, with a high level of craft and care put into each application, even down to the design of the exhibition space itself which includes a clinical display case of gruesome skin and hair specimens.
rorybradley.ie

Another example of a project which takes an extreme, imagined scenario and brings it to life with a strong, convincing campaign is Will Rice’s identity for the Irish Integration Project. The campaign is devised to educate Irish citizens on the proposed sale of the Irish State to a foreign country in exchange for repayment of its massive debts.

In one of the few examples of packaging design in the show, Mark O’Brien’s project highlights and questions the ethics of meat production. His brand identity for Better Farms uses fun, engaing imagery and copywriting to promote this lab-grown meat product as a healthy, ethical alternative to conventional meat.

This is just a small selection of the fantastic work that was on show. To see all of the terrible people’s good design visit their website here. Or to get a quicker overview of the show (or the work of students from other courses) see here.

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CR in Print
The July issue of Creative Review features a piece exploring the past and future of the dingbat. Plus a look at the potential of paper electronics and printed apps, how a new generation of documentary filmmakers is making use of the web, current logo trends, a review of MoMA New York’s group show on art and type, thoughts on how design may help save Greece and much more. Also, in Monograph this month we showcase a host of rejected design work put together by two Kingston students.

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