We Made This

Summer deadline

   

Applications for the RSA's fantastically good RDI Summer School close this Friday, 25 July.  

  

Read all about it here, and apply here.

A Recent History of Writing and Drawing

Now this looks interesting.  

A Recent History of Writing and Drawing is the new show at the ICA, opening on Wednesday 9 July. It's curated by design historian Emily King (who's also design editor at Frieze magazine), and is a project by programmer/designer Jürg Lehni, and graphic designer Alex Rich.  

  

The exhibition will look at "the evolving relationship between technologies of communication and their users", which sounds a bit dry, but should be lots of fun. They've got a large wall-drawing machine, and another machine for hole-punching posters. They've also got a running programme of Thursday evening events which promise to be pretty groovy.  

  

We'll fill in some more detail once the show opens.  

  

Image: Dots on Demand, Jürg Lehni & Alex Rich, 2008

Interesting, very interesting

  

We trundled over to Conway Hall in Holborn on Saturday for Interesting 2008, a conference kind of thing organised by the lovely Russell Davies.   

  

This is the second year for the conference, and it's a loose gathering of people who are interested in seeing short talks by interesting people. It's all very lo-fi and collaborative (they even let you play with the logo - that's our remix of it up above), and as a result it's about a hundred times better than a normal conference. If you're familiar with the Pecha Kucha events, then it's a bit like that, but with less exacting time restraints.  

  

The audience is fusion of geeks and designers, so it's getting a stack of coverage on the blogs. You can get a full run-down of the event on Roo Reynolds' site, which also has lots of links to other blog coverage, as well as various bits on Flickr.  

  

Our personal faves were Roo's talk about Lego Vignettes, James Houston's graduation video remix of Radiohead's Nude, Michael Johnson's talk about guitars and graphics, and Jim Le Fevre's wonderful analogue animation using a turntable at 33rpm.  

  

Here's the stuff from last year too.  

  

All in all, a great way to spend a day.

Carson city

  

We made our way over to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith last night for what has to be the most shambolic talk we've ever been to. (And we've been to a typography talk by Erik Spiekermann where none of the fonts on his PDF presentation loaded up. Actually... that was worse. But it's a close run thing.) 

The talk, by David Carson, was supposed to be about his new book, but he hasn't quite finished it, so instead the talk was a pretty standard retrospective of his work. 

Carson came across pretty much as you'd expect: laid-back and amiable. But he also came across as if he'd never presented before, which just isn't the case, and felt a tad disingenuous. He operated his Mac as if it were an alien device - he was unsure of any key commands, or how to create a spread PDF rather than single pages, and acted as if using the slideshow function was some magical mystery. He's been working on computers for a fair while now - can he really be so unfamiliar with them? Or is it just part of the Carson persona? 

Either way, he assured us that he wasn't really a computer kind of guy, and that the meat of his presentation would be on two carousels of slides.

Unfortunately, neither of those worked. They cluttered and stammered their way through his selection of slides, jamming, repeating, freezing, and in the end actually spitting his work out onto the floor. Everyone's a critic, eh? 

It meant that things went slowly, with the talk clocking in at two and a half hours; for a fair percentage of the audience, this was just too much, and there was a steady flow of people out of the auditorium as the talk wound on and on. 

The content of his talk was a few bits and bobs of new stuff, and a stack of the old stuff, as well as a smattering of found graphics and personal photographs. He showed his recent work for Bark (shown above), which was quieter than his old work, and perhaps better for it.

He also showed the various presentations (six so far, and counting) he's done for the upcoming identity for the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida. Get this: in each presentation he'd show the clients up to thirty different variations of a logo. Staggering. 

All in all we didn't dislike the talk as much as some of the audience, and there were some bits we gleaned in amongst the chaos:

• Magazines are good as they give you room to experiment in public
• When you're using a freelancer, your job is to hire someone good, then get out of the way and let them get on with it
• Be open to accidents, but just because something is an accident, don't assume it's good
• Carson's dad was a test pilot, and it used to be a career with a 58% mortality rate

Anyway, as we mentioned up top, Carson is in the process of putting together his new book, The Rules of Grafik (sic) Design, and he'd like you to drop him an email. He'd like to know what your personal rules are for graphic design - not the ones you learned at college, but the ones you've created for yourself during your work as a designer. 

Um, perhaps we might suggest: Make sure your presentation equipment works? 

Degrees of brilliance

We made our way across to a couple of the Central Saint Martins degree shows over the weekend. 

First up we checked out the MA Communication Design show at the Mall Galleries, and then the BA Graphic Design exhibition at the Bargehouse (just behind the OXO Tower on the Southbank). Both shows were really professional, and had some great bits of work, including Yukinori Motoya's Japanese Icons series, pictured above. The BA show extends across three floors of the Bargehouse, which is a simply fantastic space. 

Check out Alistair's pick of his favourites from each show over on this Flickr set. There are some weblinks with each image, though only a few of the students have got their stuff together on them so far. 

Both shows run until Thursday, full details here.

David Carson's new rules

   

The godfather of grunge graphics and dirty type, David Carson, hits London in a couple of weeks to showcase his new book, The Rules of Graphic Design. He's going to be talking at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith on Wednesday 18 June at 6pm, and tickets are £25 (£15 for concessions).  

  

In the mid-nineties, David Carson was the very definition of graphic design, with The End of Print from 1995 and 2nd Sight from 1997; so it'll be interesting to see what he's been up to for the past decade.  

  

The image above is a screengrab of his desktop, from the Quark promo site ilovedesign (which explains the absence of Adobe icons in Carson's dock...).

Cheers to Caspian for the heads up.

  

Fresh meat

  

Summer's almost here, so it's time to go check out the fresh meat being served up by the country's design colleges. There are 984,623,888 Art & Design students graduating this year in the UK alone (probably), and it can be tough to find the best cuts. So here's our entirely biased selection of the shows we think you should check out for 2008.  

   

Free Range

Since you're unlikely to travel all over the UK checking out student work, they've decided to all get together for you in London. Free Range is a rolling selection of shows at The Old Truman Brewery, featuring work from colleges right across the country, and is on from 30 May to 21 July, with private views on Thursdays 6-10, main shows on Fridays to Mondays from 10-7. Check the site for the full calendar. 

  

University of the Arts

Central Saint Martins always gives good show. First up we're going to be checking out the BA Graphics exhibition at the OXO Tower Bargehouse (Blackfriars tube), from Saturday 14 to Thursday 19 June, from 11-6.  

  

We're also going to scoot along to their big brothers and sisters on the MA Communication Design course, who are getting all posh and smart at the Mall Galleries from Friday 13 to Thursday 19 June, with various opening times.  

  

Once we're done with that lot, we'll be checking out their big smoke contemporaries from the London College of Communication, particularly the BA Graphic and Media Design kids. They're doing their stuff at the college in Elephant & Castle from Friday 20 to Friday 27 June, with the private view on Thursday 19.  

  

Royal College of Art

Once we've seen what the new graduates can do, we're going to check out the post graduates at the RCA SHOW (Part 2) - that's the show that features various departments, including Animation, Architecture, Communication Art & Design, Design Products, Industrial Design. They're having a Preview weekend on 21 & 22 June (to coincide with London Architecture Festival), then the show re-opens from 24 June to 5 July (closed 4 July).  

  

D&AD New Blood

If you haven't got time for all that, then why not just go straight for the high-achievers? The D&AD New Blood show features work from some of the best students in the country, particularly those who have won D&AD student awards. The show is at Brompton Hall, Earls Court; with a private view on Monday 23 June 6.30-10, and the exhibition is open on Tuesday 24 from 10-9.30, and Wednesday 25 from 10-4.  

  

RDI Summer School 2008

Crikey, is it that time of year again?

Applications have just opened for this year's RDI Summer School, and anyone with between 3 and 15 years' professional design experience can apply. 

The RDI are the Royal Designers for Industry, a gang of the brightest and best from the worlds of design, architecture and engineering. They include Jonathon Ive, Derek Birdsall, Peter Blake, Thomas Heatherwick, Alan Kitching, Marc Newson and Mary Quant amongst their number, as well as a host of others.

The school takes 12 or so of the RDI, throws them together with 30 young(er) designers, and then basically lets them play for four days. The exact nature of the school changes each year, so it's tricky to explain exactly what happens. But, heck, four days in the country doing creative stuff with incredibly talented people - what's not to love?

The school runs from Thursday 4 to Sunday 7 September, down at the stunning Dartington Hall in South Devon. Because it's subsidised it only costs £100 per person, which includes transport from London, food and accommodation. The deadline for applications is 25 July.

You can find out more at the RSA website, and can check out some of Alistair's photos from last couple of years here.

Moments of inspiration

We made our way along to the St Bride Annual Conference at the end of last week, and we were going to post a long, fascinating, detailed and critical analysis of it all, but fortunately Ministry of Type has beaten us to it.

The event was a bit of a hit and miss affair, with moments of brilliance mixed up with moments of not-so-brilliant, and we agree with pretty much everything Aegir at Ministry of Type has to say about it, except that we thought Lizzie Ridout's talk was really interesting, and that she's lovely.

We particularly liked the talks by typographers Jeremy Tankard and Rian Hughes. We'll post later about the gorgeous stuff Rian Hughes showed, but in the meantime, here's some shots of the book TypeBookOne that Jeremy Tankard gave out free to everyone (how great is that?) featuring a variety of his typefaces.

The Shire Types are especially tasty.

Overall, despite a few dud talks, the event was a great success - you get to meet a fascinating mix of really talented people, and are given a whole heap of what Tankard called 'mind-candy'.

Inspiring indeed.

Seeking inspiration

Ready for another huge dose of design goodness?

The Seventh annual Friends of St Bride Library Conference is almost upon us, taking place on Thursday 15 and Friday 16 May 2008, and focusing on the subject of Inspiration.

The programme has just been announced, and it's a fantastic line-up of wonderful design folk, including Karl Martens, Jake Tilson, Erik Spiekermann, Rian Hughes and Susanna Edwards.

We went along last year, and had a fantastic time. Read all about it here.

Tickets for this year are £100, or £50 for students.