[1995#01] fortuny graphic workshop
During the Fortuny Graphic Workshop in Venice, January 16–21th, there has been a special, open day, when Tibor Kalman, Hamish Muir, and David Carson spoke about their work: a rather unique chance to directly realize their different approaches to creative design, hereafter the strenght of the images they showed to the audience.
The Hungarian–born Kalman, former M&Co design company founder in New York, and now Benetton–sponsored multilingual Colors magazine editor based in Rome, strictly speaking is not a graphic designer: “I’ve never had any talent with my hands—he admits—. I still can’t draw, and I can’t run a computer”—but take care: Walter Gropius too never held a pencil in his life, being anyway one of the greatest architects of XXth Century. Rather, Kalman is a special kind of self–taught, disenchantedly ironic, and provocative question–maker about the borders and the meaning of graphic design in itself: “So much of what you communicate is bullshit. I think designers—he declared— really ought to get involved inside the messages and start to comment on the messages and start to influence the messages.” It clearly emerges that Kalman focal interest is the communication process goal, the content not the container, the message far more than the media: “M&Co has been a 15–year search through all the design media for the Holy Grail,—he said—but it turns out that my Holy Grail was not design, because design is a language, not a message.”
Muir of London 8vo design firm, widely–known for their Octavo sophisticated magazine on typography (8 issues in seven years, the last one as CD–rom), personifies with an amusing touch of self–understatement a different, minimalist, critically cultured trend towards “a new language of synthesis”, after the digital catastrophe that has radically changed the graphic design scene, resulting both in extremely powerful tools and a great ideas poorness, or better: inadequacy. Such a new, contemporary language “must express the spirit of the age and not to be afraid of tomorrow.—following the 8vo philosophy—It must reject letterpress–derived–dead–typography. ‘The new synthesis’ must express the relationship between the meaning and appareance of type and image whilst pushing the frontiers of the latest technology. And it’s not just print–newspapers, books and magazines, it’s everything, from vdus through tv titles to electronic information systems.”
Carson of Carson Design, based in Del Mar (California, Usa: the country where the ‘Graphic Design’ term itself has been minted seventy years ago), a pro surfer with BA Degree in Sociology, is the man behind the Beach Culture and Ray Gun cult–magazines thrilling visual identity, that lead him international acknowledgment and a flood of prizes. Carson says about his innovative ideas on visual design that “the starting point is still the same, which is to interpret”, claiming for an approach that relies upon critical empathy. The intuition strenght and the emotion supremacy that shape his approach are finely tuned with the programmatical transgression, based on abstract rigour and analytic fury, that individualizes his work: his desorder is all but fortuitous, his unreadability a defy to awake our inattentive perception. “Ultimately, one’s influences as a designer—Carson said— must come from within. The strongest, most emotional work springs from utilizing your own unique background, personality and life experience. Who you are as a person should come through in your design work. I try to work intuitively and to provoke an emotional response from the viewer.”
The Hungarian–born Kalman, former M&Co design company founder in New York, and now Benetton–sponsored multilingual Colors magazine editor based in Rome, strictly speaking is not a graphic designer: “I’ve never had any talent with my hands—he admits—. I still can’t draw, and I can’t run a computer”—but take care: Walter Gropius too never held a pencil in his life, being anyway one of the greatest architects of XXth Century. Rather, Kalman is a special kind of self–taught, disenchantedly ironic, and provocative question–maker about the borders and the meaning of graphic design in itself: “So much of what you communicate is bullshit. I think designers—he declared— really ought to get involved inside the messages and start to comment on the messages and start to influence the messages.” It clearly emerges that Kalman focal interest is the communication process goal, the content not the container, the message far more than the media: “M&Co has been a 15–year search through all the design media for the Holy Grail,—he said—but it turns out that my Holy Grail was not design, because design is a language, not a message.”
Muir of London 8vo design firm, widely–known for their Octavo sophisticated magazine on typography (8 issues in seven years, the last one as CD–rom), personifies with an amusing touch of self–understatement a different, minimalist, critically cultured trend towards “a new language of synthesis”, after the digital catastrophe that has radically changed the graphic design scene, resulting both in extremely powerful tools and a great ideas poorness, or better: inadequacy. Such a new, contemporary language “must express the spirit of the age and not to be afraid of tomorrow.—following the 8vo philosophy—It must reject letterpress–derived–dead–typography. ‘The new synthesis’ must express the relationship between the meaning and appareance of type and image whilst pushing the frontiers of the latest technology. And it’s not just print–newspapers, books and magazines, it’s everything, from vdus through tv titles to electronic information systems.”
Carson of Carson Design, based in Del Mar (California, Usa: the country where the ‘Graphic Design’ term itself has been minted seventy years ago), a pro surfer with BA Degree in Sociology, is the man behind the Beach Culture and Ray Gun cult–magazines thrilling visual identity, that lead him international acknowledgment and a flood of prizes. Carson says about his innovative ideas on visual design that “the starting point is still the same, which is to interpret”, claiming for an approach that relies upon critical empathy. The intuition strenght and the emotion supremacy that shape his approach are finely tuned with the programmatical transgression, based on abstract rigour and analytic fury, that individualizes his work: his desorder is all but fortuitous, his unreadability a defy to awake our inattentive perception. “Ultimately, one’s influences as a designer—Carson said— must come from within. The strongest, most emotional work springs from utilizing your own unique background, personality and life experience. Who you are as a person should come through in your design work. I try to work intuitively and to provoke an emotional response from the viewer.”
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