The Wieden years. It’s weird, I only interview people whose work I really like, but whenever I lay their work out end-to-end, I’m always surprised at how much better it is than I’d remembered. It could be that there’s much more of it, the sheer consistency of it or that it appears better with the benefit of time and a bit of distance. All three are true of the work in this post. Tony does a good job of shiningRead more
Month: August 2017
PODCAST: Mark Reddy.
‘Art Director’ is an unhelpful title. It has nothing to do with Art and very little to do with directing. Some think it’s about making stuff look cool, I think it’s about communicating at speed. We work in a medium people are actively trying to ignore, so we can’t hang around. Art Director’s can only communicate quickly if the understand: a) Their basic toolkit; photography, film, illustration, editing, cropping, fonts, colours and the rest. b) The world around them: how humans behave,Read more
GREEN BOOKS: Type 5.
Obviously there’s more Fred & Fabien, but probably the most interesting things in there are the bits of old typesetting I rescued from the Leagas Delaney bin. The studio was going all digital, so PMT machines, drawing desks, wax machines, art-workers a and bits of old setting were dumped. I managed to save a few bits of setting, if you eat a lot of carrots and have 20/20 vision you’ll be able to spot a few cut marks between someRead more
PODCAST: Ben Priest.
The arc of most creative agencies tends to be very similar; start idealistic and creative, become less principled and duller over the years as the realities of finance, earn-outs and fatigue start to kick in. Adam & Eve are like the Benjamin Button of ad agencies. They started burdened by the financial realities due to a situation called ‘Sorrell’. Having come through the early sensible years they seem to grow more creative as each year goes by. They won noRead more
GREEN BOOKS: Type 2.
The feedback I’ve had on these books is very consistent; ‘I had most of that stuff in my scrap books too’. What a world? Art directors from it’s four corners saving exactly the same references from exactly the same dozen or so sources* in order to help create them something different. Today there is no reason art directors should be fishing in the same pool. (*Interview, Vogue Italia, Harper’s Bazaar, Lurzer’s Archive, Rolling Stone, Creative Review, Direction, Beach Culture, RayRead more
GREEN BOOKS: Illustration 1.
After looking through this old book again, it got me thinking. a) Why do we not use illustration more in advertising? b) When we do use it, why do we always the same few styles, why not use all the weird, wonderful and exotic flavours available out there? c) What happened to these guys?Read more
GREEN BOOKS: Type 6.
When I write these posts I sometimes forget that not everyone reading them was working in advertising or design 20 years ago. After the last post a lot of people asked me what the hell I meant when I said that the green book shouldn’t be called ‘Type’, it would be more appropriate to name it ‘The Fred & Fabien Files’. It was a joke, so much of the work in that typography scrapbook was from the same two guys. FREDRead more