Table of contents for February 2020 in Computer Arts

If you’re part of the demanding creative design industry, large chunks of your day will be spent with eyes fixed on a screen, endlessly moving pixels 1mm this way or that in the search for design perfection. Well, head over to page 44 and get out in the open to refresh your senses, as we look at the dynamic world of mural design, and the creatives pushing for more artistic mural work from their clients. Though hardly a new phenomenon, hand-painted outdoor advertising has enjoyed a marked increased in popularity in recent years, with passionate new illustrators and designers finding themselves working with major clients, in major cities, with major numbers of people viewing their work in no time at all. And you can see the appeal from a creative…

Many design studios pay lip service to the idea of having “close ties to the local community”. But if you really want to integrate into the community, you have to go where the locals go. And Dave Sedgwick has done just that. “I’d been working with the landlords of the shopping centre for a few months,” he says. “The project was all about re-engaging with the local community and informing the residents of the area about the changes taking place within the centre and the wider area. So as part of the job, I decided it would be worth taking my design studio out of the city and moving it to the shopping centre itself.” As a result, Dave has gone from working among other creative professionals to being surrounded…

Meagan Hyland Graphic designer/illustrator meaganhyland.com “OFFSET in Dublin [3-5 April 2020] will always be the highlight of my design calendar. I’ve been going since its first year, back in 2009 when I was in college and brought a dictaphone to assault the speakers with questions for my thesis. Getting up close and being able to chat to the speakers has always been my favourite part. There’s no pretension: you could see Jessica Hische on the main stage at 2pm and be having a pint with her at 5pm. You don’t really see that informality at other events. Over the years I’ve been up on stage in an inflatable suit, bopping along to techno to introduce FriendsWithYou; danced with Snask at the after-party; and last year had my own work played…

Michael Bierut Partner, Pentagram Design pentagram.com “We worked with the team at Yahoo to find a balance between what’s always made the brand distinctive – the exclamation mark, the colour purple, the yodel – while creating a 21st century identity. The identity reflects a new brand strategy that focuses on helping users find a more personalised, customised experience online. This positions Yahoo as an “amplification brand”: amplifying the things that matter, helping to amplify you. The idea is neatly visualised in the exclamation point, a punctuation mark that literally stands for amplification. We worked with Yahoo to evaluate a range of options. Some were more evocative of the original, quirky 1996 logo with its offset baseline and random angles, while others were completely new. The exclamation mark has been italicised…

CA creative design & illustration Subscribe to the new-look Computer Arts □ Save up to 76 per cent on your annual print and digital bundle subscription ○ Save up to 49 per cent on your annual print subscription Δ Receive 13 issues a year, with free delivery worldwide ◊ Keep up to date with the latest design trends and industry events Offer does not apply to quarterly or six-month subscriptions subscribe and save by visiting myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/coa/promo20 or call 0344 848 2852 *This offer is available to all new subscribers. Discount applies to annual print and print and digital bundle subscriptions only for ImagineFX, Computer Arts, 3D World and Net. Offer can only be redeemed online via the web link stated above. Prices and savings quoted are compared to buying full-priced…

husmee.com ALAIN VILLASTRIGO Founder and creative director, Husmee Alain carries out design and art direction work that is practical with a fine aesthetic, based on structure, colour and typography. ANER HERNÁNDEZ Designer, Husmee Aner is passionate about creating graphics, narratives and music. He loves beautiful typography, and is still inspired by his first school text book (set in the typeface Univers). THE BRIEF AND CONCEPT Alain Villastrigo After several meetings with Kunsthal Design School in Bilbao, where we commented on and analysed their visual identity, they invited us to help develop a new one. As a graduate of the college, I understood the feeling of being a student there. As a designer, creating an identity for a design school is special. They’re a group of professionals with a lot of…

GIULIA SCHELM Born and raised in Berlin’s Kreuzberg, Giulia always had a passion for arts and crafts. She studied visual communication at the University of Arts in Berlin and at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She cofounded Burrow with Philipp and Lukas. LUKAS KÜNG Lukas spent his childhood in Zurich, drawn to letters and forms. This leisure activity led to a professional interest in graphic design and a degree in visual communication from the University of Arts in Berlin and Pratt Institute, New York. PHILIPP KOLLER Philipp grew up in Switzerland. Originally interested in architecture, he finished a four-year apprenticeship in a Swiss architecture office. His interests shifted towards graphic design. He also studying visual communication at the University of Arts Berlin, where he met Lukas and…

LISA HASSELL Lisa is a freelance design writer, visiting lecturer and founder of Inkygoodness, a platform for emerging illustrators. She’s currently developing ideas for her first book. inkygoodness.com ROSIE HILDER Rosie is operations editor of Creative Bloq. She began her journalism career in Buenos Aires in 2012, and has worked as a design writer/editor since 2016. rosiehilder.com EMILY GOSLING Emily is a London-based freelance design and arts journalist. She works as a senior editor at Eye on Design and an editor-atlarge at Elephant. emilygosling.com ANNA MILL London-based Anna is an artist and designer whose work includes commercial branding, stage illustrations for theatre, concept architecture designs and a graphic novel. annamill.com…

It’s safe to say we can’t remember trying so many executions for one cover ever before – the variety of assets and possible permutations was head-spinning. And yet, as soon as Camille Walala’s EYH campaign dropped behind the logo, we knew we had a winning treatment. Most of our covers are planned at least a month ahead – essential when commissioning fresh illustrations of course. However, with our new redesign embracing a more ambitious ethos, we explored a lot of different ideas this month, aware that the cover immediately after a redesign is just as important in establishing editorial tone. The challenge wasn’t just to execute a cover that demonstrated our new flexibility, but also deciding which article should take the lead. While the freelance 2020 feature would traditionally be…

Graphic designer Marc Armand’s creative journey began as a Paris schoolboy, painting graffiti both legally and illegally. “Through this I decided to go to art school and then discovered that it could be an actual job,” he says. Today, Marc has an impressive resume, including founding graphic design studio Tu Sais Qui; designing patterns for Desigual and Jean-Paul Goude; a succession of collaborations with Nike; working as creative director of Please! magazine; and spending a year in charge of visual communication for the Villa Noailles art centre in Hyères, southern France. So what keeps him energised? “I find a lot of inspiration through music,” he says. “A lot of electronics, but also a wide range of different types. I always listen to loud music while working. Fashion design is also…

In collaboration with Global Street Art and HYPEBEAST, Josephine was briefed on the campaign strapline: “Discover the possibilities within.” Referencing her collage work as a starting point, for her design she took inspiration from cutaway layers, alternate universes and space-time. “I liked the idea of having an optical illusion element – a bit Bridget Riley, perhaps – to create an arresting and surreal image that drew your eye through and involved hidden and surrealist elements.” Josephine presented three initial rough ideas, and taking feedback from Global Street Art, HYPEBEAST and Bombay Sapphire, refined her design with a couple of rounds of amendments before agreeing the final design – a process that took around two weeks. “I worked with the media team to create the design. They are the people who…

Creating a modern identity for a leading design school, we felt the project would benefit from interactivity and collaboration with the students, and the Bessemer process was born. Essentially, this takes the main typeface chosen for Kunsthal Design School’s identity and reworks it to create endless possible shapes and personalities that the brand can deploy. We invited students and staff to explore the typeface and experiment with different ways of changing it. The typeface used is the superb GT Walsheim by Grilli Type. It’s based on the work of Swiss artist Otto Baumberger and was designed by Noël Leu. It’s a geometric typeface, perfectly representing Kunsthal’s relationship with the avante garde. While it’s used as is in the identity, we carried out 16 different experiments looking at various new formulations…

madethought.com Made Thought has created an installation with Fred Perry promoting its 544 Collection, with designs that “decode the brand’s signature two-line collar ‘tipping’ icon”, according to the studio. “Aesthetically pared back, using exclusively black and white, the collection champions a bold graphic language,” says design lead Rachel Veniard. “Every gesture we made needed to conform to the 544 ratio: in the collection itself, and also influencing the visual world around it.” Design director Radek Wojcik adds that “in the spirit of being subversive,” the collaboration hopes to speak to both fans who recognise the formation and intrigue those who don’t. The pop-up features a window display that was designed by Fred Perry and a live mechanical installation. This sees a printer fed with a paper roll, overlaying coded patterns…

CENNYDD BOWLES Cennydd is a London-based designer and futurist with 17 years of experience advising clients including Twitter, Ford, Cisco and the BBC. His talk will address how designers can rebuild our outdated institutions and prototype better futures to come. “Design in a world on the brink means embracing our moral duties, becoming planetary custodians, and giving the many, not just the few, a stake in the future,” he says. TATIANA MAC Tatiana is an independent US designer who works with organisations to build clear and coherent products and design systems. In her talk, she’ll address the problems of building our language, laws, and technology upon reductionist Boolean thinking: true and false, good and evil, black and white, just and unjust. As an alternative, she’ll explore a new model that…

We ask ourselves why clients just don’t “get it”. Roll our eyes when people confuse a brand with a logo. Rant and rave about free pitches, where the client wants us to show them creative solutions off the bat. Bitch and moan that they don’t understand the value we add. But it’s not them. It’s us. For a profession that sells clarity of ideas, our industry has done a remarkably poor job of branding branding. Ask 10 people to define branding and you’ll get 10 different answers. Ask Google and you get two: “The action of marking with a branding iron” (probably not what we’re getting at) and “The promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design”. If we accept that, we might as…

When you’re a professional illustrator, it’s hard enough to get your head around the ins and outs of licencing, let alone try to explain it to an uninitiated client. To help you with both, the Association of Illustrators (AOI) has put together a handy guide that explains the basics of the licencing model, how to negotiate a fee and agree terms, and what clients should do if they’re not happy with your initial draft. Brought to life with illustrations from AOI member Franz Lang, this is an excellent downloadable and shareable resource for illustrators and commissioning editors everywhere. bit.ly/ca-aoi-license…

First launched in 2009, Offset Dublin has fast become one of the key events in the creative industries calendar, with more than 2,500 attendees each year from across the world. Taking place at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on 3-5 April, this year’s event will feature more than 100 speakers across two stages, including April Greiman, Rory Simms, Olaf Hajek, Leslie David, Andy Gent, Oscar Hudson, Laura Callaghan, James Burke and LEGO Star Wars chief designer Jens Kronvold Frederiksen. Weekend tickets cost €295 for professionals, €245 per person for group bookings, €125 for students and €170 for recent graduates. iloveoffset.com…

FEATURING New year, new you – right? The benefits of ditching your agency job or brand in-house designer 9 to 5 for freelance life appear to be many: it’s the freedom to work when you want, for whom and wherever you like. More and more creatives are going freelance out of choice, rather than being made redundant, for instance. A 99Designs survey showed that only five per cent do so out of necessity, with many reaping the benefits of a nomadic lifestyle. Indeed, 43 per cent of freelancers have lived and worked abroad. “One of the best things about freelance life for me is being in control of everything: time management, choosing my clients and the people I surround myself with,” says Berlin-based illustrator Chau Luong. “The biggest downside is…

ANNA MILL Illustrator Anna is a winner in 2019’s World Illustration Awards. Her first graphic novel Square Eyes, with co-writer Luke Jones, explores a near-future city where digital visions are drawn over the crumbling physical world, and dreams, memory and realities blur. annamill.com Whether drawing traditionally with pencil and paper, or drawing digitally using a graphics tablet, I still construct even the most complicated scenes entirely using the draughting techniques of the horizon line and vanishing points that most people will have learnt in art class. This might seem strangely over-complicated, when it’s so easy to quickly mock up a basic version of the scene using 3D modelling programs to guide your drawing, but when you set out a perspective drawing by hand, you give yourself some flexibility in interpreting…

denomination.com MARGARET NOLAN Co-founder and creative director, Denomination Overseeing studios in Sydney, London and San Francisco, Margaret has won more than 100 awards and has had her work published in design annuals globally. ROWENA CURLEWIS Co-founder and CEO, Denomination Rowena’s passion lies in drinks, having spent her entire design career in this category working across spirits, cider, beer and wine. Rowena regularly lectures on design, branding and innovation globally. JAMES DUMAY Founder, Wildspirit James is an avid gin fanatic and started making his own infusions two years ago. He recently left a 15-year career in digital product management to pursue his dream of crafting spirits that everyone can taste and appreciate. THE BRIEF AND CONCEPT Rowena Curlewis Wildspirit’s founder James Dumay set out to fill a gap in the market…

“As a student, the early Howies brand catalogues provided a regular source of inspiration and are things that I have often enjoyed returning too. They were a joy to receive through the post. I admire the way they always stay true to their values in everything they do; and in a creative way that engages, starts a conversation, encourages thinking/change and creates a sense of community along the way. It’s powerful stuff. As a company it’s always felt to me as though Howies wanted to push things in interesting ways, to get the most out of every opportunity, keeping things fresh and most importantly have fun doing it; whether commissioning illustration for an article, creating their classic T-shirt designs, stitching the map on to the trouser pocket, making art out…