Matthew Butterick’s philosophy is about taking risks and making things happen.
Graduated from Harvard, being a typographer, a writer (‘Typography for Lawyers’) and a lawyer, he clearly and accurately raised the importance of the written word, within the graphic design industry. He asks us two main questions: what makes typography valuable and how can we rebuild the typographic society?
Vaughan Oliver, designer and art director spoke yesterday at TYPO London of a career spanning 30 years in 30 minutes. Oliver is perhaps best known for (but certainly not limited to) his record cover work with various photographers under the names 23 Envelope and v23, producing iconic artwork for artists such as Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Lush, UVS, Pixies, The Breeders, Bush, TV on the Radio, Bon Iver, Zomby and more recently David Lynch.
Kate Moross isn’t ashamed to be a child of the MySpace generation. After all, the 26-year-old designer owes much of her success and many of her clients to aptly using the early social networking site. As a “post post punk punk,” the internet helped define Moross’ business focus of “Art + Music + Grrrl.”
Paula Scher is a an artist pretending to be a designer. With an upbringing that incorporated a rejection of modernist uniformity and embracing a revolutionist counter-culture of peace, she began her career working at CBS as an art director. Her work now covers all facets of design, yet is always anchored in a strong & consistent visual language.
Typekit’s Sean McBride had come over from San Francisco to give us an introduction to web typography. The jam-packed Drama Studio room made clear that there is still a demand for talks on the possibilities of typography on the web.
Mariana Santos and Mark McCormick shared the stage to talk about how the Guardian is using the readers to enforce their publication. Mariana is doing interactive design and Mark is specialised in infographics. They toss subjects beween their disciplines to make the most of it.
The title of Tony Chambers’ talk calls for explanation. Stringing along with Eike König, the previous speaker on stage, Chambers also announced that he would not be showing his own work, but work by others instead. As Creative Director and Editor-In-Chief at Wallpaper* Tony Chambers has received numerous invitation cards to all kinds of shows of the fashion industry. Accompanied by his assistants Sarah, Lee and Rose he presented his extensive collection of the last ten years, commenting on their typographic quality, production and overall looks. In this context, Chambers explains, a »stiffy« is an old-fashioned colloquial term for a »thick, elegant invitation to something rather grand«.
Tim Beard quickly weighs in on the conferences theme of ‘Social’ stating that “Design is a social process with social outcomes”. Over the next 45 minutes Tim (one of three directors of East London’s design studio Bibliothèque) gives insights into an array of projects via the studio culture that drives and defines Bibliothèque’s output of work.
Simon runs a company called ‘someone’ in London which is specialised in launches and relaunches. Within the last couple of years he has observed that the traditional understanding of branding does not work nowadays. Branding does not only need to be liked and stand out, today it also needs to be useful.
Eike König preferred to introduce himself with a colourful media-music show rather than with words. After being run over by an avalanche of his work (all within one minute), he started talking about the actual subject, without showing any more of his projects.
He defined himself as a mix of his empathic mum and his focused, structured dad. They encouraged him to feel responsible to what he does. As a child he was fascinated by political info graphics in magazines. Finding out that graphic designers are creating such powerfully imagery, he decided to become one himself. Another influential part of his work is music.
Offbeat(*) speaker Peter Gregson came to talk about his project ‘The Listening Machine‘, a sonification of the continuous stream of tweets by 500 selected UK twitter users. Composer Gregson created the piece together with collaborator Daniel Jones and Britten Sinfonia. It’s an unexpected talk at a design conference, but it did tie in nicely to the social theme of the conference.
