September Industry » Sessions

Process Journal – Design Rationale

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:13:33 +0000

The Rationale
The design philosophy of Process Journal is quite simple; our goal was to create a portfolio that displays the work that designers do in the best possible way. Although there is plenty of inspirational content available online, we felt that the print medium could offer a different kind of reading experience – a more tangible and immersive engagement with designers than one might encounter in the transitory and cluttered universe of the internet. Plus, our background in print design meant that producing a ‘journal’ seemed like the most logical choice.

Adrian Shaughnessy (a contributor in the first edition of Process) captured this notion perfectly, “The problem with the internet is, sure, you can find imagery, but it usually comes without any context, and more importantly, you often can’t find it a second time. A book is permanent. It’s good technology—doesn’t need batteries and you can drop it and it won’t break.”

Although our readers may have already seen some of our images online, Process is not about breaking the latest design news; it is about taking a look behind the scenes at the process and understanding the journey the designer(s) have undertaken to arrive at the final product—hence the journal’s title.

This sense of movement and transformation is also reflected in our editorial decision to produce the bulk of the journal as a series of interviews. We are not about delivering strong editorial opinions in a magazine or news format,

rather, we like to consider Process as more of a printed documentary that falls somewhere between a book and a magazine.

Beyond the simple aim of capturing beautiful design, we also look at Process as a creative outlet and project for our studio. As Process isn’t accompanied by any client or other specific requirements we have an open brief, which enables us the freedom to experiment. Our aim is to build Process up to become a great source of design inspiration, and not just for our studio, but also for the wider design community.

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Session 2: Non-Format

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:06:54 +0000

The Brief
We don’t tend to get a brief from this particular record label. We’ve been working with Lo Recordings and their off-shoot label LoAF for many many years, so the label managers give us (almost) complete freedom to art direct and design in whatever way we see fit. Our relationship is based on a decade’s worth of trust.

The Solution
This is the third Black Devil Disc Club album we’ve designed for Lo/LoAF. The first album featured a close-up shot of a black & deep red lipsticked mouth accompanied by one of our super bold custom made typefaces. The second album featured an image specially created for the album by the Belgian illustrator Géraldine Georges, with another custom made typeface appearing on the back cover. We were keen to tie in this third album with the previous two in terms of visual language, so we worked with an image that was created as part of an experimental photo shoot with long-time collaborator Jake Walters, and created another custom made typeface especially for this project.

Yes, we were able to listen to the music before producing the album packaging. The album’s creator, Bernard Fevre, has been making music for many decades. His first album was released 1975 and was titled The Strange World Of Bernard Fevre. According to Lo Recordings the album was so far ahead of its time that even now people struggle to believe it was recorded over 30 years ago. Fevre’s background seems to be in the creation of production music – music used mostly as backgrounds for television, radio and movie productions. However, rather than any of the rather bland and faceless elevator music that’s often associated with this genre, Fevre’s recordings have a far more aggressive and darker edge.
Bernard Fevre now records under the name Black Devil Disco Club and this, the third album of his on Lo Recordings is partly new music and partly reissues, or remixes, from some of his older compositions. Which ones are which is something Fevre is reluctant to divulge and the album as a whole gives very few clues as to which tracks are new and which have been previously released.
As far as our art direction goes, we tried to continue the visual theme established with the first two Black Devil albums, 28 After and Eight Oh Eight. 28 After featured a photograph of a girl’s lips in heavy lipstick, with minimal lighting to create a darkly glamorous image. The second album featured a photo-collage by Belgian image-maker Géraldine Georges, so we wanted to create an image that would work alongside these previous albums. The image used is a heavily retouched composition created from a number of /images and is, again, a collaboration between photographer Jake Walters and ourselves.
The previous albums also both featured typefaces specially made for the packaging, so we continued this approach by creating a new typeface for this Strange New World album. Borrowing the balance between light and dark, that was the main theme of the typeface used on Eight Oh Eight, we again created a typeface with extreme contrast between its solid shapes and fine lines, but which owes its heritage more to German Blackletter than anything else. This typeface was then applied to spell out the name Bernard Fevre and was used as large as possible in a semi-abstract composition that accentuates its form rather than it’s function as a typeface.

You’ve developed a visually impressive back-catalog of work for Lo Recordings. Do you ever find that with Sleeve/Music design you’re allowed a greater degree of experimentation as opposed to designing for publications? Music packaging certainly allows for a great deal of freedom, so we seize the opportunity to experiment and to push ourselves as far as we can with each project. Designing music packaging isn’t exactly the most lucrative line of work these days, so we try to establish a relationship with the record label that will allow us to use music packaging design as a springboard for new ideas. Our hope is always that these projects will be seen by other clients who may be able to offer us projects that are better paid. Editorial design tends to offer quite a lot of creative freedom too. One of the great characteristics of editorial design is its ephemeral quality. It’s always reassuring to know that if we create something that was an experiment that didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, it’ll usually only be on the newsstands for about a month before it’s replaced.

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Session 1: Commonwealth x Build x Saccenti

admin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:32:51 +0000

Lard series furniture by Commonwealth
Photography by Timothy Saccenti
Photographic retouching by DopePope
Art direction/Design by Build
Print by Generation Press

The Brief To design a catalogue (utilising photography by Timothy Saccenti) showing off their range of prototype furniture called the ‘Lard series’ to be given out to prospective manufacturers.

The Solution Designed & printed on a tight budget we decided upon the format of slipcase, and 3 sets of concertina folded inserts. This sidestepped the cost of any binding which had we done would have wiped out the budget pretty much before we started.

The outer slipcase & inners are intended to mimic the furniture range but in reverse—the furniture is very plain and un-textured on the outside but the inside of the draws etc. are heavily textured. We decided on featuring the text (written by Zoe Coombes) on the outer slipcase (clear foil-blocked, with extra deep impression) mimicking the textural parts of the furniture.

The three parts of the catalogue (slipcase, Insert 1&2, Insert 3) consist of recycled box board, Phoenix Motion & Cyclus Offset printed items respectively. Inserts 1 & 2 carry Timothy’s beautiful photography of the furniture with minimal info, and a short bio on Commonwealth. Insert 3 (printed single colour) shows technical drawings of the furniture, by cropping into these the drawings became more image like in quality and not so harsh. The whole package is then kept together by the use of die-cut shoulders in the slipcase and a good old ‘laggy-band (you have no idea how long it took for us to source the right size/width!)

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