Seeking Inspiration

the St Bride Library conference 2008

This year we looked behind the scenes at how designers can find fresh graphic styles and new approaches to their work. We heard from a varied and distinguished crowd, including designers at all stages of their careers.

First to speak was George Hardie, a quintessentially English character; the wit of his illustration work is given a really good shine when you get a guided tour from the man himself. The range and versatility of his work is wonderful, and its apparently self-contained existence, taking in styles from the present and the past and finding new and unexpected ways to twist them, is a direct inducement to inspiration: I sure we all asked ourselves why we hadn’t seen the potential presented by pine cones, the profiles of architrave mouldings, or an upside-down sieve. It might sound silly, but it is masterfully done.

In a similar vein, Suzanna Edwards and Lizzie Ridout were highly animated explorers into obscure worlds. Their talks both showed how small and overlooked corners of human endeavour can yield people of passionate enthusiasm and inordinate expertise. Susanna interviewed experts who preserve specimens and Lizzie trawled the depths of the British Library looking at the most unlikely patent ideas from the past. Dwellers in obscure corners: beware their torches.

We were very pleased to have enticed Karel Martens across from the Netherlands. Karel showed three short films that gave a broader picture of his attitude than graphic design work alone could. The first, a delicate installation: four buoys spun by the wind. The last, a chaotic jumble created when he tried to scan in items from the collection of newspaper cuttings, photos and sketches on his studio wall. They all represented inspiration from chance and error. I’m just sorry that we added an error of our own to Karel’s talk; the microphone system injected random static sounds into the conversation between him and Robin Kinross.

Rian Hughes and Jeremy Tankard are at opposite poles when it comes to type design. Jeremy is in the aesthete’s corner: forms drawn from history, architecture and music, and sketched in an exploratory style; Rian is diving in to piles of mouldering magazines, hunting down the artwork of decades ago to breathe new life into what are already interpretations of interpretations.

Hunger set in with Jake Tilson, who described the creation of a cookbook that he wrote, photographed and designed; how could it not, with so many shots of freshly-prepared food? The design seemed spiced by the subject matter, the whole truly a delicious set of spreads to set before us.

For this conference we were privileged to have Mark Frith cutting letters and Helen Ingham on the Albion press. Both were kept distracted for most of the time, explaining what they did and why they did it. In addition to demonstrating his penmanship throughout the conference, Paul Antonio followed up on a fantastic impromptu demonstration at the 2006 St Bride Library conference by giving a talk about his own journey to becoming a calligrapher; a journey that started at home as a kid in Trinidad. He finished up his talk by drawing letterforms from the fourteenth and eighteenth century, singing appropriate music as he did so. This is a tactic that perfectly relates calligraphy to human physicality and expression and explains a little about how it can be an absorbing and fulfilling activity.

And this is all without mentioning Erik Spiekermann, raconteur supreme, talking about how old graphic design techniques sneak their way back in to current practice; William Hall, arguing persuasively that in graphic design inspiration is something that we need less of; Emily Luce and Tyler Moorehead pointing out that the challenge of being more responsible with the use of paper presents an opportunity for inspiration; Joel Armstrong outlining the characteristics of his student intake in twisted wire; Antonie Baturian’s Socratic elenchus; Katherine Gillieson’s strategies to gain inspiration by looking at objects from the viewpoints of different disciplines and Sarah de Bondt paying unexpected homage to Beatrice Warde.

Words by Ben Weiner. Drawings by Sion Ap Tomos.