Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Designers Who Are Better Than Me 11

It's not often that I pick myself up out of that fortress of indifference I call my daily life to really care all that much about the state of the general majority of local graphic design (at least not in the days before I started this blog!) Sometimes something will hit close to home, it may be that I have to look at every day, maybe someone I know who can do better designed it, maybe I designed it! Sometimes it's just for something that is close to my heart. Case in point, The 2005 marketing material for The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra - it may be the 2004 stuff - I don't want to unnecessarily vilify someone for producing totally adequate design that I've just gotten the years wrong, I've tried to exorcise it out of my mind to be honest - you'll know what one I mean because it was horrible. For the past few previous seasons the promotional material had been consistently bland, The ASO went through some personnel issues and to be fair, some serious funding issues which I'm sure left their mark, but the stuff looked like no one gave a damn. And really, what more incentive do you need to produce beautiful design than doing work for a symphony orchestra? There's just so much scope there, it's my dream assignment. It looks like they got the high school work experience kid to knock it out ten minutes before the end of the day.

So come 2006, I wasn't expecting much from the ASO in regards to their season's promotional material, was I in for a shock. The 2006 design was some of the most beautiful I've seen for a local arts organisation. Obviously someone had gotten them back on track by employing the capable lads at Voice Design. Voice have been quietly plugging away for over ten years now, with some very unique and inspiring designs in their portfolio, including the work for the ASO, Rio Coffee, SA Great and Beresford Wines, to name a few. Persistence seems to have paid off for them, as their work is becoming a more common sight in design journals and competitions, including an in book award at the 2006 UK D&AD awards. Their book 'Type it Write' has become an essential reference guide around many a local and not so local design studio.

For Sydney-siders, Voice are currently part of the Powerhouse Museum's 'Design 06 - Cutting Edge Australian Graphic Design' exhibition for the benefit of all you eastern states gurus who I know flock to this blog.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Recent Surfing Highlights 9

If you get to the point where you think you've got all your Ipod needs covered, perhaps you need this.

Too much Peter Saville is never enough.

Bugs Bunny under the spotlight, deconstructing an animation icon.

A fantastic design blog, that highlights found type, print and packaging.

I was a wee bit too old when Transformers they first hit the seen back in the 1980s, but I have to admit this trailer for the upcoming film has got me excited, especially the tranformery typography at the end.

And speaking of typography, is there nothing it can't do? You'll never think of taking a shower the same way again after seeing this.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Oh, The Busy...

I've been crazy busy in my neck of the woods for the past couple of weeks, logging in the overtime trying to get a couple of projects approved before a client jets off on holiday, then going home and doing my freelance design thing for a couple of more hours - hence the relative sparsity of new articles up here on this ol' blog 'a' mine (for the benefit of the 2 or 3 people who check it on any regular sort of basis!)

The unfortunate and fortunate thing about choosing a life in design is that you carry your passion with you all the time, not many designers turn off at five o'clock that I know of anyway, most try to find some hobby outside of it or it will just consume you 24/7. I know I find myself when driving home checking out the kerning for a headline on an advert on the back of a bus, or noticing a new identity on a building on my route. I'm informed by my partner that 99.9% of the population who aren't graphic designers don't do this, and for her part, she works long hours, in a very stressful position as a Human Resources Director, but at the end of the day, she's not looking for the validity of possible compensation claims on the latest episode of 'Big Brother', meanwhile I'm driving her crazy flicking between the music channels on Foxtel to try and catch the fantastic graphics on the latest Gnarls Barkly filmclip.

So I sometimes envy the ability of people able to separate their home-lives from their work-lives, especially when you're in the middle of a busy workload - I guess the advantage that a designer has at the end of the day is that the product of their work efforts are somewhat more tangible. We have a portfolio of work, a gallery - evidence of our daily struggles whether that be a brochure, a website, an advert, whatever - it's there, we can say I did that, whether you're proud of the work or not, it's a lot more than a lot of professions can say at the end of their working day.

So yeah, busy, but slowly easing off to just a mild form of insanity.