Kegler and Blazek getting ready to start the film.

Last week Richard Kegler was in Prague to show his new film “Making faces”. It chronicles the process of making metal type. This craft would be considered by many to be already dead, as there are very very few people still making new metal type, and those that do are using computerized methods to do so. Not Jim Rimmer. After a long career as a printer and commercial artist, he decided to teach himself how to make metal type.

The film does an amazing job of showing the painstaking process of first drawing, refining, then manually cutting the letter forms into type metal. Long takes at macro range give glorious detail. You would almost expect the grime under Jim’s nails to leave the screen greasy and black. I personally really appreciated the long un-cut shots of the actual process. In this day of high-speed editing, and reliance on slickness to sell a film, it’s a raw gem.

If you are even remotely a typophile, or even if you are just amazed by the technical processes that once made the world go around, you can’t miss this film. It’s a glance at a past that was long gone, by the time your parents were born. It’s also a wonderful ode to the wonderful man who was Jim Rimmer. Jim passed on shortly after the film was shot.

Check out Richard’s film blog, and order a copy of the film. You won’t regret it.

We bought a copy after the film. It’s letterpressed with the type that Jim designed during the film. Great stuff!!!

V aktuálním čísle časopisu Dolce Vita (Květen 2011) vyšel s námi rozhovor v rámci rubriky Grafici. Součástí rozhovoru je výtah našich prací s krátkým CV. Kdo si časopis nekoupí, může si zde přečíst článke v pdf. Pěkné čtení

Ask designers is featured in the recent edition (May 2011) of Dolce Vita here in Prague. There is an interview, overview of several projects, and a short CV. If you read Czech, grab the PDF. If not, keep reading.

Questions answered by Marketa Klemešová and Ryan Cole.
Favorite Artist / artwork:
M: Egon Schiele, Georgia O’Keeffe
R: Chuck Close, Jeremiah Palecek, Irma Boom

Favorite Graphic designer:
M: Jan Bons, Gerard Unger, Linda van Deursen, Irma Boom, Studio Thonik, 178 aardige ontwerpers, Lava
R: Doyald Young RIP, Frank Chimera, Leon Dijkstra of Amsterdam

Favorite Designer:
M: Droog, Piet Hein Eek, Hella Jongerius
R: Droog

International Gallery / museum:
M: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthal Rotterdam
R: The Modern in Ft. Worth, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis

Czech Gallery / Museum:
M: DOX
R: Školská

Restaurants and food:
M: Las Adelitas in Vinohrady, TexMex, Italian, Greek and Ethiopian
R: Mexican, Asian, anything spicy

Movies:
M: Star Trek
R: everything from Jan Svankmajer, John Waters

Music:
R: I like music that tells a story. Ambient, country, noise, funk. It’s all part of the same spectrum.

Fashion designer / brand:
M: Skunkfunk
R: Not too into fashion

Book / writer:
M: John Irving
R: Malcolm Gladwell, Robert Anton Wilson, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick

Magazines:
M: Reflex, Vormberichten
R: I read more online than magazines these days. Also since I don’t read Czech so well my options are a bit limited. Online I read Monocle, Good, Sputnik Observatory to name a few.

Destination:
M: wherever
R: Middle East

Freetime:
M: Iyengar yoga, figure drawing, agility, long walks with my dog …
R: Producing music, building electronics, exploring the bottomless rabbit hole of the internet.

How did you get to graphic design?
M: When I studied book restoration at Hellichova, a lot of my classmates were doing graphic design, and I found it a lot more interesting.
R: Completely by accident. I meant to go to the orientation meeting for film making, but went to the wrong room.

Where can your work be seen and which kinds of work are you focused on?
M: Our campaigns are seen in various areas of print and online media. Corporate identities for lot of different clients, visible in their internal and external communication. We recently made a diary for the ČTK (Czech New Agency). That turned out nicely. Hopefully it’s riding around the city in the backpacks of all their partners.

Marketa, you have some time studying at the prestigious Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands. How does this experience affect your work?
M: I studied graphic design at first with Viktor Levi, and later with Linda van Deursen. This experience  brought me a radically new look into graphic design. We received huge freedom to experiment, and we learned to place great emphasis on the concept.

Does your work somehow reflect Dutch graphic design?
M: We always start from a strong concept, and then look for an appropriate form. If this is how you define Dutch design, then yes.

What are the pros and cons of working with a foreigner, and how did you set up your studio?
M: I’ve worked with foreigners nearly my whole life. In the Netherlands I studied and worked with many different nationalities, not just with Dutch people. It was an amazing professional and international experience. With Ryan, we met during his internship at PHX (studio in Amsterdam). After ten years spent in Amsterdam I wanted to return to Prague and managed to talk Ryan into moving 800 km further on. His work and approach in Ask designers help me to maintain an objective angle.

You often work for large companies. What happens working with such clients?
M: Communication can be complex and all the steps are addressed by larger teams. It is important to listen to all sides and to be as helpful as possible in order to successfully complete the project. It can be difficult, but also very rewarding.

This year we made the Distractonator. It includes about 300 magnetic words and 10 character heads. It’s a simple, but addictive word game type thing that can live on the refrigerator, file cabinet, or skull plate.

After drawing all the heads, and choosing all the words (harder than you might think), we found a printer who could print on magnetic film. They turned out really nicely. The cutting was a different story. Having them all cut by laser was out of the question, as apparently the laser would burn the plastic, releasing arsenic gas or some other similarly potent neurotoxin. I guess our printer is a bit attached to his brain cells, as he then made us an offer to make a traditional die for it. This sounded promising until we received the offer. Let’s just say we didn’t go that direction.

Instead we had them delivered as full, uncut sheets, which we then cut ourselves. It took most of a weekend, but in the end we had about 25 custom made Distractonators ready for the world.

And these are the Distractofied versions of us here at Ask designers! I’m much beardier in real life.

We also made a digital version you can play with. once you make something brilliant, hit the save button, and it will save a copy on our server. If we get any funny ones I’ll post them up here. Go for it!

Just around our corner in the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Prague 6 is a great exhibition of Eva Nádvorníková.
 
This unusual space (Makráč), known in past as an underground space for politically uncomfortable artists, still offers its walls to a new wave of art dissidents – painters.
It seems this classic discipline is pushed away from the center of Prague by conceptual art which is sometimes hard to even interpret.
 
Makráč could seem far but if you jump in trams 18 or 1 at Hradčanská you are there in 10 min.

Eva e xhibits a series of paintings based on a trees. 
She finds her energy, compositions and colors right there, inside the trees, in the rhythm of the branches and in the space between them.
You feel tension dripping from the paintings.They are dramatic, restless and some of them quite romantic. I like the zoomed in ones the most. You are soused in the crown of the tree, the branches are disappearing, transforming into lines and wanes.

Eva’s art is approachable for a lot of people, I believe there is a such a rich ‘vocabulary’ used in which everybody will find their words.
 
I fell in love with her most recent orange painting. Energy radiates from the canvas.
I would love to have this one in my own studio, to get boosted every day!

Eva, do you know the price of this painting already?

Info:
Till when: The exhibition lasts till the end of October
Where: Ústav makromolekulární chemie AV ČR, Heyrovského nám.2, Praha 6 – Břevnov,
Artists website: http://nadvornikova.eu/

Last week the (formerly) respectable clothing brand The Gap unveiled a redesign of it’s logo. Normally this process is long and complex as the value tied up in a recognizable brand is very high, and very important to the company. Not so much this time around. The Gap has chosen to relegate this complex task to a new process called ‘crowd sourcing’. The idea being that you task a large group of people (normally online) with creating something in the context of a competition. The assumption is that out of those people someone will have a brilliant idea. This is a great idea if you are designing a t-shirt or producing a promo film, but a horrible idea if you want something as complex as a brand. By definition, the participants are working on a minimum of information. They have no hint of the future ambitions of the company, the internal structure, or even something as simple as how the logo will be used. These are all critical pieces of information when we are talking about branding a company with thousands of employees and a billion dollar revenue stream.

Besides the obvious repercussions for The Gap itself and the furor it has created, this (in my opinion of course) sends a very poor message regarding the value of design and branding. This new logo presents the idea that professional design is so low in value that it is better outsourced to non-experts. As designers we are constantly fighting the seemingly endless battle of value. Would you crowd-source the mechanical design of a 747? Would you feel good letting a crowd of anonymous people install the electricity in your house? Probably not, yet large and small organizations continue to act as if design should be free.

If you happen to love the logo, you’re in luck because someone has graciously created this handy logo maker!

UPDATE: It looks like The Gap has wisely backed down and reinstated thier old logo. They have no foresight, but at least their hindsight is 20/20.

Check them all out here.

Marketa made the illustrations and Ryan animated it and did the sound design. All of the sound effects we didn’t record ourselves were taken from Freesound, and an attribution list can be found here.

Forum 50% contest entry from ryan cole on Vimeo.

There is also a Czech version!

Do you think it addresses the topic effectively?

Check out the digital version!

What did it tell you?