Graphic Journey Blog

Cutie

This is Honda's EV-N concept electric car which will be unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show next month. It is packed with green technology and lots of other innovative stuff including, secreted away in the passenger door, a unicycle. Now that's what I call 'cool', but I wont, because I hate that word. So let's say smashing!

If I were a carpenter…

This is Terence Woodgate. He is a furniture designer of great purity.

This is what he does…

Lovely aren’t they?

I have just recorded an interview with him for my RDInsights series. It is particularly relevant in light of my recent post, God's gift, on dyslexia. Terence is another of us who has overcome difficulty in one area by excelling in another. Hear about that and his unique collaboration with formula one racing car designer John Barnard to produce surface, a four meter long, carbon fiber table only 2mm thick (above).

To listen to our conversation click here. 

Inspired

Bored? Take a stack of these...

Preferably the multi coloured variety...

Place them on the table in front of you,  sit quietly and  think. What could you possible do with them?Well, here is someone who rose to the occasion and took them to a brilliant place. Take a look.

Electric soup

In 1947 the fiendish Japanese designers at Nissan produced this…

Lovely isn't it? An electric van with a top speed of 22 mph and 

a range of 40 miles.

Had they continued in earnest with their experiments just think what an effect they would have had on our planet.

It looks just the job for Tin Tin and friends

 

 

Collision of colour

This is Georgina von Etzdorf...

 She is a wonderful textile designer - silk Jacquard, velvet and chiffon with vibrant swirls, diamonds and stripes. She works the fabric into scarves, ties, gloves, dressing gowns, blouses and waistcoats etc. Everyone from rock stars to Royalty have worn her many creations. She has the ability to use colour combinations where other would fail. The main objective in her life is to have fun. And I had a tremendous amount of fun interviewing her for my RDIinsights series, which was recorded here in Spain…

 Well, that’s not quite true as the goats in the valley below were a bit too noisy, so we had to go indoors. If you are interested in the trials and tribulations of the fashion world, then there is a lot for you in this recording. If not, no matter - it’s a jolly good story about failure and success, with a lot of laughs along the way. To hear the interview click here.  And for more information about Georgina press here.

Wise words

Print v pixel

I stopped buying a daily newspaper more than ten years ago, preferring to get my news fix from the radio. But I still maintained a relationship with the printed page via the weekend editions. It accompanies my morning ritual – coffee, an almond croissant and a comfortable chair. But a year ago I made a slight adjustment to this cosy practice. I no longer buy a virgin edition of one of the bumper, multi-sectional weekend reads. I now collect the previous week’s edition from my ex-mother-in-law, extract the supplements I want – magazine, review, gardening sections and so on – then sit back in quiet bliss, grazing the pages, in a semi-soporific state. You know the feeling. My enjoyment of a week-old edition is not marred, because nothing I read is time-sensitive.

But things are not looking good for the weekend rags. Sales are falling, and with the effect of the credit squeeze it is likely a major national or two will soon disappear. Meanwhile, online readership has been increasing and is far better suited to the speed of news. At the time of writing this piece, I was viewing The New York Times site. My eye was alerted by a newly added story on the death of Harold Pinter. The Web is ever-changing, the printed page lags behind. The Financial Times has been attacking the weekend brigade with the revamped FT Weekend edition, introduced last year and aiming for a more expansive, two-day read, with its accompanying colour magazine. Sadly, the latter fails to deliver on production values in comparison to The Guardian's Weekend magazine, which wins hands down on design, quality of photography, illustration, diagrams, paper and print production...

Ironically, the FT is the only national that has increased in sales over the past year - this flush of success can only be because of its business acumen.

In reviewing the quality papers over Christmas, I had hoped that they had stopped trying to ape their Web counterparts. Not a bit of it, there seems to be even more furniture and stuff cluttering the pages. There seems to be a universal fear of the simple. In frustration, I switched to the online editions and was surprised to discover that things have really sharpened up on the quality front over the past year.  In particular, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian...

are both way ahead of The Times, The Independent and the FT in appearance, speed and navigation. All have the addition of video and audio, which, for any movie or theatre buff, is a great bonus, because the reviewers not only show clips but also often have interviews with directors and actors - which is far better than looking at a static image.

For some real chutzpa, we have to look across the pond for a more engaging and creative online experience. The New York Times has a great site, with many innovations presented in a more sophisticated way. 

And it has really stepped up the quality of the video content. There is a series called Conversations, where well-known personalities talk about their lives and passions, and it is very beautifully filmed.

There is a brilliant cooking spot, The Minimalist, presented by Mark Bittman. Its quick, five-minute recipes, cooked there before your eyes, are aimed squarely at busy New Yorkers. Another hilariously funny feature is The Carpetbagger with David Carr, a husky-voiced guerrilla film reporter who accosts passers-by to seek their view on movies they have seen. The site also has the paper's magazine T online, which is a feast of loveliness, only marred by ads popping up attempting to seduce you into buying wildly expensive jewellery. But hey, the site is free.

As T is probably the best colour supplement currently on the planet, I'd rather have that in my hand because the Web can't do justice to creative director Janet Froelich's beautiful work. So for the moment, The New York Times in print has the edge on the online editions, particularly for its superlative colour supplement.

Of all the creative environments, newspaper design must be the harshest. So many have undergone numerous redesigns in recent years, only to be constantly tampered with in panic mode in the hope that it might put on a few sales. For every decent design (and there are so few), there are hundreds of duff  ones. To have the tenacity to hang in there in order to maintain a newspaper design with integrity and sensitivity is, in my view, heroic and deserves praise. The passing of The Guardian's old design and format saddened me. But I feel compelled to salute Mark Porter's sterling work, on the now well-bedded rebirth, for its consistency of design and attention to detail. If only others would follow suit. As newspaper sites become faster and more sophisticated, online reading will become the norm and perhaps we will even be persuaded to pay for the service too. As for the printed page, I fear that most will eventually become freebies.  

By Mike Dempsey - Reprinted from Design Week 4 Febuary 2009 Centaur Publications.

 

 

 

 

The right side of Law

This is Roger Law… 

He was the co creator the award winning satirical series ‘Spitting Image’ back in 1984. ..

At its height it attracted 15 million viewers a week. But in 1996 it all ended when the programme aired for the last time after a run of twelve years. With little Interest in continuing with latex puppet making Law upped sticks and took himself off to Australia to start afresh. And from there he discovered China...

 

where he now makes these beautiful urns with a band of crafts people. And here are some finished peices...

 I caught up with him in London where we talked about the ensuing years, his love of ceramics and how his creative life started in post war Britain. You can hear my interview with him  by going to RDInsights and clicking onto the Roger Law interview. And if you like what you hear Law has written a hilarious autobiography, ‘Still Spitting at Sixty’ available from Amazon. And to see an example of what made him famous over two decades ago click here.

Can’t live without books.

Here are 15 books that helped to change my life. Well used. Well loved. And still with me. In no particular order, and there's one very important one missing. That will need a whole page to itself - more of which another time.

Touching the Past.

The thing about book covers, unlike most pieces of graphics, is that they tend to hang around forever. You’ll find them tucked away in dusty second hand bookshops, sitting quietly on library shelves or forming part of that stack of books you’ve been meaning to throw out for as long as you can remember. That’s what I love about them, and the whole notion of books. They have an expanded life, long after the initial purchase, and often the entire life of their purchasers. Here is one of my earliest book jacket designs, circa 1965. Found on Abe Books. The best second hand book site there is. Looking at it now, 43 years on, I suddenly remember exactly what I was doing at the time. I was handed the manuscript to read on the eve of a holiday to Dartmouth in Devon. I spent the entire two weeks thinking and worrying about what I was going to do for the cover. The illustration was done using black ink over Cow Gum as a resist which created the textural quality of the line. It was limited to three-colours, and I was desperate to use the extra-condensed headline typeface Schnelfetter Grotesk that appeared in the German magazine Twen – the very best in editorial design at that time and, when I could afford it would covet - so I cut out characters directly from the magazine to create the title. This is the result of my fledgling efforts as a twenty something…