Alan Fletcher: Fifty years of graphic work (and play)

Alan Fletcher was a very famous graphic designer.Fletcher's way of thinking and his amazing visuals ensured that his work survived many years. In 1962 he founded Fletcher/ Forbes/ Gills firm. In 1965 Gill left. To replace Gill was Theo crosby. The firm was renamed Crosby/ Fletcher/Forbes. As the firm continued to do well, In 1972 two more partners joined the three named Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky and they evolved into Pentagram. Fletcher created logos such as Reuters, the Victoria Albert Museum he also created a logo for Institute of Directors. He has worked with some well known clients and companies such as Pirelli, Shell, Lloyd's of London, Daimler Benz and the British arm of Time and Life.
I and a few others went along to the Alan Fletcher exhibition at the Cube art gallery to look at his work in more detail. I found that when I was looking at his work his like for typography was evident. His work was visually interesting it was vibrant and loud. I liked the rebus work he created using newspaper clippings, images and type. Also what was eye catching to me was the calender designs he created in different languages such as german, french and spanish

Damien Hirst, the once hard-drinking, hard-partying, brash, loud-mouthed enfant terrible of art, admitted he was a changed man as he unveiled an exhibition that represents a sea change in his work. Over two years he stood alone in a studio and painted. He is, he said, a man confronting his mortality.

Hirst has chosen one of the grandest galleries in the UK to exhibit 25 works that took up a big chunk of his life between 2006 and 2008. From tomorrow visitors to the Wallace Collection in London – with its arms and armour, walls covered with Old Masters including Poussin, Titian and Velázquez, and its lunching ladies – will also be able to see the artist's Francis Bacon-influenced Blue Paintings hung over two rooms.

He becomes one of only a handful of painters who have had work exhibited at the Wallace Collection in their lifetime, including Lucian Freud in 2004. Hirst paid £250,000 to make the show possible, with gilding on the ceiling, a refurbished, lighter floor and £60,000 of blue silk wallpaper, commissioned from Prelle of Lyon (Marie Antoinette's silk manufacturer of choice).

Today Hirst said he was an impatient man learning to be patient.

He said: "The paintings are about my mortality, whereas all the other stuff was about my immortality. I mean I definitely believed I was going to live forever, for a while, back there."

Hirst, the most successful of the Young British Artists, was known for his partying. "We had a brilliant time but you've got to get off the table and stop shouting 'yeahhh'. When you're drunk as a young person, you look cool but when you're old you think 'fuck off.' It's just not attractive when you're older."

Hirst admitted that for a long time he had been afraid of painting, even though he admired painters more than other artists. "I was always very dissatisfied with my paintings, I always thought they weren't very good. It was a big uphill struggle. But I suddenly thought, after everything I've been through, there was nothing to be afraid of."

Hirst's new paintings feature the artist's familiar themes and motifs – skulls, spots, sharks and butterflies – but it took a long time to get to where he wanted. "I did two years of absolutely rotten paintings and I wouldn't want anybody to see them. They were just awful.

"For two years when I was painting them I thought, fucking hell, if I die now they're going to come in here and go, 'Oh, he fucked it up at the end. He was brilliant up to that point and then he did these and they're awful.' I was painting skulls and I couldn't paint them properly so I put a fag in their mouth and a red jacket and it was like 'Death having a fag'. And then I started painting the smoke and they were just awful. And then I told myself, just go back to the skull."

Hirst had a large team to help produce some of his best known works – the animals in formaldehyde, the spot paintings, the diamond-encrusted skull – but these paintings were produced alone in a studio at Claridge's hotel.

"Someone said to me recently, after seeing me in the studio covered in paint, 'Are you really making these yourself?' It's funny that that is shocking as well. For me to do paintings is more shocking than formaldehyde."

Hirst may have rediscovered painting but that does not mean he is going to spend the rest of his career with oils. "I'm doing other types of work. Something has definitely changed but I'm not saying I'm just going to paint like this."

Projects include painting from photographs, and sculptures which look as though they have been found in the sea.

Hirst, 44, lives in Devon but is also restoring a country house, Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire, with a view to it becoming a family home and gallery.

Tracey Emin recently said she was considering leaving Britain and living in France because "I'm simply not willing to pay tax at 50%". Hirst, one of the world's richest artists, is more sanguine. "I like living here. If you live somewhere nice you've got to pay the taxes, haven't you? Unfortunately. But I will moan at the telly, like Victor Meldrew."

Here are some of my favourite logos

Identity research

These are some of the images i used when creating my identities.

I found this on the internet that i thought would be quite useful

Influenced by early 20th century avant-garde design, American album covers and the work of Russian constructivists El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, Brody began exploring new directions for graphic design in 1981 as art director for “The Face.” For this brash lifestyle magazine with its roots in the punk movement, Brody used noisy graphics and challenged conventional thinking about the form and function of typography by distorting letterforms, mixing fonts and making generous use of icons.

With the first Macs, Brody began to set new precedents in both design and typography. With the Macs, he told “Print: American Graphic Design Magazine” in 1999, he had the “opportunity to democratize the fiefdom of typographic design. Finally, we could…explore ideas that challenged our fundamental notions of what typographic language should be.”

Brody began to design his own typefaces — Insigina, Arcadia and Typeface Six are three of his most popular. They, and others, appear on everything from advertising to album and magazine covers, fashion magazine spreads and covers for rock biographies. “Blur is probably one of my favorite typefaces,” Brody says, “because it has to do with our experience in the information society today that I managed to translate into a process font. It was in the right place at the right time and became very popular, because it expressed an idea successfully and people understood the idea.”

One Mac, Any Medium

“The single major difference the Mac has made,” Brody observes “is that, from one source, we can create a language that can be used in any medium. We’ll produce a core identity and language that can then be distributed in print, web, electronic environmental design, packaging — everything — from one computer. The Mac is a means of broadcasting via the web. Via pdfs, we might send files to a printer in Japan. Of course, it’s a receiver as well. I often listen to the radio, a live stream on broadband.

“The Mac has also allowed us to work as one network,” Brody adds, “with different skill sets in different studios. The facility in Paris is largely geared toward packaging. London does most of the branding, and ‘Fuse’ comes out of London. And the San Francisco office is almost all motion graphics for film, TV and web. So we can have different skill sets in different places, and projects are often shared between two or more studios. We can not only share ideas, but we can have idea contributions from people working in very different kinds of cultures. Our process is to try and use the computer in a very human, organic way, so that there’s a lot of sharing of culture as well as the practical stuff.

“And the Mac means we can work economically, which is amazing. We don’t have to have 20 people in one place. It’s enabled us to have an extremely modular setup.”

When looking on a guerilla advertising website i came across this i just thought the idea was clever and simple.

To help me create my specimen sheets/ posters i decided to look at some posters on type and i came across this Helvetica poster and i created one of my posters in a similar style to this.

This is another Helvetica poster that i looked at. Using my Random typeface i created the poster in this style.

General research

'Cake'

For this brief we were asked to get into pairs and bake a cake. We had to do a diary of some sort including how we made the cake and if we had any problems how we overcame the problems. This could be pictorial as well as written.In our pairs we were asked to buy the ingredients, then bake the cake and make it look as mouthwateringly edible as we could.

Diary

Originally i was paired up with Lisa to do this brief but there were problems with us not being able to get to each others houses to bake the cake due to us living so far apart so we decided to bake a cake individually.

I was going to make a chocolate log at first but due to time and that i was was working on my own i decided to make a sponge cake.

I bought all the ingredients needed and then i started to bake. As i had got most of the ingredients over a week before i had to make the cake there was a short supply of eggs in my fridge there was only two and i needed three so i just stuck with two. I mixed the eggs and sugar together for about 10 minutes which was hardwork since i didn't have an electrical beater. After i did that i added the water and butter to a pan and gently melted the butter. I then added this to the mixture of eggs and sugar i also added the vanilla essence. To me it started to look a bit like a pancake mix. Then i added the flour to the mixture. Then i thought its going to taste really bland like that so i decided to add some chocolate chips to it. I then poured the mixture into the tin. Then i put it in a 190 degrees celcius preheated oven, for 20 minutes. When it came out of the oven to me it looked a bit on the flat side. I then added the chocolate topping and the icing sugar. The presentation of it looked better. Then i decided to put it into the fridge to give it a more frosty feel. Then i realised that it had gone quite hard so i left it out on the side to get the cold off it. So that is how i got the name 'Frosty flat sponge cake'. So overall considering that i had only previously made a cake twice before in school. I did well.

Historical context- Neville brody

The theory i have chosen to discuss is Radical Eclectism. I have chosen this theory because i think it really fits into Brody's work especially when it come to the style of his type. Neville Brody's work is influenced by Man ray and Maholy-Nagy. In Brody's work you can see the similarites between his work and who he is influenced by.


Neville brody's work, Man ray's work, Maholy-Nagy's work


Looking at the pieces of work of ray's and Maholy-Nagy's there use of shape and colour is very similar. When u look back at Brody's piece you can see how much they influence his work. Even though Brody is using type, after looking at his piece for a while you start to see the type more as an image filled with different colours. So what he has done is taken the composition, the colour and the shapes from ray's and Maholy-Nagy work and altered them into a different style.

Blog research

For this brief i was asked to advertise a 'Speak to your dad day'. I paired up with Lisa and we came up with three lists of ideas we also wnet round the group and got ideas from them. The lists we created were a difficult list, a father list and a communication list. Using the lists me and Lisa came up with some hybrids from the lists such as hero and graffiti.
After we had done that we started drawing out some ideas based on the lists.

The top advert is showing a way of communication by using walkie-talkies. The one below it is more about what it is conveying more than what it is showing. It is basically saying that it is wrong to cut your father out of your life because deep down you are going to regret it. The next one which i think most people can relate to is saying that when most children run low on money or are basically skint the first person they run to is usually there dad. The last one which i think is the most effective one is showing a little boy looking up to his dad as a hero and the top line of the advert is saying that it is important to keep in touch with your dad because you only have one.

The fourth plinth

For this brief me and Jay paired up and came up with some ideas as to what we could have done with our time on the plinth in trafalgar square.

I found this video on youtube which has a gorilla on the plinth.......




We both found a video that we came across on you tube called "Where the hell is Matt?" here is the video .....

So looking at this video we decided to make various A2 posters representing each country since we weren't able to go to the actual countries, which would have been better. Then we thought that this will take up too much time to do. So i suggested instead that we collect objects that will represent each country. So the idea was that we were on the plinth i stood in front of Jay and held the first object and tell the audience the country name then i would move out of the way and Jay would perform a dance and then the audience could come up in large groups and get involved and then we would have a five minute break and then repeat the cycle again but with a different object and a different country name. So by the end the whole audience would have at least 1 or 2 dances on the plinth.

The plinth presentation