i have added a new project to ‘me work’ a logo. housestyle and website for ‘cultural entrepreneur’ mirjam flik, who worked together with me and the team during ‘mind the gap’ last year, the business card has four alternate colour schemes and folds out into a mini-brochure introducing her and pointing to the website where a more complete bio and relevant info can be read, the website has a random colour background similar to the cards… although it’s not online quite yet
i visited foam this afternoon and this little ‘trompe l’oeuil’ image in the corner by anne de vries caught my eye… nice
all three exhibitions (de vries, hans eikelenboom and mitch epstein) are well worth a trip, foam has been improving greatly since the dreadful ‘kate moss show’ they did a while back…
oh well you can’t win them all… congratulations to ‘maureen mooren’ on winning the tap 07 (the HF posters i wrote about a few months back) at least i lost out to a design i also admired… anyway being selected as 1 of 10 out of almost 600 entries felt like a prize to me… the jury report can be downloaded here i hope i don’t sound like a bad loser but perhaps they might consider making the jury a bit younger in the future? they are pretty much all of the same generation and a bit of diversity (as diverse as the designers who enter it) would be a good thing i reckon
still i got some funky flowers and really enjoyed the debate i took part in with ‘anton beeke’ who as always is very entertaining and ‘annelys de vet’ whom i found very eloquent… i’m not sure i managed to get all my points across very well in the heat of the moment, but i will try and write it down and in the coming days if i can find time…
it’s been a very busy week so far, and it doesn’t look like slowing down, i visited the printer today to sign off some business cards for a housestyle i’m working on, they look great, there are four different colourways and the card is divided into six sections that fold up like a mini brochure, i’ll post some better images in ‘me work’ when they are ready & the site is online (beta testing)…
tomorrow afternoon is the awards ceremony for the TAP 07 and during the afternoon i have neen asked to take part in a debate about poster design with anton beeke, annelys de vet and others… which is a real honour for me, anton was one of the people who most inspired me to come to holland 18 years ago, i still need to write my piece and saying yes to participating was easy but now i’m nervous as hell… the debate is in café ‘ de balie from 3 to 5 and the awards ceremony starts at 5, fingers crossed…
by sheer coincidence, after posting about ‘shoe’ earlier this week, i got an e-mail invite from him for his show ‘ calligraffitti’ next week in the CS building, if you can; go… his work is great, i will be away in italy myself so sadly i’ll miss it…
my ‘van manen’ posters are hanging around town this week too, i will be referring to these in my talk tomorrow afternoon…
when i first moved to holland in the late 80’s there was a special division of the highway police that used to drive around in open-top porsche targas, wearing helmets and sunglasses… which i thought looked very cool and exotic (having previously been used to the pathetic appearance of the UK police) then in the early 90’s the dutch police got a revamped and much celebrated new identity and the cool open top targas were taken out of service, they apparently didn’t quite fit the image the police were aiming for…
whilst stuck in traffic on the motorway last week i got a chance to study the striping on dutch police cars and (although it’s not a very original point) i once again took the opportunity to conclude what an absolutely fantastic and simple design it is, the stripes are formed by two opposing colour bands cut off at sharp angles, the stripes abruptly stop along the middle of the cars and the whole creates a very striking (even aggressive) image, which works very effectively in the street, it acts as warning and demands your attention and respect all at once, there isn’t a police force in the world that comes close in terms of design in my opinion…
the dutch customs, ambulances and prison services have all adopted the same design (in their own colour schemes) too, funnily enough none of them work as well as the original red, white and blue… a great piece of design by studio dumbar that still withstands the test of time, if only someone could make the policemen as smart as their cars… now there’s a challenge