Research

Eye Magazine - All mouth and trousers?


As directed on the brief I looked at the following article from Eye Magazine, and i've highlighted the important parts that I think are relevant.


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Eye Magazine - Issue 74 - All mouth and trousers?
By Rick Poynor

Published in Eye no. 74 vol. 19 (text in full)

A few months ago, I was asked by the Design Museum to write a chapter on graphic design for a book entitled Design in Britain (Conran Octopus, October 2009). Wish I’d had the chance, while I was working on it, to see the posters commissioned by the London Design Festival’s founder, John Sorrell, and Pentagram’s Domenic Lippa for the festival in September 2009. The twenty A1 images were displayed at the V&A for a short time and are now available as limited editions from Blanka. Created by leading British designers and studios, they provide an unusually concentrated opportunity to see where British graphic design is now.

One issue the posters raise immediately is the question of form. This is a subject we don’t talk about much any more in relation to graphic design. To focus on form suggests a concern with visual appearance and style, and this is much too flimsy and self-indulgent beside weighty matters such as process, strategy, identity and branding. These are the issues you can discuss with a client, not frivolous aesthetics.

But the poster, long an endangered undertaking in Britain’s graphic culture, is an inflexible taskmaster. Four sides defining a big empty rectangle: that’s all there is. The unchanging aim is to fill the space with something surprising, memorable and visually original that communicates effectively to its intended viewers. The exercise is hard in the way that writing a really good poem or pop song is hard, requiring condensed visual thought, and the poster’s fabulous history of invention makes it even harder. Add to that the challenge, in this case, of no real client, no clearly definable audience, and being entirely responsible for the poster’s content and point of view.

Designed in a palette restricted to red and black, the screen-printed posters made a striking collection as a set – the medium is inherently alluring. The first thing they showed, though, is that lack of practice has taken an inevitable, perhaps irreversible toll. Many of these designs aren’t posters by any traditional definition. They are morsels of graphic playfulness stretched unusually large. Pieces by Bibliothèque, Matt Willey and Tony Brook are more like enigmatic diagrams: the notional audience seems to be other designers rather than any plausible public. Quentin Newark’s plain typographic homage to the Robert Brownjohn era struggles to fill the space, as does Derek and Fred Birdsall’s single-word salute to their postcode (N1). Nice they enjoy the area, but for the non-partisan viewer, there’s not a lot to think about.

Only two projects feel entirely at home with the assertive demands of the street poster: Andy Altmann’s absurdist ‘Cor-blimey trousers’ jest (courtesy of Lonnie Donegan) imposed on an Evening Standard latest edition poster; and Alan Kitching’s ‘Taxi!’, the sole image that convincingly expresses London’s excitement, although that was surely one of the project’s more obvious tasks. You can hear the clash and clamour of the streets in the explosive arrangement of letterpress type, and the energy of the graphic treatment more than redeems the obviousness of the subject matter.

While graphic design has always traded in the already familiar (less charitably, in the cliché), the choice of subject matter here is often predictable. Piccadilly Circus comes up a couple of times, London Underground twice, London buses three times, and even the pigeons rate a couple of mentions. Fuel’s amiable pest – some kind of comment on the City’s moneymen? – cocks a snook at us with an ‘I (splat) London’.

Here, again, the project that milks the cliché most vigorously proves the most diverting: Frith Kerr’s eccentric setting of Ian Dury’s version of ‘The Bus Driver’s Prayer’ is easily the warmest, wittiest, most durable idea of the bunch, though is it really a poster? For that matter, is Nick Bell’s initially confounding graphic representation of the seventeen ‘lost’ rivers of London, where the vertical red strokes stand for the Thames? Poster or not, the refusal to settle for a trite, tourist’s interpretation puts this project in another league.

I also admired Mike Dempsey’s willingness to cast aside the restraints of professional decorum and broach the problem of prostitution. No one else is anywhere near this impassioned and provocative. Why hide it away in the small print?

If the London posters are representative of the best graphic design in Britain, then we seem to be stuck in a collection of ruts. These pieces were created for a high-profile festival in a city that often proclaims itself a world leader in design, yet there is nothing here that could be acclaimed in such terms. Circumscribed thinking seems to be leading to circumscribed treatments of form.

None of these designers is an image-maker, which a poster-maker ideally should be, and the reliance on typography only makes this more obvious. For as long as graphic communication remains the aim of graphic designers, formal invention will be as crucial as clay is to a potter. On this evidence, British designers need to take its challenge more seriously.


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Lars Muller Poster Collections


Lars Müller Publishers is an internationally active publishing house. It came into being in Baden, Switzerland, in 1983, as a result of the bibliophile passion of designer Lars Müller. The press has made a worldwide name for itself – and not just in specialist fields – with carefully edited and designed publications on architecture, design, and contemporary art. 


Lars Müller works closely with his authors to produce significant publications of great independence, to the highest possible standards. Lars Müller Publishers presents its program as a “school of seeing.” It offers a precise selection from the unmanageable flood of visual events, and brings together authors, designers, and artists who stand for quality and tenacity in their own right.


Lars Müller started publishing books on typography, design, art, photography, and architecture in 1983 and, as Lars Müller Publishers, has produced some 300 titles to date. Recently, he has branched out into visually oriented books on social issues, such as human rights and ecology.

  

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Record Sleeves of Peter Saville

Peter Saville was Factory Records in-house graphic artist, designing some of the most famous record sleeves of the last 20 years. He is the most well-known rock graphic designer of the post punk era and beyond.

Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, Pulp's This is Hardcore, Happy Monday's Pills, Thrills, N' Bellyaches,and the famous floppy disc "Blue Monday" 12" that cost so much to manufacture they lost money on every copy sold.

Saville went to art school to do what he enjoyed most. He was into punk and punk graphics, but yet also inspired by Jan Tschichold and other Modernist typographers, who influenced his first poster for The Factory, a music night in his local town.

When the Factory became Factory Records, he became the art director, designing their record covers. Saville confessed that most of the time he didn’t know what he was doing in the early days. 'No one should be designing record covers after the age of 30’, and ‘Music covers are not graphic design, they do not communicate anything, they have no purpose in that respect.

I think that Saville’s work i very contemporary and minimalist as well as being modernist. I think this is because Saville has a very subtle way of communicating space and emotion. I also think that Saville’s work always seems to specific to the client, and his work ranges with influences from cubism, minimalism, surrealism and realism. His work is not only traditional but also very unique at the same time, and i can easily see Saville’s influences.

References:

http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=166

http://soundbites.typepad.com/soundbites/peter-saville/

http://owen1746.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/peter-saville/

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2007/november/subway-sect-peter-saville-and-dan-fox-in-conversation

http://tosq.com/petersaville/disc/index.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery/2011/may/29/joydivision-neworder

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Limited edition posters

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2010/october/new-anthony-burrill-print-oil-water-dont-mix

http://katepowellblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/things-i-love-iv/

http://www.harmonie-interieure.com/home.htm

http://pichaus.com/posters-art-optimism-pessimism-posters-@f037ede94f127df6f4fe2f5a2c76fe4c/

http://omgposters.com/

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Artists

http://www.designsupremo.com/index.cfm?action=product.artist

Anthony Cozzi

The most intricate screen print yet of Denver-based artist and illustrator, Anthony Cozzi, The Moment Before is a somber piece that will have you contemplating the innocence of life and the presence of death.

I’m sufficiently creeped out by this new Snowblinded art print, in a good way. “The Moment Before” is an 18″ x 24″ screenprint, has an edition of 30

Anthony Cozzi's website: http://www.snowblinded.com/

Alex Pardee

Alex Pardee just released a bunch of prints in his “Night of the Treeple” series. Basically, it’s a fictional story that he made up about mutant trees (awesome). There are six prints total, all of them 17″ x 22″ giclees with editions of 100 for $50 each. Visit Zerofriends.

Zissou

I’m telling you, this Graham Erwin guy, he’s got something special. “Zissou”, part of Gallery 1988′s Bill Murray show, is a 16″ x 24″ screenprint, has an edition of 50, and costs $50. Visit NineteenEightyEight.com.

4 color screenprint on French Pop Tone Blu Raspberry Paper #100

16 x 24 inches

signed and numbered limited edition of 50

Doe Eyed

Doe Eyed (now a duo) just released a big bunch of awesome concert posters and art prints. I’m particularly in love with their Moogfest print and the “Teachers” art print below. Everything, as usual, is limited and ridiculously underpriced. Visit Doe-Eyed.com.

http://doe-eyed.com/index.php

Todd Slater

The Faded Line is selling a few AP copies of Todd Slater’s Electric Forest Festival poster. It’s an 18″ x 24″ screenprint, has an AP edition of 25, and costs $35. Visit TheFadedLine.com.

Dave Kinsey

Dave Kinsey seems to be going in an interesting direction lately, though I kind of wish he would’ve stayed with the high-color, painted looking prints. In any case, “Paradox I” and “Paradox II” are 18″ x 24″ screenprints, have editions of 100, and cost $55 each (or $100 for the set). Visit BlkMrktGallery.com.

Kai & Sunny

I don’t know much about Kai and Sunny, but their art prints have sure been blowing me away lately. “Migration East” is a 14.5″ x 19.5″ screenprint, has an edition of 125 (already very few left), and costs £55. VisitKaiandSunny.com.

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Non Digital

Natalie Irish

Jermaine Rogers gave me the heads up about an exciting new artist, and I have to say, I was pretty blown away. Natalie Irish creates images by kissing the canvas. Yep, her prints are created entirely by her lips, it’s crazy (check out the video below). She has a number of limited edition screenprints available, they look great in person. With Christmas coming up, these would all make great gifts. Visit NatalieIrish.com.