Though Bass had more than a dozen years of his career still ahead of him when this portrait was taken, in one sense it is a taking stock of achievements so far. At this time he was one of the most celebrated designers in the world, and more than that, he had helped to shape post-war visual culture. Bass was born on 8 May, 1920, in the East Bronx, New York City, the second child of hard-working Jewish immigrants, who later encouraged his flair for art. Even as a schoolboy he showed the magpie instincts of the true designer, with his passionate interest in the visual world coupled with an ability to ‘collect’ visual gems that had caught his eye, and to adapt and transform them to his creative needs.

As a boy he spent a lot of time looking at the special exhibitions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The works he liked most were artefacts from Egypt and other ancient civilisations. Bass credits MoMA for ‘some of the most delicious, indelible memories’ of his childhood. A design for Ohio Blue Tip Matches, on page 302 of the book, shows a mirror-image motif of a highly stylised face, loosely based on Aztec iconography.

After leaving the Art Students’ League, where he was a scholarship student, in 1938 Bass went to work for Warner Brothers as a ’lettering and paste-up man’ for $20 a week. Jonas Rosenfeld, the ad executive who employed Bass recalled his ‘willingness to experiment’. Bass was an innovator, a life-long quality that worked as a catalyst in the formation of his design habits. Shortly after, when he had gone to work for the Fox Corporation, he was to bring about an historically important design innovation when he introduced to film advertising his first love, the high-design standards set by the glossy magazines.

But the most important shaping influence on Bass as a designer was still to come. Word reached the eager Bass that George Kepes, a Hungarian émigré, and Bauhaus protégé, was now teaching at Brooklyn College. Bass enrolled immediately. Kepes proved to be the guru Bass was looking for. Kepes’s book, Language and Vision (1944) was one of those rare texts that accommodated both high-falutin’ modernist design theories and examples of brash contemporary American advertising. The penthouse and the pavement, so to speak, between the same covers. ‘He really just set me on fire,’ recalled Bass of his mentor, decades later.

László Moholy-Nagy, the fabled Bauhaus teacher, and previously colleague of Kepes at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, had written a book, The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, that was to have a lasting influence on Bass. These two elder designers opened up a new world for the younger man. The beautiful title sequence for the film Casino, starring Robert de Niro, with its highly kinetic visuals, can be read as a homage to Maholy-Nagy’s 1930 film, the shimmering and visionary, Light-Space Modulator. (Only Bass’ wife Elaine, muse and lifelong co-worker at Saul Bass and Associates, was to have a greater influence on him.)

Jennifer Bass, Saul’s daughter and design historian, Pat Kirkham, expertly and passionately chart the trajectory of Bass’s career and life in this lively book, making for a fascinating story. This book comprises nothing less than a 400-or so page treasure chest of visual delights. Martin Scorsese, the film director with whom Bass was to have so many fruitful collaborations, pays him an apposite tribute in the foreword. ‘This book,’ he says, ‘so carefully designed and lovingly assembled, is a fitting tribute to a great artist. A giant. And now, welcome to the world of Saul Bass.’

Laurence King Publishing, £48

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The Panel

Architectural Association School of Architecture

Edward Pearce, Dip Arch, website

‘The toxic garden infiltrates the iron ore resource supply chain in Western Australia, specifically in Port Hedland, in the Pilbara region. Fine iron ore dust, the primary by-product of the industry, cloaks the surrounding townscape. The proposal, a Toxic Garden, is an innovative infrastructure, parasitically leeching from existing industrial facilities. The “Toxic Garden” has been developed through a series of dust and electrical simulations, rather than conventional drawing. The architect becomes a choreographer of effects and phenomena, rather than discreet built objects,’ says Pearce.

Aram Mooradian, Dip Arch, website

Drawing inspiration from the gold trade in Australia and the Aboriginal civilisation and culture that it disrupts, Mooradian says his work, entitled ‘The Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions’, attempts to ‘[examine] the pathologies that we often take for granted, the fictions that we live and shape our futures by, through a catalogue of gold objects. Gold – our most precious resource – is valued above all other things not for its material value but for an entirely virtual one.’

Samantha Lee, Dip Arch, website

The Australian mineral trade inspired Lee’s work, which intends to ‘explores the space of the mining survey as a parallel site for intervention, where I have engineered a seasonal network of mysterious dreamtime anomalies. Anchored around aboriginal sacred sites these mythic objects slowly stalk the contested territory, distorting mining cartographies to generate a new form of landscape representation. These new anomalies of points and numbers, inserted into a purely economic dataset, are the ghosts of aboriginal sacred waterholes which have dried up due to mining activity’.

Bartlett School of Architecture

Bong Yeung, Dip Arch

‘The Lee Valley Super-Farm: Institute of Fresh Fruit & Vegetables in London examines the challenges of food and fuel supplies that the UK faces in economic, environmental and social terms. The project explores potential agricultural technologies that can boost productivity and environmental performance: hydroponic farming and the closed-glasshouse system,’ says Yeung. The project was communicated through exquisite hand drawing and delicate paper models that convey the depth of the complex landscape that it occupied. Yeung’s draughtmanship is testament to the power of architectural drawing.

Erika Suzuki, Dip Arch

Designed in response to the quantity of paper wasted by the City each day, Suzuki’s ‘Her Majesty’s Paper Factory’ aims to provide sustainable production and recycling of paper. ‘The new paper factory directs its attention towards recycling this paper waste, creating a closed loop within the City in which paper is recycled and reused within the Square Mile, and there is no need to transport waste to other destinations,’ Suzuki says.

Nada Tayeb. BSc (Hons) Architecture

‘Deconstructing the conventions of traditional theatre and auditorium layout, this opera house offers a contemporary viewing experience to a traditional performance; dealing with issues of communism, censorship and propaganda. Comprised of three simultaneous audiences watching a single and constant performance, the audiences intermittently circulate to subsequent auditoriums which offer entirely unique viewing experiences. The versatility of the stage and performative spaces serve a didactic purpose of “indoctrinating” the masses as Chinese theatre was believed to furnish good moral behaviour. The theatre acts as a mechanism to implicitly reinforce certain communist symbols and ideologies,’ says Tayeb.

Steven Baumann, Diploma/MA Architecture

Baumann’s work examines the disconnection between humanity and nature in urban buildings. ‘Combing the programmes of necropolis, power station, and orchard, The New London Necropolis seeks to address our relationship with life-cycles in planning the contemporary City of London,’ Baumann says. ‘The programmes intertwine to inhabit the same volume and site utilising their allegorical potential to manage the interdependent cycles of life and death, energy charge and dissipation, and blossom and decay that are housed in its fabric.’

Birmingham Institute of Architecture and Design

Paul Watt, BA Architecture

‘This project creates a solution for spending foreign aid, which can directly affect the people of Stoke-on-Trent and global refugees, within UK shores by creating a global school for 3D printing,’ says Watt. ‘The project celebrates the arrival of large automated digital fabrication; the Contour Crafter, a machine that will change the face of foreign aid, as refugee ‘towns’ will be ‘printed’ within days, not years. Local businesses will educate up to 10,000 refugees over a three-year period, teaching refugees to provide and support themselves using the contour crafter to 3D print fully customized consumer goods, creating novel businesses and social attractions, which will entice consumers and visitors to engage in Stoke’s deprived economy.’

Victoria Crozier, MA Architecture

Crozier’s project creates a possible solution to the stoppage of waste collection by Dagenham Council last year. ‘[The public] set up a rubbish collection scheme and dump waste on land at the coast of Dagenham. The risk of flooding from the River Thames is high and local people react by creating sea walls using the dumped rubbish,’ Crozier imagines. ‘The barrier is a structure which reacts of the force of the changing tide, adapting, moving and growing when a need is identified. The architecture is created based on the knowledge that local people with low skill bases and no funding must resource these found objects [which form the barrier] themselves.’

Brighton School of Architecture

Matthew Jeniec, Architecture

Concerned at the possibility of gentrification in Brixton, Jeniec attempts to create a centre that would increase social interaction and mix cultures and societies. ‘The re-imagined BHC [Black Heritage Centre] proposes a symbiotic relationship between “institute” and “existing” through the utilisation of architecture as a means to facilitate new kinds of “social situations” and experiences within the existing community,’ Jeniec believes. ‘Rentable retail spaces (as part of the Brixton Enterprise Hub) sit within the BHC’s physical territory, allowing local businesses to benefit from the institution’s footfall as well as providing a more locally sensitive means of generating profit.’

Bucks New University

James Uren, BA Contemporary Furniture

‘The Luso lounger is a modern reinterpretation of the chaise longue. It evolved from looking at redundant furniture, and reinventing it to suit the way in which we live today. The addition of a footstool means that there are a number of ways it can be used: as a day bed, lounger, chair, footstool. The Luso lounger is an interesting asymmetrical form that is versatile and makes excellent use of space. The under-frame has been constructed using American cherry; the shell is lacquered plywood,’ says Uren.

Welsh School of Architecture: Cardiff

Angharad Palmer, MA Architecture, website

This project derives a method of settlement planning from analysis of the interdependence of the living components of organic cells. The starting point of the thesis is the notion that each component of the settlement has the ability to generate, store and distribute its own energy to every other component of the settlement. What makes the project fascinating is the way that the energy symbiosis generates such rich spatial and formal pattern. The development of the project through each stage of radical up-scaling is skilful and completely convincing. Diagrams, visuals and models are used beautifully to develop the narrative, and the absence of conventional architectural renderings comes across as a strength, not a weakness.

Ben Hansen, MA Architecture

As it does, periodically, prefabrication has returned to centre-stage in the architectural debate. We turn to it reluctantly, as we know that the most valued buildings are those that define the individual character of places. For this project the buildings are university research labs and the site is in Camden. The proposal is for a very permanent sculptured, concrete plinth with projecting service cores from which the transient accommodation blocks are hung. The form of the concrete plinth is derived from existing and historic contextual lines. It is an engaging idea, one often explored before, but this particular project demonstrates better than most how simple, mass-produced forms can yield rich urban patterns, provided the stage is set intelligently in advance.

Suzanne Prest, MA Architecture, website

A popular brief with students, the health spa demands no great functional rigour, provided the combination of space and setting captures a sense of spiritual harmony. Prest’s project starts from the right place: an abandoned quarry. There should be more projects like this, as these sites are abundant in Wales, overlooked but loaded with potential. The combination of cliff-face carving and embellishment echoes the beauty of Pueblo Indian cliff settlements. The project is expertly developed from its stringent landscape analysis through to its beguiling finished presentation.

Central Saint Martins

Anne Frobeen, MA Design (Furniture)

‘Simple Line chairs were created to help open up the body during sitting, a result of a MA research thesis completed at Central Saint Martins. Entitled Kinesthetic Imagination, the thesis proposes that by engaging the body in the design process, the designer is able to “see” latent design criteria, which might be overlooked using many contemporary design methodologies that are often centered around new materials or manufacturing processes. This project is a direct critique of the way that the design industry often pushes innovation through the use of materials, manufacturing process and the aesthetic that comes along with this,’ says Frobeen.

Jan Rose, MA Product Design, website

‘The Knitting Craftsman is a response to the ongoing trend of amateur craft making and professional rapid prototyping, resuming this craft technique to see what craft can teach us in the light of the present capacities of industry,’ says Rose. ‘Craftsmanship is a valuable tool for pushing forward innovation in manufacturing process and material production, therefore material and process take the lead in design thinking. Reusing knitting as a future manufacturing process is a critique of mass production, extensive consumerism and people’s perception of materials.’

Jessika Strataki, MA Communication Design (Digital Media), website

‘The Word Machine processes sentences from a database. It then attempts to map meaning in three-dimensional space using a set of rules of interpretation. The Word Machine will place the selected sentence in an angle in all 3 axes (x, y, z), each of which has been assigned its own meaning parameter of polar opposites,’ Strataki says. ‘The X axis stands for macro versus micro, Y axis for quantitative versus qualitative and Z axis objective versus subjective. The machine measures the meaning of the sentence by adding up the total of the key words within it, which have a specific predetermined measurement. These are defined in a growing Word Machine dictionary.’

Niloufar Afnan, MA Furniture Design, website

‘Inviting Surfaces begun initially through a four year length photography research on the cultural resilience of the Lebanese people, and grew from this research the development of contemporary furniture pieces,’ Afnan explains. ‘The collection of works questions the different possibilities of medium and form that can correspond to the associations of a table and chair. It is an exploration of new possibilities to fulfill common associations such as a seat, table surface or legs. To what extent does it affect our cognitive understanding of furniture? And how does it allow us to perceive solutions for broken objects?’

University of Dundee

Lewis Benmore, MA Architecture, website

New Nature: A Shifting Paradigm challenges the disengagement between humankind and a landscape in flux. It provides the portrait of a fragile coastal region, Walton-on-Naze, as a complex environment made through both endogenous and anthropogenic influences. For centuries man has adapted to this shifting landscape however recent attempts have been made to control the natural process of erosion. The architectural response entails a series of structures comprising a seawater desalination plant, which aims to re-establish a community within the fragile ecology that exists on the site. The physical manifestation of the plant engages with the backwaters, forming a symbiotic relationship between industry and nature.

Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL)

Brynjar Sigurðarson, MA Product Design, website

Sigurðarson’s project consists of a group of objects designed around an imaginary hunter. The items include a stool partly made from hardened leather, which becomes rigid when it contacts hot water. Another is a backpack designed specifically for hunting. The vague animal shape of the backpack is designed to attract animals to the backpack, unaware of the intentions of the hunter. Collectively, the objects Sigurðarson has designed form a group of extraordinary hunting tokens.

Glasgow School of Art

Daniela Corda, BA Jewellery and Silversmithing

Corda works in non-precious metals to accentuate the effort of craft as opposed to the value of the material, and her use of synthetic stones accentuates this question of reality. Corda says: ’My work is an expression of my passion for philosophy, cosmology, alchemy and time. I am fascinated by the ever-thinning line between illusion and reality, and so I aim to create a realm of curious instruments that are beautifully pseudo yet undeniably wearable. The symbol of the brain is a predominant theme within my pieces and I use it to represent the evolution of the zeitgeist.’

Goldsmiths College

Kristina Cranfield, BA Design, website

Cranfield’s project, Ownership of the Face, questions the modern attitudes towards identity. ‘This project is part of an explorative journey that initially stemmed from observations of my own face. During my process I revealed interesting and unexpected pathways, which explored the human face as a representation of individual identity, yet it is subject to constant change and modification according to social environments,’ says Cranfield. ‘By studying how the face is manipulated, advertised and used as an image of corporate identity, I design processes, experiments, and devices to conceptualize my investigation in real world contexts.’

Matt House, BA Design

DITTO is a series of objects that reassesses and lampoons ideas embedded in others while providing a critique of design classics. ‘Copying is fundamental to development and social interaction, yet it is viewed negatively in education and creative fields. With new media, reproduction is engrained in culture, allowing us to embrace this phenomenon. How do individuals respond when you reiterate, reprocess and reclaim their property? We are the generation that remix, parody and re-enact. Go and henceforth copy,’ espouses House.

Greenwich University

Adam Shapland, Dip Arch

‘The scheme explores the relationship between the “event” and the city through the subversion of performance in “everyday” experience and situation. It questions the notions of theatre through thresholds between the backstage of the performers dwelling spaces and labyrinths of the school and the stage of the high wire, subverting the mundanity of the emphasised “journey to school” as an exposed event,’ claims Shapland. ‘The structure itself is projected as a device, exploring a temporal facade which dynamically shifts its state to act as a secondary blanket of performance determined by primary instances.’

Adis Dobardzic, Dip Arch

Dobardzic’s project is a therapy tower designed specifically for American author Paul Auster. ‘The tower reacts to the emotions and progress of the therapy process, which is reflected through the skin and structure of the tower. As he [Auster] journeys along the levels of the tower, he is confronted by spaces that ask oneself to dwell deep into his past, whether it be through catching ones reflection in the water well, psychoanalysis occurring in the Freudian therapy space or writing about past events in the empty room,’ Dobardzic says. ‘As the occupant discloses his past the tower too starts to shed its layers. It begins to vibrate, cables swing relentlessly from the building breaking fragments of the concrete fins, as a gust of fresh air swirls through the tower.’

Leo Robert, Dip Arch

This project attempts to find a solution to a future problem: ‘By 2050 it [the Thames Barrier] will be superseded by the Thames’ expansion as a result of global warming,’ says Robert. ‘The proposal is a series of towers that cluster around strategic flooded (or soon to be flooded) areas, concentrating on the Thames gateway. These towers respond to tidal and storm surges with a series of seawater antennas providing communication between clusters offering potential for a large scale network. The towers are operated by currents and separate seawater into salt and fresh water through a desalination and salt raking process. The fresh water is stored in a giant tank, and the salt flushed through an archive room located at the top of the tower.’

Sohail Sarwar, BA Architecture

Sarwar’s three projects tackle three very different subjects. The first is an interesting study comparing two similar establishments on Brick Lane, one a carefully arranged exhibition of artefacts, the other a shop containing second-hand goods. Sarwar assesses the oddity of two neighboring buildings that are so similar in content but not in purpose. The second project deals with designing an abstract guild for the former speaker Michael Martin whilst the third is a set of designs for a canoe-making school on the bank of the Thames.

Kent University

Alex Jackson, MA Architecture

Geotrails Network has been developed to secure a long-term sustainable economic and environmental future for the Dungeness Romney marsh area. The concept focuses on principles of Eco/Geotourism, in the form of interactive education, exploration and participation. The Geotrails Network Hub provides a visitor centre and educational tool for both the immediate community, and those visiting the area. It provides the opportunity for locals and visitors to become involved with the ongoing initiatives such as research and habitat creation.

Matthew Gisbey, MA Architecture

‘Unwrapping the Cloister’ proposes a scheme to construct a Benedictine monastery on Romney Marsh in Kent. Explaining his process, Gisbey said: ‘Provision for the austere and regimented lifestyle of a monk was the primary concern when considering the design. Factors such as the scale, access and existing use of the surrounding environment have also been taken into consideration in order for the monastery to sit comfortably in its proposed location.’

Kingston University

Agi Haines (website) and Laura Pratley (website), BA Graphic Design

Pratley and Haines designed alcohol containers in the shape of fuel pump nozzles. Their idea was to raise awareness of drink-driving and its dangers. ‘It is an issue that, as students, we are very aware of,’ the pair say. Casts were made from a nozzle found online and their bottle designs, combined with the foreboding labels, intend to ‘force the consumer to think responsibly about the choices they make.’ Pratley adds: ‘The idea is that when someone is about to pour themselves a drink, the bottle will remind them that they might have been planning to drive later on and give them a moment to pause for thought and reflect on the consequences of their actions.’

Ben Lambert and Jack Llewellyn, BA Design Interaction

Designers Lambert and Llewellyn devised their website in response to the Japanese tsunami crisis earlier in 2011. Keen to bring together as much information as possible: ‘The idea was to create an information sharing network that aims to bring together people with useful skills worldwide to create the most effective information resource possible,’ Llewellyn said. ‘The website allows contributors to add content, from Twitter feeds up to custom-designed maps, or specialist applications… Aid agencies told us that, in some parts of the world, official news sources are mistrusted by the authorities. The great thing about this site is that it’s entirely moderated by the members themselves.’

Hannah Shipley, BA Graphic Design, website

‘Brand Medals is a modern-day representation of how people value success by the hierarchy and the amount of brands they own. Brands are similar to military medals as they are worn with pride as symbols of achievement. In this case the more highly regarded brands are higher up the display cabinet and have more elaborate ribbons. This project combines wry humour with a serious critique of consumer culture, calling for us to reassess the relationship we have with material possessions,’ says Shipley.

Jonathon Warren, BA (Hons) Product and Furniture Design

Warren’s drain designs were inspired by his observation that many people walking through London do so with their eyes to the floor, whether it be looking at a mobile phone or a map. Warren then tried to design alternative signposts that were not above eye level. The drains themselves mesh well with the existing London signage and suit the calls for less street clutter from London Mayor Boris Johnson.

London Metropolitan University

Lauren Campany

West Everton Community have suffered 18 pub closures in the past 2 years resulting in private drinking, depression and antisocial behaviour. The landlords were key members in the community who knew people who attended pubs and sent them home when they had enough. This no longer exists. The mobile pub designed aims to look at a new model of a public house. Designed from a readily available shipping container the pub will be transported, to the neighbourhoods of empty pub sites, where it will house an archive of local history, a hairdressers, stage, and a drink station.

Nicolo Spino

Spino’s took his designs for hybrids of benches and plant beds, which he created as part of his university course, to the Milan Public Design Festival. The multifunctional pieces of furniture were formed solely from reclaimed materials in Milan and serve as a good example of eco-friendly design, which is only becoming more popular in the 21st Century. Spino was also able to gain work from this exposure, earning freelance work for a furniture shop in Milan this summer.

London South Bank University

Anurag Gautam, Dip Arch

Gautam’s project looks at how cargo airships used for transporting and constructing tall timber towers could revolutionise the way we design and construct our cities. Gautam says, ‘Modern construction methods are inefficient, time consuming and they congest our road networks. These methods formed the tall monolithic towers of steel and concrete as symbol of economic boom for the 20th century after the world became scarred by two world wars. Today we face an environmental and economic crisis and we need to revise our understanding of how we construct our tall urban icons. 21st century towers could be made from a new revolutionary timber based technology that mimics concrete: Solid engineered timber. Its financial and environmental properties could make it a symbol of 21st century construction. It has the potential to change the meaning of architecture.’

Daniel Schinagl, BA Architecture

‘The bank of the River Thames is one of the most photographed places in the world. The majority of these photos are uploaded to Google Maps. These documents together create a virtual space as a result of the observation by separate individuals,’ says Schinagl. ‘This is a collective memory, a virtual space to which anyone can have access. This is an interpretation of the Gestalt phenomenon in the physical, human environment. We do not see our environment in its whole presence, although a place or spot can be described and defined in an objective or subjective way, too.’

Manchester School of Architecture

Harry Mulligan, Dip Arch

By utilising a disused canal basin in Milan for the location of his design, Mulligan describes his work as an attempt to regenerate the Milanese canal district. ‘Integral to the scheme are a host of environmental systems including a homeostatic double skin façade admitting diffused daylight throughout the exhibition spaces,’ Mulligan said of his design. ‘The skin reflects a mapping of the current fashion institutions within Milan, creating an aesthetic derived from the fashion industry of the city itself.’

Maryam Osman, Dip Arch

A peculiar mix of an IVF clinic and a pleasure boat ride, Osman says her building ‘derived from the essence of pleasure and purpose as sexual escapism.’ Osman attempted to blend the two separate ideas without making them one singular place, including a pair of crossing staircases where for a brief moment the inhabitants of the two sections of the building are close.

Nottingham University

Jack Sawbridge, Dip Arch, website

Denis Diderot called for ‘Liberal Art’ to learn from ‘Mechanical Art’, for making to take precedence over the made. Sawbridge’s work focuses on design through the practice of making to inform the production of the object. This project, entitled Diderot’s Workshop, is sited on the French-German border. The language of tension and tuning is represented throughout the structure by a system of looms that are weaving the countries’ flags. Sawbridge’s work was exhibited in the Architecture Room at the RA’s Summer Exhibition this year.

Marialena Tsolka, BA Architecture

‘Bensalem’s Hydra’ was selected by the Royal Academy of Arts for inclusion in the architecture room at its annual Summer Exhibition. The project proposes a hydroponic landscape embodying the crossover between architecture, geology and science, and projecting the gap between the architecural skin and the structure: a hybrid effect that becomes the common ground of nature and machine. The original drawing is more than 2m in length and took Tsolka six weeks in total to produce, first drawing in pencil, then digitally manipulating the image before rendering it by hand in ink. Tsolka drew inspiration for the work from Gaudi, Calatrava and HR Giger.

Nottingham Trent University

Joe Oliver, BA (Hons) Graphic Design, website

‘The work I displayed was for a New Scientist magazine supplement entitled Ten Scientific Objects that Changed the World. Instead of simply illustrating the objects as they are, I wanted to portray the story behind each object, aiming to keep each illustration as simple and as clear as possible… while still allowing the viewer to read the meanings for themselves. Also, I think choosing the right colours is vital, especially with vector illustrations like these. The wrong shade could prevent the whole composition from working,’ says Oliver.

Kenson Lai, BA (Hons) Graphic Design, website

‘EYE ARE GRAFIK DESIGNER-ERRR is a project of quips that illustrates some of the generic clichés and honest truths I have observed in my years of a graphic design education. It came from frustration that graphic design is a tool for communicating but instead churns out waves upon waves of visual fluff instead of inspiring and different ideas. The book humorously pokes fun of said fluff others create but also the clichés my own work suffers from. The unavoidable nature of this seemed to be universal but never voiced, which became the basis of the project,’ says Lai.

University of Portsmouth

Natasha Butler (website) and Joshua Kievenaar (website)

RIBA silver medal nominees Butler and Kievenaar’s ‘Bridge of Alchemy’ project sees a number of structures built into and beneath a rock face in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The complex buildings are stacked with Moroccan tradition and culture to entice travellers. Astounding amounts of detail are squeezed into every drawing and the effort and inspiration behind the designs are admirable.

University of Plymouth

Oliver Blanchard, BA (Hons) 3D Design

‘Together the Breakdown Beacon and Guide, aim to protect motorists with limited mobility and others in a roadside breakdown.Currently, motorists are instructed to move away from their vehicle, however for some people this is not an option. Motorists who cannot leave their vehicle are forced to sit and await rescue, leaving themselves at grave risk of a fatal accident. The Breakdown Beacon changes this. The Breakdown Beacon is an innovative inflatable warning, which allows stranded motorists to alert other road users of the potentially dangerous situation ahead. Once slipped over the window, the activation cord is pulled, inflating the illuminated beacon to a height of over 2m,’ says Blanchard.

Royal College of Art

Bethany Wells, Dip Arch, website

Following a series of interdisciplinary live projects throughout the year, in collaboration with the Transition Network, this thesis project speculates how the area around Finsbury Park, north London, could become occupied, activated, amended, infilled and embedded with a new educational network. The Fairground Collective proposes an alternative model for higher education, activating underused spaces within the urban environment, and using the high street as an informal urban campus, bridging education, design practice and community action.

Robert Ware, MA Architecture, website

‘The Repository of the Eternal Now is an addition to St Paul’s Cathedral which builds itself in real time using data from the 41 Stock Market sectors that the Church of England invests in. This data is then embodied in the physical towers, which grow in relation to the sector’s success. The repository has a stark, securocratic exterior with a dynamic interior richly adorned with intertwining iconographies,’ says Ware. This beautifully presented project balanced the politics of the C of E’s investment policy with the exploration of technologies that would allow the realisation of the repository. Ware developed a 3D printer that could represent the data he harvested as physical data objects, which in turn informed his architectural proposal.

Helen Moore, MA Ceramics and Glass, website

‘Working with the language of colour, glaze, mass and multiple, my practice aims to create a dynamic and hypnotic feast for the senses. Inhabiting the context where analytical, sensual and material intertwine, this current body of work marries simple abstract forms with the richness of ceramic surface, through visually stimulating and tactile “wallscapes”,’ says Moore. ‘Each wallscape captures a metaphysical space where scientific and poetic, tangible and intangible, logical and creative converge. Connecting the seemingly disparate facets of my own consciousness, they seek an expanded understanding of the emotional and metaphorical capacity of colour within an analytical framework.’

Malene Rasmussen, MA Ceramics and Glass, website

Rasmussen’s two projects, ‘If I Had A Heart, It Could Love You’ and ‘Fire Walk With Me’, share themes and the same level of technical quality. The juxtaposition of fine, polished ceramic flames and ominous snakes draw in viewers. Of her pieces, Rasmussen said: ‘I want my work to look like a very skilled child could have made it, clumsy and elaborate at the same time. My intention is to create compositions that have an underlying story and mood.’

Ilona Gaynor. MA Design Interactions, website

Referencing Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘Black Swan’ theory on the importance of unpredictable events, ‘Everything Ends in Chaos is an attempt to artificially construct a financial Black Swan,’ explains Gaynor. ‘Positioned in hindsight, and told through a series of fragmented hypothetical narratives that have undergone various financial assessments; from investment bankers and insurance brokers to loss adjusters and risk strategists, drawing upon the practice of insurance with the means to investigate and underpin the moment at which economical fact becomes fiction and vise versa.’

Kevin Grennan, MA Design Interactions, website

Grennan’s bizarre collection of pictures examines the evolution of robotics. ‘Much current research into robotics is focused on the creation of anthropomorphic robots – machines that look and appear to behave like humans. Although there are valid reasons for this research (and a good deal of egotism), I believe that this approach is fundamentally flawed,’ Grennan explains. He says his work aims to explore the edges of anthropomorphism and ask if this approach really is the way we want to relate to future machines.

Lisa Ma, MA Design Interactions, website

Researching passengers facing extended delays, Ma tried to find a way to entertain and occupy them. Ma’s alternative is a bike ride tour around the outskirts of the airport. ‘The project creates a dialogue between the visitors passing through and local residents that were deeply affected by but rarely in direct contact with goings on inside the fences of the airport,’ says Ma. Her hope is that the experience ‘brings together two disparate communities and leaves entertaining and memorable experiences for the passengers and a new form of activism for the protesters.’

Marguerite Humeau, MA Design Interactions, website

‘Back, Here Below, Formidable’ aimed to recreate the sound of extinct animals – such as the woolly mammoth pictured here – by reconstructing their vocal tracts. The major problem is that this part is made from soft tissue and so doesn’t fossilise. Only the bones of the long-dead animals have been preserved through time. These beasts’ bellowings were recreated by extrapolation from living descendants. New larynx and vocal cords, windpipes of estimated length and diameter, and artificial breathing produced by an air compressor brought them to life again.

Alexander Groves, MA Design Products, website

‘The Sea Chair Project’, which has the funding to become a fully-fledged ‘floating factory’, aims to collect and recycle waste plastic in the ocean. Plastic, mostly 2mm diameter plastic pellets of which Groves say there are 13,000 per square mile, will sifted from the water using a ‘sluice-like contraption’, with the plastic later reformed into comfortable plastic chairs for the local fishermen. Groves and his team plan to make the chairs in time for display in Milan next year.

Markus Kayser, MA Design Products, website

‘In a world increasingly concerned with questions of energy production and raw material shortages, this project explores the potential of desert manufacturing, where energy and material occur in abundance,’ Kayser says. ‘In this experiment sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process, that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology,’ Kayser concludes: ‘Solar-sintering aims to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and triggers dreams of the full utilisation of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource – the sun. Whilst not providing definitive answers, this experiment aims to provide a point of departure for fresh thinking.

Oscar Lhermitte, MA Design Products, website

‘Over time, society has developed a complex rhythm that demands we live in an environment artificially lit twenty-four hours a day, preventing us from experiencing the natural lights coming from billions of light years away,’ says Lhermitte. ‘The Urban Stargazing project focuses on bringing back the stars in the city sky by recreating existing constellations and adding new ones, narrating old and contemporary myths about London. Twelve groups of stars have been installed at different locations in the city, and can only be observed by the naked eye at night time. The brightness intensity is so subtle that one might not even notice them.’

Liam Reeves, MA Ceramics and Glass, website

‘As technology advances, the ways that we perceive, understand, and influence the world around us are also changing. The concept of craftsmanship itself is transforming; skill in using digital media has become comparable to skill in manipulating molten glass or other materials,’ says Reeves. ‘This work uses the tradition, technique and language of glassblowing as a lens through which to explore the effect these kinds of technological advance have on the way that we interface with our environment, and ultimately their inherent transience as innovations are superseded in their own evolution.’

Sheffield University

Neil Cooke, MA Architecture

This project aims to promote the reuse of heritage sites for touristic and regenerative use in Blackpool, as a reaction to the council’s tendency to denigrate old buildings in the pursuit of modernity. It proposes an airship mooring station at the top of the Blackpool Tower, with an elegant hotel added to the rooftop of the existing base; restoring its ballroom and circus wings and creating a vibrant ‘street life’ around a central atrium, with views straight up through a glazed screen to the tower itself. In contrast to the complexity of the tower, the 52-room hotel (matching the 52 passenger capacity of the airship) is all about legibility and clarity.

Toby Knipping, MA Architecture

‘Repurposing Ruin explores the past and future of St. Peter’s Seminary in Cardross – a modern monastic ruin. The aesthetics of decay are celebrated in a programme that brings together process involving Wood, Whiskey, Fire & Water,’ says Knipping. ‘A single malt scotch whiskey distillery and woodworking educational facility bring new layers of life and overgrowth to the brutal structure and the arboreal estate that it occupies. The project imagines a remote heterotopia where the commanding ruin acts as a backdrop to industry and activity that connects local desires with national significance that will ultimately contribute new layers of archaeology…. Space and Light becomes Substance and Shadow.’

Westminster University

Kenzaf Chung, Diploma Architecture, website

The idea of Chung’s ‘Breathing Platform’ is to ‘create a breathing platform which will rise with the rising sea levels, providing a possible habitation for human society in the future. The breathing platform will be a sustainable form of living, having a factory for seafood processing and a factory for container manufacturing at the highest level with dwelling spaces, growing places and social functions below water ready and waiting for use when the sea level rises and floods the town of Whitstable.

Andrew Cumine, Diploma Architecture

Cumine’s project, ‘Royal Laundry’, involved the designing of ‘a Royal Laundry facility for all the textiles and tapestries housed in Madrid’s royal palace,’ Cumine explains. ‘The laundry exhibits the monumental scale of the domestic by exposing the domestic scale of the royal. The codes and processes of cleaning organize sorting, washing, drying and repairs into viewable territories, and re-curate the royal treasures and the royal everyday.’

David Charlton, Diploma Architecture

‘Plaza de la Luna is an accidental square, the result of civil war bombing. The random disappearance of two city blocks in central Madrid exposed four ordinary street elevations to unexpected status,’ says Charlton. ‘The bomb crater created an opportunity for a 4-storey underground car park, except that the absent topography had to be arti­ficially reinstated above its flat roof to join up the marooned entrances and rooms on the periphery… The project imagines a partial u-turn, excavating back to the car park roof as a datum for a new strategy.’

Keir Alexander, Diploma Architecture

Alexander’s work depicts the renovation of one of Madrid’s more famous squares. ‘The design thesis was realised in two parts: the first, an analytical unpicking of Madrid’s famous Plaza Mayor, an outstanding example of a grand baroque urban gesture,’ explains Alexander. ‘The project then imagines applying such urban ambitions to a contemporary setting, in the bohemian district of Malasaña. A project conceived by modern egalitarian principles rather than by the conceits of kings.’

Rowan Sloss, Diploma Architecture, website

‘Told across several books of text and images, in­cluding The PARADISE Guide to Ávila and The Instaurative House, the PARADISE project – a research hotel, a retreat, a garden – is a concrete proposal for a place that will exist in the mind as much as in steel and wood,’ Sloss says.

The Panel

Thanks to our critic panel, who each year take the time to visit the shows and select the best work.

Alex Warnock-Smith, website

Esme Fieldhouse, website

David Howarth, website

Torange Khonsari, website

Alyn Griffiths, website

Paul Kelsall, website

Ajmir Kandola, website

Michael Hudson, website

Graham Modlen, website

Nelly Ben Hayoun, website

Johnathan Adam, website

Veronica Simpson, website

Steve Townsend

Natre Wannathepsakul

and Jean Wang

The work of Wim Crouwel has had a profound influence on contemporary graphic design. During the post-war Dutch design scene, dominated by an expressive painterly approach, Crouwel was influenced by modernism and the International Typographic Style, or the Swiss Style. The current exhibition at the Design Museum. Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey (until 3 July), charts the designer’s prolific career, including a significant body of work for the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and later for Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. It was here that he was not only given the opportunity to develop his own graphic language through posters for the museum, but was also commissioned to work on the exhibition design. The most significant aspect of these iconic posters is that Crouwel reflected the subject of the exhibition by communicating it through a striking type and use of colour, and not by using an image. For instance, with the Hiroshima exhibition (1957), which consisted of horrific paintings and drawings by two Japanese artists, Crouwel responded by using heavy black type on a solid fiery red background. Using one word to make an ‘image’-based typography became a running theme throughout his posters during this time.

The use of grids in graphic design had been developed by Swiss designers and this influenced much of the work both on the posters and exhibition catalogues. It was this process that led to Crouwel’s grid-designed lettering. An excellent example of this can be seen in the Vormgevers poster (1968). It was an industrial design exhibition and that gave Crouwel the idea of making the structure visible for the first time, and a typeface that fitted directly into the grid system was developed. There are intricate original drawings on display at the Design Museum that remind us that all this work was done by hand, yet still look fresh and fit entirely into our now digital world.

Another great example of this can be seen through Crouwel’s innovative approach to the calendar designs that he did in the Fifties for the printing firm, Van De Greer. Again, the design solution was entirely typographical and he ended up producing 25 different calendars in total. Type designer David Quay, of the Foundry, approached Crouwel to develop his lettering into digital fonts. With Quay’s expertise, they developed the typefaces together. The first was named Gridnik, after a nickname given to Crouwel by his friends in the Seventies because of his obsession with grids.

In 1963, Total Design was founded, a multi-disciplinary group of kindred spirits including Wim Crouwel, along with Friso Kramer, Ben Bos, Benno Wissing and Paul and Dick Schwarz, whose manifesto was essentially to redesign Dutch design. In the years that he worked at Total Design, Crouwel produced many logotypes and typefaces for companies such as IBM and Olivetti. Through this work, he professionalised corporate identity, which helped shape the face of modernity and the approach to graphic design that is now synonymous with the Netherlands.

There are examples on display of later work influenced by Crouwel and an example of his New Alphabet typeface put to use by designers Peter Saville and Brett Wickens on the cover for the 1988 Joy Division album, Substance 1977-1980.

When I asked Crouwel his reaction to this, he answered that he was flattered that they had used his typeface. However, he added that he had first seen it in a pop magazine and they had altered the letters to make it more legible, which was not the original idea! In the run-up to the exhibition, Crouwel’s New Alphabet typeface has been reproduced on products such as a wallpaper for Cole & Son and a rug for Tai Ping, both designed by Tony Brook, who has co-curated the show.

At 83, Wim Crouwel is still working and was recently commissioned to design the front cover of Wallpaper magazine to coincide with this retrospective. An exhibition like this in London is long overdue and the work on display stands as an education to students of  communication design and practising professionals alike.

‘As soon as we popped open the box, the Nintendo 3DS moved from desk to desk, here at our studio, and was the major distraction for a week. It is a definite concept progression from the original Nintendo DS, with ever-increasing possibilities for the games and application designer. Its unique range of available control methods, a touch screen, stylus, and 3D camera offers more possibilities for games and applications to interface with the user.

‘In our opinion, the real technological leap for the unit is not solely the inclusion of a 3D screen or camera – although it is impressive to have these features on a consumer unit, they are certainly do not create an instant holodeck – the real potential we see is using the 3D camera as an augmented reality device to create the long-promised breed of alternate reality games and applications that have been so far a science fiction to the consumer.

‘What the 3DS delivers, as so many technological artefacts have promised in the last decade, is a portable console that can successfully mix virtual and physical elements with startling accuracy. Using the image depth from its stereoscopic camera, 3D objects can be dropped into view, panned around and interacted with. In an urban context, the 3DS has the potential to offer unprecedented possibilities.

‘Sadly, the drawbacks are evident as soon as you begin to tinker. Nintendo’s software development kits are notoriously difficult to obtain, and require a significant financial commitment to the company. Whereas Microsoft offered the open source community the opportunity to get to grips with its revolutionary motion detection Xbox 360 peripheral Kinect, Nintendo retain an incredibly proprietary stance.’

Last year Media Lab, the Boston-based experimental faction of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), celebrated its 25th birthday. The occasion was marked by the launch of its new graphic identity. Following the opening of the Lab’s new home, E14, this February, the new logo also heralded a period of transition for the institution. In the run-up to the anniversary, the school recruited Richard The, a recent Media Lab graduate, along with E Roon Kang to reinvigorate the existing logo, a simple yet robust colour bar, which had been the institution’s only dedicated graphic identity since its establishment back in 1985.

After many attempts at reformatting the original design, however, David Small, a Lab professor until last year who instigated the redesign, felt it was time to give Media Lab a fresh start. ‘It is meaningful that it marks the end of 25 years and that this is for a new generation for the next 25,’ says Small. The main ambition of the design was to encompass all aspects of the school. The Logo embodies its unusual focus group-based structure; its keen encouragement of cross-disciplinary education and research; its transparency both to the public and between researchers. The original graphic identity by Jacqueline Casey, developed in 1984, was however a more fundamental basis for the new logo. That was based, in turn, on a panelled wall mural by Kenneth Noland, which was painted directly on the metal skin of the atrium in the IM Pei-designed Wiesner building (which used to house the Media Lab until recently) and continues along the exterior surface of the building.

Casey’s colour bar was never a logo per se and by the time Small returned to work at the Lab 10 years after graduating, it was a redundant feature with little in the way of a graphic unity to the expansive subsets of researchers and the main institution itself. ‘Jacqueline’s identity might have been one of the first changeable systems to be designed,’ says Small. ‘It bugged me how much they had ruined the original identity – I’m not sure anyone was left who knew it was even a system.’ Taking the original logo as a starting point and referring to tangible aspects of the school – the new building’s glass atrium structure and its coloured stairs demarking the different zones of research within it – the new logo stretches the limits of graphic design. ‘It was a complex process,’ says The, who now works with Berlin-based practice The Green Eyl. ‘Because the school is so broad in its scope and reputation.’ Brought on-board by Small, The was the perfect candidate for the job, having previously worked on interactive and adaptive installations with designer Stefan Sagmeister in New York.

Using a custom-made algorithm the new design features three intersecting coloured spotlights, which can be organised into 40,000 different shapes and 12 colour combinations. The new logo will supply the Media Lab with 25 years’ worth of individualised business cards, which was the actual start-point for the redesign. Each Media Lab student and professor can choose from the range on offer and claim their own unique logo shape and colour combination.

According to Small, these will eventually act as a key to access people’s profile and work. ‘The card could be waved in front of a computer and open a new world,’ he says. This also avoids the common problem of devolving a core identity. Rather than numerous iterations diluting the Media Lab brand, instead they align the various personalities of all staff and students with the institution’s stated mission.

Indeed, although welcomed by many, the recent rebranding highlights the Lab’s need for such clarity, something that Small feels is key to its future growth and direction. ‘Since being established, the Lab’s mission has become much broader,’ he says. ‘In 1989, when I graduated we were anticipating the internet and everything being about social media. But now it is a very different environment.’ Under the latest directorship of Frank Moss and guided by the motto ‘inventing a better future’, the Lab has become increasingly adaptive to new challenges, shifting its research to include diverse fields of study such as nanotechnology and biomechanics. While its research is behind the underlying technology of numerous ground-breaking commercial products including Guitar Hero, Lego Mindstorms and initiatives such as One Laptop per Child, the Lab’s graphic identity remained ambiguous.

Conversely, now the institution has an identity – albeit an adaptive and personalised one – it has no titular head after director Moss resigned in February. It seems an unusual situation for a brand to define an institution’s identity without a leader to promote it. So while the new logo builds on the Media Lab’s history and reflects its current relevance, it will be down to the new director to take the institution out of a transition phase and define a clear approach for the future.

During his long career, Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) designed more than 4,000 cogent, bold and instantly legible symbols and figures. The politically engaged graphic artist and designer portrayed the world in wood and linoleum cuts. It is still possible to discern his influence today in our everyday lives – in information graphics, on our computer screens and mobile phones. His pictograms are all-but ubiquitous, comprising a visual shorthand geared to a society that seems to live constantly on fast-forward. In the 1920s, Arntz began collaborating with Otto Neurath after the social scientist asked him to design symbols for the ‘International System Of TYpographic Picture Education’ (ISOTYPE). Arntz’ pictograms formed a pictorial system of knowledge transfer, one that made information concerning the relentless development of industrial, electronic and sociocultural knowledge available to everyone. Information was thus democratised, according to Neurath’s phrase: ‘Words divide – images unite’.

The key to Arntz’ effectiveness and lasting significance as a designer lies in his unique ability to transfer data through images, motivated by a passionate commitment to society and a desire to share information with the public at large. In the socialist milieu of 1930s Vienna, Arntz and Neurath sought, idealistically, to enlighten its citizens and help them develop their Bildung (education as well-informed citizens). Clearly, there’s a broadly Modernist aesthetic also at work here, centred around the notion that the qualities inherent in good design could help improve the standard of people’s lives. Could such idealism survive into the internet age with its accompanying surge in the production of imagery?

This idealism, by today’s standards, comes with a sort of innocence, one now replaced by relativism, issuing from our media-fixated social environment. Irony counters almost any attempt at a single reading of an Arntz pictogram, such an approach being regarded as a trap or illusion. The 21st century’s greater variety of information and the sheer saturation of imagery via the media has undeniably led to a noisy confusion of a pictorial kind. It is not difficult for impartial information to blur into a form of coercion when such symbols are used to try and sell us an advertiser’s product. Some of Arntz’ pictograms, conceived as a sort of visual Esperanto, show their age more than others. His symbols illustrating women working, for instance, invariably show them undertaking domestic tasks in the home, sewing and cooking, or shopping for food, basket-in-hand. Men are usually shown working in factories, as postmen and in laboratories.

It is possible today for the same purpose to be served by a whole range of imagery – take the numerous different images signifying male and female public toilets. In our globalised world, where numerous cultures and subcultures are textually and visually mixed, images like Arntz’ and his successors can ease communication – even though his and Neurath’s particular vision and goals might no longer chime with contemporary diversity and visual complexity. Yet what gives Arntz’ work its continuing ‘newness’ and vitality is his seizure of something from the real world and its coding. Whether it be the graphic of a slouching figure of an unemployed man wearing a cap, or simply an image of a letter, building or car, and approximating them in a pictogram.

Complementing hundreds of examples of pictograms, the book includes a biographical sketch of Arntz’ fascinating life along with a selection of oil paintings, political prints and other rare visual material previously unpublished. A series of incisive essays written by stars from the contemporary graphic design world influenced by Arntz complete the picture. Graphic design guru, Nigel Holmes describes an image he’s created that shows himself and his partner cycling together. It’s drawn from a modified image originally by Arntz, and was part of a graphic commissioned by Attaché magazine. ‘Am I stealing Arntz’ work?’, Holmes asks himself. ‘I hope it’s seen as more of a homage to him’, he writes. This essay contains other visual homages to Arntz, in the form of Holmes’ well crafted work for Mexican Yellow Pages, Network World and the Radio Times.

These pictograms might be a little slicker than Arntz’ work – inevitably their look is more contemporary – but they show Holmes making the same quest for a personal visual vocabulary as his master, adding in their turn to the growing mountain of visual symbols. ‘I have tremendous respect for his work,’ continues Holmes, ‘and I’d like to think that this essay might help others appreciate his influence on aspects of current graphic design’. A fitting way to salute Gerd Arntz’ achievement.

Gerd Arntz – Graphic Designer, Edited by Ed Annink and Max Bruinsma, 010 Publishers, £34.50

Kevin Foakes’ (aka Strictly Kev) 2002 cover design for Funki Porcini’s album Fast Asleep. Made solely using Photoshop, it marked a new direction for the label’s design approach

The company, founded by computer programmer Matt Black and ex-art teacher Jonathan More, who perform under the name Coldcut, had humble beginnings. The label had a temporary home in a borrowed north-London studio and was primarily a means for the pair to release their own tracks. Black and More were keen to retain creative freedom and not submit to commercial pressures of the music industry. This independence and do-it-yourself attitude has underpinned the ethos behind Ninja Tune’s distinctly bold music and design. Some of the earliest releases for DJ Food and DJ Toolz were highly graphic and 2D; the designs were hand-drawn and set by the printers as the use of computers in design was in its infancy. Record-sleeve designers were working in studios in their homes, as were the musicians. Despite the growth of the company, the experiments that formed the musical and visual catalogue were labours of love, often improvised while learning to stretch the limits of the tools available.

Early Ninja Tune packaging for DJ Food and DJ Toolz, 1990- 1993. The graphic was type-set by the printers

Over time the Ninja Tune packaging developed as an increasingly sophisticated representation of the intangible product it contained. The status of the physical object was treated with equal reverence to the music itself; one of the label’s great strengths is that it transcends any particular genre. Indeed, it remains home to some of the most inventive musicians in the UK, who share the ability to make experimental music accessible. These include British hip-hop artist Roots Manuva, nu-jazz DJ Mr Scruff, godfather of grime Wiley and, until recently, female rapper and 2009 Mercury Prize-winner Speech Debelle. This eclectic stable of musicians, inevitably, has attracted equally diverse graphic talents.

Oscar and Ewan’s cover design for Roots Manuva’s Slime and Reason, 2008 used a cast rapid-prototyped mould of the artist’s bust

A key milestone in the development of Ninja Tune’s design identity is Foakes’ cover of downtempo breakbeat artist Funki Porcini’s 2002 album Fast Asleep. The cover is entirely made using Photoshop. The only things that are real in the image are the girl and the newspaper, both of which were sourced by Foakes off the Internet. The cover is a reflection of the nature of the music it represents, in that it is fabricated using a computer – as are the loops, beats and samples that make up the individual tracks. It’s a collaborative process, says Foakes: ‘the way I generally work is to speak to the artist first and ask “what do you want? If you have something very specific let’s go down that route, if it works, let’s make it and put it on the page; are you happy with that and am I happy with that?”’

For Coldcut’s 2006 album Sound Mirrors, architect-turned-designer Nigel Peake created a fold-out die-cut sleeve

Architect-turned-designer Nigel Peake produced the artwork for Coldcut’s 2006 album Sound Mirrors. ‘I basically chucked it at Nigel and said “do you want to do it?”’ says Foakes, ‘he hadn’t done an album cover before. I think he really pulled it off, though.’ The result is an architectural, 3D object that reflects the experimental nature of the record. The intricate drawings are printed onto die-cut card that folds out in a number of directions. The packaging is explored in a manner similar to understanding the music; each aspect demands attention and can be understood as an individual layer or as a whole entity.

Peake’s drawing of the Ninja Tune HQ in Kennington, London was commissioned to celebrate the label’s 20th anniversary this year

More recently, Ninja Tune employed designers Oscar and Ewan to produce the cover for Roots Manuva’s 2008 Slime and Reason album on offshoot label Big Dada. The London-based design practice created a bust of the artist Rodney Smith before filling the plaster cranium with objects that reflected the nature of the singles, including bananas and a green slime. The bust was created by 3D-scanning Smith’s head, rapid prototyping it, and and then making a mould which could be used to create multiple plaster versions. The duo’s approach to design is a marked progression for the label, from its initial 2D graphics, to developing 3D images, through to making objects from the artwork and, most recently, building the 3D objects and environments to be photographed. A notable example is Wiley’s Playtime is Over cover from 2007, which involved painting a children’s playground in matt black.

Album design has a habit of defining a designer or artist; from Peter Blake’s seminal work for The Beatles to Jamie Reid’s Never Mind the Bollocks and Peter Saville’s work with Factory Records. Ninja Tune may not be as tightly branded as Saville’s work for Factory Records, with its infamous cataloguing system that concluded with founder Tony Wilson’s coffin being labelled after the site of its HQ and club venue, FAC 501. Yet Ninja Tune has always been about performance; from live music, to video, to packaging and club nights, it has never become complacent and has remained true to the spirit of its Ninja mascot – constantly responding to the shifting, often turbulent, landscape of the music scene and striving to maximise the impact of their presence. Michael Bartalos designed the original Ninja that has been remixed over the years by Foakes, to reflect the changing state of the label. He is bemused by the character: ‘Ninja was chosen because of their stealth attitude: nipping in, doing their business and nipping out again. It was funny going to Japan in the mid-Nineties – one time someone came up to us and said “thank you for re-appropriating the ninja into something cool,” because apparently in Japan the ninja is not cool; it’s something like a beefeater there.’ Foakes has made the character his own, over the years the sword has been dropped and Ninja has acquired a record, decks, a speaker and, in its most recent incarnation for the 20th anniversary, two throwing stars in the shape of the Roman numeral X.

Since Michael Bartalos’s initial Ninja Tune mascot, Foakes has adapted the ninja to reflect the evolving nature of the label

As ever, with all modes of publishing, there are questions over the future of this style of art as music becomes digital. ‘I don’t think that people will identify so deeply with records, and in 10 years’ time, there will be a gap here,’ says Foakes. Yet, as he concedes, the heritage of album covers makes this hard to comprehend: ‘even The White Album wouldn’t be The White Album without the cover’.

The Ghostvillage Project from Agents Of Change on Vimeo

This collaboration has led to the creation of a font entitled Floorplay. The floorplan of buildings have been translated to find the form of individual characters, which in turn have been turned into models of buildings by the model shop. The aesthetic qualities of the model were the key factor in the design of the font and models, this is an ethos which both Praline and The Model Shop share and it has resulted in a communicative exhibit that highlights the tensions that exist when appropriating language for architecture. The model shop have created four physical interpretations of characters spelling out the word ‘Avec’ (French for ‘with’). Photographs of the model will show the different aspects of the collaboration accompanying the entire laser-cut alphabet and physical model.

The project has evolved from architectural floor plates to font, from font to model, from model to 3D letters, to photographs, to text. All these elements will be installed in the exhibition, to demonstrate the process behind the collaboration. On completion, Praline hope that the font will be made available to download for free.

If You Could Collaborate
15 — 23 January 2010, 12–6pm
(open late on 21 January, 12–9pm)
A Foundation Gallery at Rochelle School, London E2 7ES.

David Hillman

Last night saw the third in the President’s lecture 2009 series at D&AD, and this time it was the turn of David Hillman to reflect on his life in editorial design. In a remarkable career that has spanned 50 years, he has worked for The Sunday Times, art directed at Nova, became a partner at Pentagram, and rebranded the Guardian, as well as starting his own studio. In conversation with Patrick Baglee of Navyblue, he covered everything from his early days at the London School of Printing, to his feelings about how publishing must tackle the new challenges posed by the web.

Read on for some memorable quotes from the evening…

On starting out:
“My father was always disappointed I never got a real job. When I was tracing type he thought I was cheating, that I should do it freehand!”

On his early influences:
Brodovich of harpers Bazaar – “the godfather of graphic design”

Henry Wolf of Esquire – “my greatest hero”

On his first job at London Life:
“I was 19 or 20 years old and I was offered the art editorship of the magazine. It was a fantasy job, a great team, working on an entertainment mag for London – though none of us knew what we were doing!”

On Nova, which he joined as Art Director in 1968:

“We tackled every taboo known to man until there were none left. This is true of design – once someone has done it, everyone does it.”

A Hillman cover for Nova women's magazine

On commissioning photographers:
“I was approached by so many photographers… so I let it be known that from 10.30 til 12.00 every day I would view portfolios, and not a minute after. It was not just about liking the work – I had to like the person too.”

On the relaunch of Nova:
“It’s a crappy idea – why couldn’t they think of a new name for the magazine? You should never resurrect a magazine, and the quality of photography left a lot to be desired.”

On working at Pentagram:
“It was an amazing opportunity. I could live off their experience and blag my way to win a corporate identity!”

Phaidon: a Pentagram project

On rebranding the Guardian:
“The brief was on an A5 piece of paper saying basically I could do what I wanted! But in the end it was done through a lot of discussions.”

On responses to his rebranding of the Guardian:
“Spike Milligan wrote in, ‘Dear Editor, I think you have had one meeting too many!’”

‘Another anonymous letter said, ‘Dear Editor, Got the comic – where’s the newspaper?’”

“And Max Hastings said to me in person, ‘How do you feel to be responsible for the death of a newspaper?’”

The Guardian: as rebranded by Hillman

On the role of online publishing:
“The web will not be the death of magazines. It’s great for  ’skimming’, but not when you want a long read.”

“There is still a desire amongst readers for newspapers.”

“It’s not the web that’s doing it – it’s the people who are publishing, giving away content for free.”

On his influences today:
“NB Studios, Simon Esterson (the first art director of Blueprint) and a whole new generation of really good designers – although I don’t know all their names.”

On setting up a studio:
“Keep it small. Try and do it from home for as long as you can. You are most profitable when you are working on the kitchen table.”

On making a successful magazine:
“Everybody’s voice has to be heard. A good magazine is a strong group of people – take one away and the whole thing falls apart.”

“Design is a team effort.”

Only in San Francisco could a former NASA space-shuttle technologist hook-up with a confectionary industry veteran and the founder of Wired magazine to launch an organic, anti-slavery chocolate. ‘Silicon Valley start-up meets San Francisco foodie culture’, as its website tells us self-consciously. TCHO (Technology CHOcolate) which launched its first variety to ‘beta testers’ (in the tradition of testing new software) in 2005, is the result of the kind of personal obsessions that come from people who have been very successful and want an amusing retirement project. The website, where you can upload a photo of yourself and your ‘honey’ for Valentine’s, or follow the founders’ blog, seems to back this up. But behind the homespun veneer, the company means business and looks set to change the way we think about chocolate, in the way that Californian winemakers transformed the classification of wine with the introduction of American Viticultural Areas in
the 1990s.

TCHO founders Louis Rossetto, who established Wired magazine, engineer Timothy Childs, and chocolate expert Karl Bittong, are also very serious about the design of the identity and packaging. As former creative director of Wired, Susanna Dulkinys was already involved in advising her old friend Rossetto about the design approach to TCHO. With her husband Erik Spiekermann – the type designer and Blueprint columnist – Dulkinys spends part of the year in San Francisco and the rest in London and Berlin. Soon after the launch, Dulkinys and Spiekermann were not just advising, but investing in the business. The challenge, according to Dulkinys, became ‘not just how to design a bar of chocolate, but how to build a brand.’

The first step was the logotype, which bridges the initial ‘beta’ packaging of brown paper bags with the precious, gold-printed packaging that was recently launched. As the brand was being built in the background, the company was optimizing the formulation/ process and taking-in peoples’ feedback about the flavours.

Meanwhile, the logo was intended to be simple and strong – ‘as if it could be stenciled on to the side of a tanker,’ says Dulkinys. TCHO, it turns out, uses letters that are the least interesting characters in the alphabet. Dulkinys therefore decided to twist and chamfer the letters to give them personality. The letter ‘T’ stayed simple – the fewest strokes it takes to create a letter. But the other letters were adapted, as if carved out of chunks of chocolate. The length of the logotype is contained within two squares. The square forms the basic unit of the smallest five-gram bar of chocolate, 32sq mm. The largest bar, 1kg, consisting of 15 squares, but this is intended for cooking with. This modular system, which stems from the production process, is the building-block for all elements of the packaging and other forms of communication.

When the packaging for TCHO’s 1.0 chocolate was launched, Dulkinys’s idea for the brand really came into play: her starting point was the fact that in Mayan and Aztec culture chocolate, or more accurately the cacao bean, was a form of currency. Setting out to make packaging that looked valuable, Dulkinys began looking at the design of European bank notes, which she describes as ‘colourful but incredibly disciplined’. Taking the complex geometric patterns from the notes, designed to be universal, but very hard to copy, she developed six different patterns, one for each of the six flavours. The patterns, printed in gold on smooth card, take their cue from the flavours: for Nutty, the design is the abstracted shape of a peanut shell; Chocolatey is like a flow of liquid chocolate; Earthy is based on crop circles, while Fruity is based on the cross section of an orange slice. The algorithmic guilloche patterns also appear on the chocolate itself.

In the early days, as if it was new software, the chocolate was ‘beta tested’. Each bar was given a number and consumers could go to a very simple website and grade the chocolate ‘as a way of practising in public’, explains Dulkinys. TCHO was keen to move away from the percentage approach to defining chocolate, so instead of categorising each type by its cacao content, it is graded according to the flavour and the origin of the beans. TCHO only makes dark chocolate and flavours come from the inherent taste of the beans rather than added ingredients. A flavour wheel represents the six types which each originate from cacao beans around the world. For example, according to TCHO, Citrus is made from beans sourced from a ‘certified organic estate in the Sambirano Valley of Madagascar, one of the world’s hotbeds of tropical biodiversity.’

San Francisco has a history of chocolate manufacturing, the most famous ‘bean to bar’ company being Ghirardelli, established in 1852. But despite this great tradition, TCHO claims it is the only company actually manufacturing chocolate within the city. Building on the growing interest in food sourcing, process and ingredients, the company located its factory on pier 17 of the Embarcadero between the tourist area around pier 39, and the Ferry building, which was converted into a food market in 1993 and is a magnate for San Francisco foodies.

The factory and factory shop are designed by local architect Holey Associates with Nik Hafermaas of UeBersee. The shop is still small – you can pick up a coffee and bar of chocolate – but eventually TCHO will open an enlarged visitor centre with factory tours, multi-media presentations and a ‘taste taxonomy’, plus of course, a vast shop selling the dark stuff.

If all this sounds over the top, it helps to remember that the TCHO founders’ slogan is ‘be obsessed, be very obsessed’, and one of their aims is not to produce a snack to be eaten mid-afternoon with a cup of coffee, but to ‘change the world.’

Photograph by Daniel de Sousa

 This year’s 100 Minutes of Havana event saw the Monorex (the guys behind Secret Wars) and Intercity crews take on the Havana Club’s freestyle drawing challenge. No sketches, no plans, just Edding pens, coloured acrylics and 100 minutes to fill a 16ft high by 40ft wide white wall. This was the first Secret Wars to use coloured inks, so expectations were high…

In my opinion, the Monorex selected crew of artists had Intercity’s illustrator gang running for the hills from the moment the timer started – the timer being a snazzy event logo which dropped a segment for every minute passed. It was clear the two teams of five came from very different backgrounds; one guy I got talking to (an illustration student at Camberwell College of Arts ) even said that the Intercity lot drew like they had had some sort of illustration training.

I personally preferred the more intricate yet huge characters that Monorex produced, and thought that they used the space better. Intercity began their piece by making a huge red circle (making good use of a piece of string and drawing pin!) which they then filled with smaller drawings that looked like inane doodles compared to the massive pieces from their rivals. At the end of the 100 minutes, Intercity launched paint filled water balloons at the wall which the crowd really enjoyed.

For me, Mr K’s bear was the best thing on the entire wall. Other people that took part in the event included Jimi Crayon, Teck 1 and Robbie Wilkinson. As the 100 segments continued to disappear, the crowds feasted their eyes upon the decreasingly white wall, and sipped on mojitos and Cuba Libre cocktails – made with Havana Club rum – obviously – and listened to upbeat latin flavoured electro.

The winners were eventually decided by the crowd (using a decibel reader). So congratulations to Monorex, who were rewarded with mixed cases of Havana Club.

Photograph by Daniel de Sousa

Photograph by Daniel de Sousa

Photograph by Daniel de Sousa

Photograph by Daniel de Sousa

Photograph by Daniel de Sousa

For reasons not immediately obvious, 2009 is shaping up to be the British Year of Le Corbusier. RIBA has launched a season of exhibitions, talks, debates and workshops, including the 1:1 scale reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s seaside retreat, the Cabanon. The lynchpin of all this activity is Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture at the Barbican Centre, London; the restaging of the show created by Vitra that has previously appeared in Holland, Germany, Portugal and Liverpool. The London exhibition is a markedly different experience to its predecessors, however, and this is mainly down to the work of one of London’s most consistently interesting and ambitious graphic design companies, Bibliothèque. The east London studio has not only created a graphic identity that reflects Le Corbusier’s work and the monumental, concrete setting of the Barbican, but has moved further into three-dimensions by designing elements of the exhibition itself.

Creating a new identity for a pre-existing show about one of the giants of modernism is an intimidating challenge, but Bibliothèque took to the project with enthusiasm. ‘Luckily, the subject matter was rich with inspiration: using Le Corbusier’s vast body of work and the Barbican‘s thorough guidelines as our starting point, we then looked for a relevant visual hook,’ says Bibliothèque co-founder Jonathan Jeffrey. One of the central inspirations for the project was the discovery that Le Corbusier and his studio used the stencil typeface Charette for the cover of several books, as well as for titles and captioning of agency documents. ‘To this day, the metallic stencil frames sold to architects in the US are known as Corbu stencils,’ says Jeffrey.

Bringing the subject and the setting together, Bibliothèque has set the title, Le Corbusier, in a modified stencil version of the Barbican typeface, Futura.Concrete forms the project’s second vital motif, as the material most associated with Le Corbusier’s architectural work and, of course, especially relevant to the exhibition’s location at the Barbican. ‘Something that interested us was how Le Corbusier used concrete in different ways, creating different textures and effects through process,’ says Jeffrey. The studio was particularly taken by Le Corbusier’s casting of concrete to create relief illustrations, such as that of Modular Man at the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. The stencil logo lent itself to this technique, and Bibliothèque cast it into concrete to create an identity that could be used across all marketing materials. This vocabulary has also been used throughout the exhibition design. ‘We really enjoy doing that when we can. It’s a 3D graphic, and I like the fact that it can translate into an environment, it works on many levels,’ says Jeffrey, who also sees the move into exhibition design as a natural extension of the studio’s graphic work. ‘Ultimately we embrace it and just have a go. You need to stretch out of your comfort zone, consult with people and then you find the points of reference you need to actually construct a 3D object,’ he says.
 

Photograph by Lyndon Douglas

For the project, Bibliotheque found ways to blend Vitra’s travelling show with the Barbican’s own graphics and the new marketing material. This included creating all the captioning, the blow-up imagery and key navigational sections which take the form of large-scale 3D graphics such as the title wall at beginning of the show, and boards throughout that announce the different sections. The project marks a further development of Bibliothèque’s first venture into exhibition design for the V&A’s Cold War Modern which ended in January this year. ‘There was a connection for us to get this job,’ says Jeffrey. ’We are very interested in post-war modernism and consider our work to be the continuation of that kind of thinking.’ For the design of the V&A exhibition, Bibliothèque worked with architectural practice Universal Design Studio. Among various inspired methods of display, they created a world map based on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. They also found an elegant solution to the problem of archive photography, which could often be crude and low-resolution, by converting it to a coarse dot screen. It established a consistent aesthetic for the exhibition, while at the same time reflecting the print-production processes of the era.

Founded five years ago by Jeffrey, Mason Wells and Tim Beard, Bibliothèque has already amassed an impressive portfolio of projects. Previous clients include Nike, Adidas, Tate Modern and the Design Council. Apart from the quality of the work, what makes Bibliothèque stand out is its tendency to work with creative clients and its engagement with a broad variety of subject matter. A particular example is its work with the London Sinfonietta, one of the country’s best classical and contemporary orchestras, for whom Bibliothèque created a logo and identity based around swirling lines of varying thickness. Jeffrey describes the orchestra as heroes and the studio turned directly to the music for graphic inspiration. ‘Its music can be very gentle and also very challenging and dense. So the symbol evokes this duality, with the lines stretching out at times and at others getting very close and dense. Without getting into an animated logo, we went with something which is implying movement, without having to change over the years,’ he says. This same technique of understanding the important elements of a client’s output has now been brought to bear on The Barbican and Le Corbusier, with characteristically bold and elegant results. Pictures of the exhibition can be seen below. 

Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture  is on show at the Barbican Art Gallery, 19 February-24 May 
 

Photograph by Lyndon Douglas

Photograph by Lyndon Douglas

Photograph by Lyndon Douglas

The Many Faces of Noma Bar will be at BAFTA, Piccadilly, London, 19 February–8 April. Bar is represented by Dutch Uncle, and screenprints of his work are available here

When Helvetica, a documentary about the ubiquitous and famously functional typeface, was released in 2007, it gained more mainstream success than anyone expected. While it was never going to challenge Spiderman III for box office receipts, the film has been shown at film festivals around the world, won rave reviews – particularly from graphic designers – and gained repeated television showings in America. In the UK it was adapted for Alan Yentob’s arts programme Imagine on BBC1.

The New York Times praised the film’s director, Gary Hustwit, for his ‘knack for finding a universe within a narrow topic,’ while London’s Time Out described it as ‘one of the wittiest, most diligently researched, slyly intelligent and quietly captivating documentaries of the year’ Perhaps the most surprised  by its success was Hustwit himself, who at the time was a 42-year-old, first-time director from California with no formal training in either film-making or design. He describes himself as ‘still learning the language of film’, and yet the film demonstrated audacity in his selection of such an apparently mundane subject matter, and displayed a skilful confidence in its film-making. Helvetica was low-budget – Hustwit puts it as in the ‘low six figures’ – but expertly made; the recurring shots of Helvetica on posters, billboards and T-shirts created a distinctive rhythm and gave respite from the talking-heads interviews with graphic designers. The film was edited by Shelby Siegel who worked as assistant editor on Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and has now been swept up by Hollywood. The director of photography Luke Geissbuhler worked on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat movie. Helvetica is about more than the eponymous font: it tells a brief history of typography and in doing so touches on the important ideological rifts in 20th-century design.

Portrait by Gergely Szatmari

Yet the film also has a lightness of touch that never loses sight of the endearing irony in making a movie about a typeface. Almost all the participants seem aware that this isn’t life or death and have fun theorising. Paula Scher blames Helvetica for starting the Vietnam War, while Erik Spiekermann compares his love of fonts to another man’s fondness for women’s bottoms. This good-humoured playfulness from the contributors makes the film accessible to non-professionals and a joy to those in the know. 

Though not an experienced film-maker, Hustwit’s acuity in catering for a niche audience comes from his background in independent music and book publishing. He worked with punk label SST Records in the late-1980s, ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press during the 1990s, and for a brief period was vice president of the media website Salon.com in 2000. Never especially academic – he was twice expelled from San Diego University for failing to concentrate on his business course – he has been restless in his pursuit of creative outlets. In the late-1990s Hustwit became aware of the potential of digital format, easily mass-produced DVDs for independent film-makers. ‘I don’t know if it was something to do with the picture quality or the format itself but I suddenly went mad, obsessively buying DVDs,’ he says.Read more…

He quickly became frustrated by the dominance of standard, studio-produced films. ‘I just thought it would be interesting to have a kind of indie record label for film and release all these quirky documentaries, that I like to watch,’ says Hustwit. He set up Plexi Films in 2001 for this very purpose and it is from its small office in Brooklyn, New York that he works on the editing of his films. After its founding, Plexi almost immediately scored a big success with a documentary made by Sam Jones that charted the decline of American rock band Wilco. Plexi does release films about other art forms, but music documentaries remain the backbone of its catalogue.

While music is his first love, design has always been one of Hustwit’s major concerns. When running Incommunicado, he started using typography and learning about the modern history of graphic design, even making his own fonts for use on book covers: ‘We were squarely in the grunge era of typography so I was making these fucked-up, photocopied letters and then scanning them back in and making fonts out of them.’ Most of these he gave away as freeware on the internet and, as a result he still sees them in use today. One of his early fonts has been used by the New York City sanitation department for their recycling campaign, while another  was used for the posters of Terry Gilliam’s sci-fi fantasy film Twelve Monkeys.

Following the success of Helvetica, Hustwit’s interest in the subject has expanded, and he has now immersed himself in the world of industrial design for his new film Objectified, which will premier at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas this month. ‘It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.’ For the film he has interviewed a huge range of designers and commentators, including Dieter Rams, Jonathan Ive, Marc Newson, Paula Antonelli, and the Bouroullec brothers. For the past year he has explored furniture and product design, getting to understand the issues and the personalities involved. Where the leading figures of graphic design tend to be called giants and geniuses, he has now entered an industry where there are stars and celebrities. Halfway through our conversation his phone rings, but he doesn’t take the call. It was Karim Rashid.

A still from Hustwit's film, Objectified, with Naoto Fukasawa

Rather than using the narrow focus of an individual product – an equivalent of Helvetica – for Objectified, Hustwit is exploring the huge range of industrial design, from furniture and domestic fittings to electronic devices. Though he will touch on the subject of conspicuous consumption and limited-edition design, Hustwit seems more interested in the creative work behind mass-produced items, exploring the methods employed by 3D designers. Without a specific story to tell, it remains to be seen if it can recreate the mix of geeky obsession and humour that made Helvetica such a success. 

In the course of making the two films, Hustwit has discovered some marked differences between the two professions: ‘I think the graphic designers have more of a sense of humour. They have more flexibility and more forgiveness in terms of production. Industrial designers are more like engineers in that way, they’re working with manufacturers and the tolerances are zero. There’s a difference in the creative process, and it breeds different personalities.’ Though he has considerably less background in furniture or product design than he did in graphics, Hustwit is no less admiring of the designers behind everyday items. ‘They’re expressing their creativity through all these different objects,’ he says. ‘Someone like Naoto Fukasawa, I think he’s a poet. It’s not that design has to be expensive or limited edition. Good design can be a simple vegetable peeler, it makes our lives that much better.’

Just like Helvetica, however, Objectified focuses on the individuals and the progress of ideas rather than on technicalities or the development of a profession. Hustwit never appears on camera and his questions are never heard, but it is clear from the responses that he asks direct, even simple questions that elicit honest answers. ‘Documentaries are not about answering questions or teaching people lessons. It’s about getting the audience to think about their relationship to the subject matter, not telling them what their relationship should be,’ he says.

Hustwit has the laid-back demeanour of an ex-surfer, but the focus and clarity of an entrepreneur. This mix of pop-culture sensibility and serious-minded curiosity clearly endears himself to the designers he shows on film. Michael Beirut, who was interviewed for Helvetica, praises the way that Hustwit managed to make graphic design seem ‘positively hip’ while also structuring the interviews ‘to create a perfect short course in post-war graphic design.’Meanwhile his production work with Plexi continues apace. The company, which also has an office in London, has put out more than 50 films in the last seven years, and Hustwit is currently overseeing the first authorized DVD release of Andy Warhol’s screen tests. The DVD includes 13 of Warhol’s classic screen tests, including Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, and Lou Reed, paired with new soundtracks. ‘Warhol made more than 500 of these four-minute screen test films, and I think they’re some of his most subtly brilliant work,’ he says.

The production of Helvetica and Objectified has, however, ignited a passion for film-making that he intends to pursue for the rest of his life. ‘I do have one other design film that I want to make,’ he says, although he is likely to broaden his subject and maybe one day move into fiction films. ‘I just hope there’ll be more documentaries about design made and released in cinemas. Real documentaries not just quickie television programmes,’ says Hustwit. ‘Because this is a conversation, I expect and hope that other film-makers will answer these films with their own ideas’

On being inspired by architecture:
– “Architecture is a great influence on me. When I come back on this earth I want to be an architect.”
– “Rietveld was one of the greatest architects in Holland: I was inspired by his sense of space.”
– “I was always interested in the two and three dimensions; bringing these things together without using perspective.”
– “Moving from full-colour to zero colour [in one poster] is a way of expressing space. A three-dimensional idea without it actually becoming three-dimensional.”
– “I sent all my three children to the same school in a Modernist building. One became an architect, one a historian, and one a designer. I think it’s down to that school building.

On the importance of good clients
– “I had one client for 30 years; the Stedelijk Museum. The director never criticised my design until after it was printed. That way, from one poster to the next you try get better and better.”

On Neo-Modernists:
– “On the one hand its flattering that [Modernism] has come back. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I think it’s rubbish. Depends if it’s good or not. But it’s stylised and therefore different: it can be very well done, but it has become a style. To us it was not a style, it was a way of doing. But maybe we were wrong.”

On selecting fonts
– “I don’t use Univers any more. Instead i use Frutiger, it was the next one by the same designer… I only need two fonts: if i need a san serif font I used Frutiger. If i need serif i always use Bembo. That’s enough for me.”

On being born in 1928:
– “All the famous chairs designed by Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer were designed in 1928. So it was a very good year.”