Minus 9 Design » London

1/21: For Sale

admin — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:29:42 +0000

1/21: For Sale is a brief-in-a-booklet that I wrote and designed for my present Second Year students on the BA Graphic Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London.

This is the final brief of their second year and it ends in a very different sort of ‘Work in Progress’ show. The show (which is actually a non-show) will be a sale of items produced for the brief and sold in a pop-up shop space on Clerkenwell Road – the proceeds of which will go towards their final degree show next year. We have been intentional in not having a usual kind of London work-in-progress show where work is sanitised and glorified, and taken out of its actual context. Instead, the intention is to engage with the audience that London as a city provides – the passers-by and specifically non-designers.

I enjoyed very aspect of the making process of this brief. The research (happily conducted off the books in my library), the writing, the editing (thanks to David Preston and Rebecca Ross who provided useful and clear critique), the design and final production.

The final 24-page booklet contained the brief, timetable but also important and essential readings. It was produced using 80gsm copier paper, laser printed masters, an ancient protesting photocopier, and rubber bands. As this is a brief about designers as producers, I chose typefaces designed by people rather than corporations. I used Archer designed by Jesse Ragan, Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler for the body text and Leyton, a chunky yet astonishingly readable typeface designed by Ian Moore for the titles.

I was keen to make the booklet as sustainable as possible – working with the recycled copier paper that was available in college and simple rubber bands from Rymans (easier to recycle than staples). Rebecca had the idea to use coloured paper to separate the content – so the yellow part is the brief, and the readings are printed on white paper. On the day of production, I must confess that I struggle not to over design the booklet but to produce it with the materials available – even if they were a strange yellow and an almost-lilac paper and the photocopier toner was exhausted and weary.

Over the weekend I collated each of the 120 copies (1 for each of the tutors and students taking part in the brief), trimmed and cut them by hand. A mad labour of love (resulting in severe tendonitis!) that was intended to convey to students that this was a physical brief rather than an impersonal pdf document, and that tutors do practice what they preach! On the day of the briefing, each of the 7 tutors personalised copies for the students using a simple label space on the cover.

Short run, an illustrated talk

admin — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:26:29 +0000

‘Short run’: experimental book design & London’s little presses was a talk I gave to launch an exhibition of the same name at St Bride Library, London.

Slides from Short run, an illustrated talk

The talk focused on important aspects of little press publishing such as the publisher’s direct involvement in the design and production of their books. The design approach of a little press was largely dependent on the publisher’s available resources and connections that contributed to the unique identity of the imprints.

With these presses, production was an integral aspect of design, and design decisions were directly linked to available production processes and materials. Pursuing low-cost options, little press publishers were inventive in their methods of adding value to books by using coloured papers, alternative forms of lettering and experimental printing techniques.

Short run

admin — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:39:06 +0000

‘Short run’: experimental book design and London’s little presses was an exhibition I curated at St Bride Library, London. Based on my PhD (at the Department of Typography, University of Reading) the exhibition showcased the book design and production practices of five London-based little presses: Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press, Stefan and Franciszka Themerson’s Gaberbocchus Press, Roy Lewis’s Keepsake Press, Asa Benveniste’s Trigram Press, and Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum.

Each of the five little presses featured in this exhibition had a unique approach to publishing and was run in a distinct, individual manner based on the publisher’s personality and agenda. The exhibition showcased how this was reflected in the design and production of the books they published.

The exhibition featured a variety of rarely seen artefacts from private archives and collections. First editions, photographs, artwork, correspondence, layout sketches and illustrations allowed the viewer to gain a true understanding of the nature of book design and production of little presses in this post-WW2 period.

“Graphic design __________”

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:45:57 +0000

I ran this as an introduction brief for my third year students on the BA @ CSM. It was a short one-week brief and a simple, effective way to get students comfortable with bringing their own perspectives to their practice.

Here are three very different results:

Ben Lee

Louise Naunton Morgan

Guglielmo Rossi

6,000,000 impressions

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:27:53 +0000

6,000,000 impressions: handcrafting the book experience is an exhibition showcasing the process and output of Tara Books, at St Bride Library London. One of the things that make Tara Books unique is their genre of books made entirely by hand.
The enterprise is a fascinating study of craft and mass production. Tens of thousands of titles created in a small workshop in Chennai, India by hand using silkscreen and letterpress and book binding craft techniques are shipped to various parts of the world – LA, Berlin, Moscow, London, Tokyo…. the list keeps growing.

A6 invitation

These are books that, as Gita Wolf, Tara’s publisher puts it, ‘refashion traditional artisanal skills into fine contemporary bookmaking’.

Designing the poster and flyer for the exhibition was fun. Keeping in mind the spirit of Tara’s initiative, the publicity material was entirely (and painstakingly) printed by hand in India on handmade paper. The peacock on the poster is an image by the Gond artist Ram Singh Urveti from the book The Night Life of Trees.

A3 poster

Critical Context Program

admin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:50:58 +0000

For one academic year (from 2007 to 2008), I ran the Professional Practice lecture series on the MA Communication Design program at Central Saint Martins, London. In practice, this meant inviting speakers of interest to come and talk to the students for an hour on a Tuesday night, on subjects ranging from independent publishing to play. Some nights we hosted a series of small-scale informal film screenings. Part of the delight of running this series meant I got to design a poster to advertise each of the events to the student community. The posters were meant for internal use only, and my constraint was that I had to spend no more than 60 minutes on each.

Often, due to shortage of time & budget, I had to be creative with low-res options available via online image searches or find images in my personal photo library that would suit. These are some favourites.

14 Non-Latin typefaces

admin — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:04:31 +0000

14 Non-Latin Typefaces was a series of posters created to celebrate a bipartite exhibition and two-day conference on ‘Non-Latin Typeface Design’, jointly hosted by St Bride Library, London and the Department of Typography, University of Reading.

I worked on the project with the wonderful, hugely experienced typeface designer Fiona Ross. These typefaces were produced for Linotype in the UK, by teams headed by Walter Tracy in the 1970s and Fiona Ross in the 1980s. It is incredible to imagine that the beautiful graphic forms and non-latin characters you see below were each created and drawn by hand.

Script: Arabic; typeface: Linotype Yakout Bold

Script: Arabic; typeface: Linotype Qadi

Script: Arabic/Farsi; typeface: Linotype Nazanin Bold

On the posters, we featured the same character ‘ka’ (often the first consonant in non-Latin languages) in a white box on the top left corner. This, along with the script and typeface titles on the top right corner provided an index that grouped the 14 posters together. The main character showcased on the poster was chosen both for its characteristic as well as its representative shape. I chose bright, bold colours to suggest the flavour and vibrancy of these scripts.

The posters were printed by silkscreen on black handmade paper by Arumugam and his team at AMM Screens in Chennai, India.

Script: Arabic; typeface: Linotype Maged

Script: Bengali; typeface: Linotype Bengali Bold

Script: Devanagari; typeface: Linotype Rohini Bold

Script: Gujarati; typeface: Linotype Gujarati Bold

Script: Gurmukhi; typeface: Linotype Gurmukhi Bold

Script: Kannada; typeface: Linotype Kesari Bold

Script: Malayalam; typeface: Linotype Manorama Bold

Script: Sinhala; typeface: Linotype Araliya Bold

Script: Tamil; typeface: Linotype Samanti Bold

Script: Telugu; typeface: Linotype Tamara Bold

Script: Thai; typeface: Linotype Sukothai Bold

You can read Fiona’s paper on Non-Latin Typedesign at Linotype and a review of the exhibition by Eye magazine. You can also buy a copy of the exhibition catalogue from St Bride Library.