Ornamental Graphic Artist Rosetta Kong
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Marian Bantjes made a successful transition from traditional graphic design into a new personal way of working. It completely crosses commercial boundaries and embraces a humanistic hand-drawn ethos and complex use of text.
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page 3 Influence Map Vector & Photography 2006 page 5 Digitopolis Previous work
he graphic artist, Marian Bantjes has suddenly become successful after a long struggle with figuring out which path to go down, graphic design, illustration, typography or writing. She was born in 1963, and grew up in a prairie province of Canada, called Saskatchewan. After the first year of being in art school, Bantjes dropped out and worked for the publisher Hartley & Marks, learning the principles of computer typesetting and historical theories of typefaces. After ten years of working there, she developed typography and design skills, and became the co-founded of Digitopolis in Vancouver, working there for eight years, producing print-base work. She decided to leave her firm to pursue a more personal approach to her work, and eventually, she started doing collaborations with designers and art directors such as Pentagram, Michael Bierut, Stefan Sagmeister, Saks Fifth Avenue, Winterhouse, and Houghton Mifflin, and gained international recogni-
“I had a very bad relationship with my business partner, and we ended up in a very classical struggle between accounts vs. creative, and at that point, we had that constant fight, I hated the constant compromise. I left very powerless.� tion. She creates custom type for magazines, advertising and special projects, and her work has been published in books and magazines around the world, such as Communication Arts (USA) IDEA (Japan), Creative Review (UK), etc. After a long stretch of doing what she loves, she has become well known for her ornamental details and her hand-worked art.
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“I hated the work I was doing, I had to change. I really felt like I was going to kill myself if I didn’t change, whereas now, what I have been doing, I still enjoy doing it. I am not anywhere near wanting to stab myself in the eye with a pair of scissors.”
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he thing that sets Marian Bantjes apart from traditional graphic designers or typographers is that her work uses intricate detail to convey layered meanings through both text and materials. Contemporary graphic designers today are obligated to produce something that is more predictable and accessible, with a simple aesthetic, but she exists outside of that mainstream genre. Marian Bantjes puts detailing into work that often has a message hidden, which is intended to stop people and draw them in, and to give them a sense of wonder in the detail. Often times, the text in her works may not be highly legible. They invoke curiosity and mystery, so what the viewers see ultimately isn’t what it appears to be. Her pieces force viewers take the time to figure it out, and they get a moment of surprise. After a year of quitting her firm and doing what she loved, her career as a more personal graphic design launched after she won a T-shirt competition. She was obsessively contributing to an online community, which was attended by some influential, important designers. At the time, this was the first design based blog created, and a T-shirt design competition was being held. Bantjes’ Speak Up design won not through judges, but through popular votes. The design of the t shirt contains so much meaning to the community, and everything from the style of text to the gesture of the lines was symbolic. The text is very block-like, and it’s reminiscent of pixels representing the online community. Claw-like forms were incorporated into the pixel to personify the commentary of the site, and it is contrasted by ornate swirls that symbolize friendship. The contrast between the two styles is quite interesting. As a result, the design led her to opportunities that gave her pride in her work as a graphic designer.
top right Want it Vector 2007 middle right New Opportunities Pen & Ink, 2007 bottom right The Moon Series Oil Paints for The Creator Studio, 2007 page 6 Speak Up T-Shirt Vector for Armin Vit, 2003
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n 2007, Marian Bantjes designed a page for the Guardian Newspaper in the United Kingdom Magazine that they call G2. Puzzle Special was first created by a series of tiling united. She specifically designed fragments so that they would contain parts of letter forms within their shapes. Then, she would rotate the ornamenting fragments, combining those pieces together to create letters and then words within the abstract patterning. The work is created with an abstract surrounding, but is illegible, so then she fills certain areas in within those letter forms, and then she can bring forward the text out of the those patterns. If it becomes too obvious, colors are added within the background until reaches a point where it is puzzling to the audiences. After, she started producing work such as Sustainability, New Opportunities, The Moon series, and I Wonder that share the same ethereal quality as Puzzle Special. They are created with the same procedure, and really show how texts become embedded into the pieces. The design of the work forces the viewers’ eyes to draw out each letter in order to figure out what is actually being spelled, and it becomes an entirely different engagement with the work as these intricate details are examined
page 9 G2 Puzzle Special Vector for The Guardian, 2007 bottom right I Wonder Mix Media 2009
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In 2008, Bantjes created Design Ignites Change for a nonprofit Academy for Educational Developments. Initially, Bantjes was restricted to only using two colors for budget reasons, resulting in a challenge of communicating change with such restriction. She had this brilliant idea to construct her designs out of shapes and forms as holes in the paper, which then was laser-cut.
illiam Drenttel at Winterhouse asked Bantjes to design a poster the required the word Sustainability, but other than that, it was a very open ended project. He left it up to her to decide how she was going to communicate. The theme of Sustainability is the continuity of time and growth, and she began designing these tiles out of historical, organic shapes, which were then turned into classical letterforms. To surround the type, there was a background that contained the same historical forms, but was blended with contemporary plastic shapes of Styrofoam, extrusions, electronics, etc.
The background was one solid color, but the design itself changed depending on what was put behind it or when light was shining through it at different angles. Since doing this cutting process will leave slight burn marks, it was crucial that the lasers through the back of the outcome stay clean. She also took the technical step into consideration when she laser-cut intentionally, which she craved from the front to emphasize the sense of the design being ignited.
The way all the tiles are formed ultimately was reminiscent of an infinity symbol, which is beyond time, and this piece shows how much is carried forward over time. It gives the sense that even though time is going forward linearly, cyclically it never runs out, which is similar to generations. The repetition of the tiles reminded of days and year, where cyclical time is inside linear time. There were subtle pieces of antique photography taken of the Library of Congress, which were incorporated into the background, connecting sustainability to the idea of familial generations. Because the majority of the background is made up of blue and green, at a distance, it resembles a giant tree against a sunny sky, which creates the sense of growth and continuity. The theme of the piece Sustainability is also the theme of all the pieces as a whole — growth and development — seen in Sustainability and in Marian Bantjes artistic development. top Sustainability Vector for Winterhouse, 2007 bottom right Design Ignites Change Laser-cutout for AED Social Change, 2008
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“My work as a graphic designer was to follow strategies. My work as a graphic artist now is to follow my heart and my interest with a guidance of my ego to create work that is neutrally beneficial to myself and a client.�
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cover Slanted Vector for Schriften, 2008 page 11 Recent work 2009–2013
Bibliography Bantjes, Marian, Rick Poynor. Marian Bantjes: Pretty Pictures. Metropolis Books, 2013, pg. 11–158. Berry, Colin. Marian Bantjes. ID: International Design, Octomber 2008, Vol 55 issue 1, pg. 102–103. Strand Bookstore. “Marian Bantjes & Michael Bierut discuss Pretty Pictures ” Youtube video, 42:02, November 22, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MNhBt3oD--c. Fraser, J. Lynn. Marian Bantjes. Letters art Review, Winter 2012, vol. 26 Issue 1 pg. 22–35.
Designed and written by Rosetta Kong Composed in Optima, designed by Hermann Zapf in 1955 Printed in the U.S: TOSHIBA colorMFP-X4 USA Copy right © 2015 Rosetta Kong, Portland, Maine, Maine College of Art
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