Tim Jarvis

I met Stephen in a rammed pub in Hampstead last weekend over the din of vuvuzelas heralding England’s exit from the World Cup. Still, you lose some, you win some. Stephen Layfield heads Sydney-based Layfield Design; a multi-disciplinary studio specialising in brand identity and design for print. Absolutely fantastic, clever and excruciatingly precise graphic design, just the way it should be.

Take a look.

Fever Ray shot by Tom Oxley

Grace Woodward is a stylist and creative director. She works regularly works with the Sunday & Saturday Times Magazines, Elle, Flaunt, Harpers Bazaar, Intersection, Numero, Nylon, Tank, 125, and in recent years has worked with Duffy, Emilia Fox, Immodesty Blaize, Fever Ray, Florence and the Machine and Noemi Lenoir. Men include Pharrell Williams for the cover of Giant, Green Day the cover of Rolling Stone, a special Yves Saint Laurent issue for GQ as well as the esteemed GQ Men of the Year cover and nominees. Her catalogue is considered and beautifully realised.

Take a look at her work on her site and on her blog.

 
Some lovely Vexel work from Natalie Sklobovskaya featured on Behance, the Ayumi Hamasaki portrait is fantastic, and some brilliant Sci-Fi landscapes from Alex Andreyev on Cretique that brilliantly capture the style and grand vision of some of my favourite paperbacks from the Sixties and Seventies.

Oh and in a more photo-real vein this Star Wars series (collected here for easy viewing) from Cédric Delsaux simply can’t go without a mention.

Alberto Romanos’ study of Frutiger is worth a look; he’s created three new versions of the typeface, each with their own quirks. Examples and showcase on Behance.

Fabien’s quirky online home-decoration workshop has been updated with some new posters. Take a look at the shop, the sticker sets are lovely.

I’ve read a lot of critical debate over ffffound both on the web and in the likes of Creative Review and its ilk recently; a sign of its blooming popularity no doubt. I have to disagree though, i think ffffound is a fantastic resource and has become one of my most trusted inspiration sources. With precipitation has come opportunity. As long as we’re all discovering, we’re all growing. Lest we forget that the medium is here to enable everyone to publish anything. We don’t need people filters.

My ffffound.

An old friend of mine Michael Feihstel has just released a wonderfully laid back mix. Michael is an accomplished, eclectic producer. Genre in and around prog. mood pretty chilled. Definitely worth a listen.

Download from here
My work with Michael

 
Gareth Long’s lenticular series Untitled (Stories) is well worth a look. From his site: A series of nine lenticular prints based on the four paperback novels of J.D. Salinger that use and manipulate the iconic but anonymous cover designs. The six-foot prints reconfigure and animate the brightly coloured geometric lines of the book covers, suggesting the modernist art historical precedents of abstract painters such as Stella and Lewitt, Minimalism, or even the Op Art movement. As such, questions arise as to Salinger’s position towards modernism and modernity and the subsequent appropriate—or perhaps inappropriate—design of these books.

Video of Untitled (Buddy) in situ here

Baseref has been added to David Leggett’s wonderful collection of Minimalist Websites. The article lists nineteen sites and a few lovely WP themes. Also in the list is Thommay’s constantly awesome site.

 
Established by Jacob Wildschiødtz and Troels Faber, NR2154 has one of the tightest portfolio’s i’ve seen. Graphic design and identity that eschews every possible whimsy. Simply method; bold, stark, lovely method.

Take a look

Baseref is featured in Spyline’s Best Portfolio’s of 2008. Some lovely stuff in there, thankyou guys!

Profission heads the StylesInspiration Top 25 Design Company Web Designs of 2008. Thankyou guys, we’ll be working on a new Profission site this year, time permitting!

 
Andrew is Art Director at Un.titled and his portfolio is constantly exceptional. A man like myself, Andrew likes nothing more than to piss printers off with silly demands and hare-brained ideas of what will work on paper. Behind every great print designer is a stack of utterly terrified, or utterly rich printers.

Take a look

There are two questions i’ve been asking myself a lot recently. These aren’t them, but they’re close; they bridge the gap between the way you think and the way i think. I have been toying with the idea of a less structured, more direct communication medium for a while now. My personal portfolio and the Profission site don’t get updated very often; once, maybe twice a year. It takes an amount of time to see a project through from brief to delivery, and often a further period to photo or present the result of that project in a way I can use in a portfolio. This leaves me then with infrequent but significant updates, and a problem – what about the little things that get left behind and what about the process? Neither of these can be explored in that environment.

So, for want of a better term, a blog. This site exists to fill in the gaps, to focus on fleeting things and to explain what is going on – perhaps as much for me as anyone else. You’ll find works in progress, updates and things that inspire me here, and that was the answer to my first question.

This site also acts as an umbrella for the various portfolios of work i maintain. There are significantly three of them; Baseref, Identity_ and Magnasoma. Baseref is an ongoing portfolio of selected work, updated yearly. Identity_ is a niche within that model that allows me to review my corporate identity work and present it as a visual case study. Magnasoma is a collection of self-initiated artworks that bear little or no meaning to anyone except me. Unfortunately in the last few years whilst i’ve been setting up and focussing on Profission with Alex this has taken something of a back seat, but its an addiction and a therapy; and like both its only a matter of time before a top-up is required. More on that soon. That answers the second question; if i have made a conscious decision to split what i produce into different vehicles, how can i collect them? The answer is omnipresent, top right.

Tim