Communication Design Department Blog / Glasgow School of Art
Across the pond: This is a book written by my typography tutor over here at RISD. It’s a good resource for beginners and referencing type terminology that you can wow your friends with (?) Also it’s by a British publisher so a lot easier to get in the UK than it is here.
Designer and Vis Com person Gordon Carmichael is travelling through South America for the next few months, and has kindly agreed to be our foreign correspondent and ‘send back’ some posts and pictures of the visual culture there. Look out for posts over the coming weeks.
Type is a good resource of type related materials, and in particular, Natalia drew our attention to these type tours which are surely a good idea for some kind of degree show fundraiser. The brown website backdrop is interestingly anti-technology, as if in denial that it’s actually a website at all, though it looks quite like the back of a geography teachers Sports Jacket.
Normally, if you told me you were going to make a homepage in flash and also have sound on it, I’d run a country mile, but the Sandberg Institute have done it so well, that I may reconsider my position on this.
In this Video, Nicolas Bourriaud previews his hypothesis that postmodernism is over and that a new type of modern – the altermodern – is emerging (see previous posts on this topic). So what do we think of all this? Wasn’t the premise of postmodernism that we were coming to the end of the idea of the ‘grand-narrative’, neatly dissolving anything that might follow in its wake? But when he says “the last continent to be explored is time/history”, I have to admit that is a pretty engaging idea to get to grips with.
p.s. Also worth bookmarking is Tate’s Channel on YouTube.
A busy friday ahead with a talk at 2pm in the 3rd/4th yr graphics studio by Mike Montgomery of Graphic Thought Facility, and a 4pm talk in the second year studio from Suzanne Martin and Eva Merz . As per usual, everyone welcome at either of these events so long as does not clash with anything else you’re doing.
In case you’ve been worrying about what ‘ism’ we’re currently experiencing, worry no more. It’s altermodernism, and the ideas therein are neatly discussed on the Eye blog. This in turn links to an awesome article on seminauts – people who “make connections in our age of proliferating signs” (i.e. you, the person dealing in semiotics) – over on Limited Language, which in itself is worth bookmarking as a smarter than average design blog.
Zen Bound has won several game design awards for it’s graphics for the iPhone. The game is not competitive and has no goal to achieve. It simply is wrapping virtual string around a wooden sculpture. Kind of pointless when you can play with real string. The actual activity is intended to be a contemplative act and I guess impress folks sitting next to you with the graphics on your iPhone as well. Bit of fun.
Then you should probably be interested in an event being held this wednesday (25th Feb) in the Mac Lecture theatre at 6pm. It concerns the Creative Scotland Project, which depending on who you speak to will be somewhere between a mild disaster and a completely monumental balls-up.
… plead Shaun and Tom.
This is either an excellent example of inventive industriousness in a get-off-your-arse-and-do-something-rather-than-sitting-around-worrying-about-the-credit-crunch kind of way, or an achingly self-aware graphic-default-grafik-snooze-fest in a look-at-us-we’re-graphic-designers-aren’t-we-wacky kind of way. Can’t decide, or maybe it’s both.
Great exhibition of up and coming artists and designers in Scotland, Visual Arts Scotland is the society’s 85th annual open exhibition showcasing lots of familiar recent graduates with work ranging from sculpture to print, and refreshing contemporary painting. Catch it at the (soon to be closed for revamp!) City Art Centre, Edinburgh, for the popular price of free.
An art/music collective based in our fair city, celebrating further creative avenues spawning from the intertwined relationship of visual arts with Glasgow’s churning music scene… worth a look.
As we’re in the middle of Awards Season, I thought I’d share this selection of some of the things people have written about design awards.
“Worshipers at Greater Grace Temple, a Pentecostal church in Detroit, prayed on Sunday, December 7, for an automobile industry miracle … Bishop Ellis urged worshipers to combat the region’s woes by mixing hope with faith in God…” writes Constantin Boym.
We’re told that we’re living in ‘post-credible’ times, the incident above being evidence of this. As the prospect of watching Jade Goody die via the pages of Heat Magazine draws closer, perhaps this idea is not as far fetched as it would once have sounded.
This is a bit of old news, but definitely worth a look. Dutch graphic designers Experimental Jetset have updated their website. Here’s what they’ve got to say about it too. And here’s an interesting page, where they reveal why the unusual act of building scale models of their work is such an integral part to their design process.
A fine art photography project. The website is intended to become a forum of peoples dreams from all over the world. All contributions would be welcome.
55degrees – a company working with user generated content UGC, video production, web design, interactive design and motion graphics – are looking for people who might be interested in doing short placements. It’d involve work on preparing visuals for a couple of RSNO concerts in June… If interested contact Russell Kyle:
ideals (at) gmail.com
Negotiation about remuneration would be up to you, not sure if its intended as a paid placement.
Contentious opinions rage in the comments section of this Eye article, about the focus of design education in a networked world.
One correspondent writes:
‘Open edutainment makes the link between teaching, learning and the capitalist culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching as well as new private-sector approaches to learning where people create and shape “knowledge” together. These new practices promise to provide students with edutainment materials that are individually tailored to their learning style encouraging the growth of an individualist and consumerist notion of education. There are already over 100,000 such open edutainment resources available on the Internet. Of course, the rich people will still continue to get first class “traditional” education at expensive private schools and Ivy-League universities, these open edutainent resources are meant for the plebs who, let’s face it can’t concentrate for more than five seconds and so find it easier to have their teaching delivered via shoot-em-up video-game, or in super-small bite-sized chunks that don’t challenge them. This also handily makes them into the ideal 21st Century consumers of web-content, downloadable iPod-games and shiny and sparkly facebook applications.’
I recently found a couple of websites of interest.
Designing Minds is a site that just has tonnnes and tonnes of interviews with successful and popular designers.
The Do Lectures is a project run by the ethical clothing brand Howies. They invite designers, sustainability and sports experts to come together (in a massive tipi) and talk about their lines of work.
Both are really worth a look.
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