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welcome to issue V 01.05.06

the Department of Design research journal

thedisciples of

iDesign

* 107iPage

Play by Mr Steve Wilkin - Illustration Tutor

Swallow illustrations taken from tattoo fl ash cards - artist unknown

fi fth issue of The Disciples of Design has arrived. Throughout this issue you will notice the gratuitous use of the lowercase i. Our inspiration for this seemingly iRandom act is the Apple Corporation and its not so random branding of every word in the iOxford iEnglish iDictionary.

One other interesting and somewhat sad point of interest are the stencil images from Melbourne, featured in issue 3. It would seem that, due to the Commonwealth Games, Melbourne City Council deemed it necessary to clean up and paint over all the artwork in the city centre. Can London expect a similar white wash come 2012?

On a lighter note, this issue will hopefully raise the spirits with a little playful freedom of expression and visual tomfoolery.

We feature the work of Rachel Simpson, a second year Graphics student who is currently on placement and has just recently collected fi rst prize in the Chartered Society of Designers student awards. This issue also has a little more emphasis on the role of the written word within design and includes several topical terms. Also scattered throughout are the thoughts and illustrations of Mr Stephen Wilkin, culled from his extensive and ever increasing mental and physical archive.

It only remains for us to say that we hope you enjoy this issue and maybe even take issue with some of the issues covered.

R. Whitehead - Editor

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Over consumption and the paranoia of further iTerrorist attacks were the inspiration for these two original montaged images.

A Cod ApocalypseIce Cream Armageddon

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“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”.

Shed - B. Bainbridge Snr Shed - B. Bainbridge Snr

Offi ce - A. Bainbridge Jnr

In the deep south the phenomena of the American fried chicken joint has reached near satura-tion point. There’s Mississippi Fried Chicken, Texas Fried Chicken, Orlando Fried Chicken, Tennessee Fried Chicken and good Ol’Dixy Fried Chicken. You can have New York Fried Chicken or Perfect Fried Chicken, you can probably even have Perfect New York Fried Chicken, if you wanted?

You can visit your local Chicken Village and have Express Fried Chicken or Kennedy Fried Chicken. Although we’ve yet to fi nd a Reagan Fried Chicken or Finger Lickin’ Lincoln. You can even have Halal Fried Chicken or “a wing and a prayer”, yes the pun is defi nitely intended. Basically, if your in London and you want chicken then O’Boy you can sure as hell have it.

A look at the many feat

hered fast food

ChickenChicken

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SouthernSouthern

The colonel’s rebel army, is an extremely interest-ing phenomenon and one which really only exists within the confi nes of the Capital. Intensively farmed and intensively distributed, chicken has, it would appear, become the meat of the masses and nowhere is that more obvious than in the hinterland of our capital.

A trip to Hackney or Dalston will provide you with a chicken feast nearly every 500 yards. They used to say your were never more than a few feet away from a rat in the Capital, well that could be changed to chicken drum stick and not be too far from the truth.

It is estimated there are in the region of 5,000 fried chicken outlets in the Greater London area, shifting in the region of 75 tonnes of fowl a day.

The fi rst Kentucky Fried Chicken in the UK was ironically to be found ‘up North’ in Preston, Lancashire, where Ray Allen opened the fi rst Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1964.

From a well-established catering background Ray Allen met with Colonel Harland Sanders in 1963, securing the famous American fast food rights for the ‘Colonel’s Secret Recipe’.

Popularising the new take-away food concept, Ray expanded the Kentucky Fried Chicken brand. By the mid 1970’s there were 250 KFC’s throughout the U.K., all successfully operating with the image of Colonel Harland Sanders and with the name fi rmly established in the pecking order of the fast food outlet.

From a design perspective the visual recipe for creating your own fried chicken franchise is very basic, simply take the following into consideration.

Try trading on a quasi American theme. Directly reference the USA via a state name i.e. Mississippi, Texas, Nebraska (southern if possible). Always exploit the use of red, white & blue in your facades (see examples) and stick as many pictures of your product in the windows as you can.

joints of the Capital.

by S. Monella

coarse!

A descriptive expletive?

Apathy by Mr Steve Wilkin - Illustration Tutor

The following spreads feature a selection of sachets from the departments ephemera archive.

These small gratuitous sealed envelopes of seasoning, coffee whiteners, shampoos & wet wipes are at the lower end of the ambient branding ladder. Yet they retain a certain charm that has not been lost on the collector. More importantly they also demonstrate to the student how a logotype works on the smallest of formats.

116 iPage

Rachel Simpson won fi rst prize and £1000 pounds for her calendar design. Here she explains her ideas and thought process.

“The brief for this project was to design a Marks & Spencers calendar aimed at the Marks & Spencers consumer aged 25 to 45 years old. From my research into the Marks & Spencer consumer of that age range, I found that the majority have traditional values.

To answer the brief I took the traditional subject of sports, and gave them a dual meaning with either the special days in the year or the sporting events. e.g. 1. An example of how I linked the sport to the special days can be found in February, with Valentines Day and Archery. I realised that Valentines day is in the middle of February, perfect for an archery target.

The copy writing plays an important part in bringing the dual meaning together. This calendar has fun with typographic styles, is interactive and uses different printingprocesses. It has humour and novelty that is done in a traditional way”.

Americas Europe Asia

Gerhard MercatorFlemish cartographer & mathematician 1512 -94

The Mercator Projection

The above projection was created by cutting up Mercators original map and then re-arranging the

74mm squares at random.

Exhibited Preston - 2001

Five years later the process was reversed. The 74mm squares were individually re-arranging

and stacked at random.

Exhibited Preston - 2006

New words and phrases are entering our everyday lexicon at an ever increasing rate, some survive to make it into the Oxford English Dictionary, but many fall by the wayside. Here we feature the word ‘Handbags’ and offer up our own defi nition (see above).

Although not yet offi cially recognised by the OED the term is under consideration as can be seen from the defi nitions below.

We look forward to this years World Cup tournament where we expect an excessive display of ‘Handbags’ and hopefully the offi cial recognition of a new ‘turn of phrase’ to boot.

OED Brit. n. 2. (handbags) humorous a confrontation that does not lead to serious fi ghting, especially among soccer players. [from the idea of women fi ghting with their handbags.

Handbags (Football)A humorous term for a confrontation without serious conviction. i.e. ʻhandbags at dawn ̓or ʻfi ve pacesʼ.

Image - The Sun new

spaper 2002

urbandictionary.com 1. handbags Mainly British. A pointless and worthless argument, deriving from the image of old ladies having a handbag (purse) fi ght at the bus stop. “Oh, put your handbags away”.

“Handles for goal posts” - The Football Museum carrier bag. The Chase Creative Consultants

“Handbags” Creative executions, some quite literally, that focus on the carrier bag handle.

*

Here we illustrate a topical but not too fl attering reference to our French cousins, believed to be of American origin. Illustration by Mr S.Wilkin.*

Context - First year 3D lateral thinking exercise.

Brief - Transpose a characteristic of a well known artist onto a bottle.

Artist - Rachel Whiteread.

Student - Rachel Simpson.

Year - 2004

Context - First year lateral thinking exercise. Word & Image. Brief - Illustrate a well known phrase, saying or adage.

Solution - Third time lucky.

Student - Rachel Simpson.

Year - 2004

The symbolism of a bird that migrates thousands of miles over land and sea, eventually returning to the exact place of birth, was not loston early seafarers.

Hence the swallow has become one of tattoo artists classic motifs and traditionally positioned on the back of either hand between the thumb and forefi nger.

The object above is designed/fashioned out of packets of Players Navy Cut Cigarettes. It is just over 8 inches in diameter, elasticated and can only be described as a ruff; pleated paper with adjustable central aperture. Why, who, when and for what purpose can only be surmised.

However the item was purchased near Robin Hood’s Bay and has a distinct maritime folk art quality that is akin to scrimshaw. Infact one can almost imagine an old salty sea dog, sat landlocked in a windswept tavern. Ale in hand, shipping forecast on the airwaves and to while away the hours he slowly and methodically begins to craft the above item from the remnants of his habit. A romantic scene you may say, but if you have any better ideas then pipe them aboard and we’ll splice the main brace.

P PESO: Another name for piece of eight (C16: from Spanish: weight,

from Latin pensum something weighed out, from pendere to weigh)

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Tattoo by Louie Malloy - 1996

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133iPage

Recent observations on the students grasp of spacial awareness - by T.Dodd

big How

Size, shape, volume, weight, balance, scale, perspective, scope, composition and aesthetics, are fundamentals to every design discipline and are an ongoing voyage of development for all. Even the most experienced designer or artist is constantly in a state of re-evalua-tion when it comes to the above.

Students of art and design, especially those who increasingly work and rely on the computer for their designs are often in danger of misinterpreting these cornerstones. In my experience as a tutor, in the area of visual communications, I am constantly reminding and pointing out to students the basics fact that they are working in miniature (most of the time). The constraints of a computer screen make it inevitably so.

“I didn’t expect it to look like that”, “it’s too big”, “I thought it would be smaller” and “it’s not the same”, are all comments from students on fi nally seeing their designs in the fl esh.

Living in an increasingly introverted, distorted, artifi cial, virtual, miniature world, has now become the norm for most 19 year olds. Yet the paradox is they wander around in the real world, where a bus is big and water is wet. It is only when they start to realise their designs that this dichotomy becomes evident and always proves a constant source of surprise to them and amusement to myself.

It is a learning curve, no doubt, but the constraints of living in the world of A4 and A3 need to be broken at some point, if they are ever to stand a chance of ‘think-ing or indeed designing outside the box’.

Spacial awareness or mental measuring would appear to be an inherent trait, nurtured in our early years with three dimensional childhood games and puzzles. From the simple round peg and square hole aptitude tests to the more complicated puzzles, like Jigsaws and Rubics cubes.

However in our “brave new world” of the internet, the playstation, the mobile phone, and the lap top compu-ter, there would also appear to be an increasing lack of basic perspective.

Miscalculation of dimensions is nothing new. NASA boffi ns have wasted millions by confusing imperial and metric measurements. Legend has it that when Henry Ford completed the prototype Model T he had to knock 6 inches (that’s 153mm) off of his garage door frame to extricate the vehicle. Errors such as these provide amus-ing anecdotes and are hilariously encapsulated in the ‘stone henge’ scene from the fi lm Spinal Tap.

But there is a serious side to all this and it manifests itself in the simple fact that todays design student has or is losing their ability to engage with the real world on a basic level. i.e. a ruler. In my limited experience, assumption is now the students closest friend.

Two dimensional screen based learning has been part of design education for a relatively short period. In the past 15 to 20 years technology and related software has advanced at an alarming rate and has revolutionised many disciplines. But what are the long term effects?

Whether we like or not, we are all now part of an ever faster and an ever more complicated, global, social experiment, with the virtual environment in the ascendency. Fortunately or unfortunately we will never be privy to the outcome of said experiment but in my humble opinion we could well be on the way to a not too distant vanishing point.

Discus - andybees@yahoo.com

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The Devils in the detail by Mr Steve Wilkin - Illustration Tutor

This recent identity for the Garden Lighting Company by The Chase Creative Consultants employs three classic techniques.

One. Try Turning a brief on its head (in this case quite literally).Two. A well considered crop.

Three. Spacial awareness within a given context.

When combined the result is a sophisticated and elegant solution, a great demonstration to all students studying the art of visual communication.

Here we feature a selection of the identities put forward for the new Mitchell & Kenyon Independent Cinema which has just recently opened in the Foster building.

Chris Challenor and ex-graduates Steve Conchie, Karen Hughes and current placement student Rachel Simpson all worked on the cinema identity.

Background

The fi rm of Mitchell & Kenyon, founded in Blackburn in 1897 by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, released fi lms under the trade name of Norden and were one of the largest British fi lm companies in the 1900s, producing a mixture of topicals, fi ction and ‘fake’ war fi lms.

The company had premises at 21 King Street and 40 Northgate but from late 1901 they were primarily based at Norden Film Works, 22 Clayton Street, Blackburn.

An elegantly crafted typographical double take for Dave & Claires wedding invite.

Designed by two ex graduates Peter Richardson and Mike Rigby, with the help of Chris Maclean.

The invite has just been accepted into this years D&AD annual.

144 iPage

This issue was set in M

yriad Apple on purpose. Finally a special thanks to all those w

ho contributed to this the Spring issue and we now

look forward to our next instalm

ent.