Manchester based freelance designer Dave Sedgwick has been in touch to let us know about BCN:MCR – ‘A unique exhibition, uniting five of the best Barcelona based design agencies at 2022NQ, Manchester’ – a culture exchange project he’s curating.

‘BCN:MCR’ premieres at 2022NQ on Thursday 21 February 2013. The exhibition unites, for the first time, five of the most innovative and cutting-edge, Barcelona based design agencies of the moment; Hey Studio, Lamosca, Lo Siento, Mayúscula and Mucho; and will provide a rare opportunity for designers, creatives and culture enthusiasts everywhere, to experience the work of award-winning, pioneering and original design from Barcelona.

In addition to the works which will be on display at 2022NQ, each agency has also been issued with their own individual letter of the exhibition title, ‘BCN:MCR’, and will submit their own unique, creative response to this. Sedgwick will be completing the 6th letter with his own contribution and the finished collaboration will culminate in an exclusive piece of design, that is a reflexive element of the exhibition and a unique reminder of the relationship between the two cities. This will be on display at the newly opened TAKK coffee shop, 6 Tariff Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester.

An exclusive talk will also be held at 2022NQ on Friday 22nd February featuring Borja Martinez, of Lo Siento and Pablo Juncadella, of Mucho, Rocio Martinavarro from Mayúscula and Veronica Fuerta from Hey Studio. They will each be providing an insight into their way of working and the graphic design scene in Barcelona, plus there will be an opportunity for a Q & A session. Limited edition tickets go on sale soon. Purchasing information and further details will also be announced shortly via @bcnmcr.

‘BCN:MCR’ has also been generously supported by, Team Impression, GF Smith Papers, Estrella Damm, Institute Cervantes and Takk. 

‘BCN:MCR’ launches on 21 February 2013, from 6:00pm at 2022NQ, 20 – 22 Dale Street, M1 1EZ. All welcome.

The notorious NYC design studio Sagmeister & Walsh have updated their portfolio site with a little help from our friends Liam Crean & Emil Olsson.

Craig Oldham knows a thing or two about lecturing. Wanting to avoid falling into the well trodden path of design lectures he came up with the idea of The Democratic Lecture. Craig’s initiative is based around a website through which students he is soon going to lecture can vote for their favourite five topics out of a list of a possible 40. The audience get a bespoke lecture based on their collective interests and Craig gets to reconfigure and deliver his lecture accordingly. Win/win!

A book that collates all 40 Democratic Lecture topics is also available (alongside the above poster) which is the easiest way to benefit from this fantastic project (as access to the voting site is cunningly restricted for lecture-attendees only). For those who know Craig’s previous work (including the excellent 10-penneth) rest assured this is full of his trademark wit and honesty.

— 40pp on 1200mic Beermat board. — 36pp 120gsm Bright White Colourplan section. — Cloth-bound with Fluro-died glue. — Screen printed black and fluro throughout. — Foreword written by Craig’s mum

Fantastic to see the typeface Jean Luc by Atelier Carvalho-Bernau put to good use too.

Sara De Bondt kicked off the two-day Typo London conference with an understated and thoughtful presentation. As the event was loosely based around the theme of ‘Social’, the first project she talked through was Radical Nature— as a vehicle for discussing the social responsibility of the designer.

The exhibition was around working with nature and creating in an environmentally sensitive way, so the pitch naturally ended up being a manifesto on how to make the event itself as sustainable as possible. This echoes her common-sense and refreshing approach to the pitch, which she sees an opportunity to learn. The point being that even if you don’t win the job, you have still gained a raft of knowledge. To present a manifesto as a pitch concept (rather than a slick creative presentation) reflects Sara’s attitude to her work— not throw away or superficial but meaningful and considered. Of course they won the job, and followed the concept through diligently— forfeiting glue for staples and nails, making furniture from old wooden palettes and riso printing the gallery guides in house on demand, hence minimising waste.

Sara round up with her latest endeavour, Occasional Papers, a not-for-profit publishers set up with husband Antony Hudek. The concept is twofold— primarily publishing affordable content heavy (as oppose to image heavy) design books, driven by what she sees as a lack of contemporary writing on, and ready access to graphic design history. The secondary purpose of Occasional Papers is to bolster the sociability of the design community by holding a launch event for each book published, therefore encouraging social interaction within the industry.

Sara delivered a poignant and thought-provoking start to the conference, the main take away for me being the importance of questioning everything, and having the courage to execute the appropriate solution— even if it’s unexpected or high risk. And of course, never ever compromise on your convictions— if you believe in something, make it happen.

Images Sara De Bondt studio, Occassional Papers & Gerhard Kassner

We were lucky to attend Typo12 London, watching some of the big names in our industry present to an audience of designers and students on the loose theme of ‘Social’. Among the 30+ speakers packed into two days, were A Practice for Everyday Life (APFEL), book designer Irma Boom, illustrator/designer/film-maker Kate Moross, Henrik Kubel of A2/SW/HK and my personal design hero Vaughan Oliver. Overall it was insightful, humbling, though-provoking and humorous. We will be posting more detailed write-ups on some of these great talks in the coming days, for those who didn’t make it to the conference. But in the mean time, there were some common conceptual themes that emerged across the board, including:

Being obsessed by what you do The usefulness of knowing what’s gone before, and access to this knowledge Social & cultural roles/responsibilities of the designer Having the courage of your convictions Serendipity, the importance of collaboration and building relationships, and having a strong support network Being able to let your work go The impact of the social and cultural climate in which you grow up The studio as a safe place in which to play and the value of embracing failure Connecting with content.

Plus some aesthetic trends, some of which you may have already noted:

DIY Data as image The rise of Riso.

Look out for further posts on Typo12 very soon. 

Birmingham’s ‘visual pop culture festival’ Eye Candy took place this past weekend including events, talks (including Mr Bingo), workshops and much more across the cities Southside district. You can see round up videos here and here. The event was a huge success, congrats to all involved! Pictured above is Filthy Luker’s tentacle installation.

This week Build celebrate 11 years of graphic design splendour with a poster exhibition, auction and catalogue. We caught up with founder Michael C Place at their rather delightful Walthamstow studio, to find out more about how they’ve grown, and what the show means to them.

Read more

Los Angeles based We are Matik are creating some interesting interactive experiences mixing storytelling, design and digital technology.

To coincide with her first solo show in London, Malika Favre has released a lovely animation for her Hide and Seek exhibition at the Kemistry Gallery. The exhibit opens from 6th Sept — 29th Sept 2012 and tells the story of “an intriguing and sophisticated woman travelling from one pattern to the next, hiding from the unsuspecting viewer”.

A series of 8 bold and minimalistic prints, exploring the relationship between positive and negative space, will be available for purchase at the gallery and online.

Felix of Singaporean agency Silnt has launched the agencies new site, along with several projects from this year. Lovely body of work and well worth a look.

The absolute highlight of this year’s OFFF festival for me was getting to see Jonathan Harris.

Harris is a designer, thinker and storyteller whose projects are often highly conceptual and ambitious. He strives to change the world for the better through design and storytelling.

He opened his talk, with an overview of his (by now well-known) 2006 project, We Feel Fine — in which the internet is scraped for uses of the term “I feel…” in a bid to gauge how the world is feeling at any given time. This still holds up as an amazing piece of work.

But since this and other data driven projects, Harris has gradually and consciously moved on a different path, believing that there is only so much you can learn from data.

In 2010, he released his Today project in which he took a photo every day for a year — an original idea at the time, which has since been mimicked to the point of overkill.

This, along with The Whale Hunt give a good sense of the importance of storytelling in Harris’ work.

He’s also openly taking a step away from the ubiquity of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, believing that they lead to a short attention span and neverending pursuit of novelty over depth of experience. Instead he wants to develop platforms that engage and tell real warts-and-all human stories.

His current work Cowbird, a storytelling platform tries to do just this. It is described as “a simple tool for telling stories, and a public library of human experience.”

So, no less ambitious than his earlier projects then.

Further recommended reading/viewing

Cowbird And Humanizing The Web A recent Jonathan Harris talk about Cowbird and his approach/philosophy.

(It’s worth checking out his other talks too).

Modern Medicine by Jonathan Harris — a brilliant, thoughtful essay drawing comparisons between software and medicine (way more interesting than it sounds!).

Joshua Davis is no stranger to the OFFF Festival series. This year incredibly being the tenth occasion he has taken to the stage. Little wonder then that he was invited to live draw (shown above) an artwork in front of the 3,500 visitors over the event’s three days.

If you don’t know him, Davis rose to prominence in the late 90s under the Praystation moniker and was a pioneer of programmatic, generative design, created mainly in Flash.

Before his talk, having not seen much of him since those days, I questioned whether his work was really still relevant, but I had him pegged wrong.

Despite not being a huge fan of his aesthetic, from the first moment of his talk, ‘Beyond Play’ I couldn’t help but be won over — his enthusiasm for what he does is boundless and pulls you on side.

He’s very much an experimental artist — mixing digital and analogue techniques to produce works based on things he encounters in nature and the world around him.

He talked a lot of his fascination for feedback loops — drawing on paper and in software and feeding these drawings back into programs to see what comes out. Ultimately, he does this stuff for fun. There is no distinction between his work and play.

And that was the take away message of his talk — it’s a simple one but it’s still resonating with me —

“Make the kind of work that you want to get hired to do.”

Or to paraphrase — publish the personal, self-initiated work you love and you might just get hired to do it for money.

Not a bad idea eh?

Yuko Shimizu is a Japanese illustrator who now resides in New York.

It was nice to go to her OFFF talk without any preconceptions, having not seen her work before. She put her illustration work in context through an honest and very human account of her life.

She grew up in a traditional Japanese family, always held back from pursuing a path in art as it was just ‘not an option’ there.

As a result, much of her work is concerned with a coming to terms with her ‘Japanese-ness’, the American perception of Japan and themes of sex and female empowerment.

She has a comic illustrative style with strong bold colours and lines, but also married with echoes of Japanese traditional painting.

What’s amazing is that she didn’t start a career in illustration until she was 34!

She is a great example of it never being too late to start on a new path and believes artists can’t help but embrace change and move forward.

“You are never too old to do ____”

In showing her process, it was brilliantly refreshing that she also showed work she was embarrassed by, her personal failures. (Not that I can find any of them since the talk!).

Take a look at Yuko Shimizu’s portfolio over here.

I arrived in Barcelona on the second day of the OFFF Festival in time to see Pete Hellicar & Joel Gethin Lewis take to the stage.

Hellicar and Lewis got together in 2008 and the focus of their work is in “creating groundbreaking experiences that use art, technology and design to take people into the moment and impart lasting memories.”

Essentially, things like this, this and this.

They are interested in making one off interactive pieces and talked about a project called Coke 24Hr Music in which a band could interact with their fans’ tweets.

Much more interesting though was the fact that the code from this large commercial project was then adapted for use in a suite of interactive therapy tools for autistic children.

They told a captivated audience how their Somantics software was helping over- and under-stimulated autistic children to temporarily escape the prison of their condition through touch, gesture and camera input.

It was really nice to see a large commercial piece of work used to go onto enable great stuff like this and to see design being put to good use to help others, encouraging stuff. You can read more about the project and watch some videos here.

In closing they explained that they believe all software should be free and that their code is available for download from Github.

A great, thought-provoking talk.

We were lucky enough to be invited to attend this year’s OFFF creative festival which just wrapped in Barcelona.

With a fantastic line up and an all new, spacious venue at the Disseny Hub, Barcelona, OFFF played host to a wonderful selection of talks, presentations, workshops and more.

Due to busy schedules, only one of our team, Guy Moorhouse could make it for a portion of the event, but in a short series of posts we’re going to cover our highlights from the festival, so stay tuned for more soon.

We’ll also have a little giveaway competition later this week for an exclusive new comic that debuted at OFFF from crazy, happy illustrators, Brosmind.

For those considering going to OFFF next year, it was confirmed at the end of the event that it will be at the same time and place in 2013, so hopefully we’ll see you there too.

More soon.