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.