I know it’s a bit old video but I’ve never posted here and it’s really refreshing. Have a nice summer everyone !
[tags]mono, blanka, event, exhibition, poster, typography, graphic design, video[/tags]
July, 2007 Monthly archive
Throughout this month, Creative Review has been following the activities of design studio Build. On 28 June, Michael and Nicola Place, who make up Build, travelled to Dublin for a screening of Helvetica, followed by a panel discusssion and talk by Wim Crouwel. The following morning Build caught up with Crouwel to conduct an interview for CR.
Excerpt :
MCP: Looking at your work, I always think it’s so incredible; the form, the typefaces, the layout. It’s very influential and yet we are seeing this out of context from the time it was created. At the time, did it seem shocking or was it accepted by those around as just good design, or were people quite indifferent?
WC: It was an amount of luck, we had the right clients who embraced this sort of thinking – mainly the director [of the Van Abbemuseum, and then of the Stedelijk Museum] who was a great and long term client. We met through my art school in Southern Holland [Groningen] where I was teaching in 1954 (up until then I was painting, i didn’t really know what to do) – the head of the school knew the director – and six months after I had started teaching I got a phone call, which was the beginning of a long relationship with him. He wanted to represent artwork with a more advanced way of thinking that reflected what was happening with Modern Art. We were very interested in the abstract at that time. He was very supportive, as I dealt with him directly, and he dealt with the curators, who always wanted to have a say in the way their shows were promoted or represented. I just dealt with him, and he was very supportive of my ideas, as they fitted with the ideas of abstract paining, so my ideas were really quite accepted.
Read the interview here.
[tags]Graphic design, Wim Crouwel, Michael C. Place, Build, Interview[/tags]
The Visual Language Of Herbert Matter is a feature length documentary film on the life and career of designer and photographer Herbert Matter. The film is produced by piXiu films and directed by Reto Caduff. It is scheduled for release in 2009.
Press release:
Herbert Matter was a man who seemingly fit many lives into one by excelling in the creative disciplines of design, photography and film. The documentary The Visual Language of Herbert Matter profiles his extraordinary life and seminal work.
With the help of historical footage, vintage photographs, never-before-seen film excerpts (some shot by Matter himself) and a broad overview of his extensive body of work. the feature length documentary helps in bringing the picture of an almost forgotten creative genius back into focus.
Interwoven with interviews from a who’s who list of legendary artists, designer and photographers, the film sheds light on a remarkable career and its impact on the evolving language of design during the short 20th century both in the USA and Europe.
For the first time in an encompassing and comprehensive way, the film touches on the innovative expressions of his free experimental work, his fashion and advertising photography and his portraiture. His amazing talent of combining bold combinations of words, images and space is shown in his iconic Swiss travel posters, pavilion designs for the New York World’s Fair 1939, photographs for Condé Nast publications; corporate image programs for Knoll furniture, the New Haven Railroad, exhibition- and numerous catalog designs for the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum; covers for the legendary Arts & Architecture Magazine and his lesser known work in film, the prime example being a film on the works of Alexander Calder.
The documentary is produced by independent Swiss production company piXiu films, directed by award-winning filmmaker Reto Caduff and presented with a unique approach of visual storytelling: beginning with Matter’s childhood in the Swiss alps, to his training in Paris with legends such as A.M. Cassandre, Fernand Léger, and Le Corbusier, leading back to Zurich and the groundbreaking photomontage in his legendary Swiss travel posters followed by his subsequent move to the United States. There, the story touches on his hiring by Alexey Brodovitch, Matter’s turbulent marriage with Mercedes Carles and his friendship with modernist thinkers and artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Robert Frank, Charles and Ray Eames, R. Buckminster Fuller or Alexander Calder as well as his over twenty years of devotion on producing an interpretative monograph of the works of Alberto Giacometti. Touching on his legacy, Matters teachings at Yale University in photography and graphic design are another vital part of this story as well as the surprising discovery by son Alex Matter in 2002 of some Pollock paintings in a storage facility belonging to his late father.
A short clip is available here
[tags]Herbert Matter, design, poster, swiss[/tags]
Smart poster. Love it. You want one ? contact Eivind at artschoolreject.com.
[tags]poster, italic, akzidenz grotesk[/tags]
