Meeting Bruno Maag and Matt Pyke

On Thursday 23rd October (2008) we was lucky enough to gain tickets to Uniform's 10th anniversary party and the after party for the Symposium. On the way to the party we was thinking about what to expect when arrived, do we come across people dressed in suits? Do we arrive and everyone looks at us and thinks who are they? Thankfully that was not the case. It was held at a venue called 3345 which was like a big warehouse/factory place. When entering we went upstairs and found the party, it was a nice chilled setting with live bands playing music and everyone chatting away.

After a few minutes we noticed that there was another room which looked like a big meeting room/V.I.P room, through there we noticed that Bruno Maag, Matt Pyke and the D&AD president Garrick Hamm was sat in there talking to people. When we noticed this me, Nick, James and Ed (the other students who was lucky enough to get this opportunity) started talking about how one of us should go in there and see if its possible to talk to either Bruno or Matt. After a while Nick got the courage and went in and spoke to Garrick about the day overall, and then asked him if it was possible for us to talk to Bruno and Matt . . . thankfully we was able to do so.

As this wasn't expected we had to quickly think of questions that we wanted to ask Matt and see what his response would be. Matt came along sat down with us and must of thought what has he let himself in for. The first question one of the members of the group asked was "what tips would you give to a student for him to become successful?"His response was that, we should "dibble-dabble" in all software available, get to know how each programme works and don't stick to one way of producing work, for example use photography, print making, typography, animation, the more the merrier. After he went through this another question got asked, "How come you don't want to expand your company?" His response was was scared of the overheads mainly. To do that you would have to do the not so appealing jobs, when he only wants to do the good jobs. With this question we ended up moving onto how he communicates with his clients and co-workers. Matt said that he tends to use the internet (ichat skype) and his web cam a lot to communicate a lot more then face to face because its a lot easier, quicker and not time consuming. Another question asked was "How are the clients brief usually processed?" He responded with saying, he will receive the brief, comes up with concepts for the company and then will commission the best people to the not so easy things i.e animation, effects and photography. He mentioned that its best to work with other people, because doing so will only make you stronger.

(Left to Right: Me, Nick Matt, James & Ed)

So after we finished talking with Matt we was able to talk to Bruno Maag. We started talking to Bruno about his lecture a couple of hours before in the day, but the first question we asked him was "Whats was your background like and what got you interested in Graphic Design?" He responded that his family is a family of engineers. After doing his work experience he realized that he didn't want to spend his career filing metal. For his work experience he worked in a printers where he came across a 10m printer. He explained to us how he loved the smell, the sounds, how the paper ran through the printer, the mass size of it and the finished print. After realising what he wanted to do in his career he then went to Basel School of Design from there he worked his way to where he his today. After this we started talking about the our course and the briefs we get given to do. When we spoke about this Bruno wasn't impressed how we have to write essays this is due to that 50% of Graphic Designers are dyslexic. He said that we should learn typography better, how to make successful body copy, the spacing, the punctuation all this was important to him and thinks we are not taught this enough. Another question what got asked was "Do you ever get bored of your own identity?" His response was yes, eventually. After seven years of his own current brand identity he has started to change it through his letter heads etc. A question I asked him was "I'm currently producing a typographic magazine, what would you recommend to make this successful. What would your tips be?" He answered this by saying, that we should ALWAYS use a Serif font for the body copy "Don't fuck with the body copy!!"""It's all in the detail, punctuation has to be perfect, where everything is spaced, is very important."

(Left to Right: James, Nick, Me, Bruno & Ed)

Magazine Video

Having just finished a brief on re-designing The Observer Magazine, we was asked to produce a one minute video based upon how we produced our work. My video was based upon the different stages i went through to get to my second spread.


As you can see i attempted to line it up with the beat . . . so when there was a certain beat the image would change.

Observer Magazine

For the past six weeks I have been working on re-designing the Observer Magazine.
The brief was to re-design the Observer Magazine to make it more appealing and interesting. I was set the task of designing a front and back page, editorial and inside cover page and two two page spreads. The two page spread was based on a article which was called Water Wars which in brief is about Tap Water against Bottled Water. I started this brief by associating words to do with War and then Water, after this I started putting two words together from each word association which helped me come up with some ideas. After I started with the initial ideas i started placing these on spreads so I could start adding type to the imagery to see how it would work. Whilst doing this I started using grids for the first time which helped me a lot because you get a lot more options for where things can be placed on the spread. Whilst doing this brief i used the Photography studio for the first time which helped me a lot with some of the imagery I used.

(going from top to bottom; front and back pages, editorial and inside cover, first spread and second spread.)

At the end of the brief looking at my final images i find them very succesful, although i wish had a bit longer to tweak the first spread because i find this page the most unsuccesful out of the set.

Liverpool Design Symposium

On Thursday 23rd October (2008) and Matt the second and third year Graphic Design students went on a day trip to Liverpool to view exhibitions in Liverpool and visit two lectures by Bruno Maag and Matt Pyke.

So we started the day early (7.30 coach journey) and as soon as we arrived in Liverpool we met James from Thoughtful (an ideas generation company who we have been working with for the past 6 weeks.) When we met James he informed us what the schedule would be, also he ended of saying that he got his hands on 5 free tickets for Uniforms 10th Year Anniversary and symposium after party. After a quick discussion with a couple of other students we thought this would be a great opportunity for us and asked if we could have the tickets . . . which we was lucky enough to receive.

So after this we started the day by letting James (from thoughtful) give us a tour of the Biennial work that they had just finished Art Directing. We started this by looking around The Tate museum and then moved on to different locations around Liverpool city center.























After this we visited our first lecture of the day. Bruno Maag was our first our lecture of the day, he's a type designer and also managing director Dalton Maag, a company which is based in London, also his company has offices in Zurich (Switzerland.) In Bruno's talk he went on to talk about the different aspects of type, how something can be appealing on a shop and something could effect you with how its wrote, for example, if somebody wrote fire stuff in hand writing on a bored for a fire extinguisher would you feel safe? Also he went on to talk how you should be so exact when using typography, for example, no punctuation mistakes, having uneven spacing and making sure the alignment is even. Bruno shown us examples of type fonts that he has created for companies, these companies consisted of Vodafone, BMW and Mini. Bruno went on to explain to us all the reason why we have serif fonts . . . thanks to the Romans. An interesting part of Bruno's lecture was when he shown us examples of type crimes. This was interesting because it let us see what he thought was bad and whats good etc, also he went on to mention how some of them nearly give him a heart attack which made us laugh.

Later on in the day we had our Matt Pyke lecture. Matt Pyke runs/works for Universal Everything. In his talk Matt went through all his work that his produced from when he started off as a designer and until this very day with things he is working on right now. Some of the companies Matt has work for consisted of, Nike, Apple, London 2012, Nokia and MTV. On one of the pieces Matt produced for Audi he was saying how Universal Design came up with there own software which helped him produce his own piece of work. Watching some of his animation, videos and looking at his work was a great influence, it made you realize the quality of work which we can produce if we work hard and not get distracted and become lazy.