Ghariokwu Lemi

Ghariokwu Lemi is a Nigerian artist and designer who is most renowned for providing many of the original cover images for the recordings of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. His work involves a variety of styles, often using vibrant colours and individuated typefaces of his own design. More than 2,000 album covers have been designed by Lemi, including covers for Bob Marley, E. T. Mensah, Osita Osadebe, Gilles Peterson and Antibalas (WKPD).

Ghariokwu's art oozes soul-drenched rawness with every stroke of the pen, creating a whole new language of album cover art that bristles with social and political criticism.

Eduardo Marin (Cuba)

EM is a member of the group Nudo (Knot). The images are filled with references to the less-than glamorous printed matter of everyday life in Cuba. Marin believes in satire as a way to convey seriousness.

"My work is a kind of archeology"

Gabriel Martinez Meave (Mexico)

Gabriel Martinez Meave is a self-taught graphic and typographic designer, illustrator, calligrapher illustrator, educator and author from Mexico. His sketches and letters, including Darka, Mexica, Rondana and Economista are distributed worldwide by Adobe. Currently he is a professor at the University of Anahuac in Mexico City.

Non-Format

Kjell Ekhorn (Norwegian) and Jon Forss (British) have worked together as the creative direction & design team Non-Format since 2000. They work on a range of projects including art direction, design, illustration and custom typography for arts & culture, music industry, fashion and advertising clients. They have art directed the independent music monthly The Wire and also Varoom: the journal of illustration and made images.

"We are trying to add expression to topography"

Markus Dressen

Markus Dressen has developed a unique aesthetics which runs through every page of his book. Dressen works are objects to unfold, touch, handle and see, as well as to read. He is a former student at the famous Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig.

Your turn #12

 New Acropolis Museum, by Bernard Tschumi (Athens, Greece).

As you've sen, design is an important medium of communication which expresses the values of the system within which it functions. Design inevitably perpetuates the ideology of the system it serves. In the 21st century the system is represented by the capitalist economic framework of mass production and mass consumption. This is less a result of design's intrinsic characteristics than of its necessary rapport with the cultural system that sustains it.

What's your thought? This is the last assignment for comments. Go ahead!

Air pollution (the China chapter)

Urban solutions

Perfect (re)touch

Adbusters

Recycling to Africa

Sustainable architectural design

Green homes

Your turn #11

What should we do with our trash? In the NYTimes.

But these next-generation incinerators, known as waste-to-energy plants, have not caught on in the United States, where most garbage is still hauled to distant landfills. What stands in the way of the U.S. adopting more of these advanced technologies?
____

The NYTimes article brings to mind the idea of technology. For example, technology as the arm driving design.

Is technology a tool or has it taken (sort of independently of any subject's overall direction) a 'life' of its own? 

Don't be naive: Technology has become something to react to, rather than direct -just try directing your latest word processing package outside its parameters, setting up a new television set without its pre-loaded instruction, or servicing your own brand new car. Such technologies have been designed with an embodied 'will' of their own that designs the users' and the technicians' relations to them.

For further reference, see Tony Fry's A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing (University of South Wells Press, 1999).

Die Gestalten Verlag

DGV books canonize the ephemeral, rather than considering ‘what excellent design is really capable of: elegant, functional, and at times beautiful and surprising communication’. Robert Klanten, DGV’s editor-in-chief, told Nadel he saw ‘no need for commenting in the traditional 1980s pre-digital way. I try to let the designers explain themselves in their language and not in the teacher’s voice.’ In other words, this is visual culture in the post-literate age; and if you need it explained, it’s probably not for you the first place. There’s another more interesting question that hangs over DGV books: are they spotting design trends or are they making them? There’s a temptation to see DGV as a sort of black-polo-necked style lab manufacturing ready-made fads that sweep through the world of design and fashion, thus reinforcing its status as graphic design’s premier cool hunter. It was certainly the first publisher to spot the arrival of the new digital decorativeness with Romantik (2003); while it did not invent the trend for cartouches and flourishes that has infested visual communication in recent years, it certainly contributed to its promulgation.

Blek le Rat

Your turn #10

There's plenty to talk about. Below, my Design Manifesto, an alternative way of looking at design. Take any theme you like.

Your turn #9

Between the 1930's and the 1950's, these are some of the new developments:

Graphic design took on the intangible and lent it visual form,

System approaches became a pervasive metaphor for design,

Universal Signs became familiar (design goes international),

Graphic design moves to Hollywood and becomes a fluid medium,

Design means sophistication and affluence,

Go ahead!