Democracy?

“A Naked Form of Blackmail”: Naomi Klein on Secretary of State Clinton’s Proposal to Set Up $100 Billion Climate Aid Fund for Developing Countries.

I absolutely despair at this, as should everyone. Have they lost their minds? Greedy bastards.

As per usual Annie Leonard predicts the future…

The Story of Cap and Trade

Witticisms of the South East

Sometimes it’s worth being an art student purely for the laughs.

Spotted at Lucky PDF’s exhibition at Area 10 Peckham.

Affluenza

Last weekend I attended another secular sunday sermon organised by TSOL where author and psychiatrist Oliver James spoke to a crowd of three hundred in the always damp but never dreary Conway Hall near Holborn. Last months sermon was led by Ms Ruby Wax, comedienne and tuneless entertainer. I left feeling amused but unfulfilled, which is highly unusual for a SOL event as there is usually always something that has got me thinking but it seemed Ms Wax was unwilling to give too much away.

Luckily Oliver was more than willing to share his knowledge on the subjects of selfish capitalism, Affluenza and our constant need to ‘keep up with the Jones’ which is something that always fascinates me about modern society, not because I am immune to it, far from it, but because it is the kind of thinking that keeps the advertising industry afloat. An irrational desire for what you haven’t got and believe that you need in order to be (considered) successful.

According to Mr James, a study showed that a UK survey of people asked, ‘How much would you need to earn to be happy?’ a large percentage said a third more of their income would be enough. The result was the same whether people earnt £2,000, £20,000 or £200,000. They all wanted a third more than they were getting.

So we are never truly happy with what we have.

I was reminded of a piece of work I did in art foundation that involved taking an old section of a bill-board and making it into something new.

I was given the section of a DFS advert.
A company I had been brought up to generally hate and despise. Because we were never that family. DFS was the second circle of hell. B&Q was the first.

So, my visual response to the DFS poster was rooted in this opinion and I began to think of the lyrics of a Talking Heads song;

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful
wife
And you may ask yourself-Well…How did I get here?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.
And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!

And so I gleefully letra-setted the lyrics on top of the unsuspecting male model’s face sat on his newly purchased orange leather corner sofa, which he bought for an amazing £399 down from £599 with interest free credit (of course) and nothing to pay until the year 1 zillion. Bargain.

This also goes back to the poem I posted here not too long ago about desire. I see a pattern emerging….however I just can’t decide if it’s a dissertation subject or a practical project.

This week, Tim Harford talks about Frugality.

A-void.

Some things that have been going around my head of late;

Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad. ~ Part of the conclusion of the last book I read, The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton.

An all too familiar dilemma in this blog post, perhaps I need to come out of the graphic design closet ~ Wisdom and honesty from Mr Dave Trott; as always.

I’ve rediscovered the book-wormish ways of my youth and so if I only get this for Christmas I’ll be happy.

More short and skittish blog posts to follow I’m sure….

 

Parlak şehir

2 weeks ago, I was sat with a Swede and an Egyptian on a roof-top terrace overlooking a glittering Istanbul skyline with a glass of red wine in hand talking to a Turkish design student about the political underbelly of design in her culture, having just come out for air from an exhibition in memorandum to Alan Fletcher. This was a typical evening during Istanbul’s graphic design week, it’s a hard life isn’t it?!

I was invited over with some of my course-mates to Istanbul for the Grafist International workshops which are held every year (this being year 13) in Mimar Sinan fine art university. Students came from all over the world (we met people from Egypt, Germany, Poland and Turkey to name a few) to take part and the workshops were led by Phil Baines, Petr Van Blokland,  Gülizar Çepoğlu, Memed Erdener, Dionysis Livanis, Piotr Mlodozeniec and Mehmet Ali Türkmen.

I was in Phil Baines’ workshop on type in the environment and the whole class collected typography from around Istanbul, my contribution is here on flickr. We then returned to the studio to make collages based on the photos we had taken.

In between the workshops (which varied from typography to poster design to branding depending on the lecturer) we attended lots of private views for various exhibitions that were happening as part of Istanbul graphic design week  including the memorandum for Alan Fletcher, a polish poster exhibition and a collaborative exhibition between Mimar Sinan and CSM (Something I would love to do with my university.)

The AGI (Alliance Graphique International) were also running conferences in the university at the same time (we managed to sneak in for free!) again with a very impressive list of speakers, we saw Fons Hickmann, Debra Sussman and Pierre Bernard talk on the first day. We also kept seeing Paula Scher (Pentagram New York) milling around all week which had me dumb-struck.

Name-dropping aside, Istanbul was and is amazing and vibrant and inspiring. We met some really, really lovely people and got to see what other design students are doing around the world. (Let me tell you now they are good, very good.) I was so impressed by the ideas that everyone came up with considering we only had 2 days and were completely out of our normal ‘working’ environments. We learnt so much about each others cultures and education and how that influences our design work.

Here are some of my favourites…a Turkish student who made a functional poster to stop rape…by making a poster that could be rolled up and used as a ‘friend.’

A German student who created a beautifully simple but powerful collage on the empowerment of women.

And here are the kitty cats we used to share our breakfast with in the morning, another thing I loved about Istanbul, felines everywhere and I am very much a cat person.

There was some incredible work on display in the university by a Turkish artist named Devrim Erbil who painted the most intricate landscapes of Istanbul.

I had an unforgettable time and definitely would like to go back next year when Istanbul is City of Culture. We are in talks to commemorate the experience with an exhibition and it would also be a great way to keep in touch with our new found friends.

We were also joined by the affable chaps from Pat and Trevor and on returning to London I went to the private view of This Is Why We Meet, a showcase of their latest collaborative project, which brought together students from across University of the Arts London (my university) from the individual colleges (LCC, CSM, Camberwell, Wimbledon, Chelsea and LCF) in association with Wieden and Kennedy. It’s refreshing to see these kinds of collaborations as they rarely happen between colleges unless between friends and in a university that is as competitive as ours it’s great to see this creativity brought together on one platform rather than produced separately in competition with each other.

It’s business time…episode 10,000

I have finally managed to settle on a design for my business cards..hoorah! I hastily decided to screen-print onto the back of some reject prints from a previous uni project and they have actually come out quite well. (I’m as surprised about this as anyone)

The nice things about them is that they have been reused 3 times now, the original design was from printer’s rejects that i made into a collage, which was then made into a poster which is now on the back of my business cards….i wonder if I could use them again some how? A necktie for rodents perhaps?…I’m joking. I blame the fatigue of waiting for my 6.30am flight to Istanbul….I am going for the Grafist festival at Mimar Sinan University where they are running workshops all week with Phil Baines and some other European designers so I am expecting it to be quite intense. I feel I haven’t designed anything in about a decade..apart from my business cards of course.

Speaking of ‘green’ things i saw a lecture by Futerra this morning at The School of Life and these were lovingly made by the programme assistant…they have little wind turbines on them, made me smile.

A belated report.

The London Design Festival is arguably the best time to be a designer in London as there are so many things to see and take part in. I was working a lot last week but I managed to fit in a few amazing lectures and workshops.

I attended Greengaged at The Design Council last Thursday for the Crafting Mass Production workshop day curated by Anna Gerber (LCC tutor, design writer and publisher) and Nat Hunter, Caroline Clarke and Sophie Thomas of Three Trees Don’t Make a Forest.

It started off with a series of lectures by Kresse Weslin from the Elvis & Kresse Organisation (E&KO), Chris Svensson from Sara de Bont Studio, (who designed the graphics for Radical Nature, mentioned in my earlier post) June Hill from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Embroidery Programme and Fred Deakin of Airside. In the afternoon we took part in workshops in paper-making by Tullis Russell Paper Mill, imposition from Calverts and finishing techniques from letterpress experts Workshop.

All the speakers were engaging with ideas around the subject of craft on a mass scale, sustainability, the designer as producer and environmentally friendly graphics.

Fred Deakin in particular brought up some really interesting debate about the revival of the arts and craft movement and how technology begins to bring a kind of rebellious regression in technique within graphic design. The aesthetics of craft graphics has always appealed to me so much more than computer produced pieces and being a student at the former London College of Printing has contributed to this interest even more.

The argument against processes like screen-printing and letterpress has always been time which inevitably comes down to money. I’m currently reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and I came across an apparently common phrase that I had never heard of before; Haste equals Waste.

This caught my attention, as I it  sums up a lot of problems in just three words. We make hasty decisions about a lot of things that lead to a waste of time, money, effort and resources. This is one of my main issues with living in London. Everyone is in such a rush to get somewhere, many are impatient and impolite and this makes for a hostile and stressful environment most of the time. Everyone is under pressure not to waste money, i.e time which means they go faster, which leads to more waste.

I hope by now you can see where i am going with this…designers choose macs and printers over compositors and screen-printing a lot of the time now even though it is often a stressful experience (wrong prints, paper issues, size issues, technology failure..etc) which can lead to a lot of wasted materials. The great thing about slower processes is that most of these problems would be ironed out in the production process and wouldn’t jump out at you when it’s too late.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that all computer based printing goes wrong as this is obviously not the case but I do read time and time again about the anxiousness of designers and art-directors when they send work to print, hoping that nothing goes wrong after all the effort they have put into the production, we have also all heard the horror stories of the mass print-off  that went wrong.

I am a bit of a weirdo in the fact that I like the smell of the letterpress and screen-printing rooms. They are great environments to be in, everyone is active and physically involved in what they are producing in contrast to the almost hypnotic state of users in the Mac suites, this is the biggest cause of discontent for people now, technology separates us from our labour.

Anyway from this I have come to the conclusion that it shouldn’t be the case that to be a designer you should be constantly tied to a Mac, as every non designer I meet always has the impression that we sit at computers all day. I think this is where ‘Mac monkeys’ originated, which is a phrase I am trying desperately to avoid and so I have decided to set myself a little challenge in the third year of my degree, one which hopefully will force me to think a little more about my work and my process.

My challenge is to not use a Mac for any of my work in my final year.

Not for compositing, image generation, anything. Everything I produce will be done by hand. Now this may be the most ridiculous (and impossible) statement ever made but I will give it a go none the less.

As you can see from this mini essay, the day at the Design Council gave me a lot to think about, I met some really lovely like-minded people and it was all completely free. Which makes me think, what do we as participants give back in return? As much as fun as it was, the whole day had a very serious message behind it – one that often gets over-looked -  so how do we give something back? It seems like we are chipping away at a huge rock a bit at a time but I suppose the more it is discussed, the more ideas will emerge. At least that’s what I hope.

Some Housekeeping

I pre-warn you dear readers, that this blog may resemble an old junk shop for a while as I have a severe amount of blogging backlog to post as I have been in mourning after the theft and ultimately the loss of my laptop, which did get in the way of the usual blogging activity.

I have now filled the Macbook-shaped hole in my life with – you guessed it – a new Macbook, so it’s time to start anew but first a little housekeeping, as there are old issues to be addressed.

As previously mentioned, I have started my placement year with an internship at The School of Life.

The School of Life is based at a shop in Bloomsbury, which is fitting as it is known as the literary heart of London.

The beautiful illustration above is by Charlotte Mann who has illustrated the walls of the classroom as well as this intricate postcard.

The school runs many programs dealing with high culture subjects in a relaxed setting drawing on teachings from philosophy, sociology and literature.

So far I have attended two of the holidays that the school runs, Urban Gardening and A Voyage of Epicuriosity as well as the evening Politics classes that run every week.

It’s great to be in an environment where asking questions is acceptable and everyone is looking for bigger answers. It’s an encouraging and nurturing environment which is obviously due to the lovely ladies who work there and the kind of inquisitive people who are drawn to the school. It also means I have a tremendously long book-list to dive into.

My father often (correctly) accuses me of being a know-it-all, as I am one those people who hates to be out of their depth in any subject and even if I don’t know something I will (shock horror) often pretend that I do + then find out later, which leads to a lot of guess work.

I planning on not doing this so much in the future as i have come to accept that there is nothing wrong with saying you don’t know, because that’s why you keep learning. It’d be a pretty boring existence if we knew it all. I’m also glad that I’ve come to this conclusion at the start of my year in industry as I’m going to be asking a lot of questions in the next 12 months.

“(There is) Only one thing I know and that is that I know nothing” Socates.

Autumnal ponderings and a punch up….

I haven’t written for a while as I have been internet-less which is an undesirable position to be in most of the time, however after a while I began to quite enjoy not being tied to the world wide web. I read more, I listened to good music, I reacquainted myself with my (musical) keyboard, it was nice…I think everyone should try it once in a while…

Now that I am back online I have the slowest internet connection since ye olden times of dial up….So lets see how long it takes me to upload some pics…

One of my previous housemates sent me this alphabet by a media researcher, Rachel Young, which was picked up by The Telegraph online. It only took 15 hours to complete which is pretty good going considering it was from the whole of the UK.

I have just moved into a new house this week in the beautiful London suburb of Peckham. And for once I am not being sarcastic…it really is lovely. I am the first to move in so it has been a little quiet, however I have had some entertainment in the form of two squirrels having a furry bust-up in my garden. This is what passes the time when you live in a TV/Internet free environment, but it is also the funniest thing I have ever witnessed.

I also finally got around to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and am currently hooked to Outliers which is just as informative and easy to read. It is a book I would suggest to anyone and everyone, as well as Tom Hodgkinson’s How to be Free. If a book can open your mind on muddied issues like work and success then it’s has to be a winner. Alain de Botton’s lecture at Ted 2009 touches on this subject as well, it’s really refreshing to think that you don’t always have to match up to everyone else’s perception of ’success.’

I have to catch myself when I apologetically tell people that I study design. It’s beginning to become a habit, a bad habit, as I am already waiting for the expected comment…”Oh, design? Well there’s no money in that dear.” (I have been told this more times than I can remember.)
But who wrote the rule that to be successful you have to be rich?

Now that’s what I call info graphics….

While researching consumerism for my dissertation I came across this work by American artist Chris Jordan. Breathtaking and one of those ideas that makes you jealous that you didn’t do it first!

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008

See the rest here.