Aucklanders have a there own taste of the festival via a set of billboards designed by Philip Kelly (the designs will also feature at the festival, and Designworks designer Josh Barr is representing there. Anyway, fans of guns and typefaces (or irony; surely there’s been no greater invitation…) might be interested to note that there is a free font, designed by Neville Brody, available from the ADF website.

Dawnfinder is a multi award-winning design team (consisting mostly of Kim Jarrett and Tina Hart) specialising in landscapes, themed environments and production design. Those who have visited New Zealand’s pavilion in Shanghai will already be familiar with the firm’s handiwork – they designed an elaborate microcosm of New Zealand’s outdoor environment: mountains to sea, pre-historic to cultivated – as will anyone who has watched King Kong and a score of other movies, and TVCs.

Pre-Expo, Dawnfinder  spent months in Shanghai preparing and implementing their vision for the landscape component of the New Zealand pavilion (which was designed by Warren and Mahoney). Hart, an illustrator, amongst other things, recently made available to us a number of her images of pavilions at the Shanghai Expo (in varying  states of completion). An obvious star of the show, of course, is the Heatherwick Studio-designed British Pavilion.

Share/Save]]> http://prodesign.co.nz/pavilions-of-the-world/2010/09/10/feed/ 0 http://prodesign.co.nz/against-type/2010/09/09/ http://prodesign.co.nz/against-type/2010/09/09/#comments Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:40:29 +0000 Michael Barrett http://prodesign.co.nz/?p=2631 London’s Anti-Design Festival Auckland Outpost

Following on from our previous post on Wellington designer Josh Barr, his Blogroll and the Anti-Design Fest (ADF) in London, we’re happy to announce that Anti-Design has another local connection.

Newly returned from NYC,  New Zealand designer Philip Kelly has, in conjunction with the ADF, erected three text/type billboards to be included in the London festival this September. You can check them out on Symonds Street, Pitt Street and New North Road (more images after the jump). Kelly says, “The billboards consist of original text and typography … that engage with the nature of language, visual communications, and the media infused urban landscape.”

Kelly’s work in visual communications encompasses art direction, graphic design, typography and photography. He says he spent a decade in New York, joining JWT as type director, before going on to launch thompsondesign. Concurrently, he designed for independent record labels and publishers, including the monograph of acclaimed design studio Socio X for Graphis Books. In 2006 he founded his own studio Pkwy, based in New York and Shanghai. Kelly’s original type and art direction have appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, Paper Magazine, Big Magazine, and the Graphis Design Annuals. After over a decade in New York and Shanghai he is now based in Auckland. This project was kindly supported by Omnigraphics and OTW Billboards.

For a girl who owns the URL ‘iamobsessedwithmycats.com’ (it redirects to her website) and describes her life as “a solitary existence where nobody showers and you get covered in cat hair”, Jessica Hische is actually a remarkably charming and talented young woman, all be it with a slight feline fetish.

She opened the show at Semi-Permanent this year and provided the audience with just the jump start they needed, real inspiration powered on by youthful enthusiasm for her craft, which is of course lettering, illustration and more recently type design. She began by taking us through some of her student work which, being only twenty-five, was somewhat recent and provided the audience with a good insight into how she entered the industry, not to mention providing a wonderful showcase for her eccentric sense of humour. This showed particularly in the board game she designed as a take on ‘The Game of Life’ only she named it ‘The Game of Divorce’ where you had to choose who to live with, mum or dad.

This may seem like student banter but humour is a great thing in illustration, she laughed, “there’s nothing people like more than dogs doing human things” — except possibly cats doing human things hey Jessica? But it’s not all fun and games. It’s obvious Hische has worked extremely hard to get to where she is today, and at such a young age too. She worked as designer after university for three years for Headcase and Louise Fili before going freelance and has now worked for everyone from the Boston Globe to the publishers of the Twilight novels.

At present Hische is working more and more in font design. She’s designed her first font ‘Buttermilk’ but still approaches the subject with the same humble attitude – talking of how the old type masters mock her when she doesn’t know the terminology. Personally, I’m not that matters when you can produce such beautiful pieces of work. A fine example of this is her current work illustrating the book covers of classic novels of the past.

This girl seems to have the world at her feet and she certainly has talent in her fingertips but it was her enthusiasm that really won me over. As designers we all face ‘challenges’ on a daily basis but she had the ability to laugh it off. She said she should make a book of all the bad art direction she has ever received, her favourite being “don’t make the fish look left it’s depressing.” She’s even seen her type on retro romance novels and, not only that; she loved the idea of this. She showed us the result and it looked nothing like she intended, but I think at this point she had won over the audience with her enthusiasm. It really was a bad romance novel but all she could say was “its every girl’s dream to have their type next to shiny lady leg.” Of course it is Jessica!

More:
Read a ProDesign interview with  Jessica Hische
Read Emma Parnell’s review of Katrin Sonnleitner’s Semi-Permanent talk

Katrin Sonnleitner finds ways to make the mundane seem interesting again, she takes ordinary objects and shows them in a new light; she believes “small changes in an object that’s everyday can bring it back into a persons perception.” Sonnleitner enjoys the unexpected and for fifty minutes so did I. I had never heard of Sonnleitner before Semi-Permanent, she walked out with her cue cards looking the most nervous of all the speakers, perhaps not surprisingly with English being her second language, but she quickly won the audience over with her amusing observations and interpretations.

Sonnleitner’s work circles around various themes. She enjoys habits in human behaviour, rituals and traditions. She often merges familiar objects or changes them in an unexpected way to make something new. She has created writeable porcelain, drawers that move through walls and the infamous ‘broom-scythe’. Porcelain and drawers are everyday objects we take for granted but Sonnleitner has reinvented them and made us interact with them in a different way creating a whole new experience around an object.

One piece which stood out for me was based around the idea that when we wear an item of clothing once, we don’t want to put it in the laundry, equally we don’t want to put it back in the wardrobe, so where does it go? Sonnleitner has the answer, an object that combines the two, a wardrobe door on the front and a laundry bag on the back. Would I buy this? Probably not, but it’s based on a human observation that people are familiar with and this makes a connection with people. Sonnleitner’s work is generally very conceptual, which is what I loved about it: there is real thought and insight behind each piece. She brings to the surface observations that are already there and ready to be made and people connect with them in a similar way they connect with, for example, observational humour. So is her work art?

Sonnleitner doesn’t really believe in the mass marketing of products as it often involves compromising on creativity, “it’s like losing a baby” she says. She has only designed one product that has made it to mass production, the ‘Puzzle Persian’.

You can buy as many or as few pieces as you like and when the small jigsaw puzzles are assembled they make Persian rug patterns made from durable flooring material. An everyday object has become something new, the difference this time being the high level of interaction making it something people want to be involved in, hence the mass-market appeal.

Sonnleitner’ s work does seem to straddle the ever-debated boundary of art and design but I think one of the main themes to come out of this year’s Semi-Permanent was that of collaboration, and the fact that we no longer need to put people into boxes. It’s time to stop arguing over ‘what is art’ and just appreciate whatever manifestation creativity takes — and with Sonnleitner you should always expect the unexpected. Everyone loves the underdog, and in the company she kept in this year’s line up Sonnleitner could be considered as such, but in my opinion she gave one of the best presentations of the weekend, the perfect combination of intelligence, fun and charm; an unexpected gem.

Share/Save]]> http://prodesign.co.nz/musings-on-semi-permanent-vol-1/2010/09/07/feed/ 0 http://prodesign.co.nz/finalists-online/2010/09/02/ http://prodesign.co.nz/finalists-online/2010/09/02/#comments Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:14:47 +0000 Michael Barrett http://prodesign.co.nz/?p=2596 Best Awards finalists are locked, loaded and ready to view over at the Best Awards website. The quality of work is always outstanding, and this year is no exception. To pique your curiosity, here’s one finalist in the spatial category of Offices and Workplace Environments. To be completely self-serving, this office for The Research Agency by architect Jose Gutierrez also happens to be in our next issue, which is scheduled to arrive on shelves any minute now. Keep an eye out…

This year the awards are being held at Skycity on 1 October. The new trophy’s are being made and a new Best website will go live on 2 October. You can also get some updates and previews via @bestawards.

These six, which you can see above and below, are now waiting online for your seal of approval. Go to iwrappeditmyway.co.nz today and tick the box of the one you like most. The winning design will be wrapped (literally) and unveiled at a special event at the new MINI Garage in Ponsonby. The winning designer will then drive around in said automobile for four months (or longer if they decide to go all Came a Hot Friday on it and disappear to Invercargill). Last but not least, thanks to all the kind sponsors who helped us out with this promotion: MINI, The Pond, BJ Ball, Geon and BKA Interactive, whose website design for this project was, in itself, a work of art.

Optimism, as the short-form goes, is an international design conference, the 10th AGDA National Biennial Awards, and site of exhibitions, design trade fair, workshops and other ‘special events’.

Visiting speakers include Steven Heller, whose list of achievements is too long to list here, Blair Enns, author of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, Jason Fan and a host of others (including Cameron Bruhn, managing editor of Architecture Media, parent company of AGM Publishing, which in turn publishes ProDesign).

Early-bird ticket sales end on 29 August.

Calvert Plastics, a Lower Hutt-based company, recently picked up a Red Dot Award for Code, an acoustic tile with, as the judges say, “a three-dimensional form [that] gives this acoustic tile a fascinating appearance”

We have a run down on this new product in the next issue of ProDesign, which will be out in the next few days. Until them well done to the deisgners, Jonathan Mountford and Natasha Perkins.

— Michael Barrett

In 2009 Alt Group took home four Red Dot awards and then later went on to win the supreme Red Dot Grand Prix for communication design. This year it has taken home seven Red Dot Awards, which is a good result in anyone’s book, especially considering there were  6,369 entries from 44 countries.

For the record,  the seven Red Dots were presented to the company for a range of projects including the ‘We Make Light’ booklet for Philips Selecon; ‘The Vigneron Centenary Wine’ and ‘The Vigneron Book’ — a hand-bound book and a limited edition series of 100 hand numbered magnums designed to celebrate the life of Najib Corban, of the Corbans wine dynasty; ‘Thinking Outside the Chair’ — a book for New Zealand furniture designer and manufacturer Formway; ‘Black Grace Gathering Clouds’ — a campaign for Auckland based dance company, Black Grace; ‘Eat Drink Merry’ a quirky Christmas gift pack designed for Auckland based law firm, Hudson Gavin Martin’s clients; and ‘A Lean Year’ — a gift for the company’s own clients which took the form of a leaning wine bottle, to symbolise one of the worst years in economic history.

Just in case you want to head along, the awards will be presented on 8 December at the Casino Zollverein  in Essen, Germany.

Click here to see previous posts that feature the work of Alt Group.