me studio

i came across this awful misappropriation of a symbol on the grrr blog, an almost optimistic and vibrant looking piece of type that stands symbol for the ugliness that is the far-right ‘british national party’… yuk

here is the magazine illustration i made last week, finally finished and delivered to the publishers…

it is a double page spread for a magazine, for which i chose to illustrate a quote made by ‘milton glaser’ to ‘steven heller’ in the 1994 edition of ‘looking closer’ ( critical writings on graphic design); glaser’s statement which i found very liberating when i first read it back then (and still do) is this:

‘every generation has to make it’s own discoveries,
even if they are old discoveries’

i applied this thinking in my approach to the piece and would already do it quite differently were i to start again (which i do not intend to do) the magazine is a one-off crowdsource project from local designer rosa de jong and will be published in early may…

the picture below was an early idea i had using a word-pun on the title of the magazine: ‘made you think’, i later rejected this one… choosing instead to use 100 meters of kite string, hundreds of metal pins and a serious test of my own patience, i passed the test, but only just…

it’s always much finer if someone else makes the point for you, i came across a blog piece from designer ‘andrew’ in tokyo regarding the moronic discussion i got into this week about one of my ballet posters (see my post form the 16th of april) the comments on the original site are still pouring in, i quote andrew’s own blog post here:

…I couldn’t fault the cover, but if someone else doesn’t like it, fine. However, the determined appearance of those who think that there is only one correct way to represent things seems almost worrying. Many people commenting would shiver at Picasso ("wow, that’s not where an nose should go! Didn’t he have time to finish the job?") and while I’m not comparing the illustrator of the ballet cover with Picasso, it does seem to me that too much of comment ? on the web generally, in fact ? is meaningless and creating some kind of new grouping of you might call the dictatorially normal…

well quite thank you andrew, i suppose my only regret is getting into a discussion with someone who starts with the following juvenile reaction:

…I will give $1 billion cold hard cash to anyone who has the original image…

the good news is: i will gladly send you the original image if you just let me know your email address ok? the bad news, of course, is that he/she didn’t really mean it, it was just an easy thing to proclaim on a blog forum…

many thanks to the numerous people who mailed me this week with reactions, i really don’t mind getting critcism or feedback ever, i just find it tough to have a coherent dialogue with angry teenagers with fixed ideas and a limited vocabulary, enough already…

some interesting crafted work from UK designer/illustrator peter nencini, about whom i also posted earlier this week, in his own words peter is:

…thinking about kits, the space between pictures and words, make-do-modernism and local universes. He is looking at Enzo Mari, Herzog & De Meuron’s models, Isotype, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the AA ‘Book of British Birds’…

to me, it has many parallels to the work of local duo niessen & de vries

talking of vinyl as a dying medium (see previous post) this piece asks some interesting questions: maybe not the most beautiful infographic ever but the content is pretty eye opening…