Table of contents for February 2019 in Computer Arts

This month I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a few particularly disruptive creatives. After his high octane, hallucinatory talk at Us By Night, I talked to Joshua Davis about a potential cover collaboration. A few days later he sent us 150 files the size of small galaxies, which me and art editor Mark Wynne proceeded to lose ourselves in for the following fortnight. The results, I hope you agree, are beautiful, challenging and fun. At the same event I sat down with the Dutch legend Erik Kessels — author of such playful books as Failed It! and Enjoy A Day in the Life of Dick. Head to page 19 for a taste of the man’s thinking. He strongly believes the importance of making deliberate mistakes to discover new creative solutions;…

Emily gosling FREELANCE WRITER Emily found it a total joy and a decision-making nightmare to whittle down 15 graphic design game changers for this issue and the next. She thinks you’ll agree they’re all belters, though. Read it on page 58. Rosie hilder OPERATIONS EDITOR, CREATIVE BLOQ Attempting to abolish her new house’s ‘60s décor, Rosie decided to embark on a painting mission. So far, she has a lot of paint samples, a Pinterest board, watercolour pencils and a ladder. Wish her luck. Production notes PRINTERS TEXT AND COVER CMYK PLUS PANTONE 806 William Gibbons PAPER COVER Precision Special Gloss FSC 250gsm P3–98: Ultra Mag Plus Gloss 90gsm TYPEFACES Trump Gothic West, Akkurat, S-L, Simplo, Kondola and Calluna, Berewyne Bold.…

Having stepped straight out of art academy in 2004 to start his own studio, ATTAK, designer Peter Korsman (aka Autograph) has spent most of his creative career pushing typography to its limits. "Everything is language," he says. "Our thoughts are words and typography is words made visual. It's the basis for graphic design." Korsman's fascination with the language-based discipline has led him to appreciate those fonts and typefaces that evoke a personal touch, when he "can feel the excitement of the designer, and get excited too." As such, the digital development towards variable and animated fonts has continued to inspire his own work. "It’s wizardry to me, and also pure eye candy," he enthuses. "I’m in awe of the skills and results, and it forces me to redefine typography." Despite…

The Subscription Mindset Following in-depth study, Christian Purser reveals why subscription models beat ownership every time CEO, Interbrand London www.interbrand.com For close to two decades, Interbrand has been calculating the brand value of the top 100 global brands. It will surprise few that, in that time, technology brands have risen inexorably to the top of the tree. Six of the top 10 most valuable brands are tech brands, which, when we consider the radical change that technology has brought to our lives — how we spend our time, attention and money — makes sense. But technology isn’t changing only where we spend money, but how. This in turn is increasingly changing not just business, but business models. The concept of ownership looks increasingly passé to the children of this generation.…

The key to disruptive design is experimentation, says Anne Ulku, and it’s an approach she often follows in her own practice. She explains: “A lot of my work is: ‘I’m going to try this, and I’m going to try that’. It’s a self-exploration of how can I represent these abstract thoughts and concepts in my mind, and put them out there for people to take in, or discover something about themselves; opening their eyes to curiosity and wonder.” It might all sound fun and exciting, but Ulku stresses that it’s not a walk in the park. Experimentation by its very nature means lots of starting again… and again. “The majority of my work gets killed or thrown out,” she reveals. “But you have to go through all those exercises of…

1. LOSE THE FEAR Innovation is all about experimentation, and having a fearless attitude is key when it comes to pushing your work. “Don’t be afraid of the unknown,” says visual and motion designer Stan Haanappel, “explore technologies you are not familiar with”. 2. KEEP EXPLORING “Don’t stop at your first sketches, even though you think what you’ve done is finished and good,” advises Haanappel. “Explore multiple routes in order to be sure you’ve found the right answer.” 3. EMBRACE THE UGLY It’s also important not to panic if you don’t get there straight away, stresses Haanappel. “Making ugly things is also an important part of the design process. Failures can lead to amazing discoveries.” 4. GIVE PEOPLE FREEDOM As operations director and online strategist, it’s Wouter Dirks’ job to…

The Association of Illustrators (AOI) is a not-for-profit trade organisation promoting contemporary illustration and maintaining industry standards. Established in 1973, the AOI works to increase the standing of illustration as a profession and improve commercial and ethical conditions, and support illustrators at every stage of their career. THE CHALLENGE Ana Jaks Up until 2014, everything I created was hand-drawn or hand-painted. Then came the Wacom tablet. Where I’d previously spent hours practising my techniques on paper, sheets of wood or spoons, I now become fixated with learning how to create everything digitally. My career has definitely benefitted from the countless hours spent trying to navigate different software, and days have been saved once I discovered I could change the colour palette of an entire project for a client without having…

We already had legendary technologist Joshua Davis in mind for our disruption-themed cover, when we were lucky enough to catch his show-stealing guest spot at this year’s Us By Night festival (see page 18). His adrenaline-fuelled, expletive-packed geek meltdown had the Antwerp audience entranced, and also gave us a chance to get some idea of what we were hoping he could make for us. Davis is as full throttle in person as his animations are on the screen — in your face, engaged, passionate — and once signed up, he showered us with codes, sequence and masses of cool images. He also tried to explain to us just how these images were being made… “For the most part I create complex compositions using simple systems. In this system, 200 particles…

ROBERT DUGGAN WHITE Co-founder, Gilly & Rob Ltd www.gillyandrob.com “Sure, I’ll add that with no extra charge.” About six years ago, when I was a freelancer I was working on a website for a client who had a small transport company. It was just a standard website – a small number of pages, a few photos and a contact form. Simple. When the job was done, the client asked me about getting a business card designed and I naively offered to do it for free, thinking it would be a quick job. The client then got this idea that he wanted to have a bus with airplane wings, because his main business involved going to and from Dublin. It turned out to be a nightmare that dragged on and on.…

Rebelling against design conventions is one thing, but what about rethinking what a designer does in general? One woman who’s done precisely that is Nassia Inglessis. Her work combining design, cutting-edge science and engineering is truly groundbreaking and category-defying – from her 3D-printed glass architectural columns for Milan Design Week, to the convergence of craft and automation as Augmented Materiality in her installations for London’s V&A Museum. But that’s nothing new, as she’s been cheerfully disregarding career boundaries ever since she was a student. Having studied engineering at Oxford, Inglessis then got interested in art and design and how it could cross over with science. After training at The Royal College of Art, she eventually founded Studio INI, which she describes as “an experimental design studio with a human centric…

BEREN NEALE EDITOR The editor joined the animal-themed secret santa this year. He offered John Gray’s Straw Dogs to his recipient, who upon opening it instantly realised that all notions of progress are nonsense… Ho, ho, ho. MARK WYNNE ART EDITOR Mark attended Us By Night design festival, in which he aimed to impress the finest design minds in the world with his ping pong skills and trampoline agility, whilst demanding everyone call him Bing Bong. AARON POTTER PRODUCTION EDITOR Midway through this issue, Aaron ventured to Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland in search of holiday celebration. He instead discovered that London + Christmas + the weekend = a tourist’s nightmare.…

Having previously been a character designer, concept artist and art director working in the video game industry, you’d think that Raman Djafari would have run the gamut of his own personal artistic endeavours. Not so, as the Hamburg-based illustrator/animator is having far too much fun bringing his derisive brand of character art to the world of music videos. “They are always really intense and challenging with all the creative freedom one can wish for,” Djafari explains. “I prefer to be super focused on one project for a limited period of time, in comparison to long, drawn out projects that might be more relaxed but lack the thrill of being fully in the zone.” Djafari admits that his creative process is flexible, adapting as each project demands it. "The sketchbook tends…

CO-FOUNDER AND STRATEGY HEAD, BROWN & CO www.brownandco.co To impart any meaningful guidance on leadership, we should probably look first at what we mean by leadership, and how it is evolving. We should also acknowledge the lingering concept of a taskmaster — the factory foreman who ensures the workforce achieves as much as possible in a set period of time. Of course, this is not to suggest that things aren’t changing, and fast. We’re moving away from the increasingly redundant concepts of control, incentive and competitiveness that imply ‘employees’ would much rather be doing something else. Increasingly, we’re realising the transformative value of nurturing talent, enabling more flexible work and lifestyles, and inspiring each other to be the best we can be as equals. In a virtual working or virtual…

”Joy” is the word Victoria Bee keeps coming back to. A former art director, working in advertising, the Belgian’s career took an unexpected turn a few years back when she accepted an offer to make some props for a client. Advertising was always the dream job, but at an agency in Montréal she found herself spending long hours behind a desk. She missed working with her hands. So she took a job as a prop maker in London before going freelance; not just as a maker of props, but as a sculptor and set designer and paper crafter and art director and photographer — and anything else the commissions called for. She can make cardboard clouds, paper pineapples, foil lobsters. She can make giant razorblades, wrenches, lipsticks. She can make…

As a young boy just out of secondary education, I wanted to understand the design landscape much better. This was in the early ‘90s, at a time when consumerism was unbridled, unabashed and demanded quality, and when the beginning of the decade announced a human-focused aspect of forward design — or so everyone thought. My sister had an old university friend who worked at the Design Council in London’s Haymarket, and she knew that her little brother had an interest in design and was about to commence a degree in Media and Production Design at the London College of Printing (now the London College of Communication). At the time, the Design Council published the Design Journal. The articles were mainly centered upon celebrating industrial design projects in the UK. This…