Inspiration: Karel Teissig, Czech Poster design.

I found this poster designer on Rick Poyner's design observer blog from his posting "An unknown Master of Poster Design" observersroom.designobserver.com This is fantastic inspiration for the Year two poster project. Some original thinking, brave compositions, and strong combinations of type and image. Beautifully quirky imagery.

The Hunterian Museum Drawing Visit

www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums
On November 3rd Year 2 & 3 illustration students will be taking a drawing trip to The Royal College of Surgeons of England. There are some fantastic exhibitions there at the moment and include: Abnormal: Towards a Scientific Model of Disability by Ju Gosling aka ju90: Extinct and Ivory,Treasures from the Odontological Collection.

Parrots at BibliOdyssey

A taster from the always wonderful BibliOdyssey.

Here are the reliminary drawings for Edward Lear's book ''Illustrations of the family of Psittacidae, or parrots: the greater part of them species hitherto unfigured, containing forty-two lithographic plates, drawn from life, and on stone' 1832  You can see the final plates here.

Edward Lear was TWENTY YEARS OLD when his Parrot book was published!!

Edward Lear Sketches of Parrots Relating to 'Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots' (1832), ca. 1830 (MS Typ 55.9). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Fontifier - your handwritting as a typeface

Here is a website were you can turn your handwritting (or anything hand drawn) into a typeface with no need for fontlab. It uses a template which you print out fill in, scan back in and upload to their website.










None of their examples are particularly inspiring but I think it could be a brilliant tool if used well.

Word as Image

This is a great film by Ji Lee (Creative Director of Google). He is a very interesting fellow and worth looking into. This is an animation of his new work 'Word as Image'.

Berger on Drawing

You should all have read (or watched - it was a TV series) or at least heard of and about to read John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' - I will write a post about this later. However, more relevant to the 1st Years 'Drawing Object' project is his less well know book 'On Drawing'. Below are a few excerpts that really rang true with the way that I think about drawing.

- “For the artist drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations.” (page 3)

- “A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – seen, remembered or imagined.” (page 3)

- “It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

John Berger [2005]: Berger on Drawing. Edited by Jim Savage. Aghabullogue, Co. Cork, Eire: Occasional Press. Second Edition, 2007.

Two Exhitbitons you must see!

Bass Notes : The Film Posters of Saul Bass

Kemistry Gallery 43 Charlotte Road, ShoreditchLondon EC2A 3PD

Old Street (Northern Line) or walk from Liverpool St (15 mins)

17 February — 17 March 2011

No graphic designer has made a greater impact on the world of film than Saul Bass. This exhibition brings together a collection of his film posters, film titles and film festival posters from the Lloyd Northover donation to the British Film Institute. The BFI’s Poster Archive has kindly loaned the exhibits to make this show possible.

Saul Bass’s work is instantly recognisable for its directness, its simplicity and the way it makes its meaning felt. Breaking all conventions in the 1950s and 60s, Bass virtually invented film titles as we know them today, and he was the first to synthesize movies into compelling trademark images.

In a period when graphic imagery can be so easily manipulated electronically, Bass reminds us that a strong idea is always at the heart of a great design. His work, as reflected in this exhibition, is as refreshing today as ever.

John Stezaker

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX
Aldgate East, Liverpool St, Tower Gateway DLR

British artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.

His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations.

Both Exhibitions are a short work from Liverpool Street Station and have FREE entry!