Following on from our previous post on Wellington designer Josh Barr, his Blogroll and the Anti-Design Fest (ADF) in London, we’re happy to announce that Anti-Design has another local connection.

Newly returned from NYC,  New Zealand designer Philip Kelly has, in conjunction with the ADF, erected three text/type billboards to be included in the London festival this September. You can check them out on Symonds Street, Pitt Street and New North Road (more images after the jump). Kelly says, “The billboards consist of original text and typography … that engage with the nature of language, visual communications, and the media infused urban landscape.”

Kelly’s work in visual communications encompasses art direction, graphic design, typography and photography. He says he spent a decade in New York, joining JWT as type director, before going on to launch thompsondesign. Concurrently, he designed for independent record labels and publishers, including the monograph of acclaimed design studio Socio X for Graphis Books. In 2006 he founded his own studio Pkwy, based in New York and Shanghai. Kelly’s original type and art direction have appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, Paper Magazine, Big Magazine, and the Graphis Design Annuals. After over a decade in New York and Shanghai he is now based in Auckland. This project was kindly supported by Omnigraphics and OTW Billboards.

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.

Perhaps unfairly, promotional material for banking institutions doesn’t often register highly on this site. But then again, the promotional material for banking institutions isn’t generally as typographically interesting as this item produced for an Australian entity called uBank.

Don’t despair, there’s a Kiwi connection: the multi-talented designer, colourist and image retoucher Geoff Francis was inolved, as was Ned Wenlock from Hoverlion in Wellington. They worked on this project with Australian creative agency Three Drunk Monkeys.

(Additional credits: executive creative director: Justin Drape / Scott Nowell; creative director: Noah Regan; art director: Becky Alperstein; copywriter: Henry Kember; broadcast producer: Helen Willis.)

Diane Mikhael, a member of the International Society of Typographers, and fellow assistant professor at VCU Qatar, Law Alsobrook are on the way to Wellington to talk about visual communication in the Middle East. The two designers have extensive knowledge of design in the Gulf and the Middle East, including bilingual design and Arabic font design. *Al Nafizah is an Arabic word meaning window. You can catch them on Thursday 22 July at 17.30, at: Massey University, Theatrette 10A02, Museum Building, Buckle St, Wellington. RSVP to L.Snelling@massey.ac.nz.

It’s a deceptively simple idea, but a stroke of genius when it comes to self-promotion. A young Brooklyn-based type designer leaves her day job to go freelance in September 2009, and needs a personal project to keep her motivated and show off her skills. Blogging? It’s been done. Online portfolio? Already got one. So the designer, who draws every new alphabet by hand, vows to create one new letter every working day — a decorative drop cap. After a brainstorming session with friends, she also decides to make each letter available for online use only, “for the beautification of blog posts everywhere” — a sort of open-source style dictionary.  Ten months later and with a target 12 alphabets on their way to completion, the Daily Drop Cap is keeping people engaged with what designer, illustrator and typographer Jessica Hische is producing, while keeping the spotlight on what she’s good at and allowing her to set her own agenda.

“I realised it wasn’t just making the letters that would make it popular, it was making it more interactive and allowing people to re-use the drop caps,” says Hische. “I’ve had unbelievable amounts of feedback. Months and months later, people are still sending me stuff, and I get so much traffic because of people posting about it on different blogs. What I thought would be a side project has been helpful for my other projects as well.”

Just twenty-five, Hische (“just like ‘fish’ but with an H”) says the Daily Drop Cap project has also encouraged potential clients to overlook her comparative youth.

“It was a hindrance at first, being young,” she says. “But I got so much exposure that people now just take me seriously, as well as taking it as an inspiration for how quickly you can do things.”

And, given the way she works, Hische is quick. It can take her as little as a couple of hours to draw a new typeface, though her first commercial font, Buttermilk, was three months in development (on and off). Her trademark vintage-look, hand-drawn style is created in Illustrator rather than Fontlab, the preferred software for most typographers as it generates crisp, perfect curves. However, Hische says a bit of wonkiness works better for her.

“I don’t want it to look too mathematical or perfect, or for my work to look like it can be made by anyone,” she says. “Before I started the project I was already pretty fast, but any practice makes you faster, and I make decisions faster. There’s a lot of fine-tuning that happens. It takes me less time now to make a new display font for something than to scour the Internet for something really good.”

As a promotional enterprise rather than a profit-making one, the DDC sits alongside Hische’s identity and book design projects, and her other work as a freelance illustrator. This has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, and often includes her characteristic swirly, vintage-look letters and wry anthropomorphic drawings of animals — such as the one featuring partied-out, passed-out cats produced for the new year’s issue of a financial magazine.

Her calendar is, she says, generally clogged up for four weeks in advance. She gets so many questions emailed to her from students and other designers that she’s created an FAQ section on her website to avoid having to respond to each individually. Hische’s success is, however, not an accident. She spent three years freelancing heavily at night after clocking out of day jobs at Headcase Design in her native Philadelphia (where she worked on, among other things, Dirty Blonde, a compilation of Courtney Love’s scrawled, illustrated diaries) and New York-based studio Louise Fili, which specialises in packaging, restaurant and book design.

Hische admits that, right now, she has five new drop caps to catch up on, but says that coming up with new ideas has never been a problem. “I never know what I’m going to do until I sit down, which can be intimidating. But I always want to do something completely different to what I’ve already done. It’s always good to know what you don’t want to do — given limitations I tend to do better. I actually thought I would be more experimental than I have been, so I’m going to push myself more for the last ones.”

Houses

Ken Leung, a London-based creative director from design consultancy Modern Publicity, was responsible for the design work. Leung, who has worked on titles such as Monocle, and says he drew on the craftsmanship of traditional architectural drawings and their hand lettering when he refashioned the magazine.

For typeface spotters out there, the fonts used in the magazine’s redesign are ITC Mendoza Roman (for body copy and headings); Christiana for captions; Rosewood for numerals; and Lydian for tags.

Houses products page.

Houses spread.

Frank Black monogram (unused).

Here’s a rock-related story. Peter Oxley is a rock climber. So too, as it happens, is the Pixies’ band manager. In a slightly convoluted chain of events, Oxley, creative director of Christchurch design firm Ratio, who knew the band manager from London, got thinking about Pixies frontman Frank Black (or Black Francis as he’s sometimes known). In particular, he got thinking about a monogram, as he’d been told that Black, with his wife Violet Clark, was about to set up a new record company.Oxley eventually designed a monogram (above) – a play on an interrelation between the letter ‘f’ and a musical note. He also designed a poster, incorporating the logotype into a circular, clock-resembling piece.
“I really liked the poster’s time-based image, created by just using the monogram. It envisages the idea of how much his music inspired me over the years and how much he is totally dedicated to producing great work.”

The designer sent the works to Black, but they weren’t used – Black subsequently changed his name back from Frank Black to Black Francis (his given name is actually Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV). But this is not a bad news story. The singer, remembering Oxley’s unsolicited work, recently approached him to design some additional material for Grand Duchy, a rock band formed in 2008 by Black Francis and his wife Violet Clark. “It was due to the monogram and this poster image that he commissioned me directly for the Grand Duchy work,” says Oxley.

“He remembered the earlier work and this led to Ratio designing and art-directing their new CD – Petits Fours. The main element of interest with that project was the design of a bespoke font for the band that supported the idea of light and dark between Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis) and Violet Clarke within the band.” MB

Frank Black Poster by Christchurch firm Ratio.

Logo (top), letter ‘G’ and CD.

Grand Duchy new font.

Words: Stephen Olsen

Van Melle at One Night Out.

This year has been a festival-based ‘coming out’ year for imported Dutch designer Gerbrand van Melle. In February he took part in TypeSHED11, the international typography event held on Wellington’s waterfront, followed in November by a one-man-exhibition for one night only at this Massey University’s BLOW creative arts festival.

A former senior lecturer in Typography and Digital Media Design at the Utrecht School of the Arts, van Melle exported his life to Wellington in 2007 where he is now a Senior Lecturer of Typography and Graphic Design at Massey University, and where he has successfully tutored a cohort of students such as Josh Barr , who took out both the Gold and Supreme gongs in the student graphic design category in this year’s Best Design awards.

2009 was always going to be a milestone year for van Melle, based on one of those almost lifelong associations that so many design careers are marked by and that often deservedly need to end with an exclamation mark!

In van Melle’s case this association long preceded his ascent into academia, going back 20 years to Utrecht’s widely famous music venue: Tivoli.

Tivoli logo.

It was there that van Melle, and his student comrades, first found a unique milieu to indulge both a passion for typography and a passion for tailormade posters.

Initially aided by the prospect of free beer, the production of posters for Tivoli created a line of work that has proceeded – gig by gig by gig by gig – over a 20 year period that matured through to the point where Gerbrand had also partnered with Tivoli as a steward of its corporate identity– all captured as an anthology in a book he published called 18+, Almost Two Decades of Popdesign (2007).

“Putting this relationship on show at the BLOW festival was too good an opportunity to miss,” says van Melle. “There is a rare thing that goes on with music posters and so the show, which I called One Night Out, just had to be about a one night event. Holding it in the Melling Morse Architects’ parking lot in Wellington was also the perfect venue for exhibiting street based work”.

One Night Out poster-making practice.

One Night Out poster (2009).

Through his 20s and 30s van Melle continued his work with Tivoli while co-founding Aap-ontwerpers and later Aapmedia, a Utrecht-based design studio working with a diverse portfolio of clients in the creative industries. He fondly recalls one particular backhanded compliment in the early days of Aapmedia was the description from within the Dutch design community that it seemed as if “somebody’s Mac exploded”.

Throughout this time the work with Tivoli was a constant companion. “In the early days Tivoli undoubtedly provided a playground to experiment with typographic and visual language and an opportunity to delve into experimental printing techniques. This then moved on to expressing the huge variety of their programme through a more systematic communication approach resulting in, for instance, my ‘black-gray-white’ series. This was developed so that the communication department of Tivoli could use it any way they liked in a modular way that also has a lot of freedom”.

Left to right: Danko Jones (2009); Sarah Kelly poster, (2007); Dub Trio (2008).

Tivoli posters from 2008/09.

Surprisingly perhaps van Melle has found his punctuated transition from Utrecht to Wellington, where his new interests are information design and online music experience, relatively seamless. He says he is just as “nourished” in Wellington as Utrecht, with the added attraction that unlike the inescapable saturation of design in the Netherland, “New Zealand is not designed, it has dangerous nature, it is still wide open”.

“Closing the chapter on Tivoli with One Night Out definitely felt right… sharing what I had collected and my design philosophy and augmenting the momentum of TypeSHED11”.

Poster installation at One Night Out.

Most importantly perhaps, paying a tribute to Tivoli was also a tribute to “every drip of energy” that had gone into the posters themselves as carriers of stories. “I love that these rare things pass out of our control, the traces they leave and the stories you hear back from their use”.

Van Melle ends with two such stories. Firstly there is the guy who is imprisoned in Utrecht and who decorated his complete cell with reggae posters that Gerbrand had designed for Tivoli. Lastly, a rare form of homage springs to mind: the time when Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, personally handcrafted his own Tivoli T-shirt to wear at a Dutch Festival to pay respect to the first time Pearl Jam played in the Netherlands.

Eddie Vedder sporting custom-made Tivoli apparel. Photographer unknown.

Van Melle: “For me this all feeds into the concept of remixing designs in a constant flow of ingredients that become resolutions that become ingredients that become resolutions that become remixes of the remix… and so on it goes”.

One Night Out.

One Night Out.

One Night Out.

One Big Night.

Disco (1993).

de Raggende Manne (1993).

Deus (1994).

Heads Up (1990).

Following an overwhelmingly positive response to our latest cover image (a poster for Kris Sowersby’s AGDA speaking tour) designed by The International Office, ProDesign returned to the Wellington-based graphic design duo to check out what other work it has done in the poster format. Here is the result, with caption information provided by designer Duncan Forbes.

‘Experimental Extinctions’: “Lela loves her layering. We love the old Freehand MX texture fills. Hate Freehand though, what a dog.”

‘Fiction/Non-Fiction’: “A project we did with writer/curator Laura Preston. A page insert to an already printed book. An intervention/reaction to the other writers.”

This work also from Fiction/Non-Fiction.

This work also from Fiction/Non-Fiction.

‘Small Victories’: “Reflection is so overused in fashion design. Lets run with it!”

‘Heat Like Me’: “They were doing a gig at the Pony club in Melbourne. Ha. Ha.”

‘New Lords, New Laws’: “An identity is more than the typeface, its the idea. These were rocking on A0.”

More from ‘New Lords, New Laws’.

And more from ‘New Lords, New Laws’.

‘Billy Apple: New York 1969–1973′: “Billy loves his Futura, and it is damn nice. We found a nice old authentic cut and based the design on his letterhead at the time.”

‘AGDA International Speaker Tour’: A good collaboration with Kris (Sowersby). What do designers love on posters? Giant f**k off letters!”

‘Hue & Cry Journal Launch’: “Taking the Gysin cut-up method literally, we used text from the magazine.”

More from Hue & Cry launch.

‘DINZ Designers Speak’: “When’s that designers’ talk?” “Um… on the 26th I think.”

Graphic designers, and fans of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, might be interested in this gallery of posters that charts the visual history of the annual furniture showcase. What’s interesting is the variance in styles from decade to decade, and of course from designer to designer. It looks a bit like the wheels fell off towards the end of the 80s – or perhaps the money just dried up.

1961

For the record, the identity was designed in 1961 by Camillo Pizzigoni; from 1962 to 1965 by Studio Becheroni-Marotta;from 1966 to 1985 by Alberto Longhi; from 1986 to 1993 by Pierluigi Cerri; from 1994 to 2003 by Massimo Vignelli/Vignelli Associates (Compasso d’Oro Award 1998 for the graphic identity); and, from 2003 to the present by Studio Cerri & Associati/Pierluigi Cerri, Alessandro Colombo [9th International Fair Poster Competition, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), first prize for  Euroluce 2005 poster, given by UFI/Global Association of the Exhibition Industry].

1962

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

1973

1974

1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1988

1989

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007