me studio

there’s nothing quite like having your privacy invaded in a discount store, from the weird to the distasteful, it’s all on offer at walmart (thanks to ‘martin de waal’ for the link)

the latest ballet poster is hanging around town this week…

this is a fun little online ‘fluffy type’ app many thanks to bart from ’60 layers of cake’ for the link…

artist ‘saskia be brauw’ has just released a publication of her bundled work traces (although the viewer app doesn’t work for me in firefox) de brauw uses photography as a means to an end for her work which all focuses loosely on the theme ‘traces’ much of the work plays with contemporary ideas such as ‘geo tagging’ although my favourite is the piece ‘contact’ where people are forced to get close to each other by folding a bed sheet together… the only thing that is a bit dissonant in the publication is the size of my ‘me’ logo on the back page (i sponsored saskia for this publication) but that logo is massive! it’s a bit too much credit for my contribution… the publication is on sale at several art book shops around town…

i couldn’t even hazard a guess as to the amount of briefings i’ve seen in my career as a designer/art director and they, of course, have ranged from the mind-numbingly boring, to amusing, to misguided to the overly ‘scientific’ (with hundreds of pages of research attached), there have been some short and imaginative ones too but usually speaking the more money involved the less imaginative a briefing becomes… clients have often felt the need to tell me exactly what i should make (even what colour font and direction a design should go in) even though they hire me to make those decisions on their behalf based on the fact that that is my profession

it’s not always like that though and since i left the world of overpaid advertising agencies and decided to go it alone, things have become quite a bit more down-to-earth, personal and perhaps realistic in terms of how dominant the clients are in defining what they need/want… a good thing, i promise you

the following briefing which i received by mail this week however, is untypical, i had to read it several times before it fully made sense but it goes roughly like this (i will paraphrase the actual email)

[i”>good morning
september the 1st: seems like a good day to get started, we’ve finally decided to stick to the name we had, i think we should focus the identity around a logo and keep the rest fairly neutral i quite liked this website (there was a link) and stuff that’s fairly light and spacious, with a tactile quality to it and the text just flowing away from it, a bit like the stuff you did for…. the logo doesn’t necessarily need to be graphic and doesn’t really need to contain the name

as for an exact list…. we need the usual stuff you’d expect for a housestyle, well you know… you’ve done this before more often than us… anyway good luck and we’d like to get started in early october.[/b]

it’s probably my favourite briefing thus far and at the same time one of the most challenging i’ve had…. no research, no self imposed restrictions and not even any "dont’s" my interpretation of what it says, you see, goes roughly like this:

[i”>we trust you, you have a lot of freedom and we want you to make something beautiful for us, thanks…[/b]

i’ll do my best… thanks