Tal Rosner: 07.11.2008

Tal Rosner is a BAFTA-award winning filmmaker and animator, most commonly known for created the title sequence to the E4 show, Skins.

Tal began his career after completing his BA Graphic Design degree, in which time he created posters, magazines and compositions. After this, he developed an interest in rhythm and decided to study an MA in Moving Image at Central St. Martin’s in London. Here, he took what he learnt from his Graphic Design degree to create his films. He found a direct link between designing single pages, in a book for example, to creating 25 pages to make one second of a film.

His final piece at Central St. Martin’s in late 2004 was a film called Doppelganger, with images taken from his surroundings in London, and played with music. I found this piece quite interesting as it begins with real imagery and develops into very abstract patterns, reminding me of kaleidoscope imagery. This was the first time Tal felt he had an idea of a proper film, and he feels that his technical skills improve as he uses the digital software used to create films more and more.

Once leaving Central St. Martin’s, Tal worked in a post-production place in London. He thought that he would like doing this kind of job as it was based on moving image, but he found that he was much happier working with a smaller budget and within a smaller group of people, in order to have creative control.

Stravinsky Concerto for Two Pianos
Tal was asked to create a 20-minute film in collaboration with two sisters who create classical piano duets. As there was only a small budget, instead of using a camera track, he used a train track to film his surroundings. Such as Doppelganger, parts of the film are real and others are abstract. I felt that some sections of the film looked very illustrative, very simplistic black and white images. The film is also split into two screens to represent both pianists, and each scene is a reflection of the tempo of the music.

E4 Skins
Tal was asked to create the title sequence to a new television programme called Skins based on the lives and relationships of teenagers, which eventually earned him a BAFTA, as it was very different to other title sequences at the time. There was only a small budget, but it is clear to see Tal’s progression as a filmmaker and it still contains scenes based on surroundings. I was quite shocked to find out that the final product was Tal’s 72nd version.

E4 Skins Series 2
When creating the sequence title for the second series of Skins, Tal was aware that it must be similar in style to series one, so viewers of the show can recognise it, but, as the series developed, the style of the opening titles could be developed. The second series is created from type, with the letters spelling out SKINS blown up, containing imagery within them. Along with the sequence title, he also creates bumpers, which are very short animations before and after the adverts.

Tal is currently working on series three of Skins, which contains all new characters. Again, the progression of style will be apparent, but as it will deal with new characters and situations, Tal will be able to incorporate this into his work.

London Symphony Orchestra – “In Seven Days”
Tal was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra to create visuals to be shown alongside a piece of music that is being played, about the seven days of creation. There were six separate screens, sometimes used as separate screens and sometimes used as one whole screen.

Without You
This film was created as a Channel 4 initiative to showcase up and coming filmmakers and animators. Tal’s was based on a poem: “Calm Down. What Happens. Happens Mostly. Without You. By Josef Albers. This was the first film that was filmed in HD. He tried to get away from using classical music, and decided to experiment with the sound taken from his footage of his surroundings. It was based on buildings, shapes and colours. As with his other films, it progressively becomes more abstract.

Tal is interested in cinema and possibly interested in creating film titles in the future, but thinks he would find it difficult as people demand a narrative in film titles, and Tal doesn’t like using a narrative, he likes his work to be organic.

He particularly likes things created in the period between 1905 and 1935, such as the Bauhaus, Kandinsky and Mondrian, as influences to his work.

Though film-making is not an interest of mine, I found the filming process quite interesting and the way the image of a building can be manipulated to the point beyond recognition, so that it appears very illustrative. I also liked the way you were able to see the connection between Tal’s personal work and commercial work, such as the Skins sequence title. I also think Tal was a very nice person, which makes his success all the more deserved.

Visit his website: www.talrosner.com

Truth, Lies & Typography: 06.11.2008

Darren Scott began his career by studying a Design Practice degree at Salford University. He had an interest in typography and did a piece of work for Fuse font foundry. He then created the typeface Berliner, and made it into a stencil so that it could be spray painted onto the Berlin Wall. This typeface looked almost like it was a code. He then created a poster for Fuse, which was his first design job. When he left university, he set up Darren Scott Typographics, a type foundry. At this time he created such fonts as Circuit, Sodium, Bad Angel and Rub-On. His influences at this time were David Carson and Eric Speakerman.

Darren eventually began working for McCann Erickson, the biggest ad agency in the world, and he began to create corporate design for big international brands. He helped to create the famous All:Sports logo and the photographic styling. He also helped to create the Christie’s “Embrace” logo, his last brief for McCann Erickson.

“Always have some ideas up your sleeve as often you get very rushed briefs – create a bank of ideas”. This helps you to work faster but if you do have things in you back pockets that you want to use, they have to be appropriate for the brief.

The first brief at Truth design studio was for The Authentic Food Company. The final design reflected world food and travel, and as it was a global brand, he created pictograms that could easily represent the company.

Darren has also created a lot of work for Durex over the past seven years. He helped to create a “brand stretch”, which is widening the products within a company. For example, with Durex, it was condoms, to sexual enhancement. He created posters and packaging that contained an element of function. This was Darren’s first foray into packaging design.

The most challenging thing is when you are taken out of you comfort zone, but this gives you a reason to create fresh and innovative ideas. He thinks it’s good not to have a particular style, as if you learn all your crafts (i.e. type, illustration, photography), it gives you more room to experiment and the ability to learn to understand it.

Mechanic Gothic is one of Darren’s most popular typefaces. Lots of magazines have used it. Bell Gothic inspired it; you need a hook that makes a typeface different. For example, in one typeface the letter G could be very decorated which would make it stand out.

Truth design studio is now two and a half years old. Jane, the account director at McCann Erickson, runs the business, whereas Darren is the designer.

“Don’t be afraid to show your working out and making mistakes. It is always quality over quantity. Create stuff that is appropriate. Rationalise, justify your work, make your work more appealing to a client.”

“Business cards speak for you when you are not there”.

Through Truth, Darren redesigned the brand “Fat Hog”, which sells painting supplies. At this brand could possibly expand in the future, Darren created a very simple logo that could be used on clothing, as well as packaging. He created something that was very striking, as he wanted it to stand out amongst the other brands out there.

Versus Cancer is another project that Truth has worked on. Versus Cancer, originally known as Manchester versus Cancer, is a charity that organises music concerts to earn money in aid of cancer. Darren “future-proofed” this company by changing the original name of the charity to Versus Cancer. By removing the city name, Darren enabled the charity to become a global charity, as opposed to one based in Manchester alone.

A project that is currently underway is a Reebok advertising campaign for the Amir Khan boxing range. What has been created so far is a very bold logo that will be used on all the advertising, and possibly the product itself.

“Have passion, enthusiasm and confidence about you work.”

I went to this lecture as I have an interest in type but I found it fascinating, as I have never had the opportunity to meet someone prominent in the advertising industry. It was interesting to see how his passion for typography has bled into commercial work, to the point where he might create a full typeface for a campaign. I also felt that Darren was very wise in the advice that he was giving, and though he fell into the industry quite quickly, he knows what it’s like to struggle to find yourself after leaving university. One important piece of advice he gave was that when you meet someone in the industry; always ask for six more names that could be helpful. If those six names each gave six more names, you could quite easily get yourself known to the people who matter in design, and this would hopefully result in work. I really enjoyed this lecture, as Darren not only spoke about design work, but about how him and his work fit into the industry, and gave advice and how to promote yourself.

See work at: www.truth-design.co.uk

Truth, Lies & Typography: 06.11.2008 (Transcript)

What I thought I’d do today is start on my journey from the last job I did at uni right though to where I got today. So, I though it would be interesting for you to see my ups and downs and how I got there, some of the things I’ve worked on, so you can sort of come along with me on the journey really.

So where it all started for me was I was at Salford University doing a design practice degree and I got really interested in typography and one of the last jobs I did was a brief for Fuse, the digital font thing with Neville Brody, and I got asked to do a typeface for that which led to Berliner which was, I was really interested in German design at the time, and I was really into Eric Speakerman and the Berlin wall thing was happening around that time and it was something I just got really in to, German design, there was some interesting German design companies at the time like Zion and Grappa that were doing some really interesting layered stuff and obviously the Berlin wall’s got all this layering of images on there and sort of instant art almost. So that was my main influence where I was creating this typeface for Fuse magazine at the time, which was Berliner. Basically, what it was, it was a typeface taking block letter type, and modernising it really, I enabled it to be stencilled onto, so you can create it instantly onto the Berlin wall, spray it on there. So, what we did we did it so that the letters had no counters so you could stencil it, and the counters became dots, and what made it interesting is it became kind of code-like, so it kind of lost its German roots, and became almost like a code. That was the interest of it, that’s what Fuse was all about, experimenting with letterforms and just going wild and it’s gone even more wild since, that was from Fuse 15 I think and it got to 20 before it stopped, they’ve started doing them again now but some of them aren’t even type, they’re just pictures and all sorts of things. I liked to stick to type because that’s what I was good at. So that’s where it all started for me really, and that was the poster for Fuse, and this was something that I created, using layered art, which inspired me in the first place. So that was my first job. That led me into setting up Darren Scott Typographic's, which was my font foundry so the first thing I did when I left university is I decided this was what I wanted to do, set up and design some typefaces. Basically, I had a few months sat at home, just got my head down and got ideas that I had off my chest. The digitiser at the time was Fontographer, I tend to use Font Lab now, Fontographer was the only one available at the time, and this was based on electronic circuitry, again, these were sold by T26 which was a type foundry, which was a new foundry at the time in Chicago, and they were just selling young designers fonts, they’re still going now and they do thousands and thousands of fonts now, they sell them really cheaply but it makes is accessible to everyone. So I basically just sat about doing these things, I’m not too much proud of these, they were part of my journey but they’re not the best quality typefaces that I’ve ever produced, I enjoy looking at them, but I never use my own typefaces anyway because they tend to, you look at them in a series of shapes and spaces in curning rather than actual words, when you’re setting them you tend to see the problems rather than the actual typeface itself so it’s really hard to use your own fonts. They’re really all kind of interesting but they’re not the kind of typefaces I actually use, they’re just these things that you create, you create them when you’re doing logos and you work them up into full alphabets and once it gets under your skin typography you go through this process of wanting to design more and more. Another type I did called Sodium, Eric Speakerman was doing a lot of typefaces for signage and I wanted to try and create a typeface that was more readable, this was kind of my first sans serif typeface that I produced and it had aspects of all my favourite typefaces in there. Everyone’s kind of said that looks a bit like this or a bit like that but it kind of does wear its influences on its sleeves really. That’s it when it’s set. These are just random Bob Dylan quotes and they’re just to show it working rather than the Quick Brown Fox, which everyone seems to use. This is Bad Angel, this was designed round the similar time, again it was just going mad with letter shapes really, really experimenting with different character shapes and how far you can push letters and make them say different things but readable as an alphabet. That was in Playboy magazine, and a few other magazines but Playboy was the most high profile magazine it was in. so it’s quite gothic, I have a lot of people, a lot of Goths saying they really love it and they use it on their heavy metal sleeves and that so it’s been used quite a lot in that sort of area. But it’s interesting cause you never go out to create that sort of look, it just evolves and I like to create typefaces and just disown them and see people interpret what I’ve done and obviously that comes across quite gothic. It’s always interesting to see how people use your fonts and you see it popping up everywhere. A lot of these things have been in magazines and on mastheads, for like Loaded magazine, and Horse and Hound are using one at the moment. This was in 1997, which was quite a long time ago, it was before the Grunge period started with David Carson, it was basically a headline font I did for a job, it was like rubbed down lettraset, created from that, scanned in and them streamlined, I think it was Helvetica Condensed, I just distorted it a little bit, took the counters out, it kind of worked. That was created in about two days to be honest, quite quickly done. T26 wanted to retail it so I worked it up into a full character set and away we went. Some people say its got a bit of a jazz feel to it. This was some stuff I did for T26, to promote the fonts, and I was doing stuff at the time with old bits of film and slide, hand creating stuff on 35mm transparencies, just scratching away at them and layering them to sort of make things and almost just random images. That’s what I was doing at the time and T26 asked me to do some postcards to promote their company and just do it in that style really and use their letters in their logo. We just played around using images that were used on posters and things. This is sort of handcrafted, which isn’t really like me, I’m quite technical. I tend to do things on the computer most of the time but at the time, I was just sort of experimenting and I kind of enjoyed it but I kind of left that and went back to the computer afterwards. This was at the time when David Carson was doing this kind of thing and it was really popular so this was the style at the time. Everyone was into the big grunge thing. So around a similar period, I went to McCann Erickson which is the biggest ad agencies in the world, got offices all over the world, head office in New York, and I worked at the Manchester one, it’s like 350 people there, clients like Coca Cola, Peugeot, Manchester United, big international brands. It gave me a change to learn a lot of skills that I didn’t have and learn a lot about corporate design, doing corporate identity and sort of applying my design to large projects, signage, all sorts of things which really interested me, it was really good. Some of the projects I did, I did the corporate ID for All Sports, I did the carrier bags which were really popular, everyone seemed to have them at the time, they were really popular, it was just All Sports repeated, all the kids had them. They were just asking to buy the bags, they were free if you bought a pair of trainers but they ended up giving more bags away than the actual product. It was interesting. These were some images we created for All Sports, we did the photographic styling for them, for their advertisements, their stuff in the windows, just telling them to go black and white, because before they had this blue, red and white which was very much a sports thing, which is a bit of a cliché. So we decided to take it back to black. All brands have different colours, you store has lots of different brands, lets make your brand a bit more neutral and you can put all the other colours with it. So we went to black, and no one was doing black at the time, this was before Size and people like that sort of followed suit and going more sort of street rather than sport. It was selling more casual clothes than sports wear at the time. So again, it was creating that more high fashion look, you had to be more imaginative with the styling really.

... At this point, the memory on my Dictaphone ran out!

Gillian Blease: 17.10.2008

After school, Gillian completed a foundation year at Manchester Metropolitan University. She then completed a four-year Fine Art degree at Newcastle University. At this time she enjoyed drawing, designing, making interesting pictures. At this time, she also became more conceptual and began creating installations.

After uni, Gillian went to London and spent a year doing nothing. She came home to Manchester defeated and completed a typing course. She then went to Japan for six weeks to teach English, and this influenced her use of colour, design and symbolism. After she returned to England, the typing course she completed helped her to get a job at the Whitworth Gallery. She then got her own studio at the Bankley Studios in Levenshulme. She then returned to London and got a three-year residency. One of her neighbours at this time was Martin Creed who went on to win the Turner Prize.

She collected images in files, there were no rules as to what she collected, but she used this collection to become aware of different things, and to then use them as an influence in her own work. She had no formal illustration training but instead did a mini crash course in illustration through the Association of Illustrators, and built up her portfolio by setting herself briefs.
Her influences include Paul Rand, Claus Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Julian Opie. She also likes the 1968 Paris Revolution Posters as they were hand-created with stencils, crude and used only one colour, which is a “really great discipline”. She also likes logos, as they are “so small but represent so much as they have to be 100% perfect”.

Gillian produces a lot of work for the Guardian, in the weekly recipe column. In three years, Gillian created 150 illustrations. She has also worked on the relationship column and the health column. In her work, she likes empty space as imagery “sits better if it has some space”. She has also worked for Restaurant magazine, the Daily Express, though she didn’t like the work she produced for them, Time Out magazine and the letters page in the Guardian. The job was to create three illustrations a week and when time is limited, “you can’t afford to be precious about work.” She has created work for Waitrose Food Illustrated but she doesn’t tend to create roughs for them, which can be dangerous, as clients don’t approve them in the beginning. She also created a poster for the South Bank Centre in London but the brief became really prescriptive, she felt like a “puppet” to produce work that other people have “created”. Gillian believes that the relationship with an art director can result in “sink or swim” jobs.

Recently, Gillian has become interested in and began created pattern. Her pattern influences include Paul Rand’s “Abacus”, Joseph Frank and Norman McLaren. Bright Agency contacted her about producing greeting cards for them and now she solely produces pattern for them. She has also been contacted by Rockport to create work for them after seeing her work on the Print Pattern blog.

Questions and Answers
Q: How often do you need to compromise with commissions?
A: 40%, what I call the bread and butter jobs
Q: Do you prefer working on your own or as a design team?
A: On my own as there are no external distractions. I also don’t belong to an agency, as I prefer to be my own boss.

Though I thought the work of Gillian Blease was good, I found it too simplistic but I think it is fantastic that, by working by herself, she has become very successful. I found it interesting that, as she has so many commissions, she doesn’t find the need to promote herself and she gains new clients through them seeing her work in context, in a newspaper for example.

See her work at: www.gillianblease.co.uk

Personal Project - Further Developments

These are some of the pieces that I have been working on. I began to experiment with combining one image and one letter, but I felt that the letter looked too large on its own. I then tried using a combination of letters, all of different sizes, and I finally added a coloured background. I like the final piece that I have created and feel that using letters of different sizes adds more interest to the overall piece.

Personal Project - Development of Imagery

This is another development I have created whilst experimenting with imagery and composition. The horse images are from a book of circus images. I like this composition as I think the contrast between the graphic lettering and the old-style horse is effective and I think the repetition of the word "circus" is really striking.

Personal Project - Imagery

I have found trying to create an illustration to display my circus type rather difficult, as I want the imagery to look good, but not to take away the focus off the type. This is a development of one type of composition I was experimenting with. Using the image of a horse, as horses have been commonly used in circuses in the past, I attempted to incorporate this into the letter itself. I then added an image of a horse into the illustration and experimented further with composition. I do like this illustration but I feel that it is too simple, and doesn't fully "show off" the type.