Table of contents for September 2018 in Computer Arts

We had to pinch ourselves when the gurus of design disruption SPIN agreed to illustrate our cover this month. With a peerless reputation for typographic innovation, they were the perfect fit for our experimental type feature (p42), but they didn’t want to provide just an illustration… they wanted the whole cover: logo, coverlines, the lot… How could we say no? And in this spirit of ‘friendly takeover’ we hand over to SPIN creative director and partner, Tony Brooks, for his take on proceedings… “The first thing to say is that we were delighted to be asked to make a cover for Computer Arts. I mean, what could possibly go wrong, right? It was only when we started to respond that we began to dimly understand how opinionated we were, and…

BEREN NEALE EDITOR While working on one of the best issues of Computer Arts to date (discuss), the ed has also been knee deep in the upcoming Brand Impact Awards. “Can one get a migrane from looking at too much good design,” he asks himself. “Yes,” he replies. “Yes, one can.” MARK WYNNE ART EDITOR Collaborating with design idols Tony and Claudia at SPIN (well, giving them an InDesign file and leaving them to it) was a career high for our art editor, last heard sobbing “Can’t we just give them every cover…?”…

Despite working on brands like Boots, Beefeater and Nokia, design graduate Julia Darze only found her place in the creative world when being hired at Fiasco Design – a studio she’d followed since their 2016 interactive Rio Olympic map illustration. “The whole team are so creative and talented,” she says. “I learn new things from them everyday.” Six months on, and Julia’s hard at work finding a balance between her personal and professional output. “I think it’s really important, both as a way of topping up new skills and also creating things in your own style.” Julia has certainly found this in channelling her affinity for Brazil: “everything seems to end up involving plants and bright colours!” With regards to ‘wowing’ clients with such designs, “definitely,” Julia reveals, “colourful and…

First year celebrations at Akin ■ www.theakin.com Championing talent in the creative industries worldwide, global consultancy The Akin celebrates its one year anniversary in August. The firm has already made its presence known, having worked with clients such as Google, Harry’s and Pernod Ricard on a range of design projects, each challenging brands to rethink their existing strategies in the hope of elevating themselves further than before. On The Akin’s first year of success, company co-founder Anna Lisa Lappenküper commented; “The agency world can be filled with fussy and overcomplicated language or acronyms which cannot be actioned – we cut all of that away to deliver tangible outputs for our clients. What’s most exciting is that it’s really working, and we are seeing real change.” Lost and Foundry ■ www.fontsmith.com…

Founded by Zosia Berkieta-Lewis and Michael Lewis of Leeds based graphic design studio The Archipelago, The Plant Room was originally conceived in June 2015 as a collaborative exhibition project promoting wellbeing and creativity in homes and working environments. "We make spaces and develop projects with people and plants in mind, working with gallery owners, curators, and independent businesses to design exhibitions and spaces. Clients so far have included Harvey Nichols, Leeds Libraries & The British Library, Northern Monk Brew Co, and more. "Working collaboratively is at the heart of what we do. And by seeking out like-minded creatives like textile designer Laura Slater, who we're working with on LAND, an installation piece for London Design Festival 2018, we promote the power of nature and landscape on creativity and well-being. "Instagram…

Strategy director, B&B studio www.bandb-studio.co.uk Done well, limited editions can attract attention and add value to a brand, expressing their unique story in a fresh, unexpected way. A limited edition offers brands the chance to explore new frontiers and aesthetics – or even entirely new mediums – while staying relatively safe, letting them reach new pools of potential consumers and reaffirm links with existing ones. It can also enable brands to test the water before embarking on a wider rebrand. For example, in 2017 we collaborated with celebrated mixologist Ryan Chetiyawardana, on a limited edition for botanical drinks brand Firefly called Superfly, encasing the bottle in bold illustrations inspired by botanical books. We removed the logo from the front, creating consumer intrigue. After the success of the Superfly bottle, Firefly…

The ubiquitous sans serif turned 60 years old last year – but what if time hadn’t been so kind to Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann’s modernist font, and the years were etched onto its withered letterforms? That’s exactly what London-based design studio SPIN wondered when the team were asked to create a poster celebrating six decades of Helvetica in 2017. “We celebrated by crinkling it up and making it look really old – like it was 60,” recalls SPIN co-founder and creative director Tony Brook. “Then we took it a bit further, into the idea of it being like [Oscar Wilde’s] Dorian Gray. What if Helvetica has been stashed away in a type drawer in Zurich somewhere, becoming increasingly exhausted by every designer’s thoughtless and careless abuse? Every time Helvetica…

How do you finish someone else’s typeface designs? And even more intimidating, what if those initial type sketches were, in fact, 90-year-old relics of typographic treasure unearthed from deep inside the archives of legendary German art and design school Bauhaus Dessau? That was exactly the challenge faced by a team of five leading design students earlier this year, when they set about recreating five undiscovered Bauhaus typefaces as part of Adobe’s latest Hidden Treasures campaign. Guided by renowned typeface designer Erik Spiekermann, the students started with hand-drawn letter fragments, typography sketches and – in one case – just a few characters from a poster, before painstakingly dissecting the lettering and developing it into five beautiful working typefaces. The key was to put themselves into the shoes of the Bauhaus students.…

Freelancing can offer a great sense of freedom. The ability to be your own boss, decide who you work for and what you produce can be incredible…except when it’s not. “Everything becomes more vivid, more extreme when your successes and failures are solely down to you and you alone,” says Freelance Graphic Designer, Francesca Tortora. “The highs are utterly fantastic and the lows utterly horrible…” This well-documented ‘rollercoaster’ nature of self-employment presents a multitude of challenges, as Freelance Illustrator Barbara Dziadosz reveals: “There are times where you don’t have enough jobs to cover your basic expenses, while there are other occasions when you don’t have enough time to do all the commissions. It’s a real balancing act between time and money, which is sometimes hard to handle.” While many try…

“Get a good accountant!” BECI ORPINS “Be versatile without losing your focus. Try to evolve your style, but stay true to yourself and your goals.” BARBARA DZIADOSZ “I guess one of the main ‘secrets’ to a healthy freelance career is valuing your own time and work. It can be all too easy to say yes to spec projects when they don’t seem like they’ll take up much time and could lead to a lucrative outcome, but doing so devalues your time – and ultimately can devalue the work of everyone else in the industry if everyone participates.” ESSICA HISCHE “Get an ‘Adventures in Design – Circle of Trust’ membership! If you don’t already know about it, this podcast is packed with tips, stories, shop talk and insights from top professional…

I didn’t ‘get’ some of my favourite albums on first listening. REM’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Aphex Twin’s I Care Because You Do… they were strange and took time and focus to get through. So I pressed stop, disturbed and slightly baffled. But of course it was me that was a bit behind, not being able to see what was new and unique about them. It was a similar thing when I first saw this issue’s SPIN cover drafts – both the subscriber and newsstand versions. There was a moment of panic. You see, even for the best design mag around, magazine publishers can approach cover design a wee bit formulaically. Top right text hit? Check. An active voice in your coverlines? Check. Is there a big number somewhere that’s…

AARON POTTER PRODUCTION EDITOR Against better judgement, Aaron braved the chaotic masses at this year’s Bristol Harbour Festival during his first month as production editor. You’d think being a native he’d be used to it – absolutely not! JULIA SAGAR ECOMMERCE EDITOR, CREATIVE BLOQ This month Julia decided to take working remotely more seriously, making plans to move to Mexico for a few months. She can’t speak Spanish, but likes Mexican food - and that counts for something right? TOM MAY FREELANCE WRITER Tom has been house-swapping in Spain this month, taking in Madrid, Grenada, and more. He doesn’t have a tan though, because at every opportunity he’s been hiding in the shade and being a total wuss. Production notes PRINTERS TEXT AND COVER CMYK, PLUS PANTONE RED PRINT FINISHING…

Halo has always been located within the mighty creative hub that is Bristol, but we’re now settling into a new studio which sits close to Temple Meads railway station. I’ve recently joined the company myself, and our old studio became pretty snug as part of this continuing expansion. We might have a graveyard to the left of us and a dodgy hotel to the right, but we've been in our shiny new digs for a month now and it's still new and exciting. The move has given us space to think, grow and escape when needed. In any studio, space is a big factor. Clichéd as it sounds, without it you really struggle to be able to focus on what you need to do, let alone do it well. We’re…

Every year, D&AD New Blood Festival is inspiring and exhausting in almost equal measure. The vast Old Truman Brewery in London's Shoreditch plays host to top graduate talent from design courses across the UK, creating a sensory overload of young creatives competing for the attention of the creative press, and agencies looking for that spark of potential in their next junior hire. This year, CA's annual New Talent issue went to press before New Blood took place – but don't worry, we've brought you the highlights to add to last month's inspirational extravaganza. Three students in particular caught our eye – two for their forward-thinking, ideas-led approach to pressing social issues such as disability and accessibility, and the third for her versatility, and overall quality of work. Elena Kidman studied…

Partner at Pentagram www.pentagram.com I am privileged to be one of the people who runs a non-profit public service called Do The Green Thing. We use world-class creativity to inspire as many people as possible to live more sustainably, and have done so for 10 years. I say 10 years, because 10 is interesting. We like to celebrate and commemorate the world in 10s – 10th birthdays, 20th anniversaries, 50-year lease extensions – because most of us humans have 10 fingers and humanity is self-centred. And because we’re self-centred, we consume as much as we do, fly or drive or Uber wherever we can, buy as much as we want, walk around in well-lit and well-heated homes any time of the year, refusing to consider what it means for others…

One fantastic resource for type-based inspiration is A2Z+, a gorgeous archive of old lettering and type. The 320-page reference book is packed with unusual, inventive fonts, and contains a wealth of typographic ephemera and graphics that cover everything from type specimens and signwriters’ alphabets to optician’s old eye-charts, logotypes, sign language and semaphore alphabets, monograms, old book and magazine covers. Authors Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding had no constraints around era, genre or purpose when they curated the projects – the result is an aesthetically expressive and culture-rich source of typographic eye candy for designers. A2Z+ is published by Laurence King in conjunction with Redstone Press. £25. www.theredstoneshop.com/products/a2z…

BARBARA DZIADOSZ Barbara is a freelance illustrator from Hamburg. She specialises in printmaking, editorial, illustrated recipes and character design. Clients include Google, Lunch Lady magazine and Handelsblatt newspaper. basiadziadosz.tumblr.com BECI ORPIN Beci is a designer, illustrator and author based in Melbourne. Over the past 20 years she has produced beautiful work for clients such as Universal Music, Kiehls, Visa and lots more. www.beciorpin.com BENNY GOLD Benny is founder of the Benny Gold brand. What started out as a ‘Stay gold’ sticker dotted around town is now a respected streetwear brand. www.bennygold.com FRANCESCA TORTORA Frankie is a freelance graphic designer who’s been freelance for six years. Alongside her day job, she also runs a vibrant community for freelancing parents called Doing It For The Kids. www.francescatortora.com/ JESSICA HISCHE Jessica Hische is…

Studio Sutherl& has a knack for coming up with ideas so simple, you wonder why no one thought of them before. But it takes a lot of work and ingenuity to create such beautiful simplicity, and the award-winning studio – voted number one in the UK Studio Rankings last year – consists of just two people. Recent projects include rebranding long-established children’s brand Start-rite shoes, (which won a D&AD Wooden Pencil), reworking the identity of Agatha Christie Ltd (shortlisted for a Brand Impact Award 2018), and creating a visual identity for the new Museum + Gallery in St Albans. But how does such a small studio manage to outshine the heavyweights, and produce work that’s so consistently outstanding? We spoke to founder Jim Sutherland and designer Rosey Trickett to find…

It’s easy to dismiss a mascot as something trivial, but characters are a proven way of helping people digest a message or understand a narrative, even if it’s a difficult one. Pixar’s Finding Nemo is essentially the story of a single parent reconnecting with his son, but told using animated fish. It’s got tough themes – the death of a parent in the first scene, sharks who are addicted to blood and the fear of separation, but they are all brilliantly and softly compelling. People turn to storytelling like this in times of crisis and need. The mascot we designed is riding solo at initial launch. After much deliberation and debate as to whether a modern family or even a non-human counterpart would work better, we landed on a single-minded…

JULIA DARZE Newly hired junior designer Julia Darze is still getting to grips with studio life at Fiasco Design. On page 14, we learn how she is implementing a fondness for carnival colours into her design work. https://juliadarze.co.uk NARESH RAMCHANDANI On page 24, Pentagram partner Naresh Ramchandani talks us through how his Do the Green Thing non-profit initiative is using creativity to inspire people to live life more sustainably. www.pentagram.com JULIA SAGAR Journalist and Computer Arts regular Julia has been learning more about experimental type than she thought possible. On page 42, she discusses the subject with industry pros. www.creativebloq.com/author/juliasagar JON KEY Award-winning art director and design studio co-founder Jon Key talks us through his processes on page 58. From giving opressed communities a voice to how he builds better…

2 Aficionado A physically active self-quant enthusiast with high-value medical data to trade 3 Addict A data obsessive who generates volumes of brand-specific bio-data for their income Until now formalised health data has been inaccessible to consumers, stored on hospital computers or retained by third-party companies to be sold on to large pharmaceutical conglomerates. However, new products and services are signalling times of change by giving users immediate access and ownership of their own personal medical information. For The Future Laboratory’s recent Health & Wellness Futures Forum, we created Bio Tracker, a speculative platform that enables people to explore the future of democratised data ownership, where consumers, not pharmaceutical companies, are in charge of their health data. In the near future, consumers could manage their health data through platforms like…

Stepping into the wide world of professional work can seem daunting, regardless of the field or industry. However, respected branding agency Taxi Studio are hoping to alleviate much of the typical fears newcomers to the design space experience – all thanks to a new short film project that features humorous insights from some of the best creatives in the community. Appropriately titled Creative Discomforts, the project began life as a series of lunchtime talks Taxi held in-house to help drive forward their company mantra: ‘courage and collaboration deliver true success’. The thoughts expressed proved too fantastic to keep close to their chests. “[It’s] a film packed with insight and inspiration," says Spencer Buck, Taxi’s self-proclaimed co-founding creative firepower. “I hope it will help instil creative courage in the next generation…

TODD PADWICK Creative director, Function & Form http://functionandform.co.uk “DJing has been a huge part of my life since university. The art of mixing forced me to hear music differently, in a way that dissects every element of any given track to its purest form. Even more so when mixing on vinyl (my preference), which is far more tactile then any digital format. This skill becomes my meditation; a chance to clear my head after a day at the office, ready to return with fresh eyes the next morning. Being able to reset and avoid the temptation to take work home is very important. I also believe that playing music in our studio helps the creatives relax and settle into their environment, becoming more open to new ideas. With a shared…

When it comes to boundary-pushing type, it doesn’t get more inspiring than the extraordinary curated collection of lettering, typography, calligraphy and graphic design housed at San Francisco-based Letterform Archive. The ever-growing museum and special collections library boasts over 40,000 items, chronicling the history of written communication from medieval manuscripts through to today’s explosion of digital type. Work from design legends past and present - Piet Zwart, Massimo Vignelli, Paul Rand, Milton Glaser, Irma Boom - is preserved alongside fascinating specimens of graphic design, stretching back through time and across different cultures. Matthew Carter, Walker, 1995. “Carter specialises in pared-down and elegantly utilitarian designs like Bell Centennial, Georgia, and Verdana. He treads more experimental waters to make this typeface with snap-on serifs of various lengths and shapes which – in the…

“If business is slow and no work or opportunities have come in, the first difficult step is to honestly ask ourselves if this is really what we are meant to be doing. Do we love it enough to pay the price and sacrifice whatever it takes to make our vision a reality? Don’t just keep something going in a looping rut if it’s not right. It’s not the end of the world to try something new when the old isn’t working, so we must be brutally honest with ourselves. It’s very difficult to focus and think clearly when the rent is due and there’s no money coming in. So, take some deep breaths and harness this powerful, negative energy that is balled up in your throat and transform it into…

1. FEED YOUR BRAIN Jim Sutherland makes sure he surrounds himself by inspiration of different types. “Keep your eyes and brain open all the time,” he says. For him, this involves going to exhibitions, reading books, listening to music, and enjoying art and good food. 2. DO LOTS OF PROJECTS Sutherland has worked across a huge variety of projects, and says that this variety is key to success. “I think it’s very important to work across sectors and project types,” he explains. “All of them feed into each other to you as a designer and a person. You get better with every project you do,” he adds. “When I get to 80 I’m going to be really good at this.” 3. EXPERIMENT “Research, experiment, and play a lot, “says Sutherland. “This…

THE BEGINNING Nick Loaring Having worked with them numerous times over the last five years, I was more than happy to help Leeds-based design agency Split Design with their These Northern Types exhibition. Explicitly looking at what it is to be ‘Northern’, my brief was to produce a fictitious gig poster that was ‘a big fat love letter to the North’ – showcasing a wide variety of bands that are from… well you know where. MOTIVATION After the initial buzz of a new job subsides, panic usually sets in. Needing to produce something is always a good motivator to start pulling stuff together, and there’s nothing quite like a deadline to whip you into shape. On this project I was asked to respond to an article by [The Guardian’s music…

Hopefully I’m going to disappoint some people. I usually do. Icons? #wtf? Define icons. Full stop. Whatever they are or might be, or whatever we think they are or want them to be, icons are good ideas stripped of their lust for life and turned to (head) stones. Be careful: what you see is what you wished for, drained of the potential to become something else. I’m not in the mood for ranking full stops. I like the lands at the top of my Faraway Tree to shift, to evolve and to move on. I’m more interested in the space ‘icons’ occupy – physically, abstractly, ambiently. I’m more inclined to feast on how we can read the negative space they interrupt – seen or unseen – and the questions they…