Michael Feihstel – Hello Sundays! Pt. 6
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.
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.
Recently i’ve been working on a sub-folio to Baseref to deal with the various identity projects i’ve worked on. This format allows me to take a much more in-depth case study sort of approach and to illustrate the process in more detail. Each project is split over two or three pages to show elements of its origin and its final use.
Minimalism Around the Web: Design Inspiration & WordPress Themes
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.
Greenwood Brook Dress-Rehearsal
Tonight marks the first public outing for any kind of branding so far on our GB side-project. Still far too early to go into details on that but we’re presenting the concept with on-screen and printed backup. I’m primarily interested in how the noisy imagery goes down, both from an outside perspective and how it prints. We’re only using a digital process for this outing, so have very limited stocks available to us but i see this as a dress rehearsal for using the noisy artwork on much rougher, matt stocks in the future. The printed result shouldn’t be as noisy as the on-screen stuff, which is a little too heavy and sharp.
More on Greenwood Brook in my Identity_ folio.
For two reasons, one of which is the forthcoming Humhum cards project. I got lucky when asked to tackle the Ace of Hearts; a nice, comfortable and somewhat regal card to work with. I wanted to do something in stone – something very austere. A certain somebody close has been cracking hearts recently so i think this was also something of a therapeutic process. It isn’t broken, and is adorned with a sash to indicate a solemn authenticity.
Baseref is featured in Spyline’s Best Portfolio’s of 2008. Some lovely stuff in there, thankyou guys!
I have been working on an identity for Chris’s new outing; Bearfight, an agency vehicle for his motion work. I wanted to work with a set of very strong, very basic geometries, to make the name a statement. Using a FontFont face called Typeface 6 I reduced each letterform down to its most minimal geometry and reworked the ‘A’, ‘F’ and ‘G’ to simplify them further. After a little work balancing the letters to give them more comfortable weights.
Blocked out type like this isn’t anything new, and has seen something of a renaissance recently, especially with phrases split over lines or words broken into syllables. I wanted to bring back the essence of the counters in the letters but using a device that was unique and fitted with the mood of the name. The solution was to crack the letters in line with their counters where possible. The first syllable uses one horizontal crack to allow a simpler, faster reading of the name.
Things are still in their infancy over there right now so anything could happen in the next few weeks, but i hope the logotype survives…
A brand new brochure site for Unicorn Group’s PowerGlide 2009 range. This site is all about the cues, so they take primary focus over and above everything else, allowing the photography to shine through and give these lovely cues the credit they deserve.
Top 25 Design Company Web Designs of 2008
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.
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