Two Brutalist Schools

Also had the privilege to go round two iconic post-war schools on London Open House weekend. The first was Erno Goldfinger's (and Wakefield architect Hubert Bennett's) Haggerston Girls School in Hackney. This was immediately a little underwhelming. But little by little i started to warm to the place - i started to realise of course that this was the model for so many comprehensive schools. Small details started to come into view - the cantilevered floor with floor to ceiling windows/ curtain wall, the strange rainwater spout with small pyramid on the ground (to disperse water??), the concrete bricks in a Op-Art formation acting as sound-proofing in the assembly hall, the double-height entrance, the accessible roof that had a picture of the Earth drawn on it that you could see the whole of the East End from.
Hallfield was something again. We walked round with a bloke who had been to the school when it first opened in 1956. It was interesting after seeing so many new schools built that here was a school built in the fifties with a progessive view of educating kids. Everything was designed from the perspective of the kids (my head kept hitting ceilings) and there were wide corridors, different size spaces from class spaces to one-to-one tuition, to a beautiful hall with elliptical wall and canteen.

London Open House

I went to London Open House this weekend - found myself down Alexandra Road, Swiss Cottage a place i've seen on films, TV dramas and pop promos (Tindersticks, Breaking and Entering, Waking the Dead). The flat we were shown around was one of the most beautiful i have ever been in. It was designed by Neave Brown in the sixties, taking its cue from the traditional London terrace. It's really photogenic but assumed it was quite an intimidating place. I was wrong - the flat we were shown around warm and welcoming, all scandanavian wood and cork floors. The flats were heated by coils in the wall, meaning there were no radiators or piping. Doors and windows were all flush, floor to ceiling and there room dividers on tracks to subdivide the spaces. It was something of an eye-opener for me and was very grateful to the hospitality of the host. Pity about the Open House officials who proceeded to deliver a rather boring and inappropriate lecture.

Introductory Booklet

The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of pen and camera alike
Moholy-Nagy

The most fundamental point : use the camera as a cinema-eye more perfect than the human eye for exploring the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe...I am camera-eye - I am mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you a world such as only I can see.
From now on and for always I cast off human immobility, I move constantly, I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under tham, I leap onto them, I move alongside the mouth of a galloping horse, I cut into a crowd...My mission is the creation of a new perception of the world. Thus I decipher in new ways a world unknown to you
Dziga Vertov

Graphic design is difficult to explain because it seems so easy to understand. An easy art, graphic design is in danger of falling victim to this easiness. (paraphrase of Christian Metz)

All it needs is the slightest detail to give a photo a meaning that is diametrically opposed to the one intended - the objectivity of an image is only an illusion.
Freund

Style is the diffference between a circle and how you draw it
Picasso

It begins with nursery rhymes and nonsense poems, with clapping games and finger play and simple songs and picture books. It goes on to consist of fooling about with the stuff the world is made of: with sounds, and with shapes and colours, and with clay and paper and wood and metal, and with language. Fooling about, playing with it, pushing it this way and that, turning it sideways, painting it different colours, looking at it from the back, putting one thing on top of another, asking silly questions, mixing things up, making absurd comparisons, discovering unexpected similarities, making pretty patterns, and all the time saying "Supposing ... I wonder ... What if ...It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won’t make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It’s when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.
Phillip Pullman

The habit of calling a finished product a Design is convenient but wrong. Design is what you do, not what you've done.
Bruce Archer, The Guardian

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.
Charles Eames

To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.
Milton Glaser, Graphic Designer

Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.
Louis Kahn

With function, flow, and form as basis, design is evaluated as a process culminating in an entity which intensifies comprehension.
Ladislav Sutnar, Graphic Designer

Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the intergration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. Thinking in relationships.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The details are not the details. They make the design.
Charles Eames

The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over.
Charles Eames

Good ideas come from everywhere. It’s more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.
Jeanne Gang

Be culturally literate, because if you don’t have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you’re not going to express anything to anybody else.
Paula Scher

You have to be interested in culture to design for it.
Lorraine Wild

Design must seduce, shape, and perhaps more importantly, evoke an emotional response.
April Greiman

Teachers of design should help a student to find their own voice. In other words, not be a templated version of the teacher, but rather to help them [the students] unfold what they already know and can bring to the table.
April Greiman

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoinè De Saint-Exupéry

There is no such thing as a boring project. There are only boring executions.
Irene Etzkorn

There’s nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.
Ansel Adams

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.
Milton Glaser

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange

The difference between good design and great design is intelligence.
Tibor Kalman

Good design, at least part of the time, includes the criterion of being direct in relation to the problem at hand—not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood.
Ivan Chermayef

Whoever said that pleasure is not a function?
Charles Eames


1. Note down and sketch every piece of what you call graphic design you encounter from waking up in a morning to walking through the door at University. What have you left out? Did you notice it all? Is graphic design everywhere or nowhere?

2. Draw a car, castle, a telephone, a self-portrait, in 3-4 minutes. then draw a car in 2 minutes. now take 30 seconds to draw a car. now 15 seconds. now 5 seconds.


3. Draw 5-10 second doodles of famous cartoon charaters from memory. Do at least 25 characters.

4. Collect 12 small objects that have something in common and photograph them. Put them in a sequence. put them in another totally different sequence. Put them in a slideshow and set each slide to change once every 10 seconds. Now do one where it changes every half a second and loop it.

5. By using four flat black squares of the same dimensions create an image to express ORDER<>

6. Tell the story of Jack and Jill using only Webdings

7. Draw 3 circles, squares and triangles equally spaced on a sheet of paper. Make other images whilst maintaining the integrity of the shape.

8. Design a road sign for the following; Fortune Teller, Crack Alley, Red Light District, Nuclear Power Plant, Flea Circus, Working Class District,

9. Draw a map of your route from your house to University. It does not need to be at all accurate.

10. Graphically represent the following sounds ; Car Crash, Clock, Typewrite, Conversation Between an Overbearing Boss and Passive Worker, An Electric Guitar and a Flute,

11. With a stack of memo cards or index cards write; something you overheard recently in a public place, something you said to someone earlier that day, a catch phrase or slogan, a question of some kind,
Next to these DRAW THE FOLLOWING; the saddest thing you can think of, the funniest thing you can think of, something sexy, something abstract, something scary, something boring or mundane. Mix the drawings with the wriiten phrases.

12. Draw the following
The beginning of the world
The end of the world
A self-portrait including your whole body
Something that happened at breakfast
An image from a recent dream
Something that has yet to happen to you
Pick the moment after one of the previous images.

Put them into a triptych.

Architectural magazines 196X-197X

Bugger. An exhibition at the Architectural Association of avant garde architectural magazines from the sixties through to the early seventies that I've missed. Seems like a really interesting exhibition. Oh well, I've always got the website.....

For all those apologetic students who say they "want to make things look nice."

I've just sat through four days of tutorials with students who are often slightly apologetic about their interest in "making things look nice". Here is a really useful article for all those students.

Gondry vs. Motorola

Wow. Gondry advert for Motorola that the company in their inimitable wisdom found "too arty". Heathens. Philistines.

Sara Nesteruk film screening

Make sure you all come to a post-Leeds Film Festival screening of Sara Nesteruk's new film 'The Accident', made as part of Channel 4's Mesh animation scheme. This has been screened only once before - at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August.
Sara is a former student on the Graphics course at Leeds Met before she went onto the Royal College of Art to study animation. She has made a number of short films as well as having produced idents/ stings for the BBC. The film will be supported by Greig Johnson's 'Sauce' and a small number of student films.

More Scott King

More from the lecture by Scott King on Wednesday 31st October.

Scott King Lecture audio

Here are 40 minutes of the recent lecture by Scott King (ex-iD magazine, SleazeNation) for students on the Graphic Arts and Design course at Leeds Metropolitan University. I'll follow this by putting the David Shrigley lecture earlier this month on my blog.
I thought this was a really interesting lecture. It raised all kinds of questions about the co-option of subversive images by fashion, style magazines so that the irony loses its edge and is peddled as simple rebellious rhetoric, stripped of its true danger and sold to individual consumers as lifestyle choice. I enjoyed most of the work but also realised that this was a very privileged career in many ways (obviously earned through hard work and a singular vision) - employed by i-D and Terry Jones very early on, gallery sponsorship etc. I think he was pretty rigorously honest about his ambivalence towards his gallery work - which was very refreshing to hear. I was pretty amazed at the lack of interest by students in asking questions as I would have expected this stuff to be extremely relevant to their work, but I'll be charitable and believe it was some collective shyness rather than any lack of engagement.