Neasden Control Center

Neasden Control Center consists of two designers. Only one of them did the designs for the Hotel Fox and it seems like the one that designed for them must not be the head honcho for the rest of their projects bc they are utterly chaotic.

I like their designs but they don't seem to get any sort of message across to the viewer...not a clear message anyway. perhaps if this was their intent, they would be masters bc i didn't look at any of their designs and get a clear representation of what their ideas were behind the work.


This particular style of their's which they have done several projects in reminds me what I would imagine Santana drawing if he could draw. It's very intricate and looks as if it took mass amounts of time and energy to accomplish but in the end, it's just easy listening and you don't get any real meaning out of the design/illustrations.


They also use word bubbles and this really strange big-headed character in soo many of their projects. I don't really get why but I like it. Almost all of their work is very chaotic in my opinion, mostly that you don't and can't really understand what is going on very easily by looking at their work, you would almost have to read their ideas behind them before you could really say you understood their concept. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, it's just all in what you are going for but I don't think this is a company that is going to be doing much designing for advertising or the likes.

oh yeah and their website completely sucks.
http://www.neasdencontrolcentre.com/

WK Interact

Before I start...someone mentioned that I'm not really doing "just" designers. Well to that I say "deal". kiss kiss!


I was overall completely disappointed with this design team's work. The only thing I found that they really impressed me with was more of the same work they had in Hotel Fox. The VW car is awesome...but what is it's purpose anyway? They're website was annoying as well, it didn't give any information about what their goals or concepts were with their projects and I didn't really get the jist of it from their pix of them either. They take a lot of pictures of them actually producing the work which I found interesting but still, not satisfactory because they didn't take time to explain what the hell they were doing in the first place.



So anyway...what do I like about their work? Just their illustration quality of the woman and how they let the paint drip and bleed into other images. They do a really nice job of this. But overall, in my opinion, their work sucks...even the other illustrations, posters and all other work they featured on their website just wasn't up to par with what I would expect a design team featured in a VW hotel to be.

It does make me want to play with loose ink though.

http://www.wkinteract.com/

Hort

I discovered Hort (Eike König and Martin Lorenz Frankfurt) by their work on the Project Fox for the Hotel Fox in Denmark. It was one of my favorite rooms to begin with, but it was only after reading their idea behind their room design that I really started to respect them as artists. Their reasoning behind the rooms was: "Someone is going to live in this room for a while, they are going to breathe the atmosphere more intensely than someone just visiting like at an exhibition. The idea was to create modern mythical creatures that function like fables or tales that give a polemic viewpoint to everyday lives. Each illustration tells its own story to the viewer. It is the visitor that brings the different fragments together and builds his own story from them.”

After reading this, I looked back at the room and they were clearly right on track. I, myself, liked their idea of breathing the atmosphere (of a hilly pasture, in this case) even though it's only four walls with paint. Just looking at the room, I could almost smell the green grass and fields stretching as far as the eye could see and I could feel the dirtiness and excitement from the monster truck in the dirt. I just loved how they took photography (at least that is how they appeared to me in the photo) and mixed it with hard edged graphics that seemingly had nothing to do with the photos but still flowed nicely together.


I researched Hort after viewing all their rooms in the Hotel Fox and was surprised at the turn their work took when it went from walls of paint to print in magazines. Not unpleasently surprised but surprised nonetheless. I expected to see clean, modern and an eclectic sort of mix of ideas put into one. They did this to some degree but more in the way that everyone else is doing it instead of solely their own like their room more represented I think. I do like this kind of work and I find it amazing sometimes when I take long looks at work such as this and wonder how they decided to put each element with each element...but then I think also, that if you really try to do this sort of thing, it's one of those kinds of designs that isn't nearly as hard as it looks and besides that, it's really been overdone...even though it fascinates me still...I just wasn't impressed with them to have done the same sort of style.


It did excite me to see some different layouts in magazines though and I absolutely adored this one and how they incorporated soo many pictures into one layout and yet it doesn't look cluttered or hard to read in any sense. It's hard to find different layouts such as this one in a world that follows in one another's footsteps all the time. And sometimes, it's hard to see that there are a bajillion ways to do one thing until you see an idea so unlike everyone else's and that still works to the ninth that it wakes you up and you say "ah ha!...well duh."

http://www.hort.org.uk/

James Victore

Where do I begin? I love his work...specifically this one. I love the anger and aggression in his work specifically and the raw style he has. I also absolutely adore politically based art-work and when artists speak their political standings through art or design...I think I like this so much bc I suck ass at it myself, as I don't pay attention to politics unless it's near election time. :(

Victore does a wonderful job of mixing raw illustrations and design with very strict, modern type. I love it and all the white space. It's the whole thing I was going with when I designed my circus poster for GD1. Raw, Clean and Modern with a twist of nostalgic.

I adore how he can do lots of different styles as well...although he really seems to excel and want to do that certain raw, made it from scratch and i never use the damned computer kind of feel, it's apparent he can do very clean and modern design when the job calls for it. I think it really all goes back to his political sense in his designs thought that I like the most. I guess I really like it when you can tell someone has something important to say in their designs and it shows through.



http://www.jamesvictore.com/

Paula Scher

http://www.aiga.org/resources/content/4/5/2/images/5paulascherpeanuts.jpg

One of the artists my professor brought up in defense to my saying that design is male-dominated. She may be a designer. She may not design everything in a manly fashion, but looking at a lot of her work, it's almost all still male-appropriate...which is to say that it's not directly female. I'd like to know of a famous designer who is very very feminine in their designs and is able to focus most of their attention on the feminine role that is playing in their work rather than the male. Are they succeeding? Who are they?

When I said that design is very male-dominated, I was refering to the every day design that we see. Street signs, billboards, logos, etc. They are extremely male oriented and by this I mean that they are hard-edge, straight to the point, blunt. Granted, we are taught in design to be that way, to get our message across in as small amount of time as possible. But why? Why can't we design something instead that makes the viewer think about it for hours? Or at least longer than 15 seconds. What is wrong with the viewer having to actually THINK? I would imagine someone who thinks about your product or concept longer than 15 secs, would actually be more likely to remember it over the others. I know this is vague and not well thought out as I would like, I'm exhausted and I'm making this short.

In short, Paula Scher is not what I consider a feminine designer. She may be a female and she may design some things with women in mind but overall, in almost all of her designs that I have viewed, she appeals more the the male audience than the female.

But I can still learn a lot from her and this peice I've posted is one of my favorites of hers.

http://www.hillmancurtis.com/

copycat

I'm going to somewhat copy from a future prof. of mine. Technically, it's not copying at all, since I'm not going to be writing about the same things as him really and also, I don't believe he has a copyright on his blog...though perhaps I should check it out.

Anyway, I learned a valuable lesson today. DO YOUR FREAKIN RESEARCH BEFORE YOU GET IN AN ARGUEMENT WITH SOMEONE!! not that I didn't already know this but it just got shoved in my face twice in one day so I decided to take action and kill two birds with one stone.

I'm going to research a designer everyday and write about them in here. Hopefully that way I'll also be able to remember some of the names of design that actually influence my work.

Here goes:

ok...well starting tomorrow...my comp is freakin slow and i have to work at 8 am and go strong until 9 pm. argh.

night