Designers Who Are Better Than Me 10

It's always great to stumble across some inspiring design work when trawling through the internet, even better when you discover the work is by someone you studied with (petty jealousies aside!) and haven't heard from in Many Years.Mia and Jem Graphic Design features the work of husband and wife Mia Daminato and Jeremy Matthews, I studied in the same year as Mia and Jeremy was a year below me. If memory serves me, they were both clever clogs when it came to designing back then (Mia won the design 'prize' for our year I believe, against some pretty stiff competition in that class) the work has certainly blossomed from that potential. Currently they are working in San Francisco, Mia at Sunset Magazine as a Creative Director and Jem at Metadesign, while finding time to do projects on the side. Their portfolio is fantastic, it includes one of my favourite identity concepts of all time Box Cafe. It's a fun site with plenty to check out, you'll be impressed if you do.

Was It Worth The Effort?

Most people who watch an average amount of commercial television and certainly most people with an interest in the design arts would have seen the advert for Sony Bravia Television featuring a multitude of coloured balls bouncing down a street to the tune of Jose Gonzalez's 'Heartbeat' tune. The amazing thing about the advert,, of course, is the scale of it, a quarter of a million bouncy balls were fired from 10 specially constructed giant cannons onto a San Francisco street that was cleared for the shoot - and it was all shot in camera. It has received a lot of praise for it's scope, it's lack of computer trickery, and it is a beautiful and sublime piece of advertising. Having seen the advert a number of times, it very much looks like it was produced using CGI - I would hazard a guess that 90% of people watching it who aren't aware of how it was produced would think so as well. So the question posed is - a lot of respect that this advert has garnered is over it's 'hands on approach' to production, but if the majority of your audience is unaware of this, does it dampen the impact? Was it worth going to all the expense and trouble to produce something that looks so computer generated, something that could have looked the same at a fraction of the cost, and the audience still none the wiser?

Design Heroes - Peter Saville

Most Graphic Designers have their personal design heroes whose work has influenced and inspired them in their creative endeavors, there's a whole industry devoted to it judging by the number of graphic designer monographs out there snapped up by an eager audience. When I started at University, the Neville Brody worship was on the wane and Duffy & Charles S Anderson where emerging as the idols that launched a million design graduate portfolios. By the time I had finished my degree, David Carson and Emigre were influencing the legions of professional designer wannabes.

My first professional work being in the music industry, the designers I looked up to tended to be those producing the look of music graphics, Art Chantry, Oliver Vaughan, Dirk Rudolph and of course Peter Saville's album covers for Factory Records. Though I've never really followed his aesthetics of his austere style in my own designs, he's been a big influence on how I approach and think about design. My favourite comments on design from Saville have been his opinion that a piece of design doesn't need to be blatantly self evident - that the viewer should be given enough credence and respect to be able to grasp the function and concept of, say, a particular logo without the designer merely stooping to visual puns, I'm quoting out of memory here, but I believe he set the example of a stylish restaurant, people who would frequent such a restaurant would be able to grasp that it is a stylish, sophisticated, upmarket establishment by the designer using an informed choice of font that reflects that, rather than, say a pictogram of a plate, knife and fork to represent it. Unfortunately, for every informed comment he makes, there seems to be an equal amount of gibberish and self posturing. He skirts dangerously close to that precipice that separates a designer from an 'artist' and has often commented that he never really wanted to be a designer and merely became one by circumstance (we should all be so lucky with those circumstances!)

He's left a lasting legacy on album cover design and visual communication in general. You can find a good biography on him here on Wikipedia.