100 Bill Murrays: Part 1.

So with just under a month to go, and a new project brief breathing down my neck, I've completed barely a third of the number of collages required. I need to either employ some child slave labour or think up a few more ways of creating collages without thinking too much about them. Here's a selection of some I've made so far:

Narrative. Here I've provided a different setting, perhaps altering the narrative of the image. Have they missed their plane? Do they care, given that they appear to be on a tropical beach? Or are they off-duty pilots?

This edited composition amplifies the loneliness of Billy Murray's character.
Surreal head-tentacles...
Rhythm. Rather than cutting and individually pasting each strip, I left them connected at the top, and laid them concertina-like across the backing card.
This collage - a post-it stuck to the backing card - refers to a different aspect of the process of making the collages. Not too sure which category to put this under though. Narrative maybe?
Contrast. Not the kind of thing you'd expect to hear coming from the mouth of a drunk. Or maybe it is?
Composition. Images removed, with cut'n'paste words standing-in, to describe the content of the image.
Composition again, with the key elements of the image presented as a simple formula.
Editing. This image refers to the editing process of choosing the still from the movie.
Editing again. The focal points of the original image have been removed, but the white shapes in their place are perhaps more visually striking.
Narrative. Speculation over the roles of the three characters. Poor Barney Gumble on the end is a nobody.

Ed Ruscha at The Hayward

Last week I visited the Hayward Gallery to see Ed Ruscha's 50-year retrospective, and oh boy is is a treat.

Besides the work itself, there are some nice touches, like this billboard-style greets the visitors with introductory information on the exhibit.

Ed studied alongside graphic design students at the California Institute of Arts, worked at a type foundry early in his career, and later even designed his own typeface, Boy Scout Utility Modern (as used in the top image here). I won't bother regurgitating from the press release, so here's an excerpt of an interview with the man himself instead:

Cheestrings

Spot the difference:

The recent news of Cadbury's recent rejection of Kraft's hostile takeover bid reminded me of the bus stop ads that came out a while ago to promote the rebranding of freakish children's dairy product Cheestrings. The ads bore an uncanny resemblance to the long-established Cadbury's Dairy Milk branding, both in the purple and white colour scheme, and the "glass of real milk" imagery.

Now, consider that the people behind the Cheestrings rebrand are advertising golden boys Fallon, who also produced the recent Cadbury's Glass And A Half Full Productions, featuring the gorilla, the kiddie eyebrows, and the airport trucks. Although there's nothing much yet to promote the Cheestrings-connection on their slightly creepy rustling flash website, I get the distinct impression that Fallon are operating above the law here.

And weirdly, although the Cheestrings product is unrelated to Kraft, there has been speculation that Cheestring producers Kerry foods may benefit from the current buy-out wrangling with an opportunity to consolidate their own portfolio of cheese-based products...

...this is too much, my head is hurting. Here's an Eastenders remix of Fallon's Cadbury Gorilla ad:

PDF makin'

Here's the PDF that Daniel, Adam, and I created in the all-day PDF tutorial last week. We used a 5-column grid, Univers regular and bold in 9 and 20pt, and a key-line in the top left corner as a consistent feature across all three pages. Our choice of images could have been better, and there's the glaring error in the first paragraph of the conclusion, where our carefully placed soft returns were disrupted by an accidental squeezing of the text box. In our defence, like every other group, we were very pushed for time.

The conclusion reads:

The Image Workshop focused upon the relationships between image and text elements within a design, and how varied combinations of both alter the message presented to the viewer.

We explored this through a series of 2-minute collages, each one based upon one of 10 themes - composition, editing, contrast, rhythm, texture, repurposing, juxtaposition, surrealism, narrative, and humour.

We were encouraged to work quickly, bypassing the usual decision-making process, and introducing a random element to the imagery.

A second exercise took this further, as Darren asked us to devise and use a system to produce as many collages as we could within 20 minutes.

Here are some unfinished layouts from this week's PDF/InDesign sessions with Jo. These feature text-styling, master-page elements, sequential page numbering, They're all based on a 5-column grid, and are set with various weights of News Gothic and Myriad Pro. The images are a a mixture of some bits of my work, and a few random pictures (that's not my dog, though I sort of wish it was)...

Finally here's a PDF I made of the VCT text about Process and Collage. A 4-column grid this time, with Univers again. I'll make hundreds of PDFs over the next couple of years alone, and I'm sure I'll look back at these layouts and bow my head in shame, but then I think it's important to be able to see progress. At least that's what I'll tell myself then.

Monumental Type

I mentioned in a previous post the opening credit sequence of the film Panic Room, which sets a foreboding tone for movie with the use of monumental 3-dimensional type, integrated into a sequence images of the buildings of upper Manhattan. The font (I think it's Copperplate Gothic) recalls the early 19th Century stone-carved lettering from the frontages of the societies and banks of the area, and it has an architectural quality appropriate to a film in which a room is the central character.

A film which uses the same technique to similar effect, albeit in a very different setting, is first-time director Duncan Jones' Moon (pictured above). Essentially a 1-man performance by actor Sam Rockwell, the film explores the theme of paranoia and madness as a result of extreme loneliness. As the text floats in the space around Rockwell's character as he works, it resembles a silent companion or invisible friend. Critics have described the film as concept sci-fi in the tradition of Tarkofsky, with a 70s-era retro-futuristic aesthtic. The accompanying publicity poster certainly fits the bill:

Next a couple of works by American painter Ed Ruscha (pronounced Ed Roo-SHAY... I always get that wrong). Ruscha apparently wanted to be a sign painter, but fell in with the wrong crowd. A retrospective of his 50-year career is currently showing at the Hayward Gallery.

Formerly a puppert-creator for psychedelic kids tv show Pee Wee's Playhouse, Wayne White these days creates paintings which sit just on the fun, folksy side of Ed Ruscha's work. With careful rendering of light, shadow and reflection, he integrates 3-dimensional type on to found thrift store paintings of often twee or sentimental landscapes.

Traditional wooden frames recall the canvases' former domestic status, and make them function as objects just as they do as images.

3D workshop: art, advertising... carrots

Jesse Wine, a fine art sculptor and 2nd year student at the RCA, gave a workshop yesterday on creating narrative using 3-dimensional objects. We looked at the photographed paper environments of Thomas Demand, Erwin Wurm's 1-minute sculptures (above), Tim Noble and Sue Webster's silhouettes and piles of rubbish, and Bruce Nauman's early post-college empty studio performances, not to mention Fischelli and Weiss' The Way Things Go:

(guilty secret: this is almost certainly the wrong thing to say, but I think we just about all agreed that we prefer the Honda advert version)

Another relevant artist, I think, would be Daniel Eatock. Despite a tendency toward bad visual puns, Eatock produces some thoughtful stuff. Works such as these sagging, and counter-balanced book shelves explore his interest in the intrinsic physical qualities of, and relationships between, everyday objects.

The session inspired me to look again at some other artists that were influential to me on my Fine Art BA, such as James Ireland, whose collections of "low" or "non-art" objects resemble something (usually landscapes) from a certain angle and if you squint a bit.

Another artist I took a lot from is Tom Friedman. In the tradition of the readymade, which began in 1917 with Marcel Duchamp's shop-bought urinal, entitled Fountain, Friedman explores the effect that isolating an object within the white space of a gallery has upon the viewer's perception of it. though instead of just presenting the objects as they are, Friedman looks at the fundamental characteristics of an object - What size is this? How does it fit together? - and assembles combinations that defy logic and patience, such as an infinite ring of plastic cups, or a pencil polygon.

I explored similar themes in my own work, by balancing either very large or very small objects, and having a go at replicating a modernist aesthetic with isotonic drinks pouches wedged between concrete slabs.

I remembered as a child baking crisp packets in the oven to shrink them, and tried the same thing with a plastic ruler, resulting in a 27cm-long ruler with 30cm markings just a little out. Another childhood trick - folding a banknote to make the Queen look like John McEnroe (well, it sort of worked...) - inspired a portrait of Charles Darwin as an neanderthal. (The portrait sadly didn't last long, as it was stolen from the wall of a Deptford gallery. Such appreciation!)

There's a fairly clear line between a lot of this stuff to advertising, though I think a lot of it may be coincidental, after all its only playing around with objects, not rocket science. Perhaps it's that disparity between the simplicity of production and the wow-look-at-that pay-off that makes these objects so appealing.

Here are two campaigns - for 42 Below Vodka by The Glue Society, and for Wallpaper Magazine - which use a virtually identical trick of stacking chairs into an arch:

And finally here are some images of the carrot-based sculptures that Ashley and I produced (with very limited materials) during the workshop, starting with a carrot-wasp:

Carrot-henge:
Face with carrot-cigar:
Carrot-wand-extender-thing:
And finally some kind of ropey-architectural model...

Text & Image: Brand Identity

Faced with the prospect of only a little more than a month now to write my first VCT essay, with still no decision made on the subject, I've decided to narrow my search to the field of logo design and corporate branding. It would be reductive to say that branding involves the production of a single image, in most cases the logo sums up the project and can be used as a staring point for discussion. Ideal for, say, a 1,500 word essay. Here are a few examples I've looked at this week, and first a bit about what got me started on this line of enquiry...

Sean Perkins of London-based studio North gave a lecture one evening last week, in which he not only discussed examples of his company's work, but also showed a couple of "pitch" films, of the kind they use to convince clients their clients to say yes and hand over the money.

Their rebranding of the RAC (shown above, next to the old version) stood out for me as a particularly impressive achievement, given the amount of work involved (including livery for vehicles and uniforms). Sean explained the problem was that for a company which, when it started out over 100 years ago, was at the cutting edge of technology ("it was like they were servicing spaceships"), the RAC's image had grown stale and antiquated, the preserve of old men with life time memberships purchased in pre-war. The bright orange and custom type of the new logo certainly look more like they belong on the side of a spaceship than a Morris Minor, and membership shot through the roof as a result.

Rebranding the Tate Gallery in 1999, Wolff Olins applied an amorphous treatment to a custom font, and dropped the prefix "The" from the name, successfully creating a more contemporary feel to an institution founded over 100 years ago. The result is a coherent and flexible solution that could be applied across a range of media and according to the needs of each gallery.

Like the RAC and the Tate, mental health charity Mind found themselves with too many disparate elements, and an out-dated and inappropriate identity. The dove motif of their old logo was deemed too Christian for a modern organisation with a pan-cultural audience, and has been eradicated so thoroughly that I've not been able to find an example of it online. The solution presented by Glazer in 2004 is friendly and accessible*, and employs an effective visual metaphor - the scribble communicates the confusion, frustration, and perhaps creativity of mental ill-health, from which comes the organisation's name in hand-drawn script. Glazer describe the logo as "reflecting the organisation’s mission to help its users create answers and solutions to complex problems". As with the RAC, the success of the rebrand was dramatic, with annual donations increasing from £8 to £17 million.

*According to Wikipedia (yeah okay, okay..), the name was changed from upper to lowercase in the mid-90s, presumably to project a friendlier and less austere image.

Produced around the same time as Mind's new logo, homeless and housing-equality charity Shelter received a revamp courtesy of Johnson Banks. The simple insertion of the instantly and universally recognisable peaked roof shape into the letter "h" sign-posts a whole series of connotations, and also makes a personal connection to the viewer by allowing them viewer to make associations with their own idea of "home".

Worth noting is that the Johnson Banks website actually contains quite a good blog, including this post on logo design and Michael Evamy's useful and aptly-named guide Logo.

Of course the logo that has swallowed up the greatest number of column inches in recent years would be another by Wolff Olins', this time for the 2012 London Olympics. Commissioned at a cost of £400,000, and met with public outrage upon its release in 2007, it may be that this is the most sensible subject for the essay, simply because so much discussion already exists, and there are so many questions to be asked about it, staring with: WHY?

There's not enough space to go into any real discussion about the logo here, but my first impressions are of it as a kind of bad-on-purpose-in-a-funky-urban-dad sort of thing. Horribly awkward, and self-consciously zany, just awful really. But it does stick in the mind, and everyone recognises it.

Font Game

How about a quick and painless way to test your skills in font identification? Have a go at ilovetypography's Font Game. I surprised myself by fluking a score of 27 out of 34. Perhpas it's not so "rather difficult" after all...

Designer vs Client

Please excuse the language, but this is very funny:

...is this what we're letting ourselves in for?!