Grottel

After 3 years of studying Graphic Design at Teesside University, alongside a 2 year apprenticeship at The Northern Block type foundry, my first font is now available to buy.
 

Grottel is a modern grotesque sans serif font family that follows the philosophy of original grotesque typefaces with enhanced personality. Fine details and tuning, balance functionality and the beauty representative of the aesthetic movement in the 19th century. Details include 5 weights, a full European character set, manually edited kerning, ligatures and alternatives to allow users to add further personality to the font.

New Books!

New addition to my collection of books on typography & type design...

Love a good book!

ISTD

This Friday I will be attending the ISTD award ceremony held at Pentagram in London to collect my award/members pack. Very excited and proud! 

Daniel Bonner on Transformation

I recently attended a lecture with Daniel Bonner, Global Chief Creative Officer at Razorfish.

He talked about transformation… the way a design company can help transform a client and the trouble with transformation.

As designers we are all involved in transforming people and companies. We should create work that takes the client to somewhere they have never been before. If the idea is already out there then make it better, if it’s already as good as it can be, don’t do it again.

There is always someone with a excuse as to why something can’t be done, but DON’T let these people hold you back, stick with your idea and support it.

 

In 2012 Kodak went bankrupt because they didn’t transform, they were too busy making printer ink, instead they should of been designing apps such as Instagram. The problem is, is that many companies seem to think if they are doing well they don’t need to be transformed but this is not the case.

10% of all photos in existence were taken in the last 12 months!!!

This shows how much changes in such a short time and it is important to always be transforming and getting better even if you feel you are getting ion just fine.

You need to ask the right questions in order to get the right answers. Someone may come to you and say… Right, we need an app, but why? What is it they are trying to achieve?, How do they know it’s an app that they need?

Small solutions are the most realistic.

Graham Rawle

Just had a very interesting lecture with Graham Rawle, an illustrator/designer.

Here is some things that I learned...

  • All designers are storytellers

  • Trust your intuition

  • When telling a story you need to find the right order of words for it to sound right, it needs to have a good rhythm to be more catchy and so it rolls of the tongue easier.

  • A story needs drama, it needs to go up and down, up and down to make it more interesting. For example, when playing snakes and ladders, with out the ups and downs you just have a boring game board. A roller coaster is the same you have to go up and down to have fun and for it to work, like the plot of a story, it has to build up and then go back down and then build to another plot. You also need to know when a story is going to end so that you are not disappointed by a sudden ending, it has to lead up to it.

  • What you don't see or say is the most important part in a story. The audience then becomes involved in the making of the story, they have to join the gap together and fill in the missing parts, a bit like juxtaposed images, our brain automatically builds a connection between these two things and makes links. The bigger the gap, the more you have to input yourself.

  • As a reader, you have to do a lot of work. There is a coding system in the text and our mind is left to put pictures to words. People don't like to mess around with the structure of a book, because it gets in the way of our mind and thought process.

  • It is important to not overlook the edge of simplicity!

  • Nothing is ever wasted! - Graham Rawle created a book called a woman's world. In the time he spent making it, a year was spent building models, cars and buildings to create a pictured story, he then decided it wasn't going to work and he needed a new approach. He left this idea and thought of a new way or telling the story, which was cut out pieces of text from womans magazines. This is a very important part of design, to go on a process and to sometimes realise that an idea may need changing after it is well thought out even if it looks good. It has to work and do the job well.

  • Don't keep compromising. You don't want it to look like everyone else's work so don't settle for a different technique, paper stock or whatever else. Go elsewhere and find what you want, do it yourself. You must get it right.

  • You need to control as much as you can! Writers don't often get to control their own stories, they don't get a say in the design of the cover, the typeface used, the peperstock or the colours, and this can change the way someone feels about the story and the way they interpret it. 

More information at grahamrawle.com