Vince Frost
November 1964
Vince Frost, from Brighton England, is an interdisciplinary graphic designer who works across a wide range of areas including advertising, design, digital, environments and fashion. Brought up in Vancouver, Canada, he returned to the United Kingdom at sixteen to complete his design education at West Sussex College of Design. He had created award-winning work for clients ranging from Nike to the Independent Newspaper, with his own consultancy based in London, Frost Design.
An area of his work that caught my attention straight away was his use and manipulation of text. Examples of this include ‘be decisive’ which is in a strong bold font to show the meaning, however at closer inspection the background consists of rows of ‘yes no’, contradicting the main message, along with the genius of combing the ‘v’ in evolve with the ends of the ‘&’ symbol, combining the words well.
One of his award-winning designs include his work for the Nike Young Directors Awards. This stood out to me as Frost took the iconic orange shoebox and turned it into another well-known symbol in film. He was successful in making sure both elements are recognisable on there own but also makes sense as a single image.
Lastly, when looking at Frost’s work as a whole, there is one common feature, his typography and how it fills the page/screen. Examples of this include, ‘Amplify!’, ‘PUSH’, and ‘Be Fulfilled’. This technique creates unique and effective compositions which are pleasing to the viewer. It is also a way of depicting the definition of the word visually. In terms of my own work, this is something I plan to try and achieve in some way.
April Greiman
22 March 1948
April Greiman is an American designer widely recognised as being one of the first designers to use computer technology as a way of designing. She is credited as being one of the artists who imported the European New Wave style into America during the 70s and 80s. She has been called the bridge between the analogue and digital. This is the main reason I choose Greiman as I wanted to see how she successfully combined the two styles.
I love Greiman’s bold use of colour with the primary colours being prominent in nearly all her designs. In this one in particular, the combination of colour and shape is striking. The whole composition fun and bright with the odd piece of text ‘floating’ around the page. I found this interesting as I found myself roaming around the page, picking up the information along the way, which is a new concept to me. The colour palette makes the image in the middle all the more striking as the back stands out. Another aspect which Greiman includes in a lot in her designs, is covering the face with either a black stripe or a seemingly random object which is something I plan to include in my own work as it creates a unique composition which would combine with digital work.
In another example of her work, Greiman’s use of layering is effective, particularly the gaps which allow the bottom layers to come through. Greiman’s use of text on this particular design, where she takes the meaning of the word, ‘wave’, and manipulates it so that it reflects the movement, is also effective. Typography is a key element of her work which is something I plan to include in my own work, along with her colour scheme.
The Stone Twins
8 November 1970
The Stone Twins is a creative branding agency based in Amsterdam. It is a family-based company, founded by twin brothers Declan and Garech Stone, who both graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. They have built up a reputation of having ideas-based, engaging, and strategic design solutions. Their work is known for having no fixed visual style while embracing a combination of graphic design, art-direction, and copywriting.
The Stone Twins created a new Amsterdam icon, A’DAM. The play on world is brilliant however at first, I didn’t realise the meaning behind it and that it was actually a shortened version of Amsterdam as well as a name. I find this almost humanises the city which would be a successful way to improve tourism. It is an effective slogan due to its short and snappy nature and can be incorporated into numerous different designs. An example of this is in the sentence, ‘Hello, I’m A’DAM’, which is extremely clever.
Another example of the Stone Twins’ work is ‘A Stamp for Ireland’. It was a commission from An Post to create a contemporary representation of Irish identity. Instead of using imagery, they used typography once again with phrases describing the weather. The simple colouring background is effective as the gradient mirrors a landscape of the grass and sky. Another subtle area within the stamp is the angle and colour of the text, it reflects the type of weather being described, rain. The Stone Twins are experts in terms of less is more. They created a landscape with only two components, text, and a gradient. This is something I am interested in including in my own work, the idea that less is more.
Helvetica Documentary
Before watching this documentary, I wasn’t completely aware of what Helvetica was. But even after the first few minutes it became clear that the font is everywhere from street signs to advertising and it’s telling us things all the time. There are many typefaces, but Helvetica is the one we see everywhere. I found it particularly interesting that a seemingly simple, almost boring, typeface is considered so ‘timeless’ and perfect by so many experts. A line that stood out to me was when trying to evaluate Helvetica, it was like ‘trying to evaluate off white paint’, as it shows that even the experts find it hard to explain.
Throughout the video, a number of graphic designers and writers speak about how Graphic Design is how companies reach us and show us what they consider to be exclusive. Massimo Vignelli, who created the New York City Transit Signage, spoke out about how it is his role is to ‘cure the visual disease’ and that ‘typography is white, it is the space between the black’. I found this a very interesting way to relook at typography as it is always the font we see first, but when you look at it from this perspective, the design is made from the spaces within each letter. It was described in a way relating to music, how it’s the space between the notes that make the music, like the space between the letters make the word. This is the main thing that I took from this documentary that I will explore in my own work.
The history of Helvetica is quite a turbulent one. It moved from a typeface that everyone used that can be applied to all areas of commercial information to being regarded as a ‘dull blanket of sameness’ as it was associated with endless faceless things. Two designers who show this are Jonathan Hoefler and Paula Schler. An example that shows how diverse Helvetica was, is the commercial use of the typeface by American Apparel and American Airlines. For the clothing, it creates a fun, cheeky persona whereas for an airline it looks professional. This highlights how the typeface was everywhere and anywhere as it was considered to be perfect. But by the 1970s this changed. Paula Scher is a prime example of how people wanted to fight against the font as she felt it quite repressive. I found this interesting as I didn’t think such a popular typeface could become so used that it became unpopular. But this resulted in an almost limbo time until the 1990s when Helvetica came back into popularity, but with a modern twist, shown through the work of Erwin Brinkers, Marieke Stolk and Danny van den Dungen. I particularly liked how they combined modernism with Helvetica which highlighted how modernism can be more subversive. They didn’t agree with the idea of globalism that had become associated with the typeface.
Overall, I found this documentary very informative about how important font and typography is as a way of communication and how we become so used to having it around us, that we might not notice how clever they are. Helvetica is a prime example of this as people keep saying how they want to improve the typeface but never really can. A message that I found most of the designers were trying to put across was that you don’t know how good Helvetica is until you work with it.