All posts tagged: Design

Going round & round: YamanoteYamanote

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Travelling around Japan earlier this year has got me seriously falling in love with the country’s beautiful places, people, food and culture. Give me a little nudge, a gentle reminder of Nippon life and I’m easily thrown into a nostalgia-induced state of wanderlust and itching to jump on the next flight eastward. Thus, I was more than fair game for Tokyo-based Swiss graphic designers Julien Mercier and Julien Wulff, who yanked me from my daily routine with excellent poster project YamanoteYamanote. Following the eponymous circular train line that whirls around the bustling metropolis and serves downtown hotspots Shibuya, Shinjuku or Akihabara, the duo creates two corresponding designs for each of the 29 Yamanote stations and their characteristic surroundings. Every new design, combining minimalism, hushed colours, a clever mix of Japanese kanji and Latin letters, is then presented at a one-time exhibition at a venue near each station. 素晴らしい! Keep up to date with the Yamanote Yamanote project here: yamanoteyamanote.com @instagram @facebook

Spot On: Marco De Masi

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Have a browse on my blog and you’ll quickly figure out that I’m in love with clever, conceptual designs and illustrations that explore an idea with simple but beautiful ingredients. Marco De Masi is an Italian freelance graphic designer and illustrator from Lecce, whose thought-provoking and eye-catching works are right on the money. His crisp and minimalist style, his selection of rich colours and the way he plays with the viewer’s perspective is just oddly satisfying. @facebook @instagram

Wee catch up: Rumana Sayed

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I vaguely memorised Rumana Sayed’s name almost a year ago when I was flicking through the truly fantastic ‘Every Woman Super Woman’ zine with its colourful aesthetics and powerful words. Fast forward half a year later, the young graphic designer becomes the new artist-in-residence at Out of the Blueprint and pretty successfully showcases a bold and punchy body of work in her first solo exhibition ‘Don’t Be Denied’. So we have a wee bit of catching up to do! Tell me a bit about your background. How did you get into making art? My name is Rumana Sayed, I’m 21 years old and live in Edinburgh. I was born in South Africa, but been brought up in the heart of Leith for 17 years. Growing up I have always been into making and creating. I didn’t know what I wanted to do leaving High School. I got into Edinburgh college to do Visual Communication & Graphic Design, studied for 3 years and it became a part of my life ever since. Its a tool for me to creative things differently in a unique way. …

Paving Space

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Often times skateboarders look at public space in a way others cannot necessarily relate to. They see obstacles in the city architecture as something to explore, to interpret and to creatively push the boundaries of what’s possible once more. ‘Paving Space’, a collaboration between artist and skateboarder Raphaël Zarka, Carhartt WIP and Isle Skateboards, illustrates this curious, explorative spirit of street skateboarding beautifully. At the time, Raphaël was captivated by the works of 19th century mathematician Arthur Moritz Schoenflies and his groundbreaking three-dimensional geometric models. Seeing its sculptural potential and seemingly endless possibilities, he started reconstructing them into large-scale modules for a series of shows at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Singapore and Sainte-Croix Museum in Poitiers. But instead of exhibiting his geometric formations as static pieces of art, Raphaël invited a group of pro skateboarders to use the spaces as creative laboratories: By riding the wooden sculptures, exploring different assembly methods and thus informing its arrangement in the different spaces, the lines between obstacle and artwork started to blur. …

Chasing Lyrical Natural Sciences: Katrina McHugh

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Last year, I dived head-first into quite a challenge. I vowed to tell a story through a photograph for 100 days straight. It was a tough, fun and quite frankly a liberating thing to do – you should all try it some day. And as I already said back then, the aspect that makes the #100dayproject so special is the communal spirit that ensued, learning about the daily struggles and inspirations of thousands of other participants, and eventually, finding out about the many supercool projects out there that otherwise might not’ve seen the light of day. #100daysoflyricalnaturalsciences was a quick favourite of mine. San Francisco-based graphic designer Katrina McHugh set out to create beautiful diagrams and infographics out of song lyrics that are rooted in the natural world: ‘I was and am interested in how often people rely on references to nature when attempting to bring shape to the intangible complexities involved in this “being alive” business. It’s no easy task to communicate our human experience so if a nature metaphor gets you a bit closer to whatever the …

Illustrated film goodness: Delve Weekly

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One of my favourite mags and absolute movie-go-to source undisputedly is Little White Lies. Well-informed writing, fabulous reviews, sleek design and each issue accompanied by a beautifully illustrated cover for the next exciting, upcoming film release. If only they’d release an issue more often than just every two months. Maybe I’m just being greedy here, but in the meantime, a cool newsletter service luckily dropped in my lap that comes in with a fresh idea to celebrate film week-by-week. Probably still flying a bit under the radar of many, Delve Weekly is the brainchild of London-based creative agency Human After All (who co-founded Little White Lies, btw) and recommends one new film that’s most worth watching at the cinema, bite-sized to our inboxes every Friday. And aside from a well-rounded review by the likes of Peter Bradshaw or Karen Krizanovich and a bunch of intriguing links that compliment the weekly feature, delve also offers a pretty tasty treat for design lovers like me: Alternative poster designs. Once the panel of critics decides on a feature they deem unmissable, the studio bucks up and tracks down just the …

On The Bookshelf: Made For Skate

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Rowley XLT, Koston 4, TNT, Chief, Reynolds 3, DVS CT, the list goes on and on. Well, what probably sounds like a lot of gibberish to some is only a small fraction of the compadres that kept my feet safe day in day out on my trips down the city streets and to the local park, joined me jumping down stairs and handrails or enduring pool and miniramp sessions since I started skateboarding back in ‘01. It’s hard to describe why I still remember this so vividly, but let’s put it this way: My weapons of choice – the piles of broken wood and the mass of shredded footwear – had as much of a story to tell as it might’ve been this soft toy from your early childhood, the first football jersey that made its way under the Christmas tree or even the first band shirt you bought ages ago. There is an emotional value, a form of identification and dissociation that so often goes without saying. ‘The worn down soles, the frazzled laces. You made …

Artist Conversations: Q&A with Mark Boardman

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I love geometry, colour, depth and simplicity when it comes to illustrations – have a look at these or these. Yet simple textural designs, storytelling & dense atmospheres don’t always go hand in hand. My newest interview partner got all bases covered, though. Mark Boardman is a Bristol-based illustrator who divides his work between editorial and advertising commissions as well as his many exciting freelance projects. I dropped him a line and had a chat about the perks of working with various media, the influence of literature, scouting locations on google.maps and yeah, heavy metal. Hi Mark! What have you been up to lately? At the moment I’m working on a lot of new portfolio pieces. I’m trying to push myself technically while putting together a collection of work that’s attractive to prospective clients. Often if I’m left to my own devices I’ll end up producing illustrations that don’t have a great deal of commercial value so it’s good for me to refocus on commercial subject matter every now and again. You were shifting from traditional oil painting …

Spot On | The mystical world of Daehyun Kim

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We always want to explain everything. Find an answer to the question. Find a reason for doing something this way or that way. Even vindicate why we adore or reject something. Sometimes, you see things that are just so breathtaking, there’s not much you have to explain. A simple ‘W O W’. That was pretty much what my brain was able to piece together at the mere sight of Daehyun Kim’s deeply mysterious, captivating and yet so simple Moonassi-series. Taking influence from his own studies in traditional East-Asian art and painting, the Seoul-born illustrator creates intricate ink drawings of characters symbolising ideas and aspects of daily life, relationships and the search for identity in an incessantly philosophical manner: ‘I wanted to draw something I really know and something I really can speak about. It was my inner feelings and my intimate relations that give me various emotions. What I like to create is a drawing as an empty space between me and the viewer, so that people can talk and find their own story from my drawings.’ …

Shaping Mountain Silhouettes | Katy Ann Gilmore

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If I’m honest, Christmas has been a wonderful time of repose, contemplation and, of course, overindulgence, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been all lazy, smug and reluctant to spend some time off browsing, searching and discovering exciting new talent now and then. So one of the names that’s scribbled on the top of my list is Katy Ann Gilmore’s and you’re about to find out why she’s the real deal: For her eye-catching drawings, large-scale murals and installations, the L.A.-based visual artist takes inspiration from nature and topography and seeks to further explore the relationship between 2D, perpendicular planes and their distortions into 3D space. Usually armed with her army of acrylic markers and a steady hand, Gilmore meticulously works the canvas, adding pen stroke after pen stroke in a staccato fashion that eventually weaves into biomorphic silhouettes of the hilly landscapes and monumental mountain ranges waiting on her very doorstep. Have a look, it’s a real treat!                   Check out more of her artworks & get in touch via social media. …