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Giedre Maciulaityte pieniulaukas@gmail.com 622842185 Graphic design projecs III 2 course, 2B group, EASD

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4 François Caspar

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3 Frédéric Deltenre

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2 Dsignes, free typography for Signes designed by Andreu Balius

Cover Illustration, The Guardian G2, 2008.

@ EASD Castello

2 Alex Trochut, between illustration and typography

4 20th Edition of the Chaumont Festival

Signage for the Spanish pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo.

7 Skolos & Wedell

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6 Reza Abedini

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5 Isidro Ferrer: Signage in Shanghai

2 Design News @ EASD Castello

Alex Trochut, between illustration and typography written by Gloria Inglis

Barcelona based designer Alex Trochut works under the premise ‘More is more’; clearly distancing himself from minimalism; his conscious ‘horror vacui’ coexists with self control and effectiveness to produce graphic material that is exuberant in detail.

The use of a contemporary and well worked out lettering is characteristic of his work. Illustrations become typographies and vice versa, in order to create compositions that transmit great communicative energy and a capacity to invoke.

Trochut exposes an academic graphic design education obtained at the Escuela Superior de Diseño Elivasa to add to his more natural form of expression through drawing.

^ Graphics and type treatments, Nixon, 2009.

Dsignes, free typography for Signes designed by Andreu Balius Typographer Andreu Balius has created Dsignes, a free access font specifically designed for architects and designers, for Barcelona based company Signes, a business dedicated to the production and establishment of corporate identity.

^ Dsignes, free typography for Signes designed by Andreu Balius, 2009.

Specially designed for sign projects, Dsignes offers three different weights –light, regular and bold– and can be freely obtained on latipodsignes@signes.es.

This project has been awarded the 2010 Ed Awards Prize (European Design Awards), and has been selected for the Shanghai 2010 exhibit ‘Desigñ’.

D esign News @ EASD Castello 3

< Save the sea! A pun that derives from the use of the French words poison (poison) and poisson (fish).

< South, in relation to the continuous difficulties which the southern hemisphere has to overcome in order to stay afloat.

Discussing graphic design and the professionals that practice it inevitably entails discussing languages. And dilemmas, in this case related to communication, since problem solving lies at the very heart of the culture of design and, also, since designing always involves making ethical, methodological and market choices. Thus, it is possible to interpret an author through his graphic language, but as the hypothesis of a personal project that deciphers a broader situation than the design itself. This is also true when the artist selects only one of the tools at his disposal, even when the instrument of choice is laden with history and meaning, as in the case of posters.

The case of Frederic Deltenre gives food for thought in both of these aspects. From the linguistic viewpoint, it must not be forgotten that this author comes from Belgium, a country that is equally under the influence of French and Central European, and particularly Dutch, culture. As regards graphic design, this influence is reflected in two very different traditions. On the one hand, Holland was the absolute protagonist of the Modernist revolution, through what we could define as a â&#x20AC;&#x153;multi-conceptâ&#x20AC;? vision. The geometrical approach prevails, even in his most ironical or post-Modern interpretations, with a richness of stroke that is facilitated by a historically sensitive clientele. This explains the extraordinarily high quality of Belgian graphic design, as well as its great achievements in specific sectors such as, for instance, typographic design.

4 Design News @ EASD Castello

Isidro Ferrer: Signage in Shanghai Cardboard is versatile and green friendly material, and is the centre of Isidro Ferrer’s signage proposal for the Spanish pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo; a project that symbolises the way in which material can reach very rich levels of expressiveness.

This material integrates with ease into the existing wood and wicker of the structure and equipment of the pavilion, a project that has been developed by the Miralles-Tagliabue studio, and has come to be known as the Spanish Basket, given the way it evokes Spanish and Chinese craft tradition. The very nature of cardboard allows for a smooth and harmonic transition from a world of information and guidance to another of communication and expressiveness.According to the creators of this project, “signage must not only guide but also promote the nature of a building in order to express

Twentieth Edition of the Chaumont Festival written by Alfredo Aracil < Piotr Mlodozeniec.

^ Detail, signage for the Spanish pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo.

importancce for the building to take part in the context of its surroundings, to flee from the idea of an artificial object that only focuses on meeting technical standards.”

Created by Isidro Ferrer in collaboration with Valencian designer Pablo Alabau and the Zaragoza Versus studio, this signage project takes advantage of the inherent characteristics of cardboard: economical, resistant and functional.

Ever since the team comprised of Pierre Bernard, Alex Jordan, Vincent Perrottet and Jean-François Millier took over the organisation of the Festival International de l’Affiche et du Graphisme in 2002, its contents have been revamped, bringing the general public, professionals and students together for what has become a landmark in today’s design world.

This time, the festival is structured around several exhibitions, contests, workshops and conferences.

D esign News @ EASD Castello 5

written by Carlo Branzaglia

François Caspar is driven by a creative exuberance. A designer with a vibrant eye, he uses a combination of practice, experience, functionality and communication to confront his work. For Caspar, a poster is a tool for linguistic research that has many levels of sophistication. Widely known for his defence of professional culture, his work stands out for its high-quality, focus on the international scene, pragmatism and its visual culture.

French poster tradition is so popular that the word affichis-me is used in many other linguistic regions. The reasons for this are readily identifiable. In the first place, the extraordinary juncture that was Art Nouveau: a concentrate of technological (lithography), aesthetic (the jilting of Western tradition) and social innovation. In addition to Cassandre’s splendorous Art Deco; Savignac’s stylized imagery; the Eastern European School’s links with the world of posters, which became apparent in the work of its emigrants ; and, finally, the public character of graphic design, whose leading characters included groups such as Gapus and individual artists like Michel Bouvet.

Fragment of poster for Rock Pop Bratislava Festival–The Western Beat. Gato Loco Productions,1994.

6 Design News @ EASD Castello ^ Rêves de Sable, film poster, 2003.

^ Photo+Graphic, exhibiion about photography and graphic design, 2004.

^ ISiah Mashq, poster exhibition of Reza Abedini, 2004.

written by Carlo Branzaglia

What a good start to 2005 for Reza Abedini. he took a gold award in Hong Kong’s poster triennale, one of many poster events currently enlivening the graphic design scene in the far east, open to entries from visual cultures beyond the border. and entries come not only from the west, but also from the middle east - a territory that (supposedly global) ‘chat’ culture seems to show little inclination to get to know or understand more about.

Any assessment of Reza Abedini must take account of two premises. The first of these is of a strictly professional nature: while it is a fact that his poster output is prolific and superb, it would be an injustice to their author to overlook his work in other areas of graphic design. These range from publishing books and magazines to designing marvellous logos in which Arab script regains all its visual coefficiency – the properties that traditionally adhere to it and which transform it into image, decoration and decorative motif, serving to represent the word of Allah in an iconoclastic religion in which representations of the deity are prohibited. The second premise is the obvious point that the anti-Arab campaign organised after the Twin Towers attacks is threatening to create a ghetto

around a culture to which we not only owe an enormous historical debt, but one which also mirrors our own antinomies in western society. Abedini functions as an ambassador for contemporary Iranian culture given the degree of visibility he has achieved.

That said, though, this is probably not as true of him as it is of Marianne Satrapi , whose comics have amazed Europe in recent years; or Shirin Neshat, an artist famous for her videos and photographs, who also lives abroad, in New York. Reza, on the other hand, lives, works and teaches in Tehran. But actually, it is Iranian graphic design that has taken the initiative in showing itself to the world, with exhibitions and congresses. These initiatives reflect a wealth of activity, expressed in Iran, and protected by a professional association.

D esign News @ EASD Castello 7

Skolos & Wedell written by Carlo Branzaglia

^ Picture of tNancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell.

Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell met at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the mid1970s. Nancyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s typography and design and Thomasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photography coexist in their

Perhaps the best way to approach the work of designer Nancy Skolos and her husband, photographer Thomas Wedell, principals of Skolos-Wedell in Boston, is through the book which they have co-authored, published by Rockport, which is available at bookshops from June. Its title, Type, Image, Message: Merging Pictures and Ideas. A Graphic Design Layout Workshop, already hints at some of the aspects peculiar to their work. The reference to message, for instance, is not accidental.

In an age in which authorship is often seen as mere formalism, the images (by international designers) shown here are all, without exception, interpretations of ideas. Moreover, the concept of workshop is related to their teaching activity.

^ 2D 3D Fusion poster for a Skolos/ Wedell exhibition, 1996.

Boston house-studio where, they generate new paradigms of visual communication. The passion both artists profess the creative process has sharpened their inventiveness in a series of forceful posters. Illusory spaces and three-dimensional images in caps.

^ Documenting Marcel, poster for an exhibition, 1996.

To sum up, in the work of Skolos and Wedell the pulverisation of image resulting from digitalisation does not create new spectacular, hyperrealist or super-realist

^ Light of Hope, 2005.

effects, just as the nonlinearity of the reading induced by hypertextual practices does not turn into an out-and-out succession of dramatic effects. The reader is asked to enter the picture, to discover its choreographic structure and to access its rich semantic content. What this boils down to is that the work of this Bostonian husband-and-wife team is not exactly polysemous, as one would often like works of art to be. Rather, it is an oeuvre that puts forth a series of meanings; these are adequately concatenated and capable of maintaining a unitary association between perceptive reading and semantic decoding.

8 Design News @ EASD Castello