Cooke, A (2018) Graphic design for art fashion film architecture photography product design & everything in between, Prestel Verlag, Slovenia
Angharad Lewis
The nature of graphic design is a multifaceted discipline, meaning practitioners must be fluent across a range of skills, which often intersect with other types of creative work- photography, film, drawing, animation, editing and writing.
Each Project can bring them into contact with a new subject, new materials, a new industry, new people, new messages.
How can I adapt this platform for a new audience?
What are the limits I can push?
Angharad Lewis is co-editor of Grafik.net, a leading resource for the world's most inspiring graphic design. She writes about design and culture for various publications and is also a lecturer at the Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design. She lives and works in London.
Andy Cooke
"If you can design one thing you can design everything."- Massimo Vignelli
The use of Graphic design for businesses
Embrace a strategic approach to brand identities, websites, mobile applications, collateral materials and experiences.
Fashion
At design schools worldwide, the idea of producing trend-led work is often met with disdain and reluctance. Instead, the concept of the 'timeless' piece of graphic design that transcends generations is perpetuated: for a brand, this means endless consistency, no matter the decade or relevance, as audiences grow with their products.
On the other hand, fashion doesn't laugh with this thinking. It moves as time moves, occasionally harking back twenty or so years to inspire new waves of trends that take multiple sources aa their inspiration. Collaborating with the fashion world is a challenge that some graphic designers avoid, as it flies in the face of how they were trained. Others, however, are able to embrace shifting tides. Certain design studios are renowned for their trend-led approach; others are recognised for defining what's in style where others follow, consciously or otherwise.
Working alongside some f the greatest minds in fashion opens up opportunities for graphic designers to push boundaries like they do when working with clients in the art world, but in a different way, as fashion-based clients are constantly seeking new ways to stand apart in the consumer marketplace. Indeed, it can be a place where designers can scratch a particular creative itch and enjoy making beautiful work that also satisfies the urge to stay in vogue.
Augustus Pili by Koto
Koto, a relatively young outfit based in south London, have already worked with a roster of huge, internationally known clients, including Airbnb, Fanta and Gumtree. In the short period since the studio's founding in 2014, the Koto team have achieved great success by taking care ti obtain a thorough understanding of a brand's essence, bringing a clear, distinct approach to every design solution.
In 2015, self-taught footwear designer Jalil Rahman launched his shoe brand Augustus Pili, asking Koto to create an identity for the business. Rahman's aim was ti start a brand that would reflect his own personality and experiences. His signature style involves a combination of striking colour choices, contemporary design and juxtaposing fabrics, with handmade British craftsmanship as the main driving principle.
This vision is communicated through Koto's exciting and vibrant brand identity, which puts the product first without overshadowing he craft that has gone into making the shoes. The contrast between the almost engraved semi-serif of the word 'Augustus' and the organic, hand rendered 'Pili' for the core logo rounds off a successful design system. It can be challenging for designers to work with clients who are so heavily invested in their own companies.
How do trends affect the woking process with creative clients who want to stay relevant?
To deny visual trends is to kid yourself, as they are so obviously present in everyday visual culture. As technology gets faster, better and cheaper, our aesthetics follows. You need only look at decade old monitor or TV to see how quick these changes in aesthetics happen. For clients, they consider two things: ideas and appropriateness. Our hope is that we imbue everything we make with ideas that ultimately live beyond trends, because brilliant ides are always relevant regardless of timescale.
Appropriateness comes into play when you consider the product and its market. Snapchat warrants an incredibly contemporary aesthetics because it's targeted at millennials. They can understand a complex product, and if they don't they are willing to discover it. A contemporary art gallery exhibiting modern work is deserving of a 'trendy' identity because it aligns with its product. Similarly, the identity for a gallery that exhibits Picasso and Rembrandt need only be aware of its heritage to tailor its identity accordingly.
How do you see graphic design's role in the wider creative industries, traditionally and in the future?
Graphic design is a tool, like any other discipline. It can mean typesetting a menu, designing an advert or building an entire brand. Traditionally, graphic design has been concerned with beauty, reduction and rule. It's the wrapping and the polish.
As creative tools become democratised, graphic design will follow suit. Instagram stories are graphic design. Type. Image. Emoji. Design can change the way our businesses are run, the way our world works and the companies we champion into our future.
Do you feel designers must expand their technology-based on skill sets to stay relevant?
Diversification of skill set is probably more a contentious point now than ever before. You only need look to Twitter before stumbling on the heavily memes statement 'designers should learn to code'. For us, disciplines like motion, 3D, development, typography and industrial design areal tools that help to tell a narrative. Sometimes appropriate, sometimes less so. What I do feel passionately about is the irresponsible nature in which these phrases are touted to younger, impressionable creatives cutting their teeth. Becoming an author of relevant ideas lives beyond any medium.
In contrast, an awareness of the disciplines at your disposal absolutely has value. I can't animate particularly well, but I know how motion can aid brands in telling their story. Not everyone in our team can write code, but they do understand how to bring a brand to life in a digital context, be that native application or elsewhere. Every discipline is a vehicle for an idea or narrative.
Bespoke by DIA
DIA operates out of Brooklyn, New York, and positions itself as a design agency that specialises in kinetic brand experiences. Offering clients a complete package of branding and rand strategy, including motion and digital, DIA's method involves valuing end goals over trends and taste, ensuring egos don't cloud the design process. This clear ethos has enabled the agency to produce work for Samsung, Nissan, Discovery Channel and Nike, as well ashore a whole host of smaller creative clients.
To mark their tenth year n business as a boutique retouching company for the fashion industry, in 2017 Bespoke commissioned DIA to revamp their brand identity with the aim of appealing to a sophisticated, growing clientele. In such a competitive visual industry there was a desire to stand out from the pack yet nit alienate existing clients or stray too far from Bespoke's roots. The most striking element of the revitalised identity is the customer display typeface, which utilises a number of weights and speaks volume through its confident, monochromatic palette.
Much of the output created for the brand allows the powerful imagery associated with Bespoke's day-to-day operations to take centre stage, with clearly designated areas where the type is used simply to communicate. The strong, impactful nature of the typeface runs the threat of outweighing the imagery, but its users always well considered and balanced appropriately. That balance is enhanced when combined with the serif typeface that's used for all other text. Overall, DIA have devised a flexible design system for Bespoke that is distinctive in a crowded commercial environment.
Nike by Hort
Founded in Frankfurt by Eike König in 1994, Hort is one of the graphic design industry's most respected studios. Since relocating to Berlin in 2007, the team have continued to carve their own unique path by producing distinct design solutions across art direction, branding, consultancy, editorial and illustration for clients such as Adobe, IBM and Universal Music Group.
Hort's strong relationship with Nike started with external creative direction for its basketball division and developed into a now ten-year ongoing partnership with Nike team in Amsterdam and Portland. Nike have clearly placed a great deal of trust in the studio, and it's for this reason that the output produced is so creative, experimental and often ground-breaking.
Hort now collaborate with Nike across different fields, including training, youth, football and basketball for the European and North American markets. What began with whole campaigns, events and product and retail designs has evolved to include a deeper role in the creative direction of the company, with Hort acting as a force guiding complex, long term projects. Most recently, this took the form of a creative leadership workshop, defining visions of Nike brand design for the future.
Coming full circle from this starting point with Nike Basketball, Hort also produced a campaign focused on LeBron James. The intent was to capture the roots of the sport through a series of designs that are urban in direction and fashion-centric, but often not utilising the products as the main focal point-homing in more on James's personality and behaviours to evoke an emotional response. This direction is further emphasised through the environments in which the campaigns are placed as well as the techniques used to apply posters- rather than glossy and refined outdoor advertising, pasteups are preferred. These stick out against concrete streets, reaching an audience at the grassroots level where the sport is played.
MoMA rebranding
Packaging in Fashion Industry
STOR by SocioDesign
SocioDesign is a London-based agency specialising in branding, packaging and digital. Its clients range from boutique start-ups to international businesses, such as space accountancy firm Stevenson Systems, chocolatiers Beau Cacao, spatial designers Curious Space and Nokia. By taking a minimalist approach, the designers at Socio help clients and their brands communicate clearly and efficiently.
To craft a visual identity for STOR, Socio started by working around the menswear brand's existing logotype, which extends across all its products and packaging. Items such as Underwear, socks ad T-shirts made from sustainable bamboo and organic cotton are the centre of STOR's offerings, and the design system Socio came up with clearly reflects this awareness of environmental considerations. The stripped-back, reductive design aligns with STOR's style ethos and sits well with the brand's desire to combat hectic urban lifestyles by promoting simple living through their products.
The STOR approach and the accompanying brand that Socio created will no doubt resonate well with the city-dwelling males who associate themselves with this kind of lifestyle. STOR's slogan 'Staple goods for the the conscious man' is given centre stage across the logo lockup as part of the flexible typographic and grid-based labelling system developed by the design studio. The suite of icons created to signify the products technical properties and natural materials is further reinforced by the packaging design, which includes a bamboo plant illustration, recycled boxes, internal tissue wraps and unbleached card stock.
Photography
Photography is a huge part of many people's everyday lives. Ongoing discussions about the ability for anybody to take a photograph on their smartphone and publish it to the world immediately is aligned with tribes about how everyone who owns a computer can produce graphic design. Yet even with these easily accessible tools and capabilities up for grabs, the work of professionals usually prevails. And when photographers and graphic designers collaborate, often relying on similar skill sets involving art direction, composition and balance, the creative potential of this kind of alliance is made only more evident.
Hunger by The Full Service
Twenty years after starting Dazed & Confused and ten years after the birth of AnOther, British Photographer Rankin launched the biannual publication Hunger in 2011. The independently published magazine celebrates the new alongside the established and always highlights fascinating people, art, music and fashion. The magazine has evolved and expanded by collaborating with up-and-coming photographers, stylists and innovative minds who harness their creative drive to keep pushing culture forwards.
Since its inception, Hunger has gone through a number of art directional changes, which serves to complement the developing fashions highlighted in its content. By employing his own agency, The Full Service, founded in 2013, to craft its latest identity and overall design, Rankin has ensured that Hunger has avoided becoming stale. From creative development to brand strategy, The Full Service pride themselves on producing all their work in-house, delivering 260-degree campaigns for clients including Coco de Mer, French Connection, Versace and Rolls-Royce, outputting a wide range of content across film, still photography, digital, publishing and beyond.
By working with The Full Service, Hunger has struck a balance between being a fashion photography- led magazine and features- focused periodical. Varying topics are covered in every issue, which keeps content fresh and appealing for new audiences. Finding quality photographers to work with can be a difficult task for graphic designers, but with Rankin at the helm, Hunger adeptly curates a feast for the eyes across hundreds of pages. Well-considered layouts complement the accompanying imagery, displaying a true hunger for innovation.
Interview with Ciara Goodger, designer at The Full Service
How important is graphic design to the wider design industry?
When we design Hunger, the graphic design is fundamental for developing a sense of the publication's tone of voice, determining its identity among all the other fashion magazines on the shelves. You become very aware how the design will support the fashion photography, and try not to overshadow or conflict with it. We aim to present work in a way that is conscious of the original concept and style, but also takes into consideration the magazine as a whole.
Do you see defined professions within the design industry being blurred by particular practitioners?
Technology has increased the ways in which people define themselves creatively and it's impossible to not be involved. Artists and designers have to adapt to how people consume art and design and acknowledge that in outcome. You really have to consider what the best platform should be for presenting your work, and that might be something you don't understand technically.
I've noticed the same DIY culture in the fashion industry, especially for younger people starting out- they have to expand their skills into all regions of design because they can't afford to have others do it for them. Starting your own magazine or collective means you shoot and art direct the fashion shoots yourselves, film them, create a website, put the material on social media, and curate, edit and design all the content yourself. It's great because the challenge keeps creativity alive. However, there is something to be said for learning as much as you can about your particular area of design and aiming to become the best you can be in it.
How much does a client's understanding of graphic design affect the design process?
Design can sometimes become devalued by the thought that you are simply trying to make something look 'pretty'. A client may not understand that the decisions you made were for a very specific reason. Because design is a visual practice it can be hard for people to look at it objectively. But as we know, there's so much more to good design than that. There are layers of meaning that we've come to understand over years and years of cultural conditioning, an there's a responsibility to communicate this to whoever your client is.
Do you have expertise or interests in other walks of design that have spawned due to working with clients in those fields?
To be a designer means you have to be curious about the world around you. It's a huge source of inspiration for me to see how other people work. Bruno Munari has a great motto to live by: 'Let us get used to looking at the world through the eyes of others.'
My job at The Full Service and Hunger only came to be because I was interested in Vicky Lawton's role there as creative director. She produces such rich and dynamic fashion imagery, so I asked if I could probe and question her about how to create more of this sort of work myself. Next thing I knew, I was working in the team as a designer. So it's always served me well to have an interest in other people's work; you just need to stay proactive.
Every potential client now has access to software that can output graphic design, income form, at their fingertips. How has this impacted the way we design for design-savvy clients?
This is a common beast of a problem in the design industry, when access to Adobe Creative Suite then makes you 'design-savvy'! Undoubtedly it can be a positive when a client has knowledge of the design process, but clients having access to the software isn''t understanding design. It can be nerve-wracking when you have to supply open artwork files for people to adjust themselves, because then you've essentially signed away all creative control. But generally the clients we work with come to us because they want to pay for the knowledge and ideas that we have, and they're invested in our creative process.
Ali Sharaf by Mash Creative
Mark Bloom has formed a global reputation for his expertise within the realms of branding, identity and logo design. Based in London, his tenure as a designer under the pseudonym Mash Creative, formed in 2009, is known throughout the creative industries, with his portfolio boasting work for the likes of Beats by Dre, Coca-Cola and Trace magazine as well as a host of self-initiated posters and publications. He also currently serves as design director at SocioDesign.
The identity he produced for Ali Sharaf, an award-winning Bahrain-based fashion photographer specialising in lifestyle imagery for adverts and editorials, centres around the concept of a letter 'A' rotated at 90 degrees counter-clockwise to create an icon of an eye. Having a 'good eye' in photography is considered a must for creating exceptional work; it involves much more than merely owning the necessary equipment. Highlighting this in such a simple way by relating it to Sharaf's first name via the icon is a skilful move by Mash. The coinciding art direction is conscious not to clash with the photography itself, but rather complements it when further typography is used within photos, alongside the photographer's full name.
The format devised for Sharaf's portfolio is flexible and changeable as time moves on (as creative practitioners are constantly progressing). The system allows new slides to be inserted as and when necessary, with older work that is potentially not representative of the photographer anymore able to be substituted out. Throughout, use of the icon and surrounding typography is uncomplicated, actings subtle reminder of Sharaf's capabilities while letting his images do the talking.
Directory
Fashion:
Bespoke by DIA
client: bespokedigital.com / studio: dia.tv
Nike by Hort
client: nike.com/ studio: hort.org.uk
STOR by SocioDesign
client: stor.supply / studio:sociodesign.co.uk
Photography:
Hunger by The Full Service
client: hungertv.com / studio:thefullservice.co.uk
Ali Sharaf by Mash Creative
client: alisharaf.com / studio: mashcreative.co.uk
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