Communication Design Department Blog / Glasgow School of Art
Several GSA students and staff are quoted in this Johnson Banks thought for the week, on the aforementioned topic. If you have any particular strong reasons as to why you wanted to be a Graphic Designer, Illustrator or Photographer, please add them to the comments section.
What’s in a name? This project seeks to develop an online dictionary of words defined through images rather than other words.
Sam and Neil have already mentioned the Walkers series of Design podcasts. Just to flag that the latest podcast is the dutch design group Experimental Jetset
George Barber
Beyond Language: Selected Video Works 1983 – 2008
Screening + Talk
Thursday 2nd April 7pm. Free
Street Level Photoworks – 48 King St (First floor) – Glasgow G1 5QT
and
Lorram Records presents a night in the saddle of unearthed sound. Iorram CDs and + refreshments will be available for sale.
Saturday 28th March, 7pm. Entry by donation
This is the view of the new M74 motorway extension, currently being built through the Southside of Glasgow, looking from Cathcart Road, near Eglington Toll, towards the City Centre. It’s used to illustrate the contrast between a regressive ‘rear-view mirror‘ approach to urban design (above), and some possibly more productive, definitely more progressive, and certainly more democratic approaches to planning, referenced online.
The first is Pop-up Landscapes, a collective of artists and designers using interactive installations to address issues of urban survival, and provide a tactile, hands-on way for people to engage with the design of their environment.
Planners Network UK (PNUK) are creating a ‘disorientation guide’ — a wiki of progressive planning resources — and in a similar vein, this article logs some of the ways online tools can be used in democratic Urban Planning.
While on the subject, likeminds have attempted to look at how cities could be designed ‘by wiki’, and more firmly in the visual communication realm, zucker und pfeffer have created these posters and promotional materials for this conference, the posters being infused with the smell of gasoline.
To round up, Brand Avenue is one of the best blogs I know of, covering the intersection of the design of cities and visual communication, and offline, Carchitecture is an eminently readable introduction to the car and the city, and the problems and delights therein. As McLuhan observes; “The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”
And this is an idea about what you could do with the M8.
The Varoom newsletter for November 2008 focusses on illustrative type, amongst other things. You can also download bits of the 01 edition for free.
Rick Poyner responds (via PRINT magazine), to a piece on relational design by Andrew Blauvelt, (the Chip Kidd introducer) on Design Observer, (which we’d posted back on the old soup-du-jour site, before this whole Altermodern thing kicked off).
Pixacao is a form of graffiti that originated in Sao Paulo in the 1960s where people wrote political messages on the street using stolen tar (´piche´in Portugese). I came across this interesting example of it on a path running alongside a lake in Argentina.
What appeals to me about this form of graffiti is the way it responds to its environment, whether that´s on the architecture and streets of Sao Paulo or this example. Here, groups of symbols have been drawn in several places along the path creating a narrative in the landscape, which culminates in the set of symbols shown in the photos. This points out over the lake and, although I don´t know what the symbols mean, it appears to me to be a tribute to the landscape.
Pixacao emerged at around the same time as ‘Wildstyle’ tagging came to prominence in New York, but only the latter went onto influence graffiti worldwide. Pixacao, on the other hand, remained confined to the streets of Sao Paulo and has retained a distinct cultural identity.
Interestingly, this distinction has recently become a source of tension in Brazil with the de-criminalisation of graffiti at the same time as Pixacao was re-criminalised. In response to this news, and as a protest against the commodification of graffiti in general, last year Pixadores (Pixacao artists) ‘vandalised’ a graffiti show in an art gallery in Sao Paulo.
The following text is from a flyer they used to promote the protest:
“The Path to Revolution: We are going to invade with our protest art a shitty art gallery (Culture Shock), which, as per its ideology, gives space to underground artists – well, then it’s all ours anyway – and we will declare total protest.
Protest slogans: Long Live Tagging, Art as Crime, Crime as Art”
For more on Pixacao check out the the book ‘Pixacao: Sao Paulo Signature’ by Francois Chastanet and for more on the protest check out the article Pixacao vs. Graffiti in Sao Paulo.
Peter Saville Q&A: What’s wrong with design education? from D&AD on Vimeo.
It seems that lately everyone has been talking about London in one context or another, so why not add Peter Saville into the mix, talking here at the D&AD President’s Lectures. Also in this series…
Jan van Toorn Q&A – The relationship between form and technology from D&AD on Vimeo.
… Jan van Toorn is a personal favourite.
As an interesting sign off, you can also follow a link from the Creative Review Saville piece comments to this, which may provide some ideas for anyone struggling to come up with a brief for their self-initiated project next term.
More lectures from this years ‘Insights’ lecture series. See below for list of speakers…
These lectures will be webcast live and archived on the Walker Channel (the first two are already uploaded)
March 10 Process Type Foundry, Minneapolis
March 17 David Reinfurt, New York (above!)
This is phenomenal — drag the little yellow man on to the map to access google maps new ‘street view’, and have a look into the first floor of the Foulis Building.
The implications for photography, web, mobile devices, privacy etc are mind boggling…
This article about a Farnham fundraiser provokes some tetchy responses from Lincoln;
“Yeah, not an original idea, has been done before by Lincoln … it’s just a shame they haven’t done anything original, instead they’ve nicked another idea.”
Count to ten … and relax …
University of the Arts London ran this series of workshops (resources from those workshops available via that link) about preparing for degree show. Heard that illustration might be doing something similar? Damien from ISO also kindly offered to come back in and do a more detailed discussion about copyright, pitching, pricing and the nuts and bolts end of being a designer. If you’re interested in something like this email me at n.mcguire (at) gsa.ac.uk and we can try to set it up.
A little peek behind the scenes at the collateral underpinning a very expensive attempt to control and moderate the language of the city.
Branding Place is a highly contentious political issue. From Wolff Olins work with Lichtenstein – (when viewed in isolation a very nice piece of graphic work, but what is going on politically behind initiatives such as these?) – to the rebrand of Glasgow as “Scotland with Style” – there is an increasing preoccupation, amongst cities, regions and countries, with external presentation and the selling of ‘place’.
Its not particularly unusual that this should be the case, given the feverish one-up-manship occurring between every second, third , fourth city in any given country, all wanting to be our favourite place to live, travel to, be cultutrally enriched by etc etc. What is debatable are the techniques used. Is employing a ‘control through consistency’ mono-message the right way to articulate the richness of any given city?
And we maybe need to consider not employing the basic principal of shouting louder than everyone else when it comes to communicating what this ‘place’ has to offer. John Thackara touches on this in his book, In the Bubble when he observes; “At first many (cities) were convinced that snappy communications were the key to success; these places spent lavishly on logo’s slogans and corporate identities … Much of this money is badly spent. There’s a big difference between selling soap and making sense of a locality – many place marketers don’t get it … (but) … some of the people running cities now realise that communication campaigns will not work unless they are accompanied by genuine improvements to the product”
Its also worth noting that, at the outset of Peter Savilles ‘identity’ work with Manchester, he went on record as saying he would not be producing a logo or a strapline. In his own words: ‘People often ask, “Why not create a logo and a strapline for Manchester?” I don’t see the point of it at all. The very prescence of a strapline indicates failure of some sort. If you’ve got a slogan it suggests you need one and if you need one, it says you’ve got a problem.’
Work from Belgian artist Fred Eerdekens. He creates language by casting light on sculptures in a gallery setting. As you can see in the image above, the light is coming from above and behind the boxes… it’s interesting as most of the sculptures could be considered pieces in their own right. Although I’m not sure if the light is ever turned off/on during the show. View his exhibitions here.
Toy Camera and Quad Camera are some creative toys for the iPhone that make it easy to create animated gifs. Both are available at Art and Mobile. along with a free tool for converting the lomo shots to an animated gif. Have fun!
From the comments section;
“I hope the follow up to this touches on the contextless.
Its impossible to agree or disagree with almost anyone of these notions. We say we want to update Morris and Loos, but what about them needs to be updated? Their visual approaches, their social theories, both? I’m not sure from what’s said. We love Gropius for making us shut up and and make, but he was just as complicit in the Terminator-ization of the Industrial Revolution as anyone. I could argue that we should update Post-modernism and just leave it as that, butt I think if we’ve learned anything, is that in this complex world we live in now, there’s no way to make it plain in 250 words or less draped in vagueness, much less one person do so. I’m hoping from here on out we can obsess over DIALOGUES the way the past century obsessed over Manifestoes….”
Well said.
All in second year studio:
Mon 16th March, 4pm — Ivor Williams + ISO.
Fri 20th March, 4pm — Christina Kernohan + Domenic Flannigan / Lucky Me
Tues 5th May, 4pm — Emlyn Firth + guest (tbc)
Fri 15th May, 4pm — Tom Jenkins, Nokia + Kieran McCann
Current Events at The Glasgow School of Art, does exactly what it says on the URL, well worth bookmarking.
SketchNorth is a discussion community, concerned with the architecture of Scotland, the further reaches of Northern Europe, and some aspects of our Modernist architectural heritage. It contains some interesting writing on architectural legacies, and some interesting photography. The site was designed by Glasgow design group Marque.
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