Non-Format

Non-Format is a creative team comprising Kjell Ekhorn (Norwegian) and Jon Forss (British). They work on a range of projects including art direction, design and illustration for music industry, arts & culture, fashion and advertising clients.

I really like their typographic work. It has that graphic design thing but pushes the envelope a bit. They obviously know their stuff, but their designs aren't conservative. I also really like the way many of them are black and white, no mid-tones, and still work really well. It's powerful stuff. I hope over the next year (or 2 if i do the BA course 3rd year) to be able to try many typographic "experiments", like limited colour palletes, black and white or a bit of print work. I hope this will give me more ideas to "cash in" later when I leave.

Transistor

More fantasic design that moves. I am well into trying to get some decent vector pieces together myself quite soon (although i would be perfectly content to do some good looking stills for now!), and I want to mess about with that slight 3d feel. This has exactly that, although not quite as groovy as the Airside stuff, it does has excellent movement. check it out out out...

Airside

I have been a huge fan of Airside's work before I'd ever heard of them, as I own a load of Lemon Jelly's records, and half of Lemon Jelly is Airside's co-founder and creative director Fred Deakin.

There seems to be loads of crossover from the world of music and design, and here it pops up again. I have always loved the Airside stuff, mostly because of it's colour and groovy illustration. I will write a full analysis again, as they cover so much good ground from print, installations, web, video, music. ace.

Airside have recently done this spot for Mika. Much of Airside's older work is vibrant and in full technicolour, full of great little characters whom they appear to adapt from all over the place (mostly from Japanese character design). The Mika spot carries on that tradition from the LemonJelly stuff, and their style is most suitable for Mika, the flamboyant new kid on the block.

Bruce Wymer

Bruce's portfolio is very impressive. starting out with a print and illustration basis he expands into branding, motion and installation work. Very stylish and mega-cool. It would be good to collabrate with illustrators for motion work whilst at college. It could be a great opportunity for all concerned.

Louise Fili

Louise Fili is a specialist designer of logos and restaurant identities, and also has a pedigree stretching back to the 1970's, when she was a senior designer for Herb Lubalin. She has also collaborated with Steven Heller on many books generally covering design history, such as Victorian era typography and art deco. This is reflected in her identities for restaurants.

I am very much interested in a wide range of typography, from hand-drwn to historical stuff. My dad was on course to become an art teacher when I was a kid of about 4 or 5, and he was totally into the 1930's era. Art Deco, Busby Berkely and that depression era between the two world wars, and the art and cinema of that time. He had these books about when I was growing up, and I used to copy the lettering. I guess that decorative style made an impact on me even when I was only about 13. Strangely enough, my dad didn't end up in art, and has been a social worker since the late 1970's. He still has great taste, and I find now I am studying again that he is into loads of cool stuff, Man Ray, Brassai, Toulouse-Lautrec (Great Posters, love the typography). Hopefully from all this there is a connection.

Panda Panther

Excellent new studio, although the people concerned have worked with many of the big creatives in the industry, so the reel is full is full of well known clips. I like the Illustration angle with the motion graphics.

Panda Panther do branding, short films, music videos, graphics and illustration.

Blind / Crazy

Blind are another of those big Californian design companies that also have a NY office. They have huge clients for all the usual monster brands like Nike and Microsoft, however I am just posting this as I'd seen the video for Gnarls Barclay "Crazy" many times (the world's best selling track of 2006), which appears to be an After Effects / graphic type project.

This is something I am very interested in. I also have many contacts in the music world, and could possible be able to at least be able to pitch ideas for this kind of thing if I had the skills/talent/ideas. This for me is a huge motivation!

Their main site is here.

Paper Fights back

BBDO NY, Dante Ariola, Digital Domain, and an army of paper demons raise a little hell in this new spot for Pepsi Cola's energy drink Amp.

Fuel

Fuel are a huge mutidisciplinary design / motion graphics studio based in California. They seem to do lots of very corporate work, but have a very inspired approach. There is a great spot they have done for McDonalds here

Their 2006 reel can be viewed here.

Some of the other students in our first year critical studies class seem to think that anything linked to the big corporations is fundamentally wrong, yet it's those very companies that hire the coolest people and fund this kind of great creative work. Creative people must eat!

In my previous job as a dance music remix producer, for a very long time dance music was really big, and during that period money was made by doing 'cool' underground work to gain credibity, but getting money for remixing very big multinatonal acts. The record companies wouldn't necessarily want commercial work. They always wanted to link their act or barnd to your 'cool' thing. I think this is the case at the moment with the motion graphics people.

Dstrukt

Originally hailing from Manchester, Chris is a skilled motion designer, animator and art director. Inspired by movie titles and with a background in both online and traditional media, Chris began working under the name Dstrukt producing work for a number of high end clients including MTV Networks Europe, Channel 5, BBC, Vodafone, Discovery Channel and VH1.

Chris is also regularly featured in design and industry magazines, such as Computer Arts and IdN, and presents at design conferences around the world. As well as running Dstrukt and numerous personal projects, he co-founded the experimental film collective Devoid of Yesterday with Rob Chiu from The Ronin. Chris is passionate about photography, music and cinema and channels these influences into his glitchy, dark and edgy creations

Dstrukt is currently a fully active Motion Graphics studio catering in 3D, Compositing, Animation & Art Direction. Chris is also a key member of London based motion house Wyld Stallyons.

Watch The VH1 "Smells Like The 90's" short here

See the AWESOME showreel here

Neu Black

Illustrator Paul Huang, creator of Nanospore, recently teamed up with animators Chris Riehl and Sean Starkweather to create an amazing animated video for Nike Japan. The piece is part of a viral marketing campaign promoting the Nike Free Trainer 7.0.

Commissioned as a short film, the video depicts the selling points for Nike’s new “Meta7″ shoe. The story was both illustrated and written by Huang. The characters, Anieruz (circle), Seveno (square), and Manipith (triangle), disappear from their oppressed lives and return transformed with new powers. Accompanied by a print and sculpture campaign, the pieces toured Asia debuting at Tokyo Designer’s week.

HunterGatherer

These guys are awesome.

Gunshop

Digital Kitchen

Digital Kitchen are a massive Graphic Design / Branding / Motion Graphics firm based in Seattle. They have recently done a great ident for the Sundance Film Festival

About "Heroes and Heroines"

Dear Teachers,

I spent the most time researching the designers / film makers etc lowest down on the page. The ones that got me most excited were:

Saul Bass
Hi-Res!
Kyle Cooper
Michel Gondry
Spike Jonze

Jonathan Barnbrook

Since 1990, London-based Barnbrook Design has been producing innovative work that combines a mixture of typographic structure, politics and irony. The studio, which chooses to remain small, and works on projects without worrying about "bringing in the money," has created such fonts as Mason and Exocet for Emigre, plus others released through Barnbrook's own font foundry, Virus.

Barnbrook has collaborated with contemporary artists, including the much-acclaimed Damien Hirst on the monograph I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere with everyone, one to one always, forever now. Currently the studio is preoccupied with work that questions the critical role of graphic design in society, including work with Adbusters and specially commissioned pieces of graphic authorship.

Susan Kare

Susan Kare (born 1954 in Ithaca, New York) is the original designer of many of the interface elements for the original Apple Macintosh. She joined Apple Computer after receiving a call from friend Andy Hertzfeld in 1983.

Kare is the designer of many typefaces, icons, and original marketing material for the Macintosh OS. Indeed, descendants of her groundbreaking work can still be seen in many computer graphics tools and accessories, especially icons such as the Lasso, the Grabber, and the Paint Bucket. An early pioneer of pixel art, her most recognizable works from her time with Apple are the Chicago typeface (the most prominent user interface typeface seen in Classic Mac OS, as well as the typeface used in the first three generations of the Apple iPod interface), the Geneva typeface, Clarus the Dogcow, the Happy Mac (the smiling computer that welcomed Mac users on starting their machines for 18 years, until Mac OS X 10.2 replaced it with a grey Apple logo), and the symbol on the Command key on Apple keyboards (also known as the Apple key).

After leaving Apple in 1985, she became one of the first ten NeXT employees. Since 1988, she has been a successful independent graphic designer working with clients such as Microsoft and IBM. Her projects for Microsoft included the card deck for Windows 3.0's solitaire game, as well as numerous icons and design elements for Windows 3.0. Many of her icons, such as those for Notepad and various Control Panel applications, remained essentially unchanged by Microsoft until Windows XP. For IBM she produced icons and design elements for OS/2; for Eazel she contributed iconography to the Nautilus file manager.

Kare received her B.A., summa cum laude, in Art from Mount Holyoke College in 1975 and her Ph.D. from New York University.

Pieces on Kare can be found at Design Boom and in Creative Review's September 2006 issue.

Jamie Reid

Jamie Reid (born 1947), educated at John Ruskin Grammar School in Croydon, is a British artist and anarchist with connections to the situationist movement. His work, featuring letters cut from newspaper headlines in the style of a ransom note came close to defining the image of punk rock, particularly in the UK. His best known works include the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and the singles "Anarchy in the UK", "God Save The Queen", "Pretty Vacant" and "Holidays in the Sun".

Reid produced a series of screen prints in 1997, the twentieth anniversary of the birth of Punk rock. Reid has also produced artwork for the world music fusion band Afro Celt Sound System. Jamie Reid created the ransom-note look used with the Sex Pistols graphics while he was designing Suburban Press, a radical political magazine he ran for five years.

Vaughan Oliver

Vaughan Oliver (born 1957) is a graphic designer based in Wandsworth, South West London. Oliver is most noted for his work with graphic design studio v23 (once named 23 Envelope), which maintained a close relationship with seminal record label 4AD between 1982 and 1998, designing posters and record sleeves for the labels' artists.

For many he is a huge influence. I found this quote off amazon's site "Vaughan Oliver is probably the most influential designer in the past 20 years as he merged both graphic design and fine art into a new graphic language. Forget one trick ponies such as David Carson, the Designer's Republic and Tomato, Vaughan is THE true pioneer".

There are several books available on him, such as Visceral Pleasures by Rick Poyner and Vaughan Oliver: This Rimy River - Graphic Works 1988-94:

Attik

Soon after graduating from Batley School of Art in 1986, Simon Needham and James Sommerville together founded ATTIK in their hometown of Huddersfield, England. With a grant from the Prince’s Trust and a good deal of ambition, James and Simon set up shop in an attic bedroom in the house of James’ grandmother – the very room the company would be named after. They bought themselves the then-revolutionary Apple Mac and set about evolving the design sensibility that would eventually gain them a trip to Buckingham Palace.

The graphic style they made their initial reputation on was a combination of passionate energy – sheer creative freedom – and the discipline of form, in particular, the use of multiple layering. In fact, multi-layered energetic explosions typify what came to be known, especially early on, as ATTIK style. It was this style – best exemplified in the experimental books produced in NoiseLab – that grew the company from Huddersfield to London, and from London to the United States (New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles), with strong affiliates in both Asia and Australia.

By the mid-90s, the company became known for working in just about every medium conceivable, from broadcast to Web to music videos. As time went on, ATTIK began to centre its focus on brand communications and guardianship so as to maximise the effect of all marketing angles and platforms. With this shift in focus came a refining of the company’s design style – every bit as passionate and energetic, but now cleaner, less cluttered, more classic.

It was during this phase, in 2004, that Simon and James were invited to the royal residence to be honoured, in an audience with the Queen, for their contributions to British (and global) design. It pleased the Queen no end to learn that the £1,000 grant James and Simon had received from her son’s trust was the starting point for an exploration in progressive imaging that, like a work in progress, continues to surprise and provoke the world of design.

The Designers Republic

The Designers Republic (TDR or miTDR for short) is a group of graphic designers, founded on July 14, 1986 by Ian Anderson, and based in Sheffield, England. It is known for its anti-establishment aesthetics.

Initially, Ian Anderson founded TDR to design flyers for the band Person to Person, which he managed at the time. His first ideas were inspired by Russian constructivism. From their beginning, the works should be viewed in contrast to the current understanding of design (Quote: TDR is a declaration of independence from what we perceive to be the existing design community).

An early client was Leeds band Age of Chance, for whom they developed a series of striking record covers from 1986-1987. The sleeve of Don't Get Mad ... Get Even was one of Q Magazine's 100 Best Record Covers Of All Time (2001).
The Designers Republic were introduced to a larger audience by their record covers for the English electronica label Warp Records. They designed the covers of CDs by Autechre and Aphex Twin, but also for artists such as Fluke, Funkstörung, Supergrass, Pop Will Eat Itself and Towa Tei.

Outside of the musical sector, TDR created the visuals, packaging and manual for the PlayStation game Wipeout, the interface for the PC game Hardwar, and packaging and posters for the first Grand Theft Auto. They cooperated with the Swatch company in 1996 to design their own watch. They also designed the packaging for Sony's Aibo.

The book 3D → 2D: Adventures In And Out Of Architecture, released in 2001, was an architectural examination of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia presented in the graphic style of their previous work. The book was preordered by over 3,000 fans, but fell short of the expectations of some due to a lack of seemingly innovative material.

Current members are Ian Anderson, Nick Bax, Si Billam, Nathan Dytor, Jules Feely, Daniel Fleetwood, Martin Fewell, Steve McKevitt, Darren Pascoe and Richard Wright.

There are pieces and interviews with them here, here and here

John Maeda

John Maeda is a world-renowned graphic designer, visual artist, and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and is a founding voice for “simplicity” in the digital age.

Named by Esquire magazine as one of the 21 most important people for the twenty-first century, Maeda first made his mark by redefining the use of electronic media as a tool for expression for people of all ages and skills. He is the recipient of the highest career honors for design in the United States, Japan, and Germany and serves on the board of trustees for the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. A faculty member at the Media Lab since 1996, Maeda holds the E. Rudge and Nancy Allen Professorship of Media Arts and Sciences, and co-directs the Lab’s design-oriented Physical Language Workshop and its SIMPLICITY consortium. He has had major exhibits of his work in Paris, London, New York, and Tokyo, and has written several books on his philosophy of “humanizing technology” through his perspective on the digital arts.

Maeda received both his BS and MS degrees from MIT, and earned his PhD in design from Tsukuba University Institute of Art and Design in Japan. In May 2003, he received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and completed his MBA in May of 2006. Maeda is a sought-after lecturer on “simplicity” at major universities and boardrooms throughout the world. He lives with his wife, Kris, and their five daughters, Saaya, Naoko, Reina, Rie, and Mika, in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Maeda's homepage is here and pieces on him can be found here, here and here.

Lars Von Trier

Lars von Trier was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was raised by nudist Jewish Communist parents who did not allow much room in their household for "feelings, religion, or enjoyment," as von Trier later said. The young Lars found in cinema an outlet to the outside world through which he could learn about subjects otherwise forbidden from his study by his parents. He began making his own films at the age of 11 after receiving a Super-8 camera as a gift and continued to be involved in independent moviemaking throughout his high school years.

Von Trier suffers from multiple phobias, including an intense fear of flying. As the director once put it, "Basically, I'm afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking." His fear of air travel frequently places severely limiting constraints on him and his crew, necessitating that virtually all of his films be shot in either Denmark or Sweden, even those set in the United States or other foreign countries. Von Trier has had a number of his films featured at the Cannes Film Festival over the course of his career, and each time has insisted on driving from Denmark to France for the festival and back.

Von Trier has said that “a film should be like a rock in the shoe”. In order to create original art he feels that filmmakers must distinguish themselves stylistically from other films, often by placing restrictions on the filmmaking process. The most famous restriction is the cinematic "vow of chastity" of the Dogme95 movement with which he is associated, though only one of his films, The Idiots, is an actual Dogme95 film. In Dancer in the Dark, dramatically-different color palettes and camera techniques were used for the "real world" and musical portions of the film, and in Dogville everything was filmed on a sound stage with no set where the walls of the buildings in the fictional town were marked as a line on the floor.

Von Trier often shoots his scenes for longer periods than most directors to encourage actors to stay in character. In Dogville he let actors stay in character for hours, in the style of method acting. The rules and restrictions are a break from the traditional Hollywood production, though directors such as Robert Altman have long been using such techniques of working with actors. These techniques often put great strain on actors, most famously with Björk during the filming of Dancer in the Dark.

more can be read on Von Trier here and here.

The Chase

The Chase are based in Manchester, cover a lot of disciplines, do a lot of work for institutions in the UK, including Marks and Spencer, their money bags design having won a Roses Design Award.

Yugo Nakamura

Regarded as one of the world's most innovative web designers, YUGO NAKAMURA (1970-) is renowned for the wit and complexity of the interactive animations he creates for his personal sites.
When Yugo Nakamura unveiled Version 2.0 of his MONOcrafts site in 1999, it caused a sensation in the web design community. One of the first designers to use the then-newly developed Flash 4 software, Nakamura had devised fluid, naturalistic images which proved how powerful a creative tool Flash 4 could be.
MONOcrafts was the product of nearly a decade of experimentation by Nakamura since he had discovered digital media in 1990. Born in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan in 1970, he originally studied civil engineering and landscape architecture at Tokyo University. After graduation, Nakamura spent four years working on bridge building projects.

As a civil engineer, he had become obsessed by his relationship with his surroundings. Nakamura's interest in digital media was sparked by his desire to create an abstract version of that relationship and also to make things by hand. An important influence was John Maeda, the creative technologist and theoretician whose work at MIT Media Lab has been devoted to transforming the computer into a creative catalyst, rather than a functional tool.

Through MONOcrafts and subsequent interactive design projects, such as those on his www.yugop.com site, Nakamura, now based in Tokyo, has striven to replicate the exquisite detailing and refinement of traditional Japanese craftsmanship on the web. Technically, his work is exceptionally complex: borne of the intellectual rigour of his early training in civil engineering and landscape architecture. Yet to the user, Nakamura's interactive images appear engagingly playful thanks to their elegant naturalism and wry wit.

More can be read on Yogo here and here

Why Not Associates

Why Not Associates are a big design firm set up by David Ellis and Andrew Altman covering branding, motion graphics, print, enviromental design, and have had two books out about their practice, Why Not? and Why Not Associates? 2 . Ellis and Altman studied at the St Martins College of Art.

More can be read on them here. and here. As you can see from the pictures they have done several title sequences for big BBC programs.

Neville Brody

Neville Brody was born in Southgate,London on April 23, 1957. At school, Brody studied A-Level Art, very much from a fine art viewpoint. In 1975 Brody went to on to be a Fine Art foundation course at Hornsey College of Art, once renowned for its late sixties agitation, now safely amalgamated into Middlesex University.
In autumn 1976, Brody started a three-year B.A. course in graphics at the London College of Printing. His tutors often condemned his work as "Uncommercial", often putting a heavy emphasis on safe and tested economic strategies, as opposed to experimentation.

By 1977 punk rock was beginning to have a major effect upon London life and, while this had a great impact upon Brody's work and motivation, was not well received by his tutors. At one point he was almost thrown out of the college for putting the Queen's head sideways on a postage stamp design. He did, however, get the chance to design posters for student converts at the lecp, most notably for Pere Ubu, supported by The Human League.
In spite of the postage stamp episode, Brody was not only motivated by the energies of punk. His first-year thesis had been based around a comparison between Dadaism and Pop Art.

Neville Brody is an alumnus of the London College of Communication and is known for his work on The Face magazine (1981–1986) and Arena magazine (1987–1990), as well as for designing record covers for artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and Nine Inch Nails.
He was one of the founding members of FontFont (now FontShop) in London and designed a number of notable typefaces for them. He was also partly responsible for instigating the FUSE project an influential fusion between a magazine, graphics design and typeface design. Each pack includes a publication with articles relating to typography and surrounding subjects, four brand new fonts that are unique and revolutionary in some shape or form and four posters designed by the type designer usually using little more than their included font.

He now continues to work as a graphic designer with his own design practise called Research Studios which in addition to London has studios in Paris and Berlin. The studios work on a wide range of projects including packaging for Kenzo Perfumes, to creating branding for companies such as Macromedia and HomeChoice.

My View:

I have Read Jon Wozencroft's first book on Brody "The Graphic Language of Neville Brody: v1" which documents Brody's early career, his outlook and influences and career up until the late 80's. Brody was something of a rebel, and was a big success in the 1980's with all his record sleeve designs and The Face, which was huge and original at that time. I hadn't read too much of what he did later, but i do know he did a lot of experimental typography, which is quite interesting as Brody is quoted as saying he hated typography in his book, and only gained his interest later by doing his own, drawing his own customised stuff for the Face.

In the 90's Brody became a director of Font Shop International with whom he launched the experimental type magazine, FUSE. Brody has exhibited at the V&A, and has recently undertaken a redesign for UK's Times and updated the famous Times typeface, times modern. more details can be read here.

Daniel Brown

One of the pioneering generation of self-taught web designers, DANIEL BROWN is noted for the humour and playfulness of his interactive animations often inspired by nature.
Like many web designers Daniel Brown discovered the medium - and drew his early inspiration - from the video games he had played since childhood. He then sought to refine the frenzied, sometimes brutal aesthetics of those games by creating interactive images for the web which would have the same sensory effect on the user as listening to a beautiful piece of music.

Born in Liverpool in 1977, Brown grew up among computers, both by playing video games and watching his father at work as a pioneer of computer graphics. After his father left Liverpool, a family friend the late Roy Stringer, who worked in the Learning Methods Unit at the city's John Moores University, allowed Brown to use the computers there.
The Learning Methods Unit was then developing early interactive learning tools on CD-Rom and the internet. After Brown left school, Stringer gave him a job at Amaze, the design company spun out of the Unit. Brown also developed a personal site, www.noodlebox.com. When it was launched in 1997, noodlebox introduced a fluid, playfulness to web design, in contrast to the pragmatic, often sterile visual style which then dominated the medium.

Now based in London where he works for the SHOWstudio web site, Daniel Brown has harnessed subsequent advances in technology to imbue new work - such as Bits and Pieces - with light, texture and the illusion of three-dimensionality. Often inspired by nature, his projects have a spontaneity and freshness even when he revisits old themes like Flowers and Butterflies. His goal in his interactive work is to elicit an instinctive response from the user by making them forget the technology.

Daniel Brown has replaced noodlebox with Play/Create, a site on which he posts his experimental work and that of other designers. After participating in the Design Museum's Web Wizards exhibition in 2002, he featured in the Great Brits, the survey of new British design organised by the Design Museum and British Council in Paul Smith's Milan headquarters during the April 2003 Milan Furniture Fair. Daniel Brown won the Design Museum's Designer of the Year prize in 2004.

There is a good piece on Daniel Brown on the Design Museum site here

James Jarvis

Amos was set up in 2002 by James Jarvis, Sofia Prantera and Russell Waterman. James had previously been designing toys for fashion brand Silas, beginning with the now legendary Martin figure, released back in 1998. Along with Bounty Hunter in Japan, Silas unwittingly became one of the pioneers of the soft vinyl designer toy revolution. With help from Bounty Hunter, who had already released two figures, Martin was unleashed on an unsuspecting world and the work of James Jarvis reached a whole new audience. For the following 5 years, Silas continued to pander to popular demand and release James' designs under both the Silas banner and as part of his World of Pain project. The Silas figures were Martin, Evil Martin and Bubba, Tattoo Me Keith and The Bearded Prophet. The WoP figures were the Policeman and Lars. All of these figures have become very collectable and some trade hands for exorbitant sums on eBay.

Because of the success of these figures, and to stop Mr. Jarvis selling his soul to The Man (he also produced the set of Juvenille Delinquents for the Sony Capsule Toy project), James and the two directors of Silas decided to create a new company. Amos was set up to independently produce and disribute James' figures; to take his work out of a "fashion" context and open up his designs to a wider audience; and to develop new projects and offer new oppurtunities to other artists whom they had worked with.

James Jarvis studied Illustration at the University of Brighton then at The Royal College of Art. There is a good interview with Jarvis on the Design Museum's site - click here

His homepage is here

JAMES JARVIS
James Jarvis graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1995. Since then he has embarked on a busy career creating numerous characters and fantasy worlds for commercial advertising and magazine editorial. He has worked for large international clients such as Sony, Nokia and Parco and contributed to a number of international style publications including The Face, Nova and Relax.

He has also contributed to a number of art book projects and had a collection of his sketches published by Relax Magazine in Japan. Jarvis has shown his work at various exhibitions worldwide including prestigious stand-alone shows at the Parco galleries in Tokyo, Nagoya and Hiroshima (during 2000 and 2001). In conjunction with these exhibitions he released two solo comic books detailing his World of Pain concept. These were also accompanied by Lars and The Policeman, two collectible 20cm plastic figures which have since become cult items. Indeed, Jarvis is perhaps best known for his plastic creations which have helped shape the infant, but growing world of designer toys and collectible figures. He is responsible for a large cast of almost 100 characters, now forever immortalised in plastic. Having previously designed figures for Silas and Maria, and Sony’s Time Capsule vending machine project, he co-founded Amos Novelties Limited which is now the exclusive base for all of his toy figure work.

Digit

I got his stuff off Digit's site:

Digit has been around for almost 10 years, and during that time we’ve experienced all the highs and lows that this industry has to offer. In spite of this we've stayed true to our founding principles of Simple Human Interaction, and are proud that they are still as relevant today as they ever were. They say that you are only as good as your last piece of work, but occasionally it’s nice to remember...

moments
ever increasing choice and media noise mean that never before have we had such a small window of opportunity to grab consumer attention. as a result, the moment of interaction has become the new marketing battleground. digit uses a combination of strategy, creativity, technology and r&d to deliver leading businesses moments that matter.

creativity
creativity is at the heart of everything we do. we believe in bringing brands and products to life through a combination of big ideas and engaging design that allow consumers to interact in new and surprising ways.

technology
technology plays a vital part in all our lives. it can be a source of great wonder and great frustration. we understand these two extremes, and ensure that technology is applied sensitively. used as a tool to engage, but one that lives in the background as a silent force.
strategy
everyone looks for context in what they are doing, and digit is no different. we use research and experience to develop strong strategic insights that help us identify solutions that answer our clients’ needs. this ensures that what we come up with not only answers the brief, but is fully accountable.

r&d
research & development is an integral part of our business. we invest time and resource to learn and explore ideas, and develop technologies that help drive and support them. this ensures that our solutions are always cutting edge, and our clients ahead of the game.


The 6 guiding principles that inform their work

Ordinary
Interactions work best when they are reduced to their fundamentals and technologies work best when we take things away. Technologies should be ordinary, boring even, using familiar objects where possible.

Physical
Our brains work best when our mind and body are entwined and making problems physical reduces the cognitive load, it literally helps us to think. ‘Tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember, involve me and I will understand.’

Play
Emotions really do matter. We process information best when we are relaxed. When in this state, play can be a powerful driver of investigation and discovery

Surprise
You can create real satisfaction by giving an interaction hidden depths... additional content or functionality that is only revealed later in the process.

Reward
The best interactions reward the user with clear and unequivocal feedback throughout the process.

Flow
Interactions are dynamic, requiring give and take, sensitivity and adaptability. The user needs to be able to put some of himself into the exchange.


My View:

Digit, like Hi-Res! have been on the forefront of web design in the UK for years, and have been very successful. Their website for Habitat I think a superb example. It think they maybe aren't as conceptual and plainly cool as Hi-Res! but they have a big portfolio of wealthy clients, and I think the kind site Hi-Res! did for Beck or Donnie Darko isn't suitable for Sky+ or Vodaphone. I would definitely like to research them further.

April Greiman

Her work evolved from her graduate education at Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland. As a student of Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart in the early 1970s, Greiman was not only influenced by the International Style, but also by Weingart’s introduction to the style later to become known as New Wave, an aesthetic less reliant on the Modernist heritage. Greiman is credited, along with early collaborator Jamie Odgers as establishing the New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s.

Prior to the mid-80s, designers shunned computers, viewing them as challenges to the crispness of the International style. However, Greiman did not feel that this should be a limitation, and embracing the physicality of digital work in terms of pixelation, "errors" in digitization, etc.

In 1986, she used Macintosh computers to create a noted issue of Design Quarterly, edited by Mildred Friedman and published by the Walker Art Center, entitled Does it make sense?

Among many other accolades, Greiman is a recipient of the American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal for lifetime achievement.

David Carson

David carson is the American Graphic designer and typographer famous for his innovative magazine layouts, original aesthetic, and like Neville Brody has experimented widely with typography. Many cite Carson as the most influential graphic designer of the 90's, and is commonly dubbed as the "Father of grunge", due to his dirty style.

Carson was also a professional surfer in the late 80's, ranked 9th in the world, and much of his earlier work was for surfer magazines such as Beach Culture , and through which Carson made his first significant impact into the world of Graphic Design and Typography. Carson then went on to develop his signature style at various magazines before launching Ray Gun, a lifestyle and music magazine which brought him to the attention of the New York Times and Newsweek, who both featured him and increased his publicity greatly. (more on this period can be read here)

Carson then went on to Launch David Carson Design, and has Nike, Microsoft, Pepsi, Levi Strauss, British Airways, Intel, Mercedez Benz and Budweiser as clients. His more recent "New School" typography and photography based style has won Carson numerous awards, and Creative Review cited him as "The Most famous graphic designer on the planet" in 2004.

Crason also lectures extensively throughout the world and holds a week long workshop at the School of Visual Arts in NYC every summer.


My View:

Carson is quite an interesting subject, as I read he only ever attended a three week course in Graphic Design intended for high school students, yet went on to forge his own style and is uber successful. Opinions on him seems to be divided, with people either loving or hating his work. I admit that at this point I am not that familiar with it yet, but will be keeping a look out for it from here on.