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.
Talking about her influences such as political activism as well as feminism she quotes Woody Allen, who describes work as ‘a quality distraction’. A portrait of Allen on her desk inspires her to follow this approach.
Sara de Bondt is a Belgian graphic designer based in London. Her talk at TYPO was divided into three sections:
To kick off the TYPO London program in Jeffrey Hall, facilitator Simone Wolf introduced Visual Editions‘ Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen as pair that likes “working with talented people and being told something is impossible.”
Anthony Burrill describes himself as a ‘persuasive, up-beat illustrator and designer’. Today at TYPO London, the softly spoken man took us on a fantastic journey through his eclectic career to date; regaling stories of letter-pressing in the “ancient” town of Rye, printing a poster using the crude oil from the disastrous BP spill of 2006 BP and why we should “Work Hard and Be Nice to People”.
The seats of Logan Hall and the those of the second stage at Jeffery Hall are taken. Opening speakers Sara De Bondt in the main hall and Anna Gerber & Britt Iversen from Visual Editions on the second stage kicked off this year’s TYPO London conference. Today and tomorrow more than 30 speakers will investigate the social impact on design.