I usually write about living creative people but I am making an exception and it probably won’t be the last time.
Under a rainy saturday, wandering around galleries and very trendy shops, I enter Kemistry Gallery. Their exhibitions always well curated display the right amount of work. The gallery currently presents the work of early 20th century illustrator, letterer, map-maker, architect, decorative artist, mural painter, typographer or more generally designer, MacDonald (Max) Gill.
From far, the colors are vivid and bright, closer I start looking deeply into the details and for Max Gill it is all about details. His work reflects its time, its context and the details give us much information about the period he lived in.

For our last article of the year, we could not miss type design and illustration superstar Jessica Hische’s contribution for Penguin Books.

Penguin Drop Caps is a series of twenty-six collectible hardcover editions of fine works of literature with a series design inspired by typography. A design collaboration between Jessica Hische and Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, each volume features on its cover a specially commissioned illustrated letter of the alphabet by Hische.

Each gift-sized book features a foil-stamped case and a decorative color stain on all three paper edges. As a whole, the series design encompasses a rainbow-hued color spectrum across all twenty-six book spines. The Penguin Drop Caps debut with the following titles :

Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Cather, Willa – My Ántonia
Dickens, Charles – Great Expectations
Eliot, George – Middlemarch
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary, translated by Lydia Davis

Jessica Hische is a self proclaimed Letterer & Procrastiworker and also a talented illustrator, typographer and web designer. She currently serves on the Type Directors Club board of directors, has been named a Forbes Magazine “30 under 30” in art and design as well as an ADC Young Gun and one of Print Magazine’s “New Visual Artists”. She has designed for Wes Anderson, McSweeney’s, Tiffany & Co, Penguin Books and many others. She resides primarily in San Francisco, occasionally in Brooklyn.

Emil Kozole is currently a student at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana.

Funny fact: he did not draw very well when he was a kid and never thought he would end up in design. At this time of his life, he was interested in other things, but since he was a few years old, he has known all the traffic signs and logos by heart. His typography work started later in high school, when he started drawing some weird letters and even tried to simplify the latin alphabet!

Kozole finds inspiration in different things, people and projects, from music, art, fashion, cities to signs, books, industry. He also works in motion graphics, graphic design, interactive design and films. But typography is one of those things that he always gets back to.

For Kozole, typography is quite basic, but still terribly complicated. Letters are already very specific, so it is even a bigger challenge for designers to give them a new character. His masters in typography right now are Spiekermann and Schwartz; the latter’s Guardian being one of Kozole’s favorite typefaces. Kozole thinks it is easy to distinguish a good designer from a great one from his type choice.

When Emil Kozole starts designing a typeface, he first thinks about where it will be used and for what purpose, will it be for information, for big headlines, for text, for screen or for some other specific media. After that, he draws a few letters that allow the most characteristics, like a, g, o, t, i, m, k, s or d. While designing those, he looks at other similar fonts and tries to make his different. For example, the letter i cannot be reinvented, but it can as well be an i with a circle or a square above (the Fedra font also has a diamond shape instead of a circle dot). Next, the letters can have both serifs or just an upper left serif or have a tail. These little differences can have great impact on the font, because in the end people are not looking at individual letters, but the harmony of all of them.

Kozole’s first bigger project was Typometry. He created it for school and put it on Behance so people could download it for free. His work was well received, so he later created a pro version. Right now, Kozole is working on two typography projects, one baptised Signalia, a monolinear typeface designed for informations, which will have 4 weights, from light to bold, and one remains unnamed, though it is almost finished and will come out in the beginning of the year 2013.

Luciano Marx and Aris Zenone are originally from Ticino, the italian part of Switzerland, Luciano works and lives in Lugano whereas Aris settled in Lausanne, in the french part of this beautiful country. Together they created the visual identity for the Club WKND based in Lugano. The work is bold. By mixing media and genres the identity comes out very powerful and graphically clear. They re-worked the typography to create the logo and it works very well!

“WKND is a club that proposes a great variety of quality activities. Its multifaceted and energetic nature was conveyed in the development of the logo and the graphic identity. Every element in the logo can stand on its own, so as to possibly bring enrichment to the various formats. The promotion occured gradually and it relied heavily on images of Lugano, in order to underline how WKND is the most important, historic and renowned venue of the night city life.”

Credits –
Art direction and graphics: Luciano Marx, Aris Zenone
Photography: Simone Cavadini (big letter made of polystyrene)
Igor Ponti (images of Lugano)

Florence Bamberger is a freelance illustrator leaving and working in Paris. Working commercially, she as well exhibited her work, been published in many magazines and published her Master thesis book 361º. In 361º she explores a new way of illustrating brands through its format, narration, style, humour in order to challenge communication common boundaries and consumer’s expectations.
She recently received the Grand Prix Stratégies du Design 2012 for the PMU annual report she illustrated.

Emily Forgot is a multi-faceted illustrator based in London. A couple of weeks ago Emily was one of the winners of the ADC YoungGuns Competition award, so we caught up with her to find out a bit more.

C&L:How do you approach a new project; do you experience a recurrent creative process?
Emily Forgot:I like jobs that require research, I often love that journey more than the actual making! Discovering inspiring things that provide the spring board for a new idea or project is always exciting. After research i’ll always scribble rough layouts and ideas down before getting onto the computer where my scribbles become fully formed.

Lyndsey Lesh is a trained freelancing illustrator, having graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2008, and having attended the University of Brighton, England for several months.

After having lived in LA for the past four years, Lesh is now re-acclimating to life in the Midwest as she moved back to Kansas City, Missouri in August to be closer to her family.

Besides freelancing and occasionally writing for Beautiful Decay Magazine, she is currently working on her own series of personal projects and also collaborates with a writer friend on short stories, both illustrating them and writing some short stories of her own, hoping to see them compiled into a book one day!

She has also been creating illustrations for a documentary project on a deceased writer and just finished fully illustrating a new literary journal in LA called The Ratting Wall.

Lesh’s art is both humoristic and nostalgic, colorful and sensitive. Most of her illustrations work is initiated by narratives that she imagines from her surroundings. She finds her inspiration in “vintage coloring, neighborhoods in San Francisco, 70s vinyl illustrations, stickers you find at coffee shops and autumn in the Midwest”.

As a photographer, Comploj was not born with a camera in her hand but can not imagine a life without taking pictures anymore.
Vera Comploj, has been featured few times on Creative&Live and this time for her newest project Persona we asked her few questions about her practice. Persona is looking at the notion of contrast; by working with model with albinism, Comploj is exploring lights, details and textures. A very exciting video is planned for winter 2013 and the trailer is available on vimeo.

C&L: How do you approach a new project; do you experience a recurrent creative process?
Vera Comploj: I actually do. The steps before the shoot are the most important to me. Meeting with the people that I am going to portray, being accepted by their environment, spending time with them to understand their personality, behaviours and motivations are the core aspects of my approach to photography. I am potentially interested in everybody and in the unique stories that may be shared. Taking the picture is just the final “click”, which sums up a much longer and deeper experience. I try to condense it in a powerful image. It’s my response to our dialogue, where my personality and aesthetics react to those of the subject.

Florine Kammerer studied graphic design and illustration with Niklaus Troxler – the famous Swiss poster designer; this is where her love for posters and screen-printing started.

Since finishing Art School in 2008, she has been based in Vienna, Austria where she has been working for several clients in design and illustration, in the art collective dasviadukt as well as for well-known design studios such as Alessandridesign.

Kammerer loves illustration and loves to draw. She started a one-year project called adrawingaday during her recent stay in New York City. She wanted to capture moments, thoughts, and observations. Some of her stories are fictitious, some have been experienced. Some are travel or daily reports, some are jobs she is currently working on.

Part of her drawings became photo-illustrations for clients or for other projects. The series “New York dogs” was photographed in the streets of Williamsburg, and the photoshooting “the deserts” took place on a trip along the American West Coast.

All these stories and observations are what inspire her the most and living in New York City has been a great inspiration too. Now back home, Kammerer finds her inspiration in the little, astonishing or funny things that you see if you look close enough.

Working on free projects with the artist collective dasviadukt is also a great source of inspiration for Kammerer. Being surrounded by creative people with different professions and backgrounds is an enrichment for her, with individuals bringing in their totally different points of view and experiences in order to create something new and extensive all together.

The font “City Railway Arc” was developed for the artist collective dasviadukt which is located in a railway arch in Vienna. Some of the dasviadukt posters use this font to announce events. Those are silk-screen printed at the studio’s own screen-print workshop.

Chloe Østmo is a british artist that works with photography and moving image. I saw her project ‘Buildings’ at the ICA in 2010 for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition and I kept her website link in my bookmarks since then. I really enjoy the disruption and surprise that she creates, the space and the actual building unfold and reveal their physicality.
In an article by John Seven, Østmo said: “I’m really interested in our physical relationship with images and their physical presence as objects. There’s something about the kind of limitations of photography, something that essentially flattens things, but also we experience physically. Even if it’s a piece of paper, it still has a physical presence, and how that might be brought out into space to create a kind of alternative space that isn’t just a depicted image but has some kind of relationship with you.”
Østmo uses found photos; as part of her process, she is interested in the idea of loss of origin. “You can see some of the processes that it’s gone through. You can see the dots of the photocopy and the physical coupling, and it’s almost like there have been so many transformations that the origin of this building is lost and it gives it a timelessness."

Daniela Wiesemann is a designer and an illustrator in Munich. I could not say how I came across it, but I was struck by her work, the composition of her creations, her management of colors and her use of typography.
I particularly loved her colorful posters, and her “Namen” series just make me want to see my own name go through her creative process.

Evelina Romano is a fashion designer leaving and working in London who recently graduated from London College of Fashion (Womenswear). She used to draw since a very young age and always draw before starting her design. As a wanderer during end of year shows, I have been struck by Evelina’s project for its humour, multi-layers of aesthetics and extreme delicacy. I asked her few questions, and if you are willing to find out more about her collection, you can read about it here…

Lines, it is what Aurelia Lange uses to creates simple, poetic drawings. She loves drawing people watching and always delivers a clear message through her work. The need to draw only the essential is striking and very much engage the audience to create its own idea of the drawing. It adds as well a bit of magic as we often wish to leave in a more delicate world.

A bit of fun and humour is always good and we are lucky to have Geneviève Gauckler to remind us of not taking ourselves too seriously. Her work is full of surprising colourful characters walking around with very cool attitudes and outfits.
Geneviève Gauckler is best known for her ever-evolving procession of lovable characters and technicolour digital mashes. Her works are bright, fun and hectic – often combining symmetrical designs with soft-edged computer generated images laid against photographed backgrounds. She’s into everything and constantly amazed, handling and creating images and shapes with dexterity and innocence.
You can find everything you want to know about her prints, exhibitions, books and more on her lovely website and she is represented by Tiphaine in Paris and Big Active in London.

Sarah Maple is one of the risen young british artist. Through her work she destabilises prejudices and boundaries about being a women and being a muslim women. She has been acclaimed by the most renowned art galleries for her work as a straightforward thinker and highly engaged feminist. Her work explores different medium from painting to photography and performance, you can follow her blog or find her on twitter.

Sarah Kahn is a paris based designer and art director. She created her own studio three years ago and works as a freelance multidisciplinary designer. She works essentially with typography, playing, modulating and creating ways of writing to deliver the idea of the work. She presents an eclectic range of works that shows her desire to mix medias and disciplines, and it works very well!

Dear All,
It is November and it is time to come back!
This month will be driven by an editorial line under the theme of Creative Women; from different continents and different creative fields, we will only publish work created by women. Interviews and reviews will enhance their relationship to their work, practice and overall experience of being a creative women.
We are also very happy to welcome Chloé as a new writer/editor amongst us, she will bring her geek views and eclectic taste.
Thank you for being everyday more and more to follow us, to send your work or just say Hi!.

Thanks for reading us.

Emma

The series ‘Between Two Homes’ is one of Martin Petersen’s drifting moments from the city.

These pictures were taken on a drive from my childhood home; passing places I haven’t seen for years, via roads I have never travelled on before, experiencing new sites, and back to where it all becomes familiar again.

Petersen is a freelance landscape photographer whose work focuses on the clash between man and nature. He captures the moment and his own experience by allowing himself to wander around and see where pathways take him, as opposed to following a prescribed route.

Vera Comploj sent me her new series of work few days ago. TransMuse presents a series of beautiful shots: cold, bright and elegant. Knowing Comploj’s previous series N-O3 and W-12, I knew her interest in shooting transgender people, and for TransMuse she chose to collaborate with the transgender model Fan Wu. Wu is definitely a muse, she opened my eyes to things I was not aware of before. TransMuse is tribute to understanding what it is to be transgender. I have never asked myself the question until I saw Vera Comploj’s work – I always thought that a transgender person culturally choose their gender, that is was a choice from life experiences. Discussing with Wu, it is easy to understand that I was completely wrong. Being a transgender individual is not a choice but it is innate. Comploj shoots in very natural, rough and untouched places, enhancing partly the inside aspect of transgender identity, to feel attached to a gender different to an individual’s biological gender.

New and innovative, it is what W.E.L.C.O.M.E is all about.
This new platform is an online gallery and store that represents a small collection of new upcoming artists and designers from all kinds of media, they aim to provide a wide range of styles that tie in with their own philosophies of art.
W.E.L.C.O.M.E is a little ambitious nest that can become bigger by building a network of artists from the new generation.
For now, please have a look at the great work of Suzanne Antonelli, Adam Batchelor, Stephen Mellor and Christopher Joyner. From psychedelic to graphic to even digital and political, I would like to see a collaborative piece made by the four of them.

Senhor Ricardo is a freelance creative based in London having a great illustration portfolio. His portraits present a very detail work which can be dark, quirky, funny and always striking. On one hand, Senhor works as a creative in advertising agencies, focuses on the other hand, on his personal projects. In order to keep his imagination and creativity going, he takes part in exhibitions, always willing to be involved in interesting projects.

Judith Sombray is a freelance illustrator based in Hamburg, Germany. She intuitively draws faces and necks by exploring a lot people around her. She has her own style but she is always shifting to something that goes wrong. It is because of this kind of unconventional aspects that her work gets interesting. This obsession of working with the portrait comes from her grandmother, who loves drawing people. Through the portraits, characters are straight away defined and Sombray would like to work now on what can come around the characters. She is researching on the scenery and the environment in order to look for more depth in her work.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
Thanks a lot for your support everyday by reading us, following us and by discovering great creative people we promote.
We have been running Creative&Live for five years and we wanted to bring it a bit more live! So, we decided to launch the first Creative&Drinks! No talk, no subject, Creative&Drinks is just a way to meet up people interested in the same things in the same city.
If you are related in any way to Creative&Live, creatives, readers or followers please join our first event which will take place in London.
Fancy a bit of networking to start the year!

Le Carnet Noir is the result of thoughts and notebook’s ideas that Nacho Ormachea collected while sipping a latte in Parisian’s cafés.
Ormachea uses photocollage in the project Le Carnet Noir which presents bodies as 2D in a 3D world. The collage onto the body insists about a flat perception of the world coming from the overwhelmed imagery world we are living in. Ormachea, conscious or not, talks about the body as being wrapped up by images.

Johanna Bonnevier is a swedish graphic designer living and working in London. After studying at Camberwell and St Martins College of Arts, she is been working professionally for eight years now in different fields, mainly architecture, culture and fashion.

Geneva, known for the United Nations, the lake and its sparkling clean, is also the place where the wonderful Neo Neo graphic design studio is set up. The collaborative studio Neo Neo, run by Thuy-An Hoang et Xavier Erni, had release some new work. They recently covered graphic design projects for museums such as L’Ariana and The Mudac as well as for Poster, a cultural magazine founded by Neo Neo itself.

Daniel Mackie uses watercolour to tell stories. He is playing with perspectives, scales and details creating uncanny and atypical characters.

Mark Warren Jacques exhibition just ended in Seattle at FlatColor Gallery. To carry on seeing his work, watch this short reel realised by Joe Lumbroso and Jesse Chandler of Third Street Works.
The work of Mark Warren Jacques is an absolute escape for the imagination, painting an optimistic world where simplicity is an Ideal.

Casey Reas explores organic and natural interaction of non visible processes. He initiated, in collaboration with Ben Fry, Processing in 2001. Processing is an open source programming language and environment for creating images, animation, and interaction. Signals is one of the multiple projects they realised via Processing and it has been commissioned for building 76 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Here are the informations:

Cell behavior is controlled by interconnected proteins operating in a network to actively transmit instructions. These networks become dysfunctional in cancerous cells. In this image, each graphical cluster represents signals between networked proteins in a cancer cell as they change over time. Individual arcs are signals from one protein to another; the size of an arc corresponds to the magnitude of the signal. Signaling data provided by the laboratory of Professor Michael Yaffe.

Le Normandie is one of the latest work of Julien Priez, a french typeface designer living and working in Montreuil. This typeface is the norman version of his previous typeface called Le Montreuil. Julien Priez developed a system exploring the composition of typography by mixing, repeating parts of letters adding ligatures, signs and many combination. He has been inspired by phone encoding using one key to create different shapes. It is a lot easier to understand the process once you watch the video.

Ritty Tacsum is a freelance photographer based in Malta. Through her work she is asking questions about gender, sensation, sensuality, freedom and identity. She experiences every time a new relationship with what she is shooting, as viewers we can feel a kind of randomness giving to the pictures an anti-serious aspect. These pictures are full of references and have to be seen as contemporary tales, ‘The Man’ series represents with simplicity the paradoxes and complexities of being a human being.

Recently graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Junyi Wu is a freelance illustrator living and working in Los Angeles. Fascinated by plants, her work shows fleeting and subtle moments shifting lights and using a small colour’s palette.

Todd McLellan is a photographer living and working in Toronto, Canada.
McLellan new body of work is showing a series of disassembled typewriter, clock, recorder and other kind of machine. I personally really enjoy the precision of it, requiring excellent skills and a lot of patience. The mind is bringing all together the pieces to re-build the objects and it is very interesting to see unusual parts of the object. More than a deconstruction of the object, McLellan reveals each object.

THIS IS IT are Andy Baker, Laura Bird, Rose Blake, Daniel Britt, Hugo Donkin, Chan An Gee, Michael Knight, Nicos Livesey, Tom McCaughan, Azusa Nakagawa, Joseph Pelling and Becky Sloan.
I can only say great things about Bad Things That Could Happen. It is the result of great separated talents that all together created this small jewell full of humour, cardboard, glue and face paint.

Les Graphiquants is a creative design studio founded in Paris in 2008 by four associates, Romain Rachlin, Maxime Tétard, Cyril Taïeb and François Dubois. They care about their artistic direction choosing projects they love allowing them to express their talent. Experimenting photography, typography, illustration, graphic design through different medium, Les Graphiquants present a diverse range of works always adhering to their identity.
Recently ended, they exhibited the great series entitled ‘Les Contreversions’ in the OFR bookshop in Paris. ‘Les Contreversions’ are a perfect example of the contemporary art notion of Appropriation. Matching two separated photographs together, Les Graphiquants follow the tradition of photomontage disrupting images giving another reading of the reality. I hope we will be able to see again soon the exhibition somewhere else, meanwhile find some more on their online shop, La Graphiquerie.

As well as an art director and a graphic designer, Cristian Ordóñez is a photographer working and living in Toronto, Canada. His photographic practice is related to his everyday life and what surrounds him in general. This discovery process form a visual narrative that helps him feel at home as a foreign in a new land.
I found interesting his series ‘Mimico’ documenting a centre for english speaking adults who have not completed post-secondary education and his series of places which express his experience and relationship within the space.
The first picture of the West End is striking my eyes as I am wondering what this three different places are doing together: people watching on the bottom right, the swimming pool and the beautiful view as a background. It seems that the swimming pool has nothing to do with the other parts of the picture creating an unexpectedness which I liked very much.

‘A Scenic World’ is one of the series created by the young photographer Valerie Chiang living and working in Raleigh, North Carolina.
This series is a reflexion about the body as a puppet showing passive and inert body in front of the world. On the other hand the body is totally present in the world, living in and owning the power to change it. Chiang develops always poetic and strong point of view about what surrounds her being influenced by old movies and children’s picture books.
Have a look to her Flickr and keep an eye on her work.

Adam Batchelor has released a new series of work untitled ‘Circles’. Based in Norwich, Adam Batchelor works as a freelance artist and illustrator looking at the relation between the unreal and the real world.
This new series explores under a new perspective the impact of cartoons and comics in society. Batchelor raises engaging questions around the fact that comics and society are influencing and manipulating each others.

Hors-Champ is the new work directed by Romain Lenancker for the issue 4 of Pilot Magazine for which he worked in collaboration with Alexis Raimbault for the photography.
‘Hors-Champ’ presents a series of pictures and a short video that we are very pleased to feature.
The work on lights, textures and composition are well realised creating suspense, strain and expectancy directly addressed towards the viewer. Indeed, the series is a metaphor. The subjects are shot in close-ups allowing the audience to imagine what is happening ‘hors-champ’.
The narration takes place in the viewer’s imagination remaining obviously purely individual and subjective. As a result, all the shots are linked together through the viewer’s perspective.

Jeremy Zaessinger is a freelance photographer based in Paris. He created ‘After Church’, a series in collaboration with the stylist Lydia Lobe Ellessa. ‘After Church’ is a graceful photographic story which has been shot in the beautiful french countryside.