me news

mind numbingly turgid stuff

renowned british designer ‘mike dempsey’ struggles to come to terms with the state of highstreet graphic design, i feel what’s he’s saying… in all fairness the UK is undoubtedly a lot worse than the netherlands (so far) in that respect but danger looms…

…imagine spending three years hard graft at art college dreaming the dreams and longing for that day when you can join a decent design company. But you don’t, instead you end up working on one of the above titles. Yes, I know it’s a job in these difficult economic times, but is it going to improve the standard of design?…

m / 14-12-2010 08:55 - tags:  

from fletcher to tschichold

the top all-time graphic design books of all time according to the guardian, not sure i agree but i might even try and make my own list, see what that turns up…

m / 12-12-2010 16:42 - tags: , ,  

welcome inc.

about time too, mister sagmeister has finally updated his website (complete with live webcam feed as navigation) not sure i need merchandise, but it is nice to see more recent work and various other content posted…

Did your work experience at the Leo Burnett agency play a large role in your deciding that maintaining a small business was better than running an office of over 100 people?

Yes, that was the major reason: I saw at Burnett that I will not be able to actually design when my office is bigger, and I saw the advantages of a large office for the clients as tiny, while the disadvantages were huge.

m / 10-12-2010 12:22 - tags: , ,  

it’s too adventurous, too difficult

…our strategy as a studio is to do very large-scale work and also very small-scale work, and to have the greatest diversity of clients. We always choose clients who interest us. We would like to be a studio that does as much research as possible. Obviously, if one wants to make a lot of money, one has to do repetitive work. Now admittedly we do repetitive work in certain areas, but we do as little as possible. We try to work in as many different fields as possible in order to innovate as much as we can…

i came across this old interview with monsieur pierre bernard in eye magazine from 2001… we invited pierre over to amsterdam in 2005 to talk at ‘mind the gap’ and he’s always interesting to listen to

m / 05-12-2010 11:41 - tags: , , ,  

Is quality a meaningful goal?

it’s quite a lot to take in… like the passage here below, for example, but the article by one of the only real graphic design critics around: rick poynor on the state of ‘art’, offers a genuinely engaging viewpoint on ‘where it’s at’ right now…

…many young artists with visual talent have decided to ignore the art world’s weary, self-serving conceptualist strictures and just go ahead and make the art they feel like making. They want to create optical art experiences of their own. By paying too much attention to the extremes of high or low we run the risk of undervaluing what’s happening in the densely populated middle — graphic novels, graphic design, illustration, low-cost film-making — where the expressive possibilities of the visual are still embraced with conviction. This, rather than art scene-mediated art, is the real center of visual culture in our time. Are we overlooking great work only because we have been instructed for so long to assume that anything presented outside the art world’s walls must be inferior? …

it required several reads to take it all in for me, but it certainly wasn’t wasted energy…

m / 03-12-2010 08:22 - tags: , ,  
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