With Brian Eno in Australia for the past months, one has been digging back into the music archive to enjoy the sounds and sights of what seems to be a less precious time in creativity. In 1972 the world didn’t have a raft of Masters or PhD academic courses to explore and rationalise process and spurts of human productivity. People made ideas and with enough practice, spirit or naivety made these ideas real – or that is what I think.

Roxy Music’s debut album – Roxy music, is a mash of the two Brians, the noisy Brian and the hopeless romantic Brian fresh out of the box with some ideas on their minds. The third track on Roxy Music – If there where something, a Marantz PMS 7000 portable music player and a daily 5km walk are unashamedly the prime influences of this image and graphic presentation. The rest was just allowed to happen until it felt right, and the deadline made it necessary.

48 this year sold out again, unashamedly.

Happy birthday Alan.

External signing – overall presentation

External signing – entry detail

External signing – window detail

External signing – internal detail

The studio was commissioned to develop a range of outcomes from print to apparel, posters to badges for Jardan’s big day in Sydney.

Edit your future

1/ Edit you future – invites the viewer to piece together their version of future and by default create new hybrids, new ideas. The future seems to have so many to-be-determined factors we felt that what may result, interms of ways of living and outcomes, may be notions that challenge and seem potentially alien.

Now is tomorrow

2/ Now is tomorrow. People have a habit of putting themselves in the middle of every situation, and one wonders with the gloomy mood of the community whether the fundamentals of life will change.

Vision for a new world

3/ Visions of a new future. As the climate and world changes it requires people and communities to embrace the present and see the potential in current circumstances.

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Poster exhibition submissions
Australian Graphic Design Association
2009 Australian Poster Annual

The poster annual invited designers to respond to:

Sampling The Future – Society is in a continual state of flux. We are now dominated by five major global conditions:

* Climate change
* Diminishing fossil fuels
* Globalised economic crisis
* Generational change, and
* New technologies

In response we felt that one could get caught in the negatives of what the future holds, so we were driven to present a positive perspective of the poster annual’s theme. In challenging times we wanted to make visual messages and impressions that empowered the viewer with possibilities rather than hopelessness.

As a first for AGDA all entries are being published online, along withe the judges‘ choices, allowing you to be the judge, assemble your favourites and vote

Visit the poster annual here

As part of the promotion for the market we have prepared a range of street posters. We love a budget job, and in this instance we combined AO black and white plan prints with fluro labels from local stationery supplier.

Many street posters characteristically have a lot of black and are heavy in presentation, so we went for a white look that paid tribute to Willy Fleckhaus. We often reference Willy in our work – shuffling graphic image, image placement, columns, big type, ugly type and negative space. Vale Willy. We also attempted to talk back to the street, speaking the language of design, marketing and injecting a little irreverence.

Hunting down street posters can be a bitch, unless you’ve designed the Rolling Stones’ latest tour poster. There are three posters and if you can find the Freight Text version around the inner city streets of Melbourne in the next few weeks, let us know where it is.

The first design market opens Sunday 19 July 2009, 9am to 5pm, 500 La Trobe Street, Melbourne as part of the State of Design festival. The market is calling for stall holders for details visit the market for details.

Migration is a major influencing factor that has shaped, developed and formed Australian culture. Many people from the far corners of the Earth have migrated to Australia and called it home and with them they brought their tastes, smells, textures, sights and sounds. It is an exciting place to be, and the opportunity in such a space is enormous. Layer on layer of cultures have graced our shores and this drove us to think that migration, particularly in Australia is not a Baby Boomer, or a Gen X’er, or a Gen Y’er, moreover it is a new generation people – Gen Now.

The poster project had a life of its own, we embarked on photographing range of local people in Melbourne – Japanese, Anglo Celt, Philippines, New Zealanders, Welsh and Nepalese and layered them on a vale constructed from all of the borders of the world. The Gen Now brand was developed during the poster printing process for the Melbourne Museum of Printing fund raising project.

If you are in Athens in the next few days the poster exhibition is being held at the Syntagma Metro Station over June 19, 20 and 21.