Coffee In A Book

Some inventive print design from Matt White on the latest NC project - a packaging brief for Glasgow-based coffee specialists Matthew Algie who were looking to create one-off gift packs of their best-selling flavours, exclusively on sale only in the National Gallery of Scotland.

Matt came up with the idea of packaging three flavours of coffee in book cover jackets rather than standard pinch bags or foil packs.  He connected each flavour to an artist whose work is on display at the Gallery - Tinderbox is connected to Emil Nolde, Pandora to John Bellany, and Forza to pioneering Modernist John Cecil Stephenson.

Inspired by Grammar school textbooks and Modernism, Matt then combined vector illustration, bold colour and clean sans serif typography to create a set of balanced, minimal paperback book covers. Each can be displayed separately at the point-of-sale, or also packaged as a trilogy or box set.

21 Card Design History Set

HNC Graphics recently completed a design-in-context brief to create a print-based design product or gift for a gallery shop or bookstore.  One nice example came from students Olga Komanek and Aiste Plechaviciute, who teamed up to design a set of 21 cards, each illustrating a movement, technique or practitioner in design history, in the relevant style. The likes of Theo Van Doesburg, Paul Rand, Tibor Kalman, Milton Glaser, El Lissitzky and Rodchenko are all featured.

The cards are printed on linen paper in ivory, 300gsm, and the set is boxed in a black die cut card case, sized at 110mm X 70mm.

Herbert Bayer @ bauhaus archiv

Our visit proved to be a highlight of the Berlin trip. The archive's permanent collection boasts an amazing range of design covering architecture, furniture, photography and of course graphics. But the real attraction was 'Werbegrafik 1928-1938' - the work of Herbert Bayer, a former Bauhaus pupil who went on to become one of the most important graphic designers of the 20th century.

Bayer studied under Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy, and became director of advertising at the Bauhaus in Dessau. During this period he designed the geometric sans-serif Bayer Universal, and a serif called Bayer Type, both of which feature prominently on the posters, pamphlets and magazine covers in the exhibition.



Also on show are some of the banknotes Bayer designed during the Weimar era of the early 1920s, when Germany suffered hyper-inflation. These included a 2 million, 10 million and a mind-boggling 50 million Mark note.

In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine's Berlin office, and the exhibition focusses on his advertising design from this period, all featuring brilliant typesetting and inventive colour and composition in the Bauhaus style. More controversially, we also get to see examples of Bayer’s propaganda work for the Nazi regime, such as “Das Wunder des Lebens”, (used as this exhibition's promo poster), “Deutsches Volk, deutsche Arbeit”, and a 1936 book cover for the Hitler Youth movement. The exhibition ends with posters from the Gebraushgrapik, a festival of design in 1938 which featured his final pieces of work before he emigrated to the USA.

The only disappointment about the show for us was that the Bauhaus don't allow the use of cameras, but we did manage to take Bayer outsider for an unofficial photo-shoot!



More:
A good Herbert Bayer Gallery (on pinterest)
Herbert Bayer Werbegrafik 1928-1938 Bauhaus Archiv, Review - (New York Times)

Berlinische

On Friday we visited one of Berlin's newer galleries, Berlinische, where we met up with one of our former graphics students, Viktorija Kravcova, who spent six months at Landor in Hamburg and is now pursuing her design career in Berlin.

The gallery hosts work that includes Constructivisim, Dada, the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and the Eastern European avant-garde. The art of the divided and reunified city of Berlin is also explored in photography and multimedia.  Berlinische has an excellent website too which covers the whole collection.

Wall Works, Hamburger Bahnhof

On Thursday we took the design students to the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum. As well as famous Pop Art and Abstract Expressionist works by the likes of Warhol, Rauschenburg and Anselm Kiefer, the group got to see the remarkable Wall Works expo - a selection of pieces celebrating the wall as a powerful space for all kinds of visual communication. Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Video Art and stencil graffiti on a gigantic scale were all represented by artists such as Daniel Buren, Sarah Morris and Nasan Tur.

We also caught the preparations for the upcoming Susan Philipsz exhibition, with the gallery team installing the typographic annotations to the pieces.

 
Anselm Kiefer 

 
Nasan Tur 

  

 
Hemio Zobering




 
Richard Rauschenburg 





 
Installing Susan Philipsz 



 
Andy Warhol

ReNoise at CTM

Part of the CTM Festival, the Generation Z : ReNoise exhibition explores the unique proletarian amateur noise music culture that thrived in post-revolution Russia. As well as some early sonic devices, and some amazing footage of experimental music performances, the exhibition also featured sketches, notes and a good selection of rare Constructivist posters, pamphlets and promotional material.

Design Chess

We love this inventive take on chess, designed by HNC students Sarah Diver-Lang and Saulius Strebulis. They developed this idea in response to a design-in-context brief - to create a game-based learning tool for student designers.

The project combined packaging, 3D and typography, and the pieces include Gutenberg as King, the Mona Lisa (Dada version) as Queen, Rodchenko as the Rook, and Jonathan Ive as the Knight. The pawns are an uppercase H set in Helvetica.  The  squares also contain design-related information, which has an accompanying fold-out factsheet.









Check out our 'Project Samples' Pinterest board for samples of other student work from this project.

Typography Posters

As well as the Mentor project, which the class have just been issued, two of the main HND projects during the early part of this semester will be Typography and Editorial, the latter working alongside our HND Photography students.

As a warm-up, the class revisited asymmetric typography and the compound grid, and came up with these nice A4 posters during a session last week.

Essential Summer Reading

Just before the summer break I checked with the college library for new additions, and was delighted to see that '100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design' had finally arrived.

Leading design writer Steven Heller and critic Veronique Vienne have collaborated to produce a nicely conceived exploration of the concepts, styles and techniques which influenced and transformed graphic design.

Bauhaus @ The Barbican

The Barbican Gallery in London is currently hosting 'Art As Life' - the biggest Bauhaus exhibition in the UK in over 40 years, and as part of our continuous professional development, the department has sanctioned a number of tutor visits to see it.

'Art As Life' is a visual narrative of the most influential art school of the last century, and features art, architecture, print design, textiles, film, interior & industrial design, and of course typography.

The exhibition documents the amazing experimentation that the school pioneered, and shows how the political landscape of Germany in the Weimar years influenced the movement and its teachings. The work on display also explains how the eventual breakup of the Bauhaus (at the hands of the National Socialists), ensured that its founders dispersed to other parts of Europe and the USA to spread the teachings of the school and set the blueprint for modern architecture and visual communication.

As well as brilliant art by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Theo Van Doesburg, there is the avante garde photography of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the textiles of Gunta Stulzl, the graphics of Joost Schmidt and the fantastic typography of Herbert Bayer.

This is more than just an exhibition - there is a public programme of workshops, talks, films and performances as well as the 'Art School Lab', a two-week summer school led by leading practitioners from all artistic backgrounds. The Barbican will also soon be announcing a date for typographer Erik Spiekermann to present a talk at the exhibition.

Well worth going to, but note that photography isn't allowed, and when I was there on Monday the shop had already sold out of Joost Schmidt's famous lithograph poster Plakat zur Bauhaus-Ausstellung (1923), which I was hoping to put up in the studio.

Swiss Style Doodles

HND Year 1 are currently working through a number of Typography Units with David W and myself.

David has been concentrating on technicalities and layout, and set a great brief on controlling type, whilst I've been looking at the emergence of the 'International Style', and how it has influenced modern approaches to visual communciation.

Thanks to HND Year 1 student Nic Cameron who transcribed these great whiteboard notes during my lecture this week.

Useful:
International Style Showcase (Smashing Magazine).
Joseph Muller-Brockmann Gallery @ Flckr.
International Typographic Style @ wiki