|
Older |
Home
| Newer
26.03.08
Embarrassing early days at johnson banks
A few weeks ago Andy Whitlock, from the blog now in colour contacted us with a plan for various designers to post, on the same day, examples of their college work. Actually, to be fair he originally suggested school work but when I pointed out the distance between myself and those early band posters (about 200 miles to a Derbyshire attic), he relented. Nice idea. A couple of problems though - only recently The Bierut revealed his entire first portfolio on Design Observer which turned out to be, er, rather good. And in my case, half a decade later, I had started an obscure course in Marketing and Visual Art that didn’t really prepare me for the design world, or any kind of world really (unless you count an entire module dedicated to industrial buyer behaviour as useful). So my college folio is pretty much non-existent. And what is there is truly dreadful - that awful illustration above dates from my ‘Polish Illustration’ period. See what I mean? The only reasonable bits of work I can find come towards the end of college as I was looking for work and doing freelance on the side. This hilarious bit of eighties nonsense is a band identity that betrays my early love of Ladislav Sutnar and middle period Neville Brody. Mmm, jazzy.
Can you see the logos on the mike stands and funky hand-painted backdrop? OK, look, it was 1985. I apologise. It seemed exciting at the time. Mind you, the symbol could be used in several different crops, and came in different versions. Does that make it an early entry into the ‘flexible identity’ canon? Maybe not.
These are a bit better, an early upside downside logo for a man called Barry Olive and a burned out set of TV titles (I was in my Saul Bass stage) to pitch a show that never got showed. Why I decided that a man with a gift of a name like Barry Olive shouldn’t have some sort of olive logo is beyond me. 
I do remember spending a lot of time on this eye symbol, but it never got seen.
I found this as well, a typographic party invite that seems to revolve around endless experimentation with adjectives, or something (this time I seemed to be going through my Odermatt & Tissi phase). You always know something’s up when a designer’s best work is for party invites, birthday’s or leaving cards... All this stuff is long-windedly pre-computer and involved endless messing about with photocopiers, Letraset and a PMT machine. Ask someone grey if none of that made any sense. 
So, pretty disappointing really. I tell people that there’s no way I would have given myself a job when I left college, now perhaps they will see why. I was also asked to post a picture of myself then, and now. So on the left (and seemingly distressed, probably about my work) I’m about 19, and what I look like now. At least I cheered up. 
By Michael Johnson ........................................ Mindful of the fact that my work was pretty awful (and remembering that famous Miles Davis dictum - always employ people younger and better than you) I asked the designers to pick a couple of their college projects as well. Democracy and all that. Kath came up with this series of posters on a one-day project brief, to promote eating more fruit. The small text says: “eating five pieces of fruit per day can help protect you from cancer”
Julia chose a brief set by art website Eyestorm to create photographs using a white shirt. The photographs had to be inspired by an existing artwork from their website. These were inspired by Damien Hirst’s dots.
Kath and Julia were at college together and chose another couple of joint projects. Firstly an identity project for a space holiday company of the future called Breeze. The main photo shows the logo as a formation of five bubbles - the largest signifying the sun and the others the holiday destination planets.
Then stationery for a fabricated company ‘ball of wool’ (using their surnames Tudball and Woollams). As cats play with balls of wool, everything in the identity had an element of ‘cat’ - fur lined envelope, bell on the business card, well, you get the idea.
Miho chose her pencil typeface. It has four weights. The idea is that once you type something and you want to erase part of it, there would be an intermediate step where the erased face would appear to show the erasing
effect. She says that ‘Bruno Maag once said if I could get it to work, he would buy it’. So there. Her second piece is a 100 year calendar created for her dissertation to remind graphic designers to be socially responsible for the rest of their life.
Pali chose part of a campaign to raise awareness of how light pollution impairs the visibility of stars in the night sky, using photo-luminescent ink which absorbs light energy from the surroundings and re-emits it as an eco-friendly light source. 
His second piece is a ‘Seize the day’ calendar - created from self adhesive memo slips which can be torn off and used as visual prompts.
Thank you for your time. Up-to-date work to follow soon, we promise.
Back to the top |
AddThis
|
