Berlin #1

V&A Designers of the Future Exhibition

A small but perfectly formed exhibition is taking place in Room 220 of the V&A's Sackler Centre, from June 15th to July 31st. Here is the brief description from their website:

"This display will showcase work by art and design students from the University of Brighton and the Royal College of Art inspired by the V&A and its collections. A related conference exploring museum and higher education collaboration will take place in July 2010."

Seizing a nice opportunity to get some work exhibited by one of country's most prestigious museums, Abby Byrne, Kelly Satchell and myself created a typographic triptych of some of our favourite design quotes in silkscreen. It evolved from the inspiration of the V&A's preservation of precious printed or caligraphically rendered ancient scriptures (see this earlier post). The idea was to create precious, fancifully rendered scriptures for own purposes of guidance as fledgling designers.

This is a little peak at my print — my quote is from David Craib,

The three prints have been bubble-wrapped into their frames and are most likely sat in a cupboard awaiting hanging in London, but once on display I will get some proper photographs of the three of them  in all their glory!

Cities Project -- Nostalgia & Berlin

Following on from a previous post below, I finished my book. As I had intended I made the whole book not using a computer at all. All the photographs are taken on 35mm film and the prints were photocopied. The type was comprised from photocopied pages of type specimen books and some of the older photos were taken from Berlin protest magazines my dad had collected from the early eighties.

 

The book is comprised of two sections were are individually stitched but then are bound together by an elastic band. The two sections separate the two years, 1980 and 2010. My dad lived in Berlin in 1980 and then re-visted for the first time when we went earlier this year. With the fall of the wall the city had changed drastically since the last time he was there, and the book is meant to express a sense of nostalgia but also to illustrate the changes in the landscape and the feel of the city that have occurred in last 30 years.

History of Art & Design — Private View Invitation

In partial collaboration with Sally-Anne Burt, we made this invitation for a brief from Brighton University's History of Art and Design courses. They wanted the invite for the private view of their dissertation presentations — although this one didn't get selected, it was a nice thing to work on. Tricky to try and encompass so many different ideas and embody the many schools of thought studied on the courses, into a small space on a page.

The invite is an A3 double-sided screen print, that folds down into A5 for posting.
With references to wide ranging topics, we stitched together the phrase "For Curious Minds" using letterforms from many different typefaces, all originating from many different cultural backgrounds, to mimic how the courses do this with the ideas they teach. The reverse has all the information.

Fun...

...with a photocopier, some old letraset sheets, a type specimen catalogue and school exercise books found in a junkshop. Think I might try and make it into a little booklet thing, for our cities project — just as an experiment see if I can finish it all completely without using a computer on any part of it.

It's been nice to have the Easter holidays to have a bit of time just to play around with stuff and not be too worried about what I'm actually doing!

This Morning...

Arrived in Berlin last night...was supposed to meet family here, but their flight was cancelled until 11am the next morning. But it was probably for the best as they would most likely have got bored whilst I spent over an hour in Pro Qm this morning — the most incredible design bookshop...ever. Its bursting at the seems with not just design books, but an extensive collection of weird magazines, journals and stacks of self-published stuff. I felt quite dizzy.
I ended up buying this...

I'm not quite sure where it comes from or who makes it as all the info text in the back is in another language (possibly korean? thats a complete guess) but this issue features the work of students from the Werkplaats Typografie (two year masters program in Arnhem, in the Nederlands which is actually where Marijke Cobbenhagen and Chantal Hendriksen studied incidentally, see post below).
It's very nice!

Cobbenhagen Hendriksen

One of the most inspiring visits in Amsterdam for me personally was Cobbenhagen Hendriksen. Set-up by Marijke Cobbenhagen and Chantal Hendriksen, the studio is based in a shared space in an old primary school, slightly on the outskirts of the city. It was Chantal who spoke to us when we visited, and was kind enough to give us all lots of tea to drink whilst we listened. What was most interesting was learning about some of the projects that they hadn’t been entirelly happy with on completion, and how that had happened. The work we were shown was all print based, and stood of for me because of the range of exciting and varied formats that tied perfectly into the concepts behind each project. I especially liked what they had done when presented with one of the large body of tedious reading lists from the Amsterdam School of the Arts. Instead of just setting the type in a nice little booklet and being done with it, all the information was printed in the back of a beautifully covered hardback A4 sketchbook. This then gave the students a reason to hold on to the info, a created a project in what could be done to fill the blank pages. 

Chantal also told us about her experiences working as a typography lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. This meant that she really understood how to relate to the kind of problems you experience as a design student. She reinforced the importance of doing work to please yourself, and the perils of trying to design for your tutors tastes rather that your own. 

Big thanks to her for what was a much required mid-year motivational boost — will defiantly be keeping an eye on the work that comes out of their studio in future.

(This poster hanging in their studio is made by Radim Pesko).