The objective of this blog and journal is to bring some kind of fluidity to the collecting of influential material and research for my design development. The form of a blog allows easy storage of such material and provides the functionality so that the information collected can be commented, and cataloged within a database like environment. This then permits the quick location of referenced material on any given subject thus making idea generating a less time consuming task. This leads to better design outcome making a blog the ideal tool in the graphic design world.

The first place I thought which would be a good place to start creating my new blog was to take a look at existing ones and find out what characteristics that make the blog effective. In searching I came across a magazine spread by Si Scott. This I believed was a perfect fusion of photographic practice, typography and illustration in a well-balanced design piece. I then continued to look at other works of his eventually coming to one that tied into a more eco friendly car design which was wind powered.

With renew ability in mind I continued my search and came across a humorous poster that gave promise of a free lunch. In truth the existence of such a poster is imposable but I think It highlights the “cut out, use, and discard” society which, we are today.

As my search broadened I found more posters, which were in a competition with the “free lunch” design. It occurred to me that despite the other pieces of work being detailed illustrations, this minimal poster won. Looking now at more simply designed work I found the “Keep it simple stupid” poster. Despite the poster having few elements it has simple elegance.

I collected a few more examples of neat minimal designs, one of these being a design consultancy website. In this site there was a good use of Photoshop enhanced images. I then tried to find an extreme example of a realistically doctored photo and found the work of Christophe Huet. His work uses surreal imagery as shock tactics to draw attention.

The next stage on the form of this surreal shock tactic was the realistic work done to promote the Benetton house of colours clothing line. They touched on things such as AIDS, sex and racism to make the shock appeal given from the work become front page news. This making it very effective as an advert.

From that I moved on to look at various treatments of typographic form, the first being a traditional well-known font – then the more rare font. I found the finger print type very interesting, the reason for this is despite the forms not being traditional type and just an arrangement of fingerprints. An aspect of them made them look as if they were letterforms.

Last of all I found my self-stumbling on a truly amazing piece of flash design. The AllYourPrey site, combines good functionality, smooth animation and a bold layout to make a site that’s a pleasure to use and navigate. This shows that a site doesn’t need to look complex to function well.

Doing this blog has helped me to understand that it is a very useful way of organizing research and ideas; it is a method I will use in the future

The image above is a small snippet from the Allyourprey website. The website is flash based and uses a very simple style and layout but is very original in its design. I think the animations are very clever in the way you shift and scroll through the various images on the site.

Above is an example of some bold illustration by Trevor van Meter (aka Van Beater). I really like the simple style and the way he has given this crazy looking creature character through its expressions. Here is a link to his website to see other examples of his wacky illustrations.

English graphic and type designer with a devoted following for his anti-traditional views. Studied at the London College of Printing. Art Director first of The Face, a London-based “style” magazine, from soon after its birth, then of the men’s magazine Arena. By the early 1990s he was able, with a straight face, to recommend abandoning typography’s requirement of legibility

Saul Bass was a graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker, but he is best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences, which is thought of as the best such work ever seen.

During his 40-year career he worked for some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers, including most notably Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Amongst his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm for Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm, and the text racing up and down what eventually becomes a high-angle shot of the United Nations building in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

Saul Bass designed the 6th AT&T Bell System logo, that at one point achieved a 93 percent recognition rate in the United States. He also designed the AT&T “globe” logo for AT&T after the break up of the Bell System. Here is an example of the logos he designed.

Gerald Scarfe was born in London. He was asthmatic as a child and spent much time drawing and reading. After a brief period at the Royal College of Art in London, he established himself as a satirical cartoonist, working for Punch magazine and Private Eye during the early sixties. He has had many exhibitions worldwide, including New York, Osaka, Montreal, Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne, Chicago and London, and 50 one-man shows. He has designed the sets and costumes for plays, operas and musicals in London, Houston, Los Angeles and Detroit. His film work includes designing and directing the animation for Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Scarfe has written and directed many live action and documentary films for BBC and Channel 4 and has published many books of his work, including Heroes & Villains: Scarfe at the National Portrait Gallery, which was published in September 2003. His most recent book, Gerald Scarfe: Drawing Blood: 45 Years of Scarfe Uncensored was published in November 2005. Gerald Scarfe has been political cartoonist for the London Sunday Times for 40 years, and has worked for The New Yorker magazine for 14 years. His work regularly appears in many periodicals.

Here is an example of an iconic logo Design created by the renowned Milton Glaser.

Glaser was educated at New York City’s High School of Music and Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), graduated from the Cooper Union in 1951 and later, via a Fulbright Scholarship, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna under Giorgio Morandi.

In 1954 Glaser was a founder, and president, of Push Pin Studios formed with several of his Cooper Union classmates. Glaser’s work is characterized by directness, simplicity and originality. He uses any medium or style to solve the problem at hand. His style ranges wildly from primitive to avant garde in his countless book jackets, album covers, advertisements and direct mail pieces and magazine illustrations. He started his own studio, Milton Glaser, Inc, in 1974. This led to his involvement with an increasingly wide diversity of projects, ranging from the design of New York Magazine, of which he was a co-founder, to a 600 foot mural for the Federal Office Building in Indianapolis.

Throughout his career he has had a major impact on contemporary illustration and design and played an influencing role for Howard Milton. His work has won numerous awards from Art Directors Clubs, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Society of Illustrators and the Type Directors Club. In 1979 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and his work is included in the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Israel Museum and the Musee de l’affiche in Paris. Glaser has taught at both the School of Visual Arts and at Cooper Union in New York City. He is a member of Alliance Graphique International (AGI).

HOLGER POOTEN is one of the most wanted photographers in recent times by advanced magazines such as Neo 2, Alert and Galore. He was born in Gelderm, Germany on 1974 and studied photography in the University of Aplied Sciences of Bielfeld. On 1998 he obtained the second place on the Agfa Talents Awards and start working as a freelance photographer in Hamburg. On 2001 Pooten won the Hasselblad Sponsorship and on 2003 moves to London. Pooten produce fantasy and shocking images for magazines and brands such as: Odlo, Adidas, Galore, Neo 2, alert, Orange & Viva.

Here is an example of some very interesting typography produced by Jonathan Looman. He has used the form of a finger print and arranged it in various manners overlapping it to create this very detailed font set. I think it is a good example of how the human brain can recognize the form of text in the more abstract of shapes.

Mexican artist Stefan Bruggemmann now lives and works between Mexico and London. Pictured is just one of his humorous neon signs, others include, ‘(This is not supposed to be here)’ and ‘To be political it has to look nice’.

The above is a photograph of a sculpture made simply by cutting carefully into a pad of multicoloured bits of paper. I think it is simple but very beautiful and ornate. Here is the website showing how its done.

American Sociology teacher who one day started doing graphic design. First it was for the magazine Beach Culture. Next it was Ray Gun. All the time Carson was doing cool stuff like using an upside-down 5 as an S, using 3 for E, and often you could hardly read the articles, they were so way out! His influence on the stodgy type world has been like an asteroid from outer space.

In 1993 Carson started the GarageFonts digital type foundry as a vehicle to distribute the fonts used in Ray Gun magazine.

Here is a short video about Carson.

Helvetica was created by Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas type foundry) of Münchenstein, Switzerland. Haas set out to design a new sans-serif typeface that could compete with Akzidenz-Grotesk in the Swiss market. Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, the typeface’s name was changed by Haas’ German parent company Stempel in 1960 to Helvetica — derived from Confederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland — in order to make it more marketable internationally.

Director Gary Hustwit produced a documentary (called Helvetica) about the typeface, which was released in 2007 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the its introduction. In the film, graphic designer Wim Crouwel says, “The Helvetica was a real step from the 19th century typeface. … We were impressed by that because it was more neutral, and neutralism was a word that we loved. It should be neutral. It shouldn’t have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface.”

The United colors of Benetton is a well know Italian clothes company. Despite clothing being there knish market they have adopted a somewhat strange advertising scheme. They have chosen to use shock tactics to get their brand known, and they haven’t done this lightly. Addressing subjects such as AIDs, sex and racism in a shocking manner there ads often hit the news, not only making them controversial but effective. Above is an example of one of the advertisements. This picture isn’t often one we see and the blood and the pure realism makes it shocking but despite this Benetton used this as an image for there billboard ad’s.

This is a piece of work by the French artist Christophe Huet. His particular skill is in the manipulation of photography to create surreal but very realistic outcomes such as the one above. I really like his work because despite is showing the impossible the level of realism is astounding. This means his work can have great shock factor. An example of this is in his AIDS awareness campaign posters. These can be seen on his website as well as a lot of advertising work he has done for companies such as Motorola and Sony.

I came across the elmwood website while searching for examples of design consultancy’s. I love the use of bold typography mixed with simple striking photography that has gone into making this website. Built using flash it animates as smooth as it looks and gives the user a simple interface that allows them to find information quickly and efficiently. This is easily one of the best examples of flash design I have seen in a long time.

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David Carvalho, has been born in 1980, he is a Portuguese Artist & Designer that has been developing work in many design disciplines, by himself and together with also other artists all around the world for the past years.

He started studding design by his own since he was a kid and simply dedicated is life to one of his biggest passions: creativity. Since then, he has worked for many design studios in Portugal. In 2003 started his own design company where he stayed for 3 years, named Pkage Design, based in a co-foundation with friend and designer Nuno Salvaterra where they both assumed the Art Direction and still continued to do design works. Actually David is working for Spirituc as a Senior Designer.

Being moved by is own rebel personality, he was responsible for launching many well known projects in Portugal. In 2002 launched the first Design related PDF Magazine called Camouflage where for more then 3 years he got together 80 Portuguese Artists, Designers and Studios. Side by side with Pkage, in 2004, once again together with his partner, he was also responsible for the launch of Propaganda that was the first Design Online Store in Portugal, that gather exclusive artwork from well known artists and studios, like Superdeux, Kleber Design, Tom Muller, Ekiselev, David Carembou, Mauro Gatti, Musa Collective, Evostruct, Mark Boyce, Dirty Deluxe, Jemma Gura and so many more.

David was also Founder and Fashion Editor for the Online Lifestyle Magazine Rua de Baixo, since 2003, where he has also collaborated with writing and photography works.

As an artist, he has created many alter egos where he expressed himself in very different ways. Electroclandestino was the most known, with which David participated at exhibitions in London, Paris, Bruxelles, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tokyo, Barcelona, Lisbon, OPorto, Milan, São Paulo and so many other places. Being some of his work published in international design books and others awarded at Design Festivals.

Karpa killed Electroclandestino in an internal dialog that assumed the homicide for Fame and Glory! “The world was too small for the both of us”, he said before pulling the trigger. Karpa, besides being a slaughter murder, is the new alter ego of David’s work, a new era, a new vision, a new way of observing, feeling and showing it to the world.

The work above is by the designer and typographer Kim Min Goo. Its simple layout and great use of typography makes it an effect and visually eye-catching poster. On Kim Min Goo’s Portfolio site you can see that it doesn’t take over complicated graphics to be graphics that work. Its all in the proportions and layout that make it aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I like this kind of bold design, and think its always better to keep it simple.

The Don’t Panic Pack is a unique free publication found in carefully selected independent shops, bars, universities and art spaces. Also distributed outside alternative music events and launch parties, it contains all sorts of arts and culture goodies and information for cities all around the world with the emphasis on design and the future of our planet.

At the heart of the pack find the Don’t Panic Poster where a rotation of established and unknown, up and coming artists design around an issue that affects culture across the world. On this site find an interactive online magazine to further explore the issue raised on the poster where you can contribute to the debate with text, graphic design, illustration, photography, animation, music and film for all to see.

I really love this strange and unique poster design. The orange and black work really well together and the layout is balanced, it is bold and very eye catching. What I like the most about it is the very clever idea behind it.The brief for the poster is simply ‘free’.

The designer chose to play on that making this poster seem like it came with something free, this being a free lunch. He achieved this by making the poster appear that items of food had been removed from it. I like the way he used dashed lines to symbolize that you need to cut something out to retrieve a free object.

Si Scott studied Graphics at Buckinghamshire Chilterns Uni. He is now a full time artist who works by hand with pen & ink to create his unique pieces. The combination of his love of drawing and typography is the basis of most of his work but more recently commissions from Angelika Buettner Photography have seen Scott apply his unique illustration style to other projects.

The past year has been a busy one! He finally went full time as an artist in April and has also produced work for a wide selection of commercial clients including BBC, Orange, BBH, Casio, New Balance, & New York Times. He exhibits regularly and has a solo exhibition coming in late 2006. He has also featured in Eye, Grafik, Contagious, Computer Arts and 1000 Type Treatments in the past six months. Si’s ambition is to work on private commissions and bring his original work to as many people as possible.

The video above is the introduction to the BBC show The Secret of Drawing. The video shows Si Scott’s unique style of drawing using developed flowing patterns spawning from typography. I really like this style of typography, it has a real elegant form but the high contrast pen on white paper lets it retain a modern look.

This magazine layout about the WindJet land speed craft was designed by Si Scott. It uses a large photographic spread incorporating his signature typographic style. The flowing extensions of the type seem to suit the article well being wind like in there form. One of the other reasons I thought this article was suitable for my blog is the strong link with our subject theme ‘ Surviving the 21st Century’. The wind powered car could be something that could be more common in the future. As we continue to deplete the resources on our plant we may need to turn to wind power as a means on renewably sustained transport.

I thought a good starting place and a way of finding out what makes a good blog was to check out some existing ones. I just did a simple google search on (Graphic Design Blog). i found a lot of them weren’t really like the blog i set out to make, they contained designers work and developments of their design and not inspiration.

I then came across Strangersoul’s Blog. This blog was a group of influences that a graphic designer had grouped together. When looking through this a certain article caught my eye, this was a magazine layout much like ones we had to design for the G3 project brief.The layout shows a good balance and between the photo and the text. The image in the layout is a 3-year exposure shot of the New York Museum of Modern Art being built, taken by Michael Wesely. The layout and typography design is that of Si Scott.

In this bustling and ever growing world we are constantly bombarded by outside influences. These things shape the way we think and to some degree the way we act. The aim of this blog is to try and sift through the vast amount which are subjected daily, for example tv, magazines, internet and use it to develop ideas. This resource of research and ideas can then be taken forward and used to generate my own work and designs.