Why I am a Designer?
Early Influences Microsoft Paint 6 Mr. Squiggle 8 Hands on Experiences 10
Mature Influences
Collections LEGO 30 Pokémon Cards 34 Bikes 36 Sunglasses 38
MFA Exhibits Summer of Love Posters
42 M.C.Escher 46
Contents
Alexey Brodovitch 14 Josef Müller Brockmann 16 Johannes Itten 20 Twen Magazine 22 De Stijl 26
Early Influences
Microsoft Paint
Microsoft Paint, is a simple raster graphics editor that has been included with all versions of Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft paint was my sanctuary. I had unlimited colours, unlimited shapes, and unlimited possibilities to create endless experiments. I would use the free draw tool to create basic house-tree-sun-dogfamily drawings, all the way to creating abstract landscapes of overlapping circles, squares and rectangles. I would import outlines of clothing and make my own custom t-shirts, I would create my own fonts, I would mix colours in the color pallet option. My experiences on
this program planted a Graphic Design seed in me all those years ago that since coming to college and being immersed in my major has started to flower and flourish! It’s funny, I really didn’t think anything of it up until my sophomore year of college, but Microsoft Paint was essentially the same as me spending hours on adobe illustrator as a 6-year-old. The concept is very similar – creating your own graphics using lines, shapes, colors and erasers – and honestly, the user face and navigation are not that far off either. Because of this I found it extremely easy to transition into the Adobe suite, nearly 15 years later! Just to show how similar the two programs are I’ve included two images of graphics that I have created. The yellow, blue and green one is using illustrator and the maroon, purple and pink one is using Microsoft Paint (set inside the original user-window).
Early Influences
It sounds like a sob-story but growing up I didn’t really have internet. We had dial-up which was so slow it was probably faster to run to the library and borrow a book to find out any information you were looking for. This being the case, it didn’t mean that I spent any less time on our family desktop computer! Hours were spent playing Solitaire, Pinball, Mine-Sweeper, and using Microsoft Paint.
Mr. Squiggle
Mr. Squiggle is an Australian children’s television series, and the name of the title character. The show was first presented on television on July 1, 1959 and ended in 1999.
right way up and revealed something that I couldn’t previously see. I couldn’t believe what he was able to do with the millions of squiggles that me and thousands of other young kids sent in. I fell in love with the idea of creating something that would stop someone in amazement when they looked at it.
The character of Mr. Squiggle was a man from the moon who would come down in a rocket at the beginning of each episode. After greeting his sidekick, he would examine pictures made of random squiggles sent in by young children. After doing so, he would make a picture out of those squiggles using his pencil nose. Upon finishing, the picture would be turned the other side up — et voilà I would yell at the TV— a picture that resembled something from real life.
This show also encouraged me to pick up a pencil and paper and start putting my ideas onto the page. this is a process that I still include in all of my projects today. I love being able to vomit out my ideas onto a page or into a book through sketches and writing and have them sitting there in front of me. from here I can them start to re-assemble these ideas and construct concepts.
I remember being in complete awe when he would flip the drawing the
Early Influences
Mr. Squiggle is a television puppet show that I used to watch religiously as a small child. I think this is where my passion for drawing stemmed from. I also only found out at 24 years of age that this is an Australian show, and that no-one has any idea what I’m talking about when I try to describe it in America!
Hands on experiences
Modelling clay, measuring and sawing in wood works classes, playing with the sand on the beach, since a young age I have been extremely active making things with my hands.
Ever since I was a young kid I was always outdoors playing with mud, dirt, sand or sticks and getting up to mischief. I vividly remember mum showing me a home video where I chose to have a mud fight in the back yard with my cat Tabatha – neither she nor the cat were too happy about that. Family trips to the beach would soon turn to construction sites; mass scale sand-castle empires were erected by my sister and I, equipped with underground tunnels, motes that
As I grew older I started to go to work with my mum and work with clay. I would spend hours modelling my favorite action figures or squeezing my fingers through the clay to create amaz-
ing, abstract shapes. My first paid job as a designer was creating mock ‘Academy Award’ statuettes for an awards ceremony at age 12. It wasn’t until I started at high school that I was able to transfer all my years of using my hands as a child into a skill that was more graphic design orientated. In drafting class, we would 3D-model chairs, pencil cases and basketball hoops, sketch them to, and then go down to the workshop and build them out of timber and acrylic. This was my first real passion of creating something tangible and it brought out the inner perfectionist in me. I would pay so much attention to detail to the fine measurements and carefully chisel out dovetail joints that would fit snugly into each other. I was always so proud of my work.
Early Influences
utilized the incoming tides to fill them, and immense walls to keep out unwanted invaders. Other times at the beach my mum and I would walk around in circles creating incredible patterns with our footprints and then going back into these designs tracing words and shapes with our fingers. I became obsessed with the impressions they left behind and the way that I could control the sand on my canvas. Each day would be something new as the tide would come in overnight and sweep the old designs away. These are my earliest childhood memories being creative with my hands.
Mature Influences
William Golden
William Golden was an American graphic designer. He is best known for his work at Columbia Broadcasting System, where he would eventually became Creative Director.
In 1946, Golden was placed in charge of the campaign to create a bold new graphic identity for CBS. It was here that the con-cept for the ‘CBS Eye’ was born – one of the most successful corporate identities of the 20th century. Golden’s success was achieved through consistency and clarity. His guidelines for design were so consistent and clear that he was able to transform the identity of an entire corporation, across multiple platforms into an abstract, yet simple illustration of an eye.
William Golden was a realist. He cared little for verbose, high-flown theories and pretentiousness, as he thought that such things obscured the artistic vision of a designer. A good designer, he felt, should respect the stubbornness of certain facts and should design accordingly, not indifferently; as redundant as it may sound, his belief was that a designer should design. If the message you are trying to communicate was designed logically and tastefully, and then produced faultlessly, he believed that it would achieve its objective and effectively reach the eyes, ears and hearts of the targeted audience. This idea of accepting challenges and pushing through really resonates with me. Once you establish and accept your limita-tions it is far easier to think outside of them.
Mature Influences
I first learnt about William Golden in my Sophomore year of college and what impressed me most about him was his very clear vision of whatever he was doing, and his ability to think big, foresee, and design accordingly to future trends in a way that remained timeless and consistent, yet also adaptable.
Josef Müller Brockmann
As with most graphic designers that can be classified as part of the Swiss International Style, Joseph Müller-Brockmann was influenced by the ideas of several different design and art movements including Constructivism, De Stijl, Suprematism and the Bauhaus. He is perhaps the most well-known Swiss designer and his name is probably the most easily recognized when talking about the period. Brockmann became a teacher at the Zurich school of arts and crafts – one of the two major design schools in Switzerland at the time, the other being the Basel School of Design. Of the many contributions to develop from the two schools were the use of, sans-serif typography, grids and asymmetrical layouts. The primary influential works were developed as posters which sought a universal graphic expression through a grid-based design purged of extraneous illustration and subjective feeling. This was seen to be the most effective means of communication. In my research about Brockman I remember stumbling across an interview which asked him about the source of his efforts to clarify everything. Brockmann’s response is something that has stuck with me since:
Josef Müller-Brockmann was a Swiss graphic designer and teacher. He studied architecture, design and history of art at Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich.
“The unconscious is part of the support structure: everything that is stored there comes to light in the work process. What I try to achieve in my work is to communicate information about an idea, event or product as clearly as possible. Such a down-to-earth presentation is barely affected by present-day trends. But it is not so much a question of making a statement that will be valid for all time as of being able to communicate in-formation to the recipient in a way that leaves him or her free to form a positive or negative opinion.”
I love this idea of simplicity yet being straight to the point. To me this is where design transcends the barrier between aesthetics and language. These posters are literally speaking to you, poetically, whilst simultaneously being complimented by visuals. Once you begin to think in this mindset, it is easy to see where the Swiss Design School idea of posters being the most effective means of communication comes from. If someone was to show you a picture of an event you would comprehend and retain some information; if someone was to speak to you in person and outline an event you would retain some of the information. But, if someone was to pair those two together harmoniously, you are essentially experiencing both forms of literacy simultaneously. Joseph Müller Brockman’s posters do just this.
Mature Influences
What inspires me about this quote is his concept of conveying a message and its content in its most pure form, so that the viewer can absorb the information and make their own judgements or decisions. His posters utilize a delicate balance of typography, photography and graphics to cre-ate a visual message that communicates the essential elements – the essence – of the content, whilst remaining free from bias.
Mature Influences
Johannes Itten – Color Theory
The first time I came across Johannes Itten and his theories on colour was in my Graphic Design 1 class during the summer of 2017. Johannes Itten was one of the first people to define and identify strategies for successful color combinations. Through his research he devised seven methodologies for coordinating colors utilizing the hue’s contrasting properties. These contrasts add other variations with respect to the intensity of the respective hues; i.e. contrasts may be obtained due to light, moderate, or dark value. On the next page is an exercise that we did to investigate the effect that colors had on one another when placed side by side. The idea behind this investigation was that no color existed on its own – they are all relative to another color. In this exercise we put two identical squares of colour in the center of two larger, different colored squares. Immediately you notice that the identical colors no longer look the same! Using CMYK values we played with one of the identical squares until it matched the original color again. After this we brought the two smaller squares down beneath the exercise to see just how different the two identical colors now
Johannes Itten was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school.
were to be able to look the same. I was captivated by this concept. For me it opened up my mind to the effect colors have on one another as well as the depth of field in a composition. I was able to bring the lessons I learnt from color theory to add an extra dimension to my future projects.
Mature Influences
Twen Magazine
Twen was a West German magazine that was published from 1959 to 1971, and known for its innovative design and typography.
These spreads from Twen Magazine inspired me most by giving me the confidence to experiment. The confidence to think outside the box and run with it. A lot of these spreads I see, my first reaction is, ‘wow, that’s incredible, I would have never thought to try that’, which is what I love most. It exposes me to compositions and ideas that are so foreign to me. So abstract and different, yet they work harmoniously, highlighting the essence of the content. Text that mirrors image and image that mirrors text, Twen Magazine spreads opened my world of the use of typography to tell a story. Instead of starting safe, I now tend to push something to the extreme first and then draw it back if need be!
Mature Influences
I remember feeling inspired the moment I discovered Twen magazine and looked at its spreads. It’s use of typography and photography both as individual elements and meshed together is absolutely beautiful. Take this spread on the left for exam-ple, ‘Das Kinder Zimmer’ which translates to child’s nursery is set next to an overwhelming graphic of a child’s head split open and a lion rushing out of it – seemingly an insight into their thoughts. Immediately you feel the rush of imagination and crea-tivity that is swirling inside of this child’s brain, which is most probably alluding to the goings-on at a childcare nursery. I’m trying to find the words to further articulate the feeling that I get inside when I see these spreads, however, all I feel I need to say is ‘just look at them’, even to the untrained eye they are playful, inviting, and engaging to the reader.
Mature Influences
De Stijl
De Stijl, Dutch for “The Style”, also known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of artists, furniture designers and architects.
I had heard of and seen works by Piet Mondrian before, but it wasn’t until my junior year of college that I was exposed to the entire body of artists and work that emerged from the De Stijl movement. The Netherlands-based De Stijl movement embraced an abstract, pareddown aesthetic centered in basic visual elements such as geometric forms and primary colors. Partly a reaction against the decorative excesses of Art Deco, the reduced quality of De Stijl art was envisioned by its creators as a universal visual language appropriate to the modern era, a time of a new, spiritualized world order. Led by the painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, De Stijl artists applied their style to a host of media in the fine and applied arts and beyond. Promoting their innovative ideas in their journal of the same name, the members envisioned nothing less than the ideal fusion of form
and function, thereby making De Stijl in effect the ‘ultimate style’. I remember being immediately captured by the simple, and what seemed to me straight-forward design concepts. For me, the simplicity immediately highlighted the form and function of the architecture and furniture design. Their idea of a modern universal style and language of design is something that stuck with me. I really like the concept that good design, when composed simply and to the point can be just as important and influential as a page filled with text! I also loved its application across so many different media. Furniture design and industrial design are things that I have had a passion for since school and to be finally learning about a modern art movement that centralized itself around media such as these in such a beautiful, elegant way reignited these passions.
Mature Influences
Collections
LEGO
Lego is a Danish family-owned company based in Billund, Denmark. It is best known for the manufacture of Lego-brand toys, consisting mostly of interlocking plastic bricks.
Over the years I have accumulated A LOT of LEGO pieces. My collection started When I was very young, so young in fact that I can’t even remember how it started! With that logic, back before I even knew what was going on I was piecing random bricks of LEGO together constructing naive masterpieces. By the time I can start to remember what I was doing with my LEGO pieces all I had was a mass box of colorful bricks of all shapes and sizes. From here I started to collect the prepackaged boxes of LEGO such as the big plane pictured on the right. These came with step by step instructions on how to turn your heap of bricks into things such as planes and trucks, cities, or even scenes from your favorite movies such as Star Wars or Harry Potter! I enjoyed this process but very quickly my own creativity kicked in and I started to experiment. I would take pieces from planes that I had built
and attached them to trucks – creating winged-truck-hybrids. I would use my existing bricks to build houses and garages for my winged-truck-hybrids. I would then add pools and trees which I created myself and add them to these houses to create expansive estates! As I got new pieces I would continue to evolve my hybrid vehicles and add rooms and floors to my houses.
Collections
As I got older I turned down a more abstract path with my building. I would build abstract sculptures – paying careful attention to my use of colour and form, as well as the structural integrity. I would use my LEGO pieces to create small scale models for my architecture classes which I would then photograph and add to site plans. My love for LEGO grew from something innocent, to something creative, to something that was practical and applicable to my studies.
Collections
PokĂŠmon Cards
PokĂŠmon Trading Card Game, originally released in Japan, is a video game adaptation of the original tabletop trading card game of the same name, which in turn was based on the PokĂŠmon role-playing video game series.
When I was 10 years old, Pokémon was the most popular TV show, card game and Gameboy game. It was everywhere! Naturally I became obsessed with it. Like most things that I become obsessed with playing and collecting, there was an evolution narrative to the game i.e. the more you played the more you levelled up your Pokémon. there was also an aesthetic aspect of the game which is what drew me in and kept me close. So close in fact, that although my Pokémon cards are stuffed away at home I will still find myself playing Pokémon on Gameboy whenever I have a long international flight.
Collections
I took my Pokémon card collection very seriously. I kept them in a binder folder that was just for Pokémon cards, with the logo on the front and back. Within this folder I broke up the cards into sections according to their type (grass=green, electric=yellow, psychic=purple, water=blue, red=fire, normal=white, brown=ground). Within each type category I had the cards sorted in order of aesthetics from most aesthetic to least. Yes, that’s right, I chose not to collect, sort, and play my Pokémon cards according to their strength or skill level, but instead I judged them on how much I liked what they looked like! My first two favorite Pokémon were Polywhirl and Scyther (the two larger cards pictured), especially Polywhirl though. I loved the massive swirl on his stomach. My love for swirls has continued since then and swirls, curves, and organic shapes often manage to find their way into my design work.
Bikes
High performance, super light, carbon fibre racing bikes – as seen in events such as the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France.
My passion for high-performance racing bikes is probably my most recent obsession; and my most expensive. There is a joke within the cycling community that the number of bikes a bike enthusiast will own at any one time follows the formula: “number of bikes = n + 1”. My obsession started when I was 18 and was lent my very first road bike. It was an aluminum frame Orbea Aspin which I borrowed off my friend’s father to train on for rowing. Cycling culture within the rowing community is a massive thing back home in Australia as we use our bikes for cross training and to get around the city as extra fitness. Besides falling in love with the feeling of floating freely through the air as if I was on a cloud, it
Collections
was the geometry, and color schemes that I loved most. Once I reached this stage, the bike you rode wasn’t just a vehicle to get from A to B, it became more of a statement of who you were and what you were going to do with the two-wheeled weapon you had chosen to sit on. Pictured above is my very own 2012 Focus Izalco Max, with SRAM Red and Shimano Ultegra accessories, and ENVE 3.8 Carbon Clincher Rims. That may sound like a bunch of overwhelming non-sense, but a bike really is that customizable. Every part I have chosen individually to make a certain statement. Last year when my child-hood dog passed away I built a bike in dedication to it and named it ‘Chloe’. I know everything about this bike, even the dimensions and spacing between the bolts that hold the crank arm to the frame. I spent months researching, designing and assembling the pieces before I finished the build. I find the process much the same to designing a poster, however, I get to ride this poster around the city I live in and show it off to everyone who sees it roll past.
Sunglasses
this is a short descirption or overview about their work or what it is, or why its important/ significant, revolutionary??
Sunglasses are another passion that was born from my rowing career. these fashion items tie in perfectly to both rowing and the cycling subculture that I became a part of. Not only are they a logical addition to these outdoor sports as protective eyewear from UV rays and flying debris on the road, but much like the bike you decide to ride, sunglasses are a statement. Also, they are just as customizable and personal to the individual wearer. I have accumulated 8 pairs of sunglasses since my 18th birthday. Each pair signifies a particular phase of my career and was specially designed by me to suit my mood and goals at the time. Over the years my preference has shifted from bright, outrageous colour schemes, to a more refined formula of ‘one bright color + black, with black lenses’. This design scheme comes with a very particular purpose. To me black lenses are the height of intimidation. Staring across to a pair of black lenses is a menacing sight at the start line. They mean I’m here to do business and I’m dead serious about this. The incorporation of one single bright colour is to add an extra edge, or flair to the pair that I am wearing. I guess this is the creative me shining through the serious me
MFA Exhibts
Summer of Love Posters
In celebration of the Summer of Love’s 50th anniversary, this exhibition explodes with a profusion of more than 120 posters, album covers and photographs from the transformative years around 1967.
I went to this exhibition twice this past summer of 2017 – once in san Francisco and once at the MFA here in Boston. The exhibition is a 50th anniversary celebration of the adventurous and colorful counterculture that blossomed in the years surrounding the legendary San Francisco summer of 1967, The period is marked by groundbreaking developments in art, fashion, music, and politics. Local bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were the progenitors of what would become known as the “San Francisco Sound,” music that found its visual counterpart in creative industries that sprang up throughout the region. Rock-poster artists such as Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson generated an exciting array
I remember feeling so intrigued by the expressive illustrations of the posters. I went to this exhibition at a time in my design career where I was starting to become very interested in Illustrations. Before this exhibition I can recall still being quite restricted and self-conscious about the illustrations that I was creating. Seeing the looseness and freedom of these illustration inspired me to let go and create! Ever since then I have been able to remove these self-imposed restrictions and draw freely, embracing the abstract and pushing my own boundaries.
MFA Exhibits
of distinctive works featuring distorted hand-lettering and vibrating colors, while wildly creative light shows, such as those by Bill Ham and Ben Van Meter, served as expressions of the new psychedelic impulse.
MFA Exhibits
M.C. Escher
Maurits Cornelis Escher, or commonly M. C. Escher, was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.
Through this style of art, I developed a passion for hyper-realist artists such as Chuck Close, Robert Longo and ultimately M.C. Escher. For me the works of Longo and Close represented the hyper-realism that I would strive for in my work, but the works of Escher pushed these boundaries further into a whole new dimension – a dimension where hyper-realism becomes unrealistic. The scenes that you are looking at appear so real,
MFA Exhibits
I would say that my desire to become a Graphic Designer started in the world of Fine Art. From the 10th-12th grade at my high school I was lucky enough to be given the DUX of Art Studies (highest mark in my grade), where I would complete large scale graphite drawings of photos that I took whilst walking through the city.
I would sit online and google images of Escher’s works, studying them for hours. It wasn’t until 2 weeks ago that I actually got to see them in real life at the MFA. It was so special to be able to see these works with my own eyes and study them the way I used to when I first became interested in art. M.C. Escher’s works are something that are very special to me.
MFA Exhibits
yet often on closer inspection the content doesn’t seem to make sense. What I loved about hyper-realism was the ability to create something that would shock someone, something that would make them double take and ask, ‘how did they do that’, something that looks so real you could talk to it and it would respond back to you. For me, Escher’s work did all those things, but also made me question what I was seeing in a different way, a way that pushed the emphasis back onto me and made me question if what I was seeing was really happening.
Texas Lawton.