Last week I attended the Melbourne AGideas conference, the annual design inspiration event held in Melbourne where local designers and designers from around the world come to talk design. The event runs over 3 days and for those that can’t afford the time the Australian Graphics Design Association (AGDA) presents one of the speakers for it’s members to experience.
Tobias Frere-Jones, one half of the type designers Hoefler & Frere-Jones (www.typography.com) was the guest speaker for this year. True to the expected demure persona of a type designer who spends his time tweaking, finessing and fussing over the minute detail of type design, Tobias shuffled onto stage and immediately began talking type.
It’s lovely to see a type designer talk type - it feels liberating - how many of us designers have tried to talk type design to clients and friends to only see their eyes roll to the back of their heads - here we got to indulge in the passion that drives type designers and to discover where they draw their inspiration for the expression they put to their typefaces.
Tobias discussed the inspiration behind 2 of their typefaces - probably their most know and commercially successful sanserif typeface Gotham, initially designed for GQ magazine, and the slab serif typeface Archer, designed for the Martha Stewart Living magazine.
Here both Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones talk about Gotham - almost verbatim, though he did elaborate further in his speech!.
here they talk about Helvetica and thoughts on type design:
The magazine born of the great depression of the 30’s and built a reputation as having a social conscience and practically paving the way for the designed magazine was Fortune magazine. It came to life being different to every other publication produced at the time and gained a strong following after it first issue. The publication was a larger format, used heavy paper and printed in colour - whilst the norm was simply black text and perhaps some decorative vignettes and ornate type.
The art director Thomas Cleland rationalised the new design as “The design of Fortune is based upon its function of presenting a clear and readable text profusely illustrated with pictures, mostly photographic, in a form ample and agreeable to the eye”, and with regard to print production he stated that it went “beyond the technical limitations of most periodicals”.
The publication was 280mm wide x 355mm high and had over 200 pages.
In 1949 the magazine was redesigned by Dutch designer Leo Lionni along with Walter Allner, who graduated from Dessau Bauhaus. The new design was implemented in 1951 and ran through to 1969 and through this period the covers of the magazine came to life with some of the most expressive illustrations of the time - a gallery of some of the more impressive examples are here.
This is an article by Paul Rand, discussing the failure of some CEOs to acknowledge the strength of visual design as an effective tool for their businesses and not to be seen simply as decoration. Read on …
“Because design is so often equated with mere decoration, it is safe to assume that few people understand what design means or the role it plays in the corporate world. Graphic design pertains to the look of things — of everything that rolls of a printing press, from a daily newspaper to a box for corn flakes. It also pertains to the nature of things: not only how something should look but why, and often, what it should look like.
Why then do design programs in large corporations seem to be going out of style? Why is the average graphic design effort today merely average at best? Is the paucity of good designers and good CEOs possibly the reason for the paucity of good design? The Arco Oil Company began to lose interest in its design program when it chairman Robert Anderson departed. The highly acclaimed CBS design program began to erode when William Paley and Frank Stanton were no longer active.
One rarely hears of the program that put Westinghouse on the design map. And when Walter Paepcke, the CEO of the Container Corporation of America died, why did the flow of distinguished advertising by world-famous painters and designers cease? Is it mere coincidence that when Rawleigh Warner departed, Eliot Noyes’s elegant designs for Mobil stations were aesthetically downgraded?
Who can resist this crazy technology? We were skeptical about the benefits of Twitter when we were first drawn to it through curiosity, it seemed like a self indulgent, me me me, time wasting, Facebook wannabe - but since having a personal Twitter account for some time now I have discovered it’s strengths and it certainly is a powerful web tool for gathering information, receiving recommended links to relevant information and keeping abreast of comments and attitudes with those with similar interests and professions.
We’ve only just started so give us some time to find our feet but do follow us at Design in the mind on Twitter
When I speak with printers these days most feel confident that print will be here for the long run - who could live without the tactile feel of paper, the smell of ink, the satisfaction of turning a page to reveal a new one and the intimate relationship we have with these items that hold so much inspiration?
Within the last 10 years the big print presses that put ink to paper have progressed like the car - fundamentally they are the same machine - same concept as the very original machines, but now a lot of the human control has been taken over by computers, accuracy and efficiency have improved.
Creating printing plates have improved immensely from film photo offset to direct to plate using lasers (CTP). So there is little sign that this technology is going to drop off anytime soon.
Or will it?
We have already seen the advances in digital printing almost equaling that of offset printing with printing process like the HP Indigo, but what about the non-printing options that may kill printing altogether.
No need to mention the web and the onslaught of the PDA where we can visit any site any time for all information. But these devices rely on transmitted light in their visual displays to get the image to the viewer - this can be straining to the eye and be difficult to read over several hours and doesn’t provide the same readability as paper.
The future is likely to be in the area of electronic paper displays (or ePaper) - the only technology available at the moment that comes close to the reflective qualities of ink on paper. This technology has been around since the 1970s and was only available in black and white - like the Amazon’s ‘Kindle”, but now technology is advancing at a high rate and most major players in the computer display markets are getting involved and we’re are now seeing full colour screens.
Initially the technology used polyethylene spheres between 75 and 106 micrometres across. Each sphere is composed of negatively charged black plastic on one side and positively charged white plastic on the other (each bead is thus a dipole). The spheres are embedded in a transparent silicone sheet, with each sphere suspended in a bubble of oil so that they can rotate freely. The polarity of the voltage applied to each pair of electrodes then determines whether the white or black side is face-up, thus giving the pixel a white or black appearance.
Now it involves what is termed as e-ink through Electrophoretic display and Electro-wetting displays.
Cross-Section of Electronic-Ink Microcapsules
The E Ink microcapsules are only 100 microns wide, which means that roughly 100,000 microcapsules can fit into a square inch of paper. Each of those microcapsules contains hundreds of smaller pigmented chips. In earlier prototypes, E Ink worked with white chips and blue ink, but later it developed other color inks for multicolored displays. Wiring the pages to create an electric charge and still maintain a paper-thin page has been a challenges in developing a digital book out of electronic ink. E Ink partnered with Lucent Technologies to enable the use of organic transistors developed by Lucent in the e-paper displays. These tiny transistors can be printed onto a page to provide the adequate charge needed to switch the E Ink chips from one color to another. - source
At this rate I think I might call this blog Design in History - not a bad idea as history holds, what appears to be, an endless source of inspiration for innovative ideas and visuals that stand the test of time.
Olivetti played a large part in creating innovative and contemporary marketing visuals in their time.
Established in 1908 by Camillo Olivetti with the first typewriter manufactured in 1910 - as you might imagine - the typewriter would have been almost as innovative as the computer in those days, freeing up the labor-intensive hand written manuscripts. Adriano Ollivetti, Camillo’s son, was appointed general manager in 1933 and set about employing architects and designers to develop a modernist aethetic for the company, which was popular at the time - which permeated throughout the organisation, from thier factory buidlings through to product design and to their advertising and graphics.
As early as the 1930s, the Development & Advertising Office, headed initially (1931) by Renato Zveteremich and later (1937) by Leonardo Sinisgalli, became a cultural centre which attracted, applied and spread new ideas in corporate graphics and communication. Its role and philosophy were further strengthened between the 1960s and 1980s under the leadership of Renzo Zorzi.
Over the years, an impressive number of painters, graphics artists, scholars and architects have been involved in the development of graphics art and advertising communication to match the Olivetti style and the characteristics of its products. After the creation of a series of posters on the first Olivetti machines created by M. Dudovich, the company’s advertising and institutional graphics made ample use of the talents of Giovanni Pintori, who worked with Olivetti between 1938 and 1968, and, a few years later, Egidio Bonfante. Their work complemented that of the product designers and architects who were planning Olivetti’s buildings and also designing graphics, exhibition stands or gift objects. - Source
The renowned contemporary visual designer/artist Stephan Segmeister created this public art installation in an Amsterdam square - a typographic expression of a statement “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better” made up of 250,000 Euro coins covering 300 square meters, painstakingly put in place by a team of dedicated workers over a period of 8 days.
Find out what happened to the this public art once it was completed - 250,000 coins in a public space! not quite what was expected, find out here
A delightful animation created by Nexus Productions and funded by Adobe, developed to show off the capabilities of Adobe CS4 software. It was created with various methods inlcuding paper, stop-frame animation and 2D drawing
The popularity of screen printing does not appear to have waned - with the advent of new technology that seems to be making old technologies redundant, screen printing still thrives as a very flexible printing method.
Screen printing (also known as photomechanical serigraphy) is one of the oldest forms of printing, first seen used in China. It is a versatile printing process that allows a printed image to be applied to many substrates that no other printing process can achieve. Today it is well know for it’s use of applying graphics to T-shirts but is also used for printing posters, textile fabric, product labels, printed electronics, including circuit board printing, balloons, plastic packaging, manufactured products - and the list goes on.
Screen printing: A printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas - wikipedia
The advantage of Screen printing is the density and viscosity of the inks used - they are opaque and rich in colour, flexible and adhere to a vast number of surfaces. there are about 5 types of inks used in this process: solvent, water, and solvent plastisol, water plastisol, and UV curable.
Screen printing is a printing method that is a truly hands-on process, and a potentially messy one at that. It is a relatively simple process that can be done from a home studio or be done by large automated machines.
T-shirt/fabric screen printing
Commercial screen printing
Screen printing on a small scale
Here is a video that goes into depth about the screen printing process, including finishing the job at the end with guillotining
