Newclear Design

When I came back from Berlin I spoke to somebody who had a friend called Phil that is a director of a company called Newclear Design based in Manchester.

I didn't get to actually go to the offices as he said there was a lot of work lying around that his company are doing at the moment to do with huge canvases they've started creating. So we met at a local coffee shop where I showed him my portfolio and explained the kind of pathway I want to go down when I leave University which is to do something in either advertising, packaging/ product design.

To me this was a different experience to my previous visits to agencies as it was in a much more comfortable environment and had taken out a lot of time to sit and talk to me about his past experiences from leaving University to being where he is now. It was very interesting to find that he started in product design, then did a bit of freelancing and then decided to collaborate with his friend Ben who he went to University with who studied psychology but is also a photographer. He explained that this was good because clients trust their company a lot more as they have knowledge of what works in the industry and how peoples minds work and how we understand different designs.

Phil also told me that there are many stresses and strains of graphic design such as people wanting to change things at the last minute but its all part of the job which is a challenge and if you like a challenge you're right for the job.

He showed me a brochure of the kinds of things that his company creates such as:

Logo Design

Corporate Branding

Advertisements

Brochures

Posters

Leaflets

eShot Campaigns

Magazine Design and Layout

Product Packaging

Exhibition Design

Graphics for Print

And much, much more

He told me it would be worth perhaps E-mailing different graphic companies and do a placement for a couple of weeks for free. This then boosts skills and confidence in the industry and he said that sometimes they may even want to take you on for a job with them. This is something that I will definitely give a go because it's all about making contacts too.

He also told me to E-mail him some of the canvases I paint in my own free time to see what he thinks of them and if any contacts he knows would be interested in buying them. And he told me to stay in touch and keep E-mailing him some new recent things that I get up to and create.

This is the kind of company that in reality I would like to work for. It seems fast paced, a challenge and a good small group of people that work well together. Their work is flawless and to work as a collaboration can only be a good thing as they learn different things from each other all the time.

Hesign

Whilst on my travels in Berlin I went to an agency called hesign run by Jianping He (on the left). He has two agencies of the same name one based in Berlin and the other in Shanghai.

He was a lovely man who has a very witty nature about him. He always sees his problems as being funny and he will make his creation out of it.

I don't have the pictures to hand but he showed us a presentation that he had made using his own photographs which nobody has a copy of to explain some of his ideas. One example would be that he said a client rang him up and asked him to create a publication and after designing it he realised he didn't have enough paper so he made the book but using around the size of an A5 piece of paper and half this size constantly throughout the book, so the end result of the book looked as though it was a wedge of paper almost like a 3-D isosceles triangle. It looked fantastic, very unique. Also he explained that he was supposed to be putting on an exhibition in Shanghai to show the public his publications that he had made, his contact that was putting the event together rang him a day later and told him there wasn't 50 people turning up there was 5000! So again he realised that he didn't have enough books and he didn't want lots of people touching his work so he took his books down the road and had them put in what looked like a transparent pillow so people were unable to touch them. They were all then set out in a contemporary room spaced apart on long white tables. In my opinion this looked fantastic.

Here is one of his books that he created in 2006 which has been a massive hit to many graphic designers.

Overall he seemed pretty impressed with our portfolios and said that if we were ever in Berlin again then to pop back and E-mail him some of our ideas sometimes. He also had a guy from Scotland that was a interim for him which has opened my eyes a bit to perhaps gaining experience in another country which is what I plan to do with my future anyway. So I would definitely class this as one of my top portfolio visits as perhaps making a bit of a contact

123buero

Whilst in Berlin a select few of us that was interested in typography and had examples of good editorials and typography in our portfolios were chosen to visit a small graphic agency called 123buero. The main man was called Timo.

My first impression was that I could not believe how much space they had in a room where they work. It consisted of 2 chairs, 2 Macs and a huge shelf of design books. Here is an image below:

Timo was very nice and completely honest and critical about our portfolios. He firstly made us some ginger tea which seems to be quite popular in Berlin and we after we had all settled in a little we started going through our portfolios. He told us straight away if he didn't quite understand why something irrelevant was put in our work and he gave good constructive criticism about how we could make our portfolios better. He said that with mine I should have more scamps and the thought processes behind the final idea as he said it would be easier for a employer to understand your way of thinking. I found this very useful and have since

changed it and added more recent thought processed work.

He then started telling us about his company and what he had been up to recently. He also showed us his portfolio which obviously consisted of mostly typography and he showed us his high quality print outs that he had made in to books. One piece of work that I was very impressed with was A.D.Deertz which they are currently working on the future positioning and rebranding of the fashion label ADD, which will be redefined toA.D.Deertz with the collection of Fall/ Winter 2009/2010 and will be shift from a unisex concept to an all menswear line. He had directed the photography too.

Here is an image of one of the catalogues below:

Timo and his colleagues have also created a few of their own typefaces using Fontlab which he showed us the basic of how to use it which was very interesting. A couple of fonts to look out for when they are ready to be downloaded are: Maison and Naiv.

I overall really enjoyed this visit as it gave me an insight to how a small company works hard and is now getting big clients. He said it's always important to be able to get on with and work with somebody that is on your wave length so that there is no conflict and this gets the cogs of the company turning.

David Airey

David Airey is a design author and brand identity designer. He have a passion for design, and makes a living by creating visual identities for companies of all sizes. His client-list includes the likes of Yellow Pages (Canada), Giacom (England), and Berthier Associates (Japan).

He writes two popular graphic design blogs, logodesignlove.com and davidairey.com, attracting more than 250,000 online visitors per month and approximately 1 million monthly page views. He is the editor at his newest venture, Identity Designed — a site featuring the work of some excellent studios.

I chose to write about this David Airey as I was looking through his portfolio and his advertisements and some of them are really just fantastic. They are humorous and really make you say.. "oh yeah! I get it" Those kind of design to me are the best. Here are a few examples of the ones I found the best below:

Deborah Sussman

Deborah Sussman has worked at the interface of graphic design and the built environment for more than 30 years. She has created striking visual imagery and devised its imaginative application for architectural and public spaces both permanent and temporary, including the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Seattle’s opera house, and Disney World. Throughout her career Sussman has claimed an ever more expansive role for graphic design in the urban landscape.

Sussman uses graphic design to emphasize aspects of the built environment and to provide rich connections to the communities and cultures in which it will participate.

I chose to put Sussman on my blog because she is a legend and shes a woman! Most of the greatest graphic designers are men so I wanted to do a little research on what woman have played their parts in graphic design and how well they have done for themselves and other companies. I am not very familiar with Deborah Sussman but I have seen her work around and about and it is very good.

“Although environmental graphic design started as architectural signage—hence, graphics—a flat discipline turned out to be inadequate in a round world. An exhibition, for example, is more than a book on a wall or an arrangement of artifacts under glass. It is the engagement of people as they move through space. Sussman/Prejza carries this engagement into stores and other public spaces, and into designed events—a contextual approach that brought the company international renown with the 1984 summer Olympics.”

—Ralph Caplan, “Beyond Sussman/Prejza: Jungle Rhythms in Environmental Graphic Design,” Process Architecture 124, 1994.

Marc Quinn

Marc Quinn (born 1964) is a British artist and part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists)

Perhaps best known for Alison Lapper Pregnant, a sculpture of Alison Lapper which has been installed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, "Self", a sculpture of his head made with his own frozen blood, and "Garden" (2000). He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) and is known for his innovative use of materials to make art, including blood, ice, faeces, etc., his use of bringing scientific developments into art, and his designs for "discussion-generating" artworks.




















I have chosen Marc Quinn as one of my artists as I am always intrigued with what unpredictable designs and concepts he will be coming out with next. He always produces exciting statues/ sculptures using different materials.

The thing that I like best about his work is that he has made people such as Alison Lapper feel so much more confident in herself as she was put on the plinth at Trafalgar Square (well her life sized statue was) and people could not see her as being a freak but see her body as being beautiful and see how different yet amazing this art was and how she lived her life with her child. He truely saw something in her that he knew the public had to see. Some say it was cruel, yet others look at her and other amputees in a different light now.

Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley OBE RA (born 30 August 1950) is an English sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in the North of England, commissioned in 1995 and erected in February 1998, Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, and Event Horizon, a multi-part site installation which premiered in London in 2007, and in 2010 around Madison Square in New York City.


















Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live." Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside." His work attempts to treat the body not as an object but a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical — a trace of a real event of a real body in time.




















I remember going to see his work in Liverpool on Crosby Beach with my old college friends. It was a good day out, but I was just a little worried if boats were to come in and not see them when the tide comes in as they have no lights on them etc. But they are a spectacular sight to just stand there and watch as the sun is setting.












The sculpture consists of 100 cast iron figures which face out to sea, spread over a 2 mile (3.2 km) stretch of the beach. Each figure is 189 cm tall (nearly 6 feet 2½ inches) and weighs around 650 kg (over 1400 lb).
In common with most of Gormley's work, the figures are cast replicas of the artist's own body. As the tides ebb and flow, the figures are revealed and submerged by the sea.

Quirky yet random design that in my opinion is brilliant.