Month: November 2015

Offset London 2015

Posted on by Tom Wild

The Big Smoke

We were lucky enough to head down to the Offset London 2015 design conference last week and not just one of us – the whole design team! It was set in super hipster Shoreditch, at the town hall and we decided to make like the locals and rent a trendy pad from airbnb for the night. As you can imagine there were beards and skinny jeans everywhere. With a wealth of inspiring speakers we were excited to get going.

 

Anna’s Highlights

McBess

What I found great about McBess was not only his inspiring illustrations, but he is very straight forward and funny. He opened his presentation with a quote from himself which simply said ‘I like drawing’ – McBess 2015. It is clear that he truly enjoys his craft and mentioned that all his work contains one of three themes – music, food or girls. A simple man.

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His illustrations are very complex and can take a very long time to create and it really shows. In his presentation he said “I try to find a way to make the work a challenge, harder to draw.” I suppose when you do something day in day out you can become comfortable and its great to push yourself even when you find something easy. 99% of his work is black and white but he has on very rare occasions strayed into colour.

Mcbess is part of the band ‘The Dead Pirates’ and as a keen animator he created a music video with his friend Simon Landrein for the single ‘Wood’ which has gathered hundreds of thousands of views online. The video took four months to make but the result is brilliant and well worth a watch.

WOOD from mc bess on Vimeo.

Erik Kessels

Erik Kessels is co-founder and Creative Director of the agency KesselsKramer, based in Amsterdam who are known for their risky approach to advertising. In his presentation he talked us through some of their projects and also a few of his own side projects.

The piece of work that stood out for me was the branding and advertising project they completed for a budget hotel in Amsterdam called Hans Brinker. Hans Brinker is the sort of place you might stay if you were on a stag do and it was constantly getting complaints for the state it was in. KesselsKramer took the idea of these complaints and rather than using the usual advertising method of trying to make it look amazing, they created a brutally honest campaign that ended up getting the hotel huge numbers of new customers who now complain that it isn’t bad enough!

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Erik then went on to talk about some of his side projects which often entailed finding bizarre pictures of people online or from flea markets and compiling them into books. One of them followed a lady who would have a photo taken of herself every year when she entered a local shooting competition and you could see her gradually ageing over time. You could also see the advancement of technology as the pictures started in black and white and gradually merged into colour.

The best of these side projects for me was a book he made when he stumbled across photos of a couple in Florida called Fred and Valerie. Fred had a slightly odd obsession with taking pictures of Valerie stood in water. The photos get more and more strange as the book goes on but it’s one of those things that really documents humans and their sometimes eccentric nature. He actually got to meet them too.

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Nath’s Highlights

Tomi Ungerer

Expectations were high for Tomi coming on stage, being introduced as a seminal illustrator whose work has influenced art and illustration throughout the 20th century. And he didn’t disappoint. At 83 years old he was helped on stage and was quick to say ‘I don’t normally do interviews, but I’ll probably die soon’ which set the scene for the rest of the interview.

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Touting himself as an agent provocateur he spoke about his early influences living in Nazi occupied France and growing up playing in tank filled fields with his sister and being brought up to fear nothing. Growing up with Nazi propaganda all around him it’s clear to see how this and his circumstances growing up has permeated his work. It’s difficult condensing his interview into a few paragraphs and nigh on impossible to communicate how charismatic and sharp he was on stage.

Admittedly, I never recognised the name but as a selection of his work cycled through on the screen behind him I certainly recognised his work. What’s more I saw how it has influenced other illustrators of his era and how his satire and controversial style continues to influence illustrators today.

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Johnny Kelly

One of the speakers I most looked forward to hearing was Johnny Kelly, a London based director/animator who has produced stunning work for brands like Dropbox, The Salvation Army and Chipotle. His talk was positioned as ’13 lessons I’ve learned…’  and begun along the lines of a clickbait article you might see on Buzzfeed.

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Whilst the ‘lessons’ occasionally sounded cliche (‘don’t get comfortable’), they acted as a nice platform to demonstrate them by showing relevant work and discussing his experiences. These were the bits I were eager to find out more about.

In all of the work shown, what underpinned them all were: great ideas, emotional resonance and perfect execution. His work for The Salvation Army for example was incredibly well executed and managed to communicate so much in so little time (just 15 second spots) whilst at the same time being such a simple idea. It’s this beautiful simplicity which is so effective when combined with great execution.

The Salvation Army – ‘Shelter’ from Nexus on Vimeo.

 

Andy’s Highlights

Seb Lester

The one underlying theme that I took away from the conference was the the art of ‘mastering your craft’ and that if you have a passion for what you do and genuinely enjoy doing it, this will come across in your work. Through years of refinement, Typographer Seb Lester has  ‘crafted’ his skill to a point that he can now effortlessly create hand drawn Letterforms like the example below:

What i also liked about his talk was that he came across as a very down to earth, funny guy with an almost modest approach to his skills. He talked through his early student work which was inspired by BMX’s and Drum and Bass and also his font Neo Sans which went on to be used by Intel – which he explained was pretty crazy as his work was then featured on millions (if not billions) of computers across the globe.

Neo Sans
Neo Sans

Neon Workshop Session

Posted on by Tom Wild

Seeing the light

Designers all need inspiration, it’s very easy to sit staring at your computer at the start of a project viewing the usual design websites like www.awwwards.com and  www.designspiration.net but I’m a firm believer in getting away from your screen and doing something completely different to be truly inspired. The design team have done some screen-printing and a bit of laser cutting down at inc.workshop in Leeds city centre in the past but when Nath pointed out the Neon Workshops Studio in Wakefield we thought we’d give it a go.

 

Neon Workshop Session

None of us had any experience of Neon at all so we opted for the 2 hour taster session which gave a really interesting history to Neon, the process by which it is made and some hands on experience of bending and moulding glass into some basic shapes.

 

What we learned

Neon gas was given its name from the Greek word ‘neos’ meaning ‘new’. It was a British invention but first used for advertising in Paris in 1912 and it soon found its way to America. We discovered that neon gas only actually makes one colour – red. All other colours of ‘neon signs’ are made using different gasses such as helium, xenon and mercury. They can be mixed or used on their own depending on the desired colour. You can also create coloured light by using coloured glass, but this is more expensive to source.

neon3Different noble gasses that can be used to make coloured neons. Source: Boundless.com

 

Task 1

Our first task was to cut a thick piece of glass tube which we would then use to make a bend in, there were three types of bends to choose from. To cut the glass you had to make a score mark in it and then hold it out in front of you and snap it in half (most of use were covering our faces at this point) but despite us thinking that glass would shatter everywhere, it actually snaps clean in half!

neon-task-1 About to break the tube in half & then bend it into shape.

Then you had to take your tube and heat it over a bunsen burner. Once the glass began to melt you made the bend whilst gently blowing through the tube attached to the end – this was the ensure the middle of the tube didn’t collapse in on itself during the bending process. Then you had to flatten the tube on the bench whilst it was still a little hot. Lastly, you has to toast your tube lightly over the flame again to bring the temperature down slowly as not to shock it, otherwise it would just crack or break.

 

Task 2

Our second task was to make a ‘creative squiggle’ out of very thin tubing. Depending on the thickness of your neon tube determines which type of bunsen burner you should use. Because this tube was thin it meant using the ultimate bunsen burner – the ribbon.

The idea was to hold your tube over the line of blue flames until it created a strip of orange flames above it. Once you had it in the optimum position you would hold it there until the glass began to melt. It was a very strange experience as the glass began to sag in the middle and it was quite hard to control. Once it is flexible you would remove it from the flame and quickly create your shape before it cooled down again. You had to remember not to let the glass touch itself as this would make it venerable during the gas processing phase.

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The team about to make shapes as the glass begins to melt.

Some of us made more interesting shapes than others but were even all given the option of having our masterpieces filled with gas and illuminating with electricity to take home.

bending-glassNath bending his glass into shape.

 

The electron bombarder

Yes it looks as cool as it sounds. This is the machine that is used to fill the glass tubes with gas and make them work. When a sign is finished, an electrode is melted to each end of the tube. All seals must be perfectly leak-proof to high vacuum before proceeding further. The electron bombarder is then used to draw out the air from 
the glass, create a vacuum and fill it with gas. An electric charge is then ran through it and hey presto! Neon light.

electron-bombarderThe electron bombarder.

Against most preconceptions, even though neon is high voltage and is really bright it only needs a tiny amount of electricity to run and lasts for decades.

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Finished Neons.