ITAP - David Osbaldestin - Design Heroes: SO ME

David Osbaldestin gave a great talk talking about the links between fine art and design and he spoke of over 10 of his design heroes. The first designer he spoke about was the one he focused on more. 

SO ME, real name Bertrand Lagros de Langeron, a french designer and animator who is also the art director for Ed Banger Records. Bertand is a self confessed part animal, he says that has best ideas come when hungover or on the road "so partying abroad is perfect" for him he told Surface to Air in a 2012 interview. Although from a Graphic Design background he spends most time in film making now, having made music videos for Kanye West, Kid Cudi, Justice, DJ Mehdi and MGMT. He also directs music videos and recently directed the music video for the 'Duck Sauce' song, "Barbra Streisand".



SO ME's video for the french electro duo Justice, friends of so me, incorporates hand drawn type that has links to Vernacular Typography (Lettering in the urban environment) the verity of type design is impressive and the composition on some of the T-shirts with more text is great. Here are some examples of Vernacular Type that remind me of SO ME's work.

(these 4 images are taken from http://vernaculartypography.com/)

I had a go at one of my own type designs using my initials. And in the process I learnt that it's not as easy as it looks to get it exactly right. I'm not very happy with this rushed attempt and I think I would have to do more by hand with pen and paper rather than simply using illustrator.

This video was a huge success and possibly landed him the job to do Kanye West's "Good Life" video after SO ME got his attention by creating this spoof cover of the artwork of the song that beat Kanye at the EMA awards when Kanye stormed the stage declaring that his video cost $1,000,000.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/collective/dnaimages/gallery/2/edbanger/2.jpg

These kind of bold acts are those that get you noticed and get you recognition along side good work. We can learn from SO ME here, his ability to respond so quickly to an event like this is great.

ITAP - Ranveer Nandra - Design Heroes: Peter Chung.

http://www.rubberslug.com/img_show.aspx?ImageID=316046&X=530&Section=Item

Here an original drawing of Aeon Flux by Peter Chung to one of his adoring fans at Comic-Con in 2005.

Peter Chung is a Korean American animator who is most famous for his creation, Aeon Flux which featured on MTV's Liquid Television and then aired as it's own 30 minute episode series. He is a man who was tired of the boundries/templates/rules set by Walt Disney and by Anime and Manga animation, so he broke those rules. And as far as examples of people who broke the rules go, this guy  b r o k e  the rules! Watch this.

He broke traditional animation styles, in the way this was animated but also in the plot lines, the dialogue or lack of it as the case may be here. He broke traditional methods of telling stories, Aeon Flux would die at the end of each episode for example, completely challenging the typical 'serial style' used in popular tv and film.

Compared to his other work on the Rugrats where he felt constrained buy the characters but also by the boundaries set in place by Nickelodeon and the standards of kids tv shows of the day. Some would say that Rugrats was quite an 'on the edge' childrens cartoon and there actually many theories about the show's hidden storylines, one being that there are no babies and they're all in Angelica's imagination they infact where all meant to have died at birth or in vitro and this is meant to explain the parents behaviour and also why Angelica can speak to both the babies and adults. I think that is going a bit far, but I think some of these theories are plausable because of Peter Chungs style of animation being quite quirky.



By watching the Rugrats however, you can see how Chung was trapped in a babies world with his animation and in an interview he expressed that his desire was to create athletic characters with long limbs. He wanted to create something that was super sexy and super cool and he certainly did that whilst blowing the rules out the water.

ITAP - Colette Jeffreys - Design Heroes: Otto Neurath

Colette gave us a very broad and extensive talk about the subkect of Information Design, talking about a broad number of people however I am going to talk about one of those names. Otto Neurath, one could say that he is the founder of information design, he certainly is the founder of the Isotype System and undoubtedly one of the key figures in the history of information design. 

Otto Neurath, born in Austria in 1882, died in England in 1945 sadly seeing non of his work come to completion. His work was continued on after he died by Marie Neurath, his 2nd wife who later died in the 1980's having completed and published Otto's work and herself written many children's books using the Isotype system.

What is the Isotype System? 
It is the International System Of TYpographic Picture Education. It's the idea of communication without words. It's a global language using symbols and pictures to speak and communicate with people. Let's take a look at some of his work. I'm going to jump straign into a very specific example of Neurath's work, I get the sense that it has a style but it's done completely for information purposes. It's as if the style isn't as important as the actual fact, figures, processes, stats etc.

http://www.humantific.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/image_04-450x600.jpg

http://www.humantific.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/image_02-450x600.jpg

Here Otto is displaying information about the production of plastics and their properties, sounds like a boring science lesson to me but when you look at it it's strangely inviting and you find yourself wanting to learn wanting to see what the plastics are made from. I think this is for a few reasons.

1 - Curiosity. You want to see what symbols have been used to represent each element. This hooks you in

2 - Simplicity. It's designed in such a simple way that you don't feel bombarded with scientific nonsense, it's clear and concise, so you're not put off.

3 - Use of shape and colour. Your eye follows the process through cleaver use of arrows and shapes that flow into each other and through cleaver use of colour that again makes it simple to follow.

I had a go at creating my own in the same style. It requires a lot of skill to use the right kind of symbols. Hence a near lifetime spent working on such symbols.

ITAP - Ros Sinclair - Design Heroes: Sir John Hegarty & Juan Cabral

Ros spoke about many different designers and art directors but I have chosen to blog about two, Sir John Hegarty & Juan Cabral as it was their work that stood out to me the most and I was interested in comparing the old and the new.

Sir John Hegarty

This man has been in the business of advertising since the 60's. He is a firm believer of being a specialist in your particular field and he's a believer of reductionism. Reductionism is where you strip an idea to it's bare bones whilst staying succinct and to the point.




I particularly admire his work for the launch of black Levis in 1982, it is a perfect example of Hegarty's Reductionism theory. It was a very bold decision to go with such a simple poster design but the idea behind it is so strong and Levis obviously wanted the bold statement of being different and not going with the crowd to represent their now product launch. You can agree that over 20 years later this is still a good advertisement, the idea still stands strong!

http://thegalleryfromoverthere.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/when-the-world-zigs-zag.png

"Music is 50% of advertising."

Hegarty was a big believer in music in advertising. Many of Hegarty's commercials would put songs in the charts and often right to the top. Which reminds me of the Windows Internet Explorer 9 advert with the Alex Clare's song, "Too Close" that went into the top 10 in both the UK and US charts and went double platinum all from the advert the aired the song a month early to it's release. This brings me nicely onto the 2nd design hero of this blogpost.

Juan Cabral - famously used Jose Gonzales, "Heartbeats" for the sony bravia 'colour' advert to it's glorious success.

This ad is so beautiful, when I first saw it I was in the cinema about to watch a film and I was utterly captivated and mesmerised by the stunning images that were before me. It hooks you to believing anything they tell you, "this TV has the best colour", "this TV uses alien spaceship technology". I would buy it; "because of the trance like state you have just lulled me into you can say thing you want to me and i'll buy it!". It's no secret that this advert heavily relies on it's music, if it was silent it would still be beautiful but the music engages your soul and spirit into it, as music has that unique capability.

Similarly this advery of Juan's also relies heavily on music and it really does contribute masses to the overall success of the advert. 

So what do we take from this? As designers, visual communicators you could take this information about music making 50% of an advert as bad news however I think we can use it to our advantage. It provides us with a new challenge, to create images/visuals that compliment, enhance or even outshine the music in an advert, it's more of an art to be able to create a perfect relationship between sound and image and I think Juan has this skill within his grasp and we too can aspire to attain such skills.

ITAP - Jonny Griffiths - Design Heroes: Matt Pyke.

http://www.arch2o.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Hyundai-Vision-Hall5.jpeg (edited by me)

In the creative world you often hear about people who 'push the boundaries  and 'think outside the box', these people are the ones who 'break all the rules' and 'try not to be bound by one discipline'. Matt Pyke is no exception to this character profile. He is one of those people who let's nothing get in his way of success and he utilises anything and everything to help him progress. He spoke to Apple about the use of the Macintosh and how it helps him work from his attic in the northern town of Sheffield yet still uphold a robust and professional appearance to the outside world. He is a person to look up to and learn from certainly and I am glad Jonny chose Matt Pyke as his design hero.

With a list of clients like MTV, Apple, Hyundai, Coldplay, Chanel, Audi, Nissan, the V&A, Nike all projects of which were full of diversity yet had the unique stamp of Matt Pyke, I couldn't help but spend a good half an hour lost in his website. Universal Everything is the name of his company and he has recently launched Matt Pyke.com as a seperate entity, he said in an interview with 'It's Nice That'. 

"There’s more people now involved with Universal Everything. Other people are working on things, leading projects, but ultimately it’s still my baby. A lot of the work still stems from initial seed ideas I have, and I then tend to oversee the creative direction, help to push people further."

Some of my favourite pieces of his work are the work he did for Hyundai filmed here:

The beauty of the movement is captured beautifully and then represented by the digital work with such excellence, it's art. The idea behind this particular video, is 'Made By Humans' there are other works in the set that capture different elements of the creation of these Hyundai cars.

"What we tried to do is really emphasise the importance of the human and their role in the creation of things. Although a lot of what you see industrial and automated the important part is that the human spirit is in everything."

Matt Talks about the design process and how working on the computer is an essential part of that process. They transfer the video captured by dancers or tai chi masters and animate around the subjects so that only when the movement is applied, the play button is pressed, you can see what is actually going on. And in Matt's words "that's the thing that breathes the soul into the work".

ITAP - Jane Anderson - Design Hereos: Stefan Sagmeister & Kate Moross

Janes talk on Stefan Sagmeister & Kate Moross was one of those talks that you hear and it makes you want to do stuff. I couldn't help but get passionate in my note taking, i was inspired to get out there and make stuff with stuff just for the sake of it! I believe in those kind of talks/lectures because they have movement and action in them.

I think the reason for such a motivational talk was the two subjects  you cannot look at Sagmeister or Moross' work and not be inspired to 'do'. Their simple philosophies...

Personal work makes client work better.

- Sagmeister

"Make your own shit, just make shit."

- Moross 

...inspire you to get out there, forget about clients brief and projects and just do stuff for the fun of it, the reason you enjoy it in the first place.

Sagmeister's work is heaviy influenced by what he does in his private life. I watched his talk at one of the TED conferences and he talks solely about his personal work, his travels, his own self initiated projects and it's clear that he deems these things highly important. 

http://www.sagmeisterwalsh.com/images/made/images/u_work/Aizone-13_1800_1114_75.jpg

http://www.sagmeisterwalsh.com/images/made/images/u_work/Aizone10_1_1800_1114_75.jpg

These two images are from the "Art Direction & Design for Aizone, a luxury department store in the Middle East. Taking the vibrant nature of the brand and presenting it in campaigns that are printed in newspapers, magazines, and billboards throughout Lebanon."

http://kingydesignhistory2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/trying-comp1.jpg

These images are from his personal work entitled, "Things I Have Learnt In My Life So Far", you can clearly see the influence. Experimental and environmental typography is very striking and when doing the Aizone project they decided to do as much as they could in physical and not on computers for a 'next level' quality of image. Which brings me nicely onto Kate Moross who believes in 'making shit'.

Kate Moross' work has a very hands on feel to it also, she seems to have developed her style simply by making stuff, having a go and not discounting anything right from the beginning of here career.

http://a4.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/7/561c23d7ff3628fb7161e810a85af9ad/l.jpg

http://payload85.cargocollective.com/1/7/237494/4015761/RIDEJOURNAL_800.jpg

These two pieces the first one from 2006 and the second from 2013 you can see how her style has progressed and improved but you can see where it has come from and how she has been on a journey. Much like Sagmeister, the work she has done in the begging (which I would imagine was in the early, fun stage of her career) has influenced her more professional work.

Both these designers are inspirational and I hold them very high up in my hero's list.

ITAP - Mark Murphy - Design Heroes: Saul Bass & David Carson.

Mark Murphy from Surely Creative Design and a visiting lecturer to our course gave us a very diverse and informative talk about two of his design heroes, Saul Bass, the American graphic designer and film maker and David Carson the American, graphic designer, art director and surfer.

SAUL BASS - This man had a very distinctive style. Using Limited colour palates  and hand made type in most of his film title work, but he was also a very prolific graphi designer, designing some amazing logos along with loads of other work.

Here you can see some of the iconic, simplistic logos, all of which were deigned in the 60s and early 70s. His use of white space and drawing with space is exceptional and what every logo designer wishes to achieve. Many of these logos are still in use today, not many of them have needed to be adapted and they are such timeless design pieces.

http://www.graphic-design.com/design-bookshelf/2012/saul_bass/Saul_Bass_Logos_t.jpg

In the talk Mark showed us many different examples of Bass' work I particularly liked the Lawry food packaging for it's timeless design, great use of colour and illustration and typography. These designs would fit right into the supermarket shelves of today and would out rank some of the competition still. That is the mark of great design in my opinion, weather it's still going to look good in 30/40/50 years!

(source: Mark Murphy's presentation slides)

DAVID CARSON - A rule breaker and experimenter, a mad scientist of design. Mark described this guy as 'a marmite designer' you love him or you hate him and at the time I disagreed. My stance was exactly the same as my stance on marmite,  I actually didn't mind his work. I din't love or hate it, it was just ok. I have to be in the mood for it to like and appreciate it. BUT as time has gone on, I have seen more of his work and had time to think about it and i have decided that I am not the biggest fan. In some cases i think his work is good, but i would never choose to design in the way he does. Unless i was requested to.

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/images/uploads/2010/12/lwl_black_swan_0.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgug7HQZlwHq9clK0NSO5LKoHBC_n4wK4gJzzjD285pCS99HzTyKEolCAAY4zjngH0EK16tBKxhDstzcSYw65ask0MdHvMwZmeyZVf3rFeTONW18OLcpLMYau7uchEuHQl49ON_CrK-ib8h/s400/mastercard_david_carson.jpg

I do like this cover image he produced for Little White Lies and I do appreciate his style somewhat. I think in this context it works really well, I also like his use of hand written type in his master card work but a feel that both of these images I like are not typically 'David Carson', they have elements of his style but they're far from signature pieces.

These magazine covers and ads are more what you would think of immediately when someone says David Carson.

http://mabsoota.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/4590744095_a8c360d082_o.jpeg?w=900

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnbVw5zsIyjI0H9ce3QEYTeaX2hm-uGWpYibmzd8p4YA5qDZsHks7rQf8LCvhY1cUR92VOfmsquRUvNQC-iNtQQbFOAIfFw9n_1deBV6ncygmHMBZ4XUQonxp7SVXDtDlRV0LDOQJ7Ca3g/s400/casron%2527s+work+3.png

One thing I cannot bypass is the amazing ability to break the rules of design and come out with innovative and exciting work that forces you to engage with it, 1 - because it's genious and 2 - cause it's slightly different and difficult to read. I have to hand it to him.