Blog Roll to Hit London

Wel­ling­ton designer Josh Barr has work chosen for Anti Design Fest­ival in London.

Barr’s work, Blog Roll, is a sculp­tural piece that chal­lenges the notion of graphic design as two-dimensional and ques­tions the value of digital com­mu­nic­a­tion or, as he puts it, “In essence, the work pro­vokes debate about the value of what pub­lish­ing is.”

“I’m ask­ing: does review, thought­ful­ness and edit­ing go out the win­dow in an era when any­one can quickly pub­lish any­thing online? And what is the value of pub­lish­ing anymore?”

Barr works at Design­works, in Wel­ling­ton, and cre­ated Blog Roll by devel­op­ing a soft­ware pro­gramme that takes the con­tent of any blog and prints it through a fax machine into a 45-metre long roll of one-ply paper. He then hand per­for­ated and rolled it into a toilet-roll like object.

Blog Roll was Barr’s final present­a­tion for his fourth year Bach­elor of Design at Mas­sey Uni­ver­sity and a stark con­trast to his fel­low stu­dents’ work, much of which was presen­ted in book format.

He says his work is likely to have been accep­ted into the Anti Design Fest­ival because it was a strong cri­tique of graphic design and the anti­thesis of good design principles.

“Each Blog Roll is prin­ted using web fonts such as Arial and Verd­ana: that’s a real chal­lenge to graphic design­ers who are used to spend­ing a lot of time con­sid­er­ing the typo­graphy of each work,” says Barr.

“The present­a­tion of these fonts didn’t go down well with my design lec­tur­ers, but iron­ic­ally that’s prob­ably what got me into the Festival.”

The Anti Design Fest­ival runs from Septem­ber 18 – 26, 2010.

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