Anthony Burrill

 

 

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/illustration/anthony-burrill-poster-book-gives-you-30-wryly-inspirational-prints/

 BIOGRAPHY

Graphic artist, print-maker and designer Anthony Burrill is known for his persuasive, up-beat style of communication. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York and has been exhibited in galleries around the world including The Barbican, The Walker Art Centre and The Graphic Design Museum, Breda. In 2012, he made his first foray into curating with the exhibition Made in L.A. - Work by Colby Poster Printing, at KK Outlet in London.
Words and language are an important part of Burrill’s output and he has developed a distinctive voice that is sought after not only by collectors of his posters and prints but also by clients including Wallpaper* magazine, The Economist, The British Council, London Underground and The Design Museum. Burrill is perhaps best known for his typographic, text-based compositions, including the now-famous “Work Hard and Be Nice to People”, which has become a mantra for the design community and beyond.
Burrill has a long-standing relationship with the printers Adams of Rye where he uses traditional techniques to compose and print his work. The integrity lent to the process of image-making by hand-made methods is essential to his practice across all media — from print, to screen-based, to three-dimensional applications. In 2010 he worked with Happiness Brussels to design a screen-printed poster made with oil and sand collected from the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Proceeds from the sale of the limited edition poster “Oil & Water Do Not Mix” went to CRCL (Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana) and copies were acquired by the V&A and Cooper-Hewitt for their collections.

 

http://coolmompicks.com/blog/2013/05/09/inspiring-posters-words-work-hard/

While Burrill’s work is grounded in a serious devotion to his art, he has a lightness of touch and humour that, although often copied, is unique in the field of graphic communication. He frequently embarks on innovative collaborations with friends and fellow creatives. Recent and regular colluders include product designer Michael Marriott, writer and philosopher Alain de Botton, designer Ben Kelly and creative director Erik Kessels.
Installations, events and work in three dimensions punctuate Burrill’s practice. At the renowned annual graphic art fair Pick Me Up at Somerset House in London in 2011, Burrill re-located his studio to the gallery and held workshops and daily collaborations with fellow designers, illustrators, photographers and musicians over the course of ten days. For Graphic Design Worlds at the Triennale di Milano in 2011 Burrill and Michael Marriott built and installed a red-timbered chalet structure, clad with recreations of Burrill’s work cut from multi-veneer board.
As well as his self-authored work and commissioned design, Burrill makes regular appearances at events and talks worldwide. He also runs creative workshops attended by children, students and creative professionals alike. He documents and communicates his work and points of inspiration prolifically via social media, with thousands of followers on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.
Burrill was born in Littleborough, Lancashire. After studying Graphic Design at Leeds Polytechnic he completed an MA in Graphic Design at the Royal College of Art, London. He now lives and works on the Isle of Oxney, Kent.

http://www.anthonyburrill.com/about/biography

 

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/tags/typography/page/12/ 

Anthony Burrill's work is beautiful. By using the traditional printing press he gives his work a homely and warm atmosphere. It also allows him to create crisp pieces of work that are always slightly varied. This makes every poster it's own exciting piece. The type is basic and bold, simply stating the message with no urgency or abruptness. The works are easy overlooked but, once noticed, they are unforgettable. The simplicity of the coloration and type makes his posters easy to absorb and highlights the individual differences. Burrill keeps us on our toes with clever ideas like the 'Oil & Water Do Not Mix' poster, which was printed in oil from the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill disaster. This brought a completely new message to the poster. The phrases he uses are uplifting and lighthearted when they aren't political messages. If collected together, they would create a fantastic manifesto. His work will be helpful in my 2D course because it provides beautiful examples of how basic, clear designs can enliven a message.     

Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kisa-lala/

 

 

Graphic Designer (1962-)
Design Museum Collection

STEFAN SAGMEISTER (1962-) is among today’s most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His long-standing collaborators include the AIGA and musicians, David Byrne and Lou Reed.
When Stefan Sagmeister was invited to design the poster for an AIGA lecture he was giving on the campus at Cranbrook near Detroit, he asked his assistant to carve the details on to his torso with an X-acto knife and photographed the result. Sunning himself on a beach the following summer, Sagmeister noticed traces of the poster text rising in pink as his flesh tanned.
Now a graphic icon of the 1990s, that 1999 AIGA Detroit poster typifies Stefan Sagmeister’s style. Striking to the point of sensationalism and humorous but in such an unsettling way that it’s nearly, but not quite unacceptable, his work mixes sexuality with wit and a whiff of the sinister. Sagmeister’s technique is often simple to the point of banality: from slashing D-I-Y text into his own skin for the AIGA Detroit poster, to spelling out words with roughly cut strips of white cloth for a 1999 brochure for his girlfriend, the fashion designer, Anni Kuan. The strength of his work lies in his ability to conceptualise: to come up with potent, original, stunningly appropriate ideas.
Born in Bregenz, a quiet town in the Austrian Alps, in 1962, Sagmeister studied engineering after high school, but switched to graphic design after working on illustrations and lay-outs for Alphorn, a left-wing magazine. The first of his D-I-Y graphic exercises was a poster publicising Alphorn’s Anarchy issue for which he persuaded fellow students to lie down in the playground in the shape of the letter A and photographed them from the school roof.
At 19, Sagmeister moved to Vienna hoping to study graphics at the city’s prestigious University of Applied Arts. After his first application was rejected – "just about everybody was better at drawing than I was" – he enrolled in a private art school and was accepted on his second attempt. Through his sister’s boyfriend, the rock musician, Alexander Goebel, Sagmeister was introduced to the Schauspielhaus theatre group and designed posters for them as part of the Gruppe Gut collective. Many of the posters parodied traditionally twee theatrical imagery and offset it with roughly printed text in the grungey typefaces of punk albums and 1970s anarchist graphics.
In 1987, Sagmeister won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Here humour emerged as the dominant theme in his work. When a girlfriend asked him to design business cards which would cost no more than $1 each, Sagmeister printed them on dollar bills. And when a friend from Austria came to visit, having voiced concern that New York women would ignore him, Sagmeister postered the walls of his neighbourhood with a picture of his friend under the words "Dear Girls! Please be nice to Reini".
After three years in the US, Sagmeister returned to Austria for compulsory military service. As a conscientious objector, he was allowed to do community work in a refugee centre outside Vienna. He stayed in Austria working as a graphic designer before moving to Hong Kong in 1991 to join the advertising agency, Leo Burnett. "They asked if I would be interested in being a typographer, " he later told the author, Peter Hall. "So I made up a high number and said I would do it for that." When the agency was invited to design a poster for the 1992 4As advertising awards ceremony, Sagmeister depicted a traditional Cantonese image featuring four bare male bottoms. Some ad agencies boycotted the awards in protest and the Hong Kong newspapers received numerous letters of complaint. Sagmeister’s favourite said: "Who’s the asshole who designed this poster?" By spring 1993, he had tired of Hong Kong. Sagmeister spent a couple of months working from a Sri Lankan beach hut before going back to New York.
As a Pratt Institute student, his dream had been to work at M&Co, the late Tibor Kalman’s graphics studio. Sagmeister bombarded Kalman with calls and finally persuaded him to sponsor his green card application. Four years later on his return from Hong Kong, the green card came through. His first project for M&Co was an invitation for a Gay and Lesbian Taskforce Gala for which he designed a prettily packaged box of fresh fruit. Cue a logistical nightmare as M&Co’s staff struggled to stop the fruit rotting in the heat of a sweltering New York summer. A few months later, Tibor Kalman announced that he was closing the studio to move to Rome, and Sagmeister set up on his own.
His goal was to design music graphics, but only for music he liked. To have the freedom to do so, Sagmeister decided to follow Kalman’s advice by keeping his company small with a team of three: himself, a designer (since 1996, the Icelander, Hjalti Karlsson) and an intern. Sagmeister Inc’s first project was its own business card, which came in an acrylic slipcase. When the card is inside the case, all you see is an S in a circle. Once outside, the company’s name and contract details appear. The second commission came from Sagmeister’s brother, Martin who was opening Blue, a chain of jeans stores in Austria. Sagmeister devised an identity consisting of the word blue in black type on an orange background.

 

http://mediaofzion.squarespace.com/home/2009/12/28/profile-of-stefan-sagmeister.html

As none of the record labels he approached seemed interested in his work, Sagmeister seized the chance to design a CD cover for a friend’s album, H.P. Zinker’s Mountains of Madness. Many of his contemporaries felt that music graphics had become less interesting once their old canvas, the vinyl LP cover, had shrunk to the dimensions of a CD, but Sagmeister saw the CD as a toy with which he could tantalise consumers. Having spotted a schoolgirl on the subway reading a maths text book through a red plastic filter, he placed his CD cover inside a red-tinted plastic case. Replicating the optical illusion of his business card, the complete packaging shows a close-up of a placid man’s face, but once the CD cover is slipped out from the red plastic, the man’s face appears furious in shades of red, white and green. Mountains of Madness won Sagmeister the first of his four Grammy nominations.
Invited by Lou Reed to design his 1996 album Set the Twilight Reeling, Sagmeister inserted an indigo portrait of Reed in an indigo-tinted plastic CD case. When the paler coloured cover is removed, Reed literally emerges from the twilight. The following year, Sagmeister depicted David Byrne as a plastic GI Joe-style doll on the cover of Feelings. One of his trickiest assignments was for the Rollings Stones’ 1997 Bridges to Babylon album and tour. Sagmeister struggled to persuade the band’s management to accept his motif of a lion inspired by an Assyrian sculpture in the British Museum. Also the astrological sign of the Rolling Stones’ lead singer, Mick Jagger (a Leo), the lion doubled as an easily reproducible motif for tour merchandise.
As well as these music projects, Sagmeister still took on other commercial commissions and pro bono cultural projects, such as his AIGA lecture posters. The obscenely elongated wagging tongues of 1996’s Fresh Dialogue talks series in New York and a Headless Chicken strutting across a field for 1997’s biennial conference in New Orleans culminated in the drama of Sagmeister’s scarred, knife-slashed torso for 1999’s deceptively blandly titled, AIGA Detroit.
In June 2000, Sagmeister decided to treat himself to a long-promised year off to concentrate on experimental projects and a book Sagmeister, sub-titled Made You Look with the sub-sub-title Another self-indulgent design monograph (practically everything we have ever designed including the bad stuff.) The worst of the "bad stuff" was a 1996 series of CD-Rom covers for a subsidiary of the Viacom entertainment group. "Don’t take on any more bad jobs," Sagmeister scolded himself in his diary. "I have done enough bullshit lately, I just have to make time for something better. Something good."
© Design Museum 
http://designmuseum.org/design/stefan-sagmeister

 

http://www.onb.ac.at/sammlungen/plakate/archiv/erwerb/objekt_august.htm 

 

Stefan Sagmeister's work appeals because I've never seen anything like it before; it is totally unique. Everything he does is wackie, random, and usually appears to have no relevance to the clients he's promoting. Every crazy idea is different and they can vary from overtly sexual to sinister to hilarious, often incorporating all three. Though his work can be shocking, repulsive, and terrifying it's almost a breath of fresh air because it's so different to anything else. It's great for my 2D course because he shows how random and playful good design can be.

Paul Rand

PAUL RAND (BORN PERETZ ROSENBAUM, AUGUST 15, 1914 – NOVEMBER 26, 1996) was a well-known American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs. Rand was educated at the Pratt Institute (1929-1932), the Parsons School of Design (1932-1933), and the Art Students League (1933-1934). He was one of the originators of the Swiss Style of graphic design. From 1956 to 1969, and beginning again in 1974, Rand taught design at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Rand was inducted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1972. He designed many posters and corporate identities, including the logos for IBM, UPS and ABC. Rand died of cancer in 1996.

Although Rand was most famous for the corporate logos he created in the 1950s and 1960s, his early work in page design was the initial source of his reputation. In 1936, Rand was given the job of setting the page layout for an Apparel Arts magazine anniversary issue. “His remarkable talent for transforming mundane photographs into dynamic compositions, which [. . .] gave editorial weight to the page” earned Rand a full-time job, as well as an offer to take over as art director for the Esquire-Coronet magazines. Initially, Rand refused this offer, claiming that he was not yet at the level the job required, but a year later he decided to go ahead with it, taking over responsibility for Esquire’s fashion pages at the young age of twenty-three.

The cover art for Direction magazine proved to be an important step in the development of the “Paul Rand look” that was not as yet fully developed. The December 1940 cover, which uses barbed wire to present the magazine as both a war-torn gift and a crucifix, is indicative of the artistic freedom Rand enjoyed at Direction; in Thoughts on Design Rand notes that it “is significant that the crucifix, aside from its religious implications, is a demonstration of pure plastic form as well . . . a perfect union of the aggressive vertical (male) and the passive horizontal (female).” In ways such as this, Rand was experimenting with the introduction of themes normally found in the “high arts” into his new graphic design, further advancing his life-long goal of bridging the gap between his profession and that of Europe’s modernist masters.

Though Rand was a recluse in his creative process, doing the vast majority of the design load despite having a large staff at varying points in his career, he was very interested in producing books of theory to illuminate his philosophies. Maholy-Nagy may have incited Rand’s zeal for knowledge when he asked his colleague if he read art criticism at their first meeting. Rand said no, prompting Moholy-Nagy to reply “Pity.” Heller elaborates on this meeting’s impact, noting that, “from that moment on, Rand devoured books by the leading philosophers on art, including Roger Fry, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey.” These theoreticians would have a lasting impression on Rand’s work; in a 1995 interview with Michael Kroeger discussing, among other topics, the importance of Dewey’s Art as Experience, Rand elaborates on Dewey’s appeal:

[. . . Art as Experience] deals with everything—there is no subject he does not deal with. That is why it will take you one hundred years to read this book. Even today’s philosophers talk about it[.] [E]very time you open this book you find good things. I mean the philosophers say this, not just me. You read this, then when you open this up next year, that you read something new.

As is obvious, Dewey is an important source for Rand’s underlying sentiment in graphic design; on page one of Rand’s groundbreaking Thoughts on Design, the author begins drawing lines from Dewey’s philosophy to the need for “functional-aesthetic perfection” in modern art. Among the ideas Rand pushed in Thoughts on Design was the practice of creating graphic works capable of retaining their recognizable quality even after being blurred or mutilated, a test Rand routinely performed on his corporate identities.

http://www.paul-rand.com/foundation/biography/#.Uyr8gpUkSJU

Paul Rand, American Modernist, was one of the originators of Swiss Style of graphic design. He is best known for his work and design on corporate logos. He was born on 15th August 1914 and passed away on 26 November 2006 at the aged of 82 years old, from cancer. He was educated at Pratt Institute, Parsons The New School of Design and then the Arts Student League. He taught design at Yale University in New Haven for a few years. Though he was famous for his corporate logo works, he’s initial reputation was built on ‘page design when he was tasked the job of setting the page layout for the anniversary issue of Apparel Arts’ magazine, which earned him a full time job.

http://nattyow.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/paul-rand-milton-glaser/

Paul Rand was able to create instantly recognizable designs and his logos and brands became as familiar as the furniture. He did this by keeping his designs very simple which meant you could grasp the gist of a company in a single glance and wouldn't forget their branding very easily. He harmoniously combined geometric shapes, a limited color pallet, expert typography, and basic illustrations to create work that was easy on the eye and effortless to absorb. His work is useful for my 2D class because it shows how recognizable an image can be when harmoniously combining a few, well thought through, elements.