Earlier this year the Designers Republic was victim to the economic down fall and ever present recession, so when i read about a new company born from two previous members of tDR I was immediately interested and felt great that something positive had come out of the closing. The company is based in Leeds at a 'pent-house style' office space. The link below to their website has a great introduction movie but the sight is yet to be up and running fully.
For Ashley and Anthony's interpretation of the % brief they decided to give everyone in our class and the 1st year class one of the percentages to go away and think about for a week then bring something they think represents the percentage. All the objects would then be placed on the floor over the word 'graphics' taped on the floor. My word was brainstorm and it was worth 2%, straight away what sprung to mind was political correctness and how the word was changed from 'brainstorm' to 'though shower' so not to offend people with brain damage. I liked this idea and thought about ways i could present this. As the object had to be larger than a matchbox and smaller than a brick i knew i wouldn't be able to use a real umbrella to highlight the idea of a shower, so i used cocktail umbrellas and wrote 'thought' and 'shower' on both. I didn't spent too long on pushing the idea because of the volume of work i have for other briefs but think it was a qwerky response.
We have been asked to bring something to a group session that we have found or that we like and find interesting, this could be a piece of design, an article, a piece of music, whatever. I have decided to talk about Esopus Magazine. Esopus is an independently run American magazine for arts, culture, photography, literature, craft and a whole range of other categories. It prides itself on its non-commercial funding and ability to interact with its audience. It is run twice a year in spring and autumn (or ‘fall’ as the Americans would put it) and each edition is unique. Esopus strives to push the boundaries of what a magazine can contain. Each issue is crammed full of different paper types, textures, rip-out articles, and collected ephemera with one issue including a pop-up page. It seems the goal is to reinvent itself with every new issue and with the flexibility of having no commercial adverts it has full reign on the outcome. It isn’t a surprise only two a year are made, as the attention to detail and craft is impeccable. I first came across Esopus Magazine when I lived in Bristol and was working on a project studying Independent Magazines and spoke to the editor, Tod Lippy of its growing success. It has no doubt been a different experience reading Esopus to other leading art magazines, and a definite refreshing change.
For an exercise for Critical Studies we have been asked to research an artist and their influences, I chose to look at Robert Brownjohn, not only has he done some fantastic Graphical work that incorporates whit, humor and intelligence but also because his talents stretch over several different mediums, most noticeably for his title sequence for Goldfinger and From Russia with Love. Delving into his past, it is clear his main influences came from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy his tutor at the Institute of Design in Chicago, people directly link Brownjohn and those title sequences with similar pieces of work made by Moholy-Nagy in the 1920's. Robert Brownjohn was also a lover of music, in particular jazz, and also drugs. He was part of an outstanding design group called BCG, compiled of himself, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar in New York in the 50's and returned back to London during the 60's working for McCann Erickson, on the Bond title sequences and later with the Rolling Stones on the album Let it Bleed.
