Aiga/Mn and Walker's 2004 Insights Graphic Design
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No. 14 February 6, 2004 Immediate Release Press Contact: Karen Gysin 612.375.7651 karen.gysin@ walkerart.org AIGA/MN AND WALKER’S 2004 INSIGHTS GRAPHIC DESIGN LECTURE SERIES FEATURES PRACTITIONERS FROM MINNEAPOLIS, NEW YORK, THE NETHERLANDS, AND LONDON This year’s Insights graphic design series, presented at 7 pm Tuesdays, March 2–30, by the Walker Art Center and the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Minnesota Chapter, searches for the simple life; not the vacuous world of Paris Hilton, but the verdant territories of the post-“dot- bomb” world. Do ideas have to be complicated to be good? Do things have to be visually complex to look designed? Does simple mean simplistic? Can design be both conceptually and visually engaging? Is process personal or a means to an end? Designers from near and far—from Minneapolis to the Netherlands—will shed light on, or merely dodge, these and other questions in talks taking place at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) Auditorium, 2501 Stevens Avenue South, Minneapolis. Insights 2004 is part of Walker without Walls, an exciting year of programming spanning the Twin Cities while the Walker building is closed for renovation. Walker without Walls is made possible with generous support from Target. Insights 2004 Tuesdays, March 2–30, 7 pm Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) Auditorium, 2501 Stevens Avenue South, Minneapolis $20 ($10 Walker and AIGA members, full-time students) Series tickets: $80 ($40) Attend five lectures for the price of four. Paula Scher, Pentagram, New York Tuesday, March 2 It seems a bit ironic that Paula Scher began her career as an illustrator but has received the greatest recognition for her use of typography. As an art director at Atlantic and CBS Records in the 1970s, she created numerous album covers with strong graphic and typographic designs, eschewing the genre’s dominant and conventional uses of photography and illustration. Today she is a partner in Pentagram’s New York office producing identities, posters, exhibition designs, (more) Insights 2004 Graphic Design Lecture Series, page 2 and the like for such organizations as the Public Theater of New York, the Lincoln Center Jazz programs, the American Museum of Natural History, and Herman Miller. She has drawn inspiration from a diverse range of historical design, which she admires for its emotional resonance and appeal to contemporary audiences. When she says “I’d rather be the Beatles than Philip Glass,” she acknowledges her own characterization as a “Pop designer.” A recipient of more than 100 awards, Sher has been inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame and the Alliance Graphique Internationale, and has been awarded the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ Gold Medal and the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation. You can read more about Scher in the recently published book on her work to date, Make It Bigger. Find out more online at www.pentagram.com. Michael Byzewski and Dan Ibarra, Aesthetic Apparatus, Minneapolis Tuesday, March 9 What began in Madison, Wisconsin, as a sideline venture producing silkscreen posters for local band P’Elvis has evolved into Aesthetic Apparatus, a two-person design studio operating from Minneapolis with a nationwide clientele. Michael Byzewski and Dan Ibarra formed Aesthetic Apparatus while working together at Planet Propaganda, a major design firm in Madison. A bold use of eclectic typography, a free-floating compositional simplicity, and a seemingly endless supply of found imagery constitute the design elements of their coveted limited-edition posters for bands such as Har Mar Superstar, Mark Mallman, Atmosphere, Wire, Mission of Burma, Lydia Lunch, and the Meat Puppets. As Brad Zeller wrote in a City Pages profile, Byzewski and Ibarra are “creating some of the most distinct and distinguished posters in a now seriously crowded field.” Although their warehouse screenprinting operation matches both their “lo-fi” aesthetics and the garage band culture, their work extends beyond posters with a roster of clients that includes Virgin Records, Capitol Records, ReadyMade magazine, Mister Hip-Hop, and CMJ Music Monthly. See more of their work at www.aestheticapparatus.com. Scott Stowell, Open, New York Tuesday, March 16 Rejecting the idea of specialization, Scott Stowell embraces the open-ended possibilities of design by, in his words, “mixing form and content in two, three, and four dimensions.” Open’s two-dimensional work includes more than 200 covers for The Nation and the identity for “docfest,” the New York International Documentary Festival. In three dimensions, its packaging design can be found on special cans of Coca-Cola for the Atlantic Olympic Games (which included such useful tips as how to ask for directions to the bathroom in 12 languages or the rules to obscure Olympic games) and on packaging for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, including the beautifully produced six-CD box set, Anthology of American Folk Music. Open’s Web site and motion-graphic work include MTV’s So Five Minutes Ago, as well as comprehensive identities for the Nick at Nite channel (done in collaboration with illustrator Chip Wass, with whom he shares studio space) and art: 21, a series on contemporary American artists that recently aired on PBS. Despite Open’s wide-ranging media, graphic simplicity and conceptual accessibility prevail across the entire range of work. Stowell’s penchant for humor and conceptually driven designs is no doubt a product of his tenure with Tibor Kalman at the legendary M&Co and later as art director of Colors, a magazine about social issues for global youth culture sponsored by the Italian fashion company Benetton. Learn more about Open at www.notclosed.com. (more) Insights 2004 Graphic Design Lecture Series, page 3 Thomas Castro, Jeroen Barendse, and Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen, LUST, The Hague, The Netherlands Tuesday, March 23 Coincidence, process, context, essence. These four words characterize the working methods of LUST, a design studio based in the Netherlands. Information plays an important role in LUST’s work. For example, its design for the Digital Depot, a permanent installation space at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, includes two main areas where visitors can learn more about the artworks: an interactive DataWall with giant, transparent touch screens; and DataCloud, a digital environment navigable with a joystick containing the museum’s entire 117,000-piece collection. For an open house at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie, the studio delineated pathways with different kinds of tape, creating a simple and effective solution to wayfinding. For the city of Hoek Van Holland, the group cleverly reworked the typical folding action of a map and used it to more effectively present the information, avoiding the common problem of a large unwieldy piece of paper. For a Web site promoting the Dutch high-speed railway system, LUST devised an interface utilizing a grid of points that expands and contracts to convey concepts of time and distance. This sense of invention extends to typeface designs such as Blowout, which is based on a series of spatial experiments with letterforms using the negative space of cutout squares. The trio likens their activity to the moment when you realize that the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle is missing. To them, this sense of incompleteness and indeterminacy is “a thousand times more interesting than the moment when the puzzle is finished because when that happens, there is nothing more.” Explore the worlds of Lust at www.lust.nl. Andrew Stevens, Graphic Thought Facility (GTF), London Tuesday, March 30 In its own words, Graphic Thought Facility (GTF) “plays the straight card.” The group has developed an influential body of work with a refreshingly straightforward approach that always manages to surprise. For its particular projects, GTF creates a system or employs a method whereby “ideas design themselves.” Far from mechanistic, this approach results in designs that are unique and distinctively crafted. For an invitation to the exhibition Stealing Beauty at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, they simply used the existing press release as the basis for the design. In a prospectus about the Royal College of Art GTF presented press clippings about the school’s activities directly from their sources. The group created an identity based on slide mounts as part of the exhibition graphics for Design of the Times, allowing the client to select any images they preferred. Their work favors ad-hoc assemblages of materials, such as their scrapbook approach to the London College of Printing catalogue, and an exploitation of processes from foil-stamping to lenticular printing and materials ranging from plastics, laminates, variable paperweights, and paper stocks to electroluminescent signage for London’s Science Museum. GTF’s three directors—Andrew Stevens, Paul Neale, and Huw Morgan—have also designed retail products for Tate Gallery, Earthbaskets tombstone pet memorials, and the customizable Me Box storage system. One of Britain’s most celebrated design firms, GTF has produced work for The Peter Saville Show and the Designer of the Year for the Design Museum, London; the graphic identity and materials for the British home furnishings company, Habitat; and print collateral for the 2003 season of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. For more information, read GTF: Bits World, a 2001 publication about their work, or visit www.graphicthoughtfacility.com. Insights 2004 Graphic Design Lecture Series is cosponsored by the Walker Art Center and the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Minnesota Chapter. Additional support provided by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. (more) Insights 2004 Graphic Design Lecture Series, page 4 Walker Art Center box office hours (phone orders only; 612.375.7622): 10 am–5 pm Tuesday–Saturday; closed Sunday and Monday. Tickets are available online at www.walkerart.org/tickets/. (more).