John L Walters rolls up his trousers and paddles into the cool wavelet sounds of Scorching Bay on Wellington’s curiously tranquil south coast, and calls out, “I’m going to have that Michael Nyman tune (from The Piano) in my head…” Before The Piano was released, Walters had featured the tune in his audio journal Unknown Public (UP03 pianoFORTE): “An uncharacteristic, but cinematically powerful piano solo. His [Nyman’s] presence in the film, as an unseen nineteenth-century composer, is as wordlessly powerful as Holly Hunter’s,” he wrote.

We’re at Scorching Bay because John Metcalfe, a New Zealand musician currently working with Peter Gabriel on his New Blood tour produced an album, Scorching Bay, reviewed by Walters in 2004. ( He said: “The best bits of Scorching Bay are as pure as a piano study or a solo improvisation.”) While in Wellington for Massey University’s BLAST design conference, Walters took a hotel in Cuba Street, the title of a track on the same Metcalfe album.

In conversation on the beach, I push him to recall the first album he ever bought. Either Help or Revolver, he says, and then quotes, in response, outspoken New York designer Paula Scher, “You can learn everything you need to know [about graphic design] from just three Beatles covers: Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s and ‘The White Album’.”

Walters is editor and co-owner of Eye magazine, the influential quarterly international review of graphic design, founded in 1990 by the equally influential Rick Poynor, a prolific writer on graphic design and visual communication who edited the first 24 issues (1990–1997). The simpatico Walters, dauntingly clever, was a musician, composer and producer in his first life, and moves seamlessly in and out of an infinite improvisation, where music and design play with, off and against each other. “Graphic designers are like session musicians,” he says, describing the selfless ingredient of collaboration. These cross-references tumble out of him.

“I can’t not think about these connections, it’s the way my mind works.” His assertion brings to mind designer/artist/teacher Paul Elliman who, by discussing his Concorcio de Transportes (2006) audio signage project, lifted TypeSHED11 (Eye supported Wellington’s 2009 TypeSHED11 symposium by publishing a Hamish Thompson preview on its Blog) out of a comfort zone, with voices from the Madrid metro “speaking as if they were typographical language”.

The print magazine comes out of an airy second-floor office in Hoxton, a London neighbourhood that’s part of London’s currently self-confident arts culture. Contributor Steven Heller writes, “Eye came into being at a very critical time in graphic design history: it was the beginning of the digital revolution, which propelled the so-called Postmodern aesthetic and Deconstruction movements.  It was a time when type and layout experimentation was fervent, and literary and other communications theories raised the ‘discourse’ of graphic design.”

There’s not space here to speak at length about the blue-blood graphic design names who are or have been involved with Eye, so let’s just roll-call them. After Poynor, Max Bruinsma took on the editorship with issues 25–32 (1997–1999) before Walters arrived in 1999 (issue 33). Stephen Coates was art director for issues 1–26, Nick Bell from issues 27–57, and Simon Esterson since issue 58. Along with Bell and Esterson, contributors include Phil Baines, Peter Bilak, Malcolm Garrett, Anna Gerber, Steven Heller, Steve Hare, Richard Hollis, Robin Kinross, Ellen Lupton, Jan Middendorp, J Abbott Miller, Russell Mills, John O’Reilly, Tom Phillips, Alice Twemlow, Kerry William Purcell, Steve Rigley, Stefan Sagmeister, Adrian Shaughnessy, Erik Spiekermann, David Thompson, Teal Triggs, Veronique Vienne, Christopher Wilson and more. Rick Poynor now writes the regular “Critique” column. These names, edited from Wikipedia, and double-checked, I readily recognise from 20 years of reading.

Walters arrived at Eye, he says, just before the dotcom boom and bust, and launched its website just after (late 2001). Around the same time, he began writing about music for the Guardian, a review column held in high regard. And “now I’m a media owner”. He and Simon Esterson, whom he credits with bringing many new elements to the magazine, bought out Eye, in April 2008, just before the global financial meltdown. Walters is a Blogger and a Tweeter (175,000 followers: “Who are these people?”) in an era in which the iPad and tablet technology may be revolutionising the way we consume and pay for new media.

“I’ve gone from being a part-time employee to a fulltime co-owner and editor. The workload and risk is vastly different from just a few years ago.”

His parents were school teachers. He was raised in Creswell, England, a mining village with a brass band, in what’s turned out to be one of Europe’s most significant archeaological landscapes. Cave art was recently discovered at Creswell Crags, just a few hundred metres from where he grew up.

In the early ’70s, Walters headed to London to be part of the jazz scene (as I write, he’s attending, and voraciously reviewing, the London Jazz Festival) while studying for a degree in maths with physics. “I studied piano (not very well), played guitar, played in folk clubs, learned flute in the sixth form and bought a sax when I went to London after attending several jazz summer schools. I also studied privately with composer Neil Ardley.” He later joined Ardley as a member in the electronic jazz orchestra, Zyklus, 1987—1996. “School was also taken up with magazines (Eyebrow, Afghan Hound), silkscreening, drama, concrete poetry, the photography darkroom – all the pretentious creative stuff you do at 15,16, 17. Later I taught myself to play the lyricon (wind synthesizer); Richard Burgess (a New Zealander) and I worked on one of the first Roland MC8 Microcomposers in the UK, and on the first Fairlight CMI (keyboard sampler), which we borrowed from Peter Gabriel. You can hear our efforts (broken glass, cocked rifles) on Kate Bush’s Never Forever. It was the dawn of electronic music-making, which still dominates today.

“There was a time when British pop music was a big arts lab – you could bring together performance, touring, composition, writing, recording, video-making – play around with ideas and make them happen. I was fascinated by the realisation that you can make marks on paper and write songs, and it does make an impression on people, they remember it. That’s very thrilling, when you first do that – magical.

“I had a few lucky breaks in music – but it proved less enjoyable (and more difficult) to sustain as a career that would support a family.” Walters is married to writer and journalist Clare Walters – they have two daughters, the eldest, an aerial performer, is a hula hoop artist in the troupe Hoop La La.

“I went through that thing of no longer wanting to be an artist – the music business uses the word ‘artist’ which means somebody as a recognisable figure, as opposed to being a ‘session musician’, and I think having gone through a little bit of pop stardom, I actually thought that wasn’t me.”

Walters’s 15 minutes of “pop stardom” came in 1981 when his band Landscape (named after the play by Harold Pinter) hit the UK charts with the “hellishly catchy” (said a review) Einstein A Go-Go, followed by a further five minutes with Norman Bates. Peter Blake, the designer of the aforementioned Sgt. Pepper’s cover, designed a cover for their Manhattan Boogie-Woogie album, “which got rejected by the record company, RCA. It wasn’t a great album, but the cover was good.”

As a record producer, Walters had some top 20 success with Swans Way (Soul Train, 1983); he worked with Kissing The Pink, neo-progressive rock band Twelfth Night, ex-Pop Group pianist Mark Springer, and the jazz composer Mike Gibbs, whose 1988 album Big Music (Virgin, re-released on ACT) is “probably my most satisfying achievement as a producer.”

Eye came into the picture through John Warwicker (who had designed Landscape’s posters, flyers and first two album covers while a student, and later went on to form Tomato, a collective of artists, designers, musicians and writers), who suggested that they should approach the magazine about featuring Unknown Public, a hardback audio journal and CD compilation, an idea Walters devised with music manager Laurence Aston (who, in parallel with Unknown Public, established a management company, First Name, representing TV and film composers, including Zbigniew Preisner).

Named wittily after the audience for new creative music, and referred to, I read somewhere, as the “Granta of music”, Unknown Public’s guest graphic designers included Richard Hollis, Stuart Bailey (who later founded DotDotDot), Lucy Ward (successor to Paul Elliman at The Wire) and Jonathan Barnbrook, whose card inserts (see Barnbrook Bible) displayed a graphic critique of the music industry. Unknown Public never featured in Eye, but it was included in Poynor’s exhibition Communicate: British Independent Graphic Design Since the Sixties at the Barbican in 2004.

He describes the now dormant music journal (1992–2007) as “a self-subsidised labour of love” which “in retrospect seems like a bridge between my career as a musician-producer [’70s-early ’90s] and writer-editor [late ’80s-present]. When we met up last summer in London, he gave me UP15 Dancing/Listening and UP01–04 Volume One, an 80-page CD-book retrospective — both exquisitely packaged and exceptional to listen to. “The Unknown Public idea tested the ways music could be presented by using graphic design, but it was always difficult, and impossible to sustain in that format once people stopped buying music in a physical form.”

Later, when working as acting production editor at the Architectural Review, Walters would see copies of Eye on the publisher’s desk: “I think the first issue I read properly was number 13, which included Rick’s feature about Tomato, and Andrew Howard’s ‘There is Such a Thing as Society’.” Walters recognised in Eye, “a world that wasn’t mine directly, in that I wasn’t a graphic designer, but that felt closer to my interests than architecture or art.”

My entire Eye collection (I don’t have no. 1, damn it) is in storage, except for Eye no. 76, the music design special, and the latest issue (77) arrives in the post the day before Walters arrives in town.

He writes to me before reaching Wellington: “The music issue is something that had been at the back of my mind for a while, and when Catherine Dixon (in London) asked me to be a co-curator of the St Bride one-day conference last January, the timing felt perfect: we could use that day as a kind of think-tank out of which the music issue could grow. Catherine and I were the ringmasters that day, since neither of us spoke! I also felt that we had turned a corner, with a lot more young designers becoming fascinated by the legacy and future possibilities of music design.”

The possibilities: a Dutch student of David Bennewith (a New Zealand designer in The Netherlands) has just emailed his portfolio. Opening it, I am staggered by the clarity with which this young man, straight out of the Academy of Arts in Arnhem, has mapped out his thinking, visually interpreting and systematising concepts of sound, time and space. Is this student’s experimentation the synchronicity Walters is seeking to encourage?

“When I talk about design and music, it’s not because I’m trying to impose music on graphic design, it’s in the hope that my observations might make designers think slightly different about their practice and thought processes, that it might be a helpful freeing up of the mind.”

The spirit of generosity in this subtle yet extraordinary gesture is what makes Eye stand apart, and why its legacy is matched by the loyalty of its hardcore subscribers. As a reader and collector of Eye, along with other culture/specialist magazines, some of them now out of print (The Face, Octavo, Typografische Monatsblätter, Emigre, Baseline, DotDotDot and, more recently, and closer to home, The National Grid), I developed a skewed sense of ownership early on, a sort of cult belonging, inspired by the minds of Barbara Kruger (issue 5), Katherine McCoy (16), Lawrence Weiner (29), Laurie Anderson (76). It was Eye that prompted me on journeys to find the poetic works of Joan Brossa (37) whose sensibilities helped inform mine. Sculptor Josep Subirachs, whose typographic Passion Entrance to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona brought tears (yes, design can move). I even followed the 1930s train journey of Rebecca West (author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon) to the door of Croatian designer Boris Ljubicic, where I could “Read Between the Lines”, at 100 per cent scale, the poster’s small print revealing the genocide at Srebrenica in 1991. And in Basel, I witnessed Wolfgang Weingart making the book of his life.

Over the years, in my attempt to reciprocate, I would fire across small packages to Eye – “bombs in plain wrapping”, always with the option to leave them on a park bench – that might skim the editorial radar. Turns out Eye holds a small collection of Bruce Connew’s artist books, and Walters says he has worn threadbare the Wellington Writers Walk t-shirt with the quotation by Bill Manhire: “I live at the edge of the universe, like everybody else.”

Talking about his quest with Eye, Walters explains, “There’s a double challenge of living up to Eye’s legacy/reputation, and exploring new things as culture, technology and the profession move on. Eye has to keep changing and evolving, by its nature, but the readers have high expectations and rightly expect a certain standard of writing, design, visual editing, production, etc. It’s a challenge for our contributors, too, and they meet it magnificently.”

As we slip into cross-disciplinary talk, I recall Bruce Connew explaining The Poetics of Music by Igor Stravinsky, a book he’d read as a photography student in Guildford, England. He had replaced the word “music” with “photography”, and the book, he said, became sublimely about photography. I put this to Walters.

“A lesson to draw from Bruce’s experience is that it might be better to read a good book about a different discipline than a bad book about your own. For example, I found John Boorman’s book Money Into Light [about making his movie The Emerald Forest] more inspiring than many books about music production or graphic design.

“That cross-disciplinary influence was there long before I joined Eye, and while Bruinsma was editor I wrote “Sound, Code, Vision” for Eye 26… this blurring of boundaries between visual, written and musical languages…”.

This is a mind-swirling piece that substantiates the vast landscape of Walters’ knowledge, and his facility to wander intellectually through and connect rival expressive disciplines. As he writes in that essay, “Frank Zappa warned against the fetishisation of musical scores by pointing out that ‘you don’t eat the recipe’. In some senses, the post-war avant garde’s obsession with graphic notation is a critical commentary on the redundant conventions of European art music.” The information in this feature, and the manner in which it is presented, is laden with an expanse of mind.

“In recent years, I’ve become more interested in writing about ‘mainstream’ graphic design — interviewing people like Marian Bantjes (72), Paula Scher (77) and Anthony Burrill (75). I made a deliberate decision a few years ago to get out more and meet more designers and discover different design cultures.”

When Walters arrived in Wellington, he joined us one evening for dinner with Luke Wood and Jonty Valentine from the National Grid magazine, and Ian and Clare Athfield. Perched high up at Athfield’s Titanic Tearooms on a Khandallah hillside, looking south to the Antarctic, it was a way of throwing open the conversation, extending a network of ideas. Later, he met designer, writer and author Hamish Thompson and type designer Kris Sowersby, both of whom have had their work published by Eye. In Sowersby’s case, National and Newzald were guest typefaces in Eye no. 72 (which first introduced Simon Esterson’s redesign). Eye employs a different set of text and display typefaces for each issue and, yes, back to the music design special, which employed Galaxie Copernicus, a collaborative typeface between Sowersby and Chester Jenkins of Village in New York. Len Lye’s exhibition The Body Electric opens this week in Birmingham, and Walters is already eyeing up the New Zealand legend with a future feature in mind (imagine, experimental film, poetry, painting, kinetic sculpture, sound and, you guessed it, music), a possible cover image, spotted high up on a stairway wall of the ex-National Art Gallery, already archived in his mind.

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ProDesign published a review on this Best Design Awards bronze-winning project a few months ago, but we recently found some additional images, shot by photographer Paul McCredie, that we didn't run — here now, for your veiwing pleasure, after the jump.

— Michael Barrett

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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.

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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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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.)

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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).

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