MUSÉE DES ARTS DÉCORATIFS, PARIS EXHIBITION, 2009

antoine et manuel“Recapturing a sense of levity could well be what Paris needs to reclaim a leadership position on the contemporary art and design scene.”)

Antoine Audiau & Manuel Warosz began their working partnership in 1993. They are both illustrators and type designers and they create an extremely diverse range of work, from advertising campaigns to furniture design and home décor. Their work has previously included paint blotches, marker doodles, rough sketches computer rendering, 3D modelling, photography, but their most favoured process is collage.

The style of their work is very much dependent on delving into their imaginations for inspiration rather than being reliant on historical and cultural references. The outcome of this work ethic is very light hearted and playful, sometimes childlike imagery, with a hint of hallucination. Another element of their somewhat abstract style is quite lavish pattern making which draws reference from very ornamental design, of which there has been a fairly recent revival in graphic design.

There are a small group of young creative’s that work in a similar imagination driven way and can be likened to A+M; Jaime Hayon, Genevieve Gauckler and M/M (Paris).

Antoine and Manuel’s work is sometimes criticised for promoting style over substance because it’s not always concept driven in the same way as a great deal of graphic art and design. Although it seems, the majority doesn’t share this view.

“Recapturing a sense of levity could well be what Paris needs to reclaim a leadership position on the contemporary art and design scene.”(Veronique Vienne)

See ‘the decriminalisation of ornament’ Eye no. 58 vol. 15

book by it’s coverA REVIEW OF ANTOINE ET MANUEL COMPILATION VOL. 1

The French duo Antoine et Manuel have been making work together for more than ten years. The designers have worked on a wide range of projects from designing campaigns for theatres to constructing crazy 3-d sculptures to designing furniture and home decor. This book is a huge compilation of their work which all feels really fresh to me. There’s

lots of amazing typographic treatments and some really cool looking illustrations, pages from sketchbooks and the invitation made for a Christian Lacroix show. The book has a few essays in the back from Christian Lacroix, Emmanuelle Huynh, Daniel Larrieu, Jean-Marc Grangier and more, that I can’t read- hopefully you’re fluent in French.

genevieve gauckler

1. DIGITALLY ISOLATED. KEMISTRY GALLERY, LONDON (FIRST SOLO SHOW IN ENGLAND)

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“PATACORP, THE FAT ONE AND THERMOKUKUS, THE TALL ONE,

STAND ON THE FLOOR OF MY FLAT AND COMMENT VARIOUS SITUATIONS.” G.GAUCKLER)

SILLY & ABSURD, AS USUAL.

Genevieve is part of the wave of graphic artists and practitioners in France that is helping to revive the design scene with the wealth of imaginative work that she produces. She also uses humour in her work, especially in her character design. who creates numerous lovable characters, blends them into everyday life scenes and turns the fantastical world into reality with her magical power. She has an evident taste for simple, colorful shapes. She’s into everything and constantly amazed, handling and creating images and shapes with dexterity and innocence. (From the bio on her website)

She was also featured in Eye Magazine as part of the aforementioned article on the revival of ornament and decoration in graphic design. Pattern making and effectively making things ‘look pretty’ is becoming celebrated again which, in my opinion, is positive because it seems that graphic designers often get bogged down by having a concept or a reason for every aspect of a piece of work.

2. GENEVIEVE SIGNS PRINTS FOR LONDON EXHIBITION

3. PART OF A SERIES OF 10 ILLUSTRATIONS FOR ISSUE 10 OF ONLINE MAGAZINE ‘THISISAMAGAZINE’

THE EMPEROR OF WHAT?

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“THIS IS A NEW SERIES, INSPIRED BY OLD PAINTINGS OF CHINESE EMPERORS, SITTING ON HYPER-DECORATED CHAIRS AND WEARING AMAZING CLOTHES. I DEFINITELY LIKE DECORATIVE ARTS” G.G

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maureen mooren

daniel van der velden “something between an H, the silhouette of a building and a cross”

An example of the combination of good typesetting and pattern making is the work of the collaboration of the Dutch designers, Maureen Mooren and Daniel van der Velden. They met when they were students and worked together between 1998 and 2007. The most influential project that they worked on was to design the new identity for the Holland Festival in 2005, which they won various prestigious awards for.

I admire their interesting approach to this project (and others). The reason being that the majority of designers when asked to design a brand identity would centre it around the production of a logo. Their opinion on that generic process was that a logo is ‘a product of corporate culture.’ Alternatively, they create a patterned theme to use throughout all the design work to unify it as opposed to branding it explicitly. This method was applied to the Holland Festival brief. Argyle jumpers and socks inspired the pattern favoured by the festival goers, i.e. middle aged, educated and wealthy consumers of culture. ‘These argyle patterns stand for a conservative, yet playful aesthetic.’ The patterns also are supposed to be a comment on contemporary Dutch society and are made up of stained glass windows and ‘rather apocalyptic’ images.

In their opinion, ornament and decoration in 21st century patterns are ways to convey messages that are not direct statements. ‘We think that patterns are interesting to the extent that they promote discovery, mystery,’ they say.

“patterns are interesting to the extent that they

promote discovery, mystery”

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1. ARCHIS MAGAZINE 2001 - 2004

2 & 3. HOLLAND FESTIVAL POSTERS

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1 & 2. 50 HANDS ORCHESTRA BOOK - BY HOUSEHOLD LONDON 3. ‘50 HANDS’ WHISTLES IN CONSTRUCTION

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household

Household are a design collective based in London and set up in 2008 by George Wu and Sarah Gottileb. They work in print, book publishing, exhibition design, film events and educational workshops. Their broad spectrum of experience and knowledge means that they are successful in creating interesting, relevant and beautiful design. I think that they also manage to balance concept with craft and creative design extremely well.

Their raison d’etre: \ “To offer curious experiences through talks, workshops and collaborative projects, with an aim to set up a community addressing the origination of new ideas.”

50 hands orchestra

50 Hands is a book that allows participants to become part of a fully-fledged Orchestra. Regardless of musical ability, you will be able to play popular classics within just one hour. Inspired by Change Ringing - Outside the church environment, Bell Ringers would memorise their musical sequences through the use of Hand Bells. Each page is cut to a pretuned length which is torn out, rolled and attached to a length of straw to transform the book into a series of whistles. In collaboration with Yuri Suzuki.

To watch a video of the 50 Hands Orchestra in action at Arnolfini, Bristol, go to; http://vimeo.com/6848410

the festival to plead for skills

POSTERS DESIGNED FOR HOUSEHOLD’S SERIES OF WORKSHOPS HELD DURING THE RCA SHOW 2008. POSTERS FOLD DOWN INTO INVITATIONS

posters designed for household’s series of workshops

held during the rca show 2008. each poster folds down

to an invitation for the individual event.

on the reverse is an introduction to the new studio.

Type On Demand was a a collaborative project between George Wu and Sarah Gottileb in which letter forms were constructed in no more than eight minutes. I think this is a really interesting project, both aesthetically and creatively.

When put under such short time constraints, it forces us to stop thinking and just let ideas flow through working. This can produce very experimental solutions to design problems as it goes totally against the grain of how designers usually work.

In terms of typography it breaks away from the conformity of our preconceptions of what letterforms should look like. Obviously, instinctively we are still influenced by typographic history when doing an exercise like this.

This project links well to Peter Bil’aks experimental approach to typography he applied when creating the model for this History typeface.

“Dance is comparable to typography because they both rely on rhythm & harmony, but at the same time you could say that they are almost the opposite of each other”

peter bil’akPeter Bil’ak set up the type foundry Typotheque, in Den Haag

in 1999. Since then they have produced some very well regarded typefaces. They create a ‘continuously evolving catalogue of typefaces and developed in innovative ways of sampling & consuming them.’

‘Typotheque started with a single typeface’ – This was Fedra sans which since its release in 2003 has grown into a very large font family of over 100 variations. In 2004 a custom version was commissioned by Collins dictionaries for use in their redesign, which had to be exceptionally readable at small sizes.

The other typefaces that have been released run on an alphabetical system; Eureka, Fedra, Greta, History, Irma… (the letters A-D were used on earlier typefaces that weren’t commercialised.

History is a conceptual typeface system that uses ever-changing combinations of existing typefaces. It links to the computers calendar to produce a random generation each day.

Despite the fact that type design is more reliant on historical reference and concepts, when ‘History’ is used in context it can still look quite decorative. As shown in the window design of the ‘20 Years of Dancing in Print’ exhibition at the AIGA National Design Centre, New York. History is a big seller for Typotheque but the feedback that Peter received was that the project was ‘interesting…but hardly usable’

Alongside Typotheque, Peter works with commercial design, makes projects for contemporary dance, writes, curates etc. He puts the reason for all of this variation down to the fact that he is ‘not really able to argue strongly for any single idea. I usually see the opposing view at the same time.’

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Type design, like many disciplines, has often been driven by technology, each wave of change in printing technology provoking the development of new approaches to design. In the eighteenth century, for example, innovations in papermaking and inking techniques inspired new typefaces with much higher contrast between the thick and thin strokes of the characters. The introduction of pantographic punch- and matrix-cutting in the late nineteenth century enabled numerous variations of a typeface to be manufactured from a single drawing, transforming

is supplanted by technological progress, the less obvious motifs of type design such as continuity or self-awareness are neglected. Solving a particular technological problem is only a short detour in history’s path. Solving all the technical problems would mean the end of type history, but this history can itself be the prime inspiration for new designs.

The History type system was in development longer than any other project I ever worked on. Its beginnings can be traced to the early 1990’s when I experimented with decorative layering systems

To read the whole essay, go to; www.typotheque.com/articles/the_history_of_history

inspired by 19th century types, trying to dissect Tuscan typefaces into their structural components.

While most historians and designers regard this period with horror, and many history books call the typefaces decadent or regressive, I found Tuscans very charming and inspirational. I started drawing a layering font that incorporated the possibilities of Tuscan types, but because of technological limitations, I never completed the project.

Based on a skeleton of Roman inscriptional capitals, History includes 21 layers, 21 independent typefaces which share widths and other metric information so that they can be recombined.

typefaces into flexible systems with vast ranges of typographic variants. In the mid-twentieth century the adoption of photocomposition systems meant that spacing and kerning could be adjusted with greater precision, inspiring (among other things) the development of more fonts simulating handwriting. Most recently, the personal computer has spurred a wave of new fonts based on previously unexplored motifs, such as modularity or random chance.

Seeing type design solely as a problem-solving exercise is limiting, however, reducing type design to a response mechanism‚ a craft detached from its own history. When the idea of cultural progress

Emigre Magazine Covers

emigreRudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko founded the type foundry,

Emigre in 1984 and they also published Emigre magazine between 1984 and 2005, which showcased the designs created by Emigre in order to display their potential to the design world. They set up the foundry in order to distribute their own typefaces and became one of the most widely recognised early users of bitmap fonts designed on the early generations of Macintosh computers.

Over the years Emigre have had some very well regarded designers and typographers working for them including Jonathan Barnbrook, Jeffery Keedy, Edward Fella, amongst many talented others.

Their fonts were designed in relation to restrictions of the times so were considered ‘experimental’, especially those by Zuzana Licko.

For example, matrix was designed in 1984 and worked with the various restrictions of the technology at the time, of slow processing and low resolution. 45-degree serifs were used because they require fewer points to define shapes so the typeface would take up less memory and would print more quickly.

Licko also designed triplex in 1990 as a substitute for Helvetica, which was also subject to inspiration from the restrictions of early Macs.

Mrs Eaves is another of Emigre’s well known typefaces but it is of a different style to the bitmap designs of early Licko and is influenced by tradition. It was designed in 1996 as a revival of Baskerville and named after John Baskerville’s wife. The idea of the typeface was to represent the individual qualities created by letterpress technology through digital reproduction.

mrs eaves was widely used in issue 38 of emigre magazine

I came across this manifesto when flicking through Font.The Sourcebook - a book about the history of type which acts as a very handy research archive. The original manifesto was written in 1964 and signed by designers at the time. It was written to highlight the importance of design in relation to society. The manifesto was rewritten and updated in 2000 to show that it still had relevance in current graphic design. The new manifesto was published by Adbusters, Emigre, Eye, AIGA and Blueprint. The signatories included Zuzana Licko, Rudy Vanderlans and Jonathan Barnbrook of Emigre fame.

Both manifesto’s in full are available in the 8 page insert

published in

magazine

‘We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, photographers and students who have been brought up in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable means of using our talents.

...we have reached a saturation point at which the high pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise. We think that there are other things more worth using our skill and experience on.’

SIX was printed on 130gsm Snowdon paper with a hand screen printed cover on 240gsm cardPaper supplied by Jacksons, Liverpool

Researched and written by Isobel Seacombewww.idiosyncraticdisplay.tumblr.com