Posts Tagged ‘design’

Native

— Posted on by Sean Batchelor

My Submission for the Australian Infront Virtual Response Competition.

It is based on a page from William Dawes’ notebooks from 1790, the first real documentation of the Aboriginal Language, Dharuk, from the Sydney area.

William Dawes had an incredibly interesting story, as I found on this amazing website. williamdawes.org

He came to Australia with the 1st Fleet as an astronomer, and ended up making the first serious attempt to document the native tongue in the form of 3 notebooks. Importantly, these also captured the sentiments of the Aboriginal people whose conversations he transcribed.

He was asked after some time in the service of the Governor Arthur Phillip to take part in a hunt to decapitate 10 Aboriginal men as revenge for the death of the Governor’s Gamekeeper. Dawes resisted but was eventually persuaded to join the pursuit. After the group returned unsuccessful he expressed his regret in participating and wouldn’t apologise to the Governor for this attitude, making him one of the first Europeans who stood in defence of Aboriginal interests. As a result, Dawes was returned to England, despite his great wish to remain in New South Wales.

He continued to undertake many honourable pursuits including setting up schools for the children of slaves in Antigua.

Whether William Dawes recognised it or not, I think that his documentation of the language would have played a major role in his moral objection. When you speak a foreign language you immediately have a cross cultural experience, and with these experiences you learn and show respect.

Pretty sure this isn’t a winning response, but it was an interesting theme to work with.

Naabangoon…

What do you want from me?

— Posted on by Sean Batchelor

For designers it can feel as though marketing teams or business committees are a well intentioned pair of solid concrete boots. We as designers have all conceded our share of defeats at the hands of lower/middle/upper management as they try to tell us how to do our job. They would argue though, that they are just doing their job. For a real solution to this conflict, and to create more progressive, positive outcomes for design, business and society, we need to learn each others language and especially business needs to learn exactly what to expect from a graphic designer.

We aren’t supposed to be our clients, just as we expect them not to act as designers. Meaning we need a more mutual understanding of roles. It must be a partnership in which both parties are aware of their own and each others basic roles but I feel that it is the designer’s role that is more often sublimated.

The design industry as a whole has an identity crisis. We are strategy consultancies, advertisers, artists, activists, innovation hikers etc etc… amongst which ‘graphic designer’ could sound a bit dry. Whilst the role(s) of a graphic designer may seem broad, we need a coherent description of services that we share and that business can understand. Even designers who design exclusively for online should describe themselves as graphic designers to maintain this sense of consistency for the sake of the industry.

These transformations would take place slowly and require organisation and an a consensus within the industry. As well as improving the quality of the work, I think this would have other positive effects such as enabling designers to quote/charge with some consistency, find clients more easily, and once a job has been secured allow for it to run more smoothly. Articulation is key and we can start with the questions…

What should business expect and respect of graphic designers?

I propose something along the lines of:

  • Dedication to, and expertise in the field of aesthetics
  • Whilst being a service industry, we have our individual ideologies, ethics, and sense of purpose towards the improvement of society beyond answering a brief.

That is maybe a left of centre place to start, but maybe one day I’ll go into why I think these are the really important concepts that hold back our industry from job to job.

What should designers expect and respect of business (clients)?

I’d say this ball should be thrown in to the court of a ‘business-person’, but I’d say designers should expect a set of definable goals or motivations and for their responses to be challenged and held accountable.

The Best Design Magazine

— Posted on by Sean Batchelor

It’s a good feeling when an impulse purchase, in this case necessitated by an emergency need for pain killers and a strict $5 eftpos limit at a train station news agency, leads to valuable discovery.

After a quick scan of the magazine shelves I opted for Bloomberg Businessweek. It was an aesthetic decision. Simple bold masthead, neutral colour scheme full bleed image and a big headline about Google. I joined my travelling partner and boarded the train. I am NOT a businessman. I am a graphic designer and i’m pretty sure that I am not the target audience, however I found it to be the best design magazine I have read this year in both it’s layout and its content.

Layout

The grid was pretty scrappy but there were so many IDEAS. Margins were either non existent or crammed with supportive facts, anecdotal illustrations of graphical representations of the textual content. The typography was simple and unadorned with articles navigating elegantly from start to finish. There was no Jan, Emil, Herb or Eric looming over its shoulder. The aesthetic led to my surprise it’s brashness. It felt free and dedicated to the editorial focus of its content. No design magazine that I’ve seen/read recently has this freedom.

Content

Graphic design as an industry has an inherent link to business. It is a commercial undertaking (even more so when it’s trying not to be) and anyone working within the industry needs to be at peace with this. The articles in Bloomberg Business were plainly written, with minimal business/economic jargon and despite it being American-centric, fairly international content. With well edited coverage on innovation, products, economics, management, markets, politics, media – all of which design is or should be entwined. To be a good designer it is more important to be aware of business than of graphic design. Obviously we must know our tools, both our programs and technical restrictions and the typographic and compositional rules of the art form. These are rendered useless without a strong understanding of the message the message’s environment and the message’s recipient.

Design literature should make us better designers and a smarter industry collectively, though most magazines fail to go further than patting ourselves on the back. It is important that the industry’s acheivements and the best of our designs are documented and discussed but this does not really make us better at our job or improve the position of the industry – especially Australia.

The Indigenous Voice

— Posted on by Sean Batchelor

Designers have long asserted the influence of their craft on a social and political level. It can be demonstrated (from Jazz, to Nazism) where a visual aesthetic has offered more than a colour scheme throughout the course of history and where the tone of communication has galvanised a message. In this new era, we as professional image makers and thinkers in Australia should be asking what is broken, and what can we do to fix it? What can designers offer to the betterment of Australian life?

One such area of great importance is white understanding and acceptance of indigenous culture. The huge difficulty that has faced Aboriginal people is in communication. Plainly, there is a disconnection in language both spoken (heard) and unspoken (seen). This being the result of a violent and guilty past which is tolerated by most westerners with embarrassed forgetfulness and by Aboriginal people with anger and sorrow.

Western designers and artists working in Australia have, in the past, drawn from Aboriginal motifs in proclamation of our independence and individuality from Britain. It plays well for our global identity. However, the presentation of Aboriginal Culture in this way is perhaps just as damaging, given the ongoing national struggle to fully accept and respect the original owners of our country. The plagiarism of indigenous motifs and symbols in this way is simplistic and disrespectful.

Designers today should in all cases present the true sense of what being Australian means, in politically focused messages and – more importantly – in the everyday visual media. It is necessary for this to have within it, an understanding of Aboriginal culture and language. Australian design, fashion, hospitality, entertainment and especially big business should all be open to the recognition of this cultural asset as part of the make up of their visual identity. The result of this would be a collaborative achievement and Australia would benefit for the shared experience, with reconciliation as a natural progression.

Foodstuffs

— Posted on by Sean Batchelor