To be published on 24. february: It’s Not Easy Being Green. Aart van Bezooyen flicks through its pages on Vimeo 

What can designers do for a better future? This question in mind, the Dutchman Aart van Bezooyen and German Paula Raché called the “It’s Not Easy Being Green” project of 2011 to life. They went on tour and initiated knowledge-sharing and inspiring lectures and workshops with like-minded designers and learn more about local problems and practices of local designers elsewhere.

On their way, which led them to three continents, they met, and exchanges ideas and concepts with local professionals and students in South America, New Zealand, Australia, Southeast Asia and Japan. Stories about designers who manufacture bamboo skateboards, researchers, improving packaging design or children being taught jungle lessons of sustainability and surprising ways, material was (re)used, make this book an encouraging “sustainable snapshot”.

“This book is a MUST for anyone who sees himself as a forward-thinking designer,” said the renowned trend forecaster and one of its first readers, Zuzanna Skalska. The authors believe that it is important to share your experiences and learn from each other. “Sustainability concerns you, me and everyone else, that’s why this book is addressed not only to designers, but encourages everyone to act and to learn new.”

“It’s Not Easy Being Green: Two Designers Exploring Sustainability Worldwide” has no set price. Donations are used to support Viva con Agua, a nonprofit organization that enables people in developing countries to gain access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. Aart and Paula believe that reading pleasure is the best way to support a good cause.

More about the book and ordering: www.itsnoteasybeinggreen.net

Aart van Bezooyen and Paula Raché revenge “It’s Not Easy Being Green” | Winner of the first prize of the “Sappi Ideas That Matter Award” Europe, 2011 | personal contributions by 60 designers, entrepreneurs and do-gooders | Foreword by Niels Peter Flint, co-founder of the “O2 Global Network on Sustainable Design” | over 250 color photographs of people, places, things and materials | 176 pages, paperback, limited to 1000 copies | all proceeds go to: Viva con Agua, drinking water and sanitation for developing countries |

Latest news for TYPO Berlin 2013: Latest speakers …

Who could have predicted, for instance, that fully two-thirds of respondents – 67% – would be women? While this may well reflect the overall gender breakdown of the conference, it is equally likely to reflect self-selection on the part of female conference attendees, or a greater tendency on our parts – as women – to distribute the survey to women rather than men! We are less likely to have influenced whether UK citizens or people from other parts of the world got the survey so here, the split was nearly equal, with Brits accounting for 49% of the 181 respondents and the international crowd for 51%.

Of the 89 British respondents, an overwhelming majority were left-leaning in their political affiliations. One-third reported having voted Labour in the last general election, 17% Lib Dem and 14% Green, compared to just 6% who reported voting Conservative. Likely reflecting the high proportion of students – students accounted for over half of those surveyed – 28% of British respondents reported that they hadn’t voted in the last election. This data begs the question: are designers generally a liberal bunch, or did the theme ‘Social’ appeal particularly to liberal designers? But this in itself is a simplistic, and misleading, set of propositions. Statistically speaking, people who choose, and are able, to attend a conference in London – whether British or international – are more likely to be from urban areas, which tend to vote liberally. Thus, we’d predict similar results with regard to political affiliation at both the TYPO Berlin and TYPO San Francisco conferences too.

Likewise, it’s impossible to say for certain why a staggering majority of respondents – 90% – affirmed that design bears a social responsibility and that designers should be concerned about the messages they shape. Did the conference theme draw exclusively socially-conscious designers to TYPO London? Did we happen upon the 181 designers who are fervently committed to the social impact of design? Did the survey, in asking so directly about social consciousness in design, prime respondents to answer in the affirmative? Only one brave individual admitted to thinking that designers shouldn’t be concerned about the messages they shape. Interestingly, though, of the respondents who answered ‘yes’ to both questions, 32% had nevertheless worked for clients whose business practices or political aims they disagreed with.

On success, the results were more decisive. Personal satisfaction was overwhelmingly reported as the most important factor in success, with 60% of respondents ranking it first or second. Social value and client satisfaction were a close second and third – 44% and 43% ranked these first or second, respectively. Appropriately for such a socially concerned sample of designers, the least important factor in success was career advancement.

Many thanks to those of you who agreed to be contacted and/or interviewed in the future – I look forward to involving you in my extended research on designers, which will be published by GraphicDesign& as a GraphicDesign& Social Science title next year.

– Nikandre Kopcke

TYPO London 2012, Logan Hall: about 380 of 850 delegates were permanently in the conferences wireless network and published numerous ingenious quoutes and atmospheric images to the outside world (Photo: kassnerfoto.de)

It was marvelous! However, we organized it, so you would except us to say so. But you don’t have to take our word for it: thanks to social media, these days every conference participant is also a conference critic. We are happy to present an array of independent voices on TYPO London 2012. This is what visitors and of course media thought of TYPO London 2012 “Social”:

• Computer Arts: TYPO London 2012 highlights (Robert Mead-Green)
• Creative Review: An ongoing occupation (Mark Sinclair)
• Eye magazine: The Bloomsbury set – De Bondt, Boom, Burrill, Butterick, Garland, Kubel, Scher and any more make Typo London 2012 a highly ‘Social’ affair. No question about it. (Sarah Snaith)
• FormFiftyFive: Small on drama, big on content: Sarah De Bondt (Emma Laura Jones)
• FormFiftyFive: TYPO London – Vaughan Oliver (Emma Laura Jones)
• FormFiftyFive: TYPO London – Erik Kessels (Sean Rees)
• FormFiftyFive: TYPO London – Kate Moross (Emma Laura Jones)
• Good Design: TYPO London Part One, Highlights (Joe Maduma)
• Good Design: TYPO London Part Two, Interviews (Joe Maduma)
• GraphicDesign?: TYPO London (Caroline Roberts)
• The Guardian: Story pieces: experiments in crowd-sourced design (Mark McCormick & Mariana Santos)
• Monocle Radio Design Show “Section D”, Audio-Podcast (60 min, Hugo Macdonald/James Pearson)
• Salford Type Foundry: Sneaky peek at TYPO London (Video; Tim Isherwood)
• Typographic Bike Tour (with Erik Spiekermann and Phil Baines), GPS-Data, recorded by Amen G.
• “Typo London 2012” storify-diary by Elena Veguillas

This years TYPO London featured more than thirty international speakers to present their personla view on the topic “social” to audiences at Logan and Jeffry Hall at the Institite of education of the University of London

• view ongoing twitter comments by searching #typo12

Voices announcing TYPO London 2012:

• The Guardian, Datablog: “Typo London 2012: watch the design conference live with our video stream”
• Computer Arts, Blog: “The second ever Typo London event kicks off this Friday (19 October) and it looks like it’s going to be a doozy.”
• Creative Review, CR-Blog: “Typo London returns”

Not enough chairs at the speech of Rick Banks (Face37) (Photo: jasonjwen@gmail.com)

More photographs of TYPO London 2012 from Flickr-group-pool …

Bibliothèque’s Tim Beard talks in Logan Hall about »Design as a social journey« (Photo: kassnerfoto.de)

Our own channels:

• Video 1: Anthony Burrill: Working Hard and Being Nice to People
• Video 2: Paula Scher: Breakthroughs, Successes and Failures
• Video 3: Ken Garland: Word and Image
• Video 4: Irma Boom: Manifesto for the Book

• TYPO London blog day 1 …
• TYPO London blog day 2 …
• TYPO London blog, all speeches …

Most touching moment: Ken Garland commencing his speech with a walk around the audience (Photo: kassnerfoto.de)

Meeting and making friends and colleagues at TYPO: just as important as the talks. (Photo: kassnerfoto.de)

We would like to take the opportunity to thank all our participating guests and our fantastic team for turning the second TYPO London conference into another big success. Please stay in touch: keep reading our blog or subscribe to out newsletter.

We look forward to seeing you next year!

Phil has also prepared a leaflet to follow the tour: PublicLettering.pdf

photo © Jason Wen

Paul Barnes is a seasoned typographer. He runs a modern day type foundry called Commercial Type with Christian Schwarz. Together they have produced a vast array of successful typefaces, each unique and tailored to do a certain job, and always to much acclaim. Paul is typographic consultant at Wallpaper magazine. He is also very much involved with the St Brides printing library, currently digitising all the historical materials there.

Paul and Christian first worked together when asked to improved the typography for The Guardian. They originally suggested an improvement on what was already there as opposed to a redesign. This entailed a study of Helvetica and implementing the original Neue Haas Grotesk of 1957, instead of the Neue Helvetica crafted by the Stempel foundry in 1980’s. When the paper decided to change from a broadsheet to the Berliner format, a new direction was needed, which resulted in the development of a new serif typeface. The outcome of this process was an Egyptian, which contained the elegance and sophistication of a serif, yet had the impact and versatility of a sans like Helvetica.

He talked a lot about history and what it can teach you. As Catherine Dixon stated, she reads & writes a lot about type, but rarely gets so excited as she did upon seeing his recent project Marian; a single stroke typeface steeped in history. He looked to the classics that were definitive of each style for inspiration. Each weight reflects a serifed book face of an era, such as the 1554 roman based on Granjon or the 1571 baroque inspired Galliard. Marian is typeface history reduced to basic skeletal forms.

For the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations, Paul was commissioned to create a typeface that portrayed Africa. This project posed interesting constraints as both FIFA and UEFA have their own set of restrictions for type on football shirts including stroke width or font heights. Puma Darren is the outcome of this. It is a condensed typeface due to the length of some players names. It is inspired by hand written signs often seen in Africa, and although curtailed it still reflects the Puma brand to excellent effect.

A lot of his typefaces are the fruition of an idea generated from a logo design. Paul and Christian als o work often with other type designers and have just recently released Atlas with Atelier Carvalho-Bernau. 

By Graphic Birdwatching

Please help us to further improve TYPO London by filling in our three-minute-questionare. All you need to do is to login at MyTYPO and fill in your answers, of course completely anonymously.  Let us now how you liked the venue, what got you there and whom you would like to talk at the next TYPO conference.

We thank you for your support by drawing a free TYPO ticket among all entries. Please follow this link to our survey … 

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photo by Gerhard Kassner

photo © Gerhard Kasnner

Hjalti showed a picture of their small design studio, not unlike any other small design studio, a small white room, with people staring at Mac screens, clicking mouses. “This is what I like, the less I’m disturbed the happier I am.” (slightly paraphrased).

He wasn’t here to talk about that, instead he wanted to talk about what happens when you go out, leave the Mac and studio, what happens then? With karlssonwilker, A LOT.

It started with a call from a new client in Serbia, asking them to produce a calendar for their country. After realising it would be ‘lame’ to sit at their computers and google a country they knew absolutely nothing about, they put forward an idea. They asked if they could visit Serbia for twelve days, and design everything while they were there. Budget approved, they flew over ready to start work. However, their hope of being left alone to gently soak up the culture, was rudely shattered following their arrival at Belgrade airport.

They had billboards with their faces on, a media frenzy of interviews each day, and a whirlwind tour of every aspect of Serbian culture that could be crammed into those days. Ultimately of course, this would be Serbian culture percolated through the minds of an Icelander and German living in New York. I liked the concept behind February’s page: in reaction to  being told that asking a typical Serbian “How are you?” will get the pessimistic response of “Better than tomorrow”, they flipped it to a more optimistic tone of “Better than yesterday”. They hoped with the continual exposure over the month would encourage a little more positive feeling amongst the Serbian people (the results aren’t in yet).

This project led to another 10 days in South Africa to produce 10 posters, and later 12 days in Jerusalem to produce 12 posters. Then with a sigh of envy from some of the audience, he showed the trip paid for by Matter Magazine and Mini to promote their new sporty coupé. They drove from Munich to Istanbul with a producer, photographer and videographer to document their adventures. The photography and films spilled out into a section of the magazine, a short film and a website, where the car itself was almost incidental. The client understood that you don’t need to bash people round the head with nice pictures of the shiny car, instead show people actually enjoying it!

Back in New York they were commissioned by Creative Time Inc. to produce a book celebrating 33 years of producing public art in New York, usually ephemeral in nature.

Instead of sticking to the brief and just producing a simple book, they proposed the ideas of an ‘Urban Visual Recording Machine’ that would feedback information from the city and create content they could use for the book. As the Creative Time had put so many works out into the city, it was time for the city to give back, and contribute to this new piece. Sadly, their idea of building an actual giant robot to roam around the city wasn’t realised (this surely would have been terrifying). Instead working with Show+Tell they adapted a van with a transparent back section, and covered it with sensors and filled it with devices to output the information. The UVRM drove around the city and visited all the places Creative Time had installed artworks and every 30 seconds it printed out a visual interpretation of all that abstract information. These different graphic interpretations of the city appeared on different covers – each one documenting the exact location, time and date.

So, leaving the studio can certainly lead to more interesting projects, and not simply because they were lucky. Having the courage to follow an idea (especially when you don’t know how it will end up) and thinking beyond the restrictions that are imposed naturally by the client, or even ourselves. With the Creative Time brief, the book expanded beyond a simple art book, to something a whole city could feel they had some involvement – self-generating it’s own publicity as part of the process. And, okay, they are lucky bastards, too.

By Ian Moore (@ian1pm)

Photo: © Gerhard Kassner

Grant McCracken is many things: consultant, author, teacher, anthropologist and scholar of consumer patterns. He digs deep to find the roots of culture, identifying shifting forms and investigating their origins.

At TYPO Lndon 2012, McCracken declared that contemporary culture as we know it has seen the rise of a new order, one that is far from orderly but filled with chaos, confusion and commotion.

He cites a meeting at furniture company Herman Miller as an epiphanic moment in which he saw the manifestations of this new order at large. During the meeting he spotted a take-away coffee cup, it’s surface filled with feverish notes and sketches. Herman Miller employee Greg Parsons had used this medium to record his ideas and thoughts. McCracken quickly deduced that this is what the world looks like now. In the old order of culture, a designers process would be confined to a note book, considered and clarified before unleashing it to the world. But now this has changed. Order is slowly becoming a repellent to consumers. Culture demands the anti-industrial, the hand-made and unbranded. Order systems are no longer hierarchical with labour roles clearly defined under a clear mission statement. They have become more dynamic with complex adaptive systems. He likens it to a quote by technologist David Wynberger’s where he defines the Internet as ‘small pieces loosely joined’. McCracken believes that consumers now favour items that are bespoke, almost nook and crannyish to industrial perfection. This can be seen in the reincarnation of Rube Goldberg’s cartoons that have once again become popular and influential to contemporary culture. His depictions of complex gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways are echoed in the infamous Honda advert and the viral video ‘The Page Turner’ by Joseph Herscher.

McCracken also warned the audience of ‘Black Swans’ in our midst. A ‘Black Swan’ is an event or occurrence with unexpected and unpredictable outcomes. Nokia has seen one in the form of the Apple iPhone. UCLA has seen one in the form of online study courses. An explosive game-changer. Because of this, he believes that strategy is now dead. The future is so unpredictable that the best efforts of many organisations to counteract is more often too late.

So, who does McCracken think can help businesses to survive and make sense of this new order? Designers. He believes the skills no longer lie in the C-Suites or B-Schools of the old business set-up but in the processes and systems of the designer. He stressed their ability to recognise patterns and utilise mood-boards is key, allowing the elements of a problem to speak to each other which in turn filters down into their own imagination and design. A liquid form of intelligence. In this time of turbulence and unpredictable shifts, McCracken advocates designers as ‘the heroes of peace’.

By Deirdre Breen, Graphic Birdwatching

Joshua Davis, photos @ Gerhard Kassner

7pm on day 2 of the conference, a few people might be flagging. The caffeine is wearing off, and eyes on the clock for the last speaker – which is exactly why it was the perfect time for Joshua Davis to make an appearance. An energetic, loud, sweary, tattooed ball of energy crashed onto the stage like a train tearing through a wall. Behind the bluster (and energetic wedding dancing) it was apparent this was someone who clearly worked incredibly hard at everything he does. Even with his talk on the day (which some speakers may seem as a distraction from their day jobs) he treated like any other project – tweaking, playing around with ideas and refining over a year, trying to get the right balance.

Davis sees work and play as synonyms, in contrast to his peers who see them as direct opposites. He’s managed to maintain that child-like enthusiasm for just creating, without those hangups we acquire with jobs and deadlines. You could pick up his visible excitement at the things that inspire him, from old stain glass windows to a friend’s mismatched floors in his basement. Each of these sparked off into a whole cluster of new ideas.

Davis uses programming as a tool to create rich, graphic, complicated patterns, that he admits would take forever to draw by hand, by tweaking the programming he could produce countless variations in patterns, colours and density. However, this isn’t a mindless pressing of buttons, he clearly has strong ideas before he even sits in front of the computer inspired by real life. He encouraged us to just try things, without a client in mind, just to go with an idea and see where it goes.

He gave an example of visiting what he calls “the EVIL Cathedral” when stuck in Cologne. He was inspired by the patterns of the tiles on the floor which led to experiments with tiling patterns, repeatedly feeding them back into the process to produce more complex shapes. He had no intention for a commercial purpose, but eventually found a use for them on a book cover, which seems to fit perfectly with the subject, ‘Aim High, Keep Moving’.

Davis encouraged designers to keep giving themselves their own projects – something he tries to do himself everyday ideally with tight restrictions. ‘Failure is part of the process’, and should be embraced, especially with no client and only yourself to answer to.

Getting away from the computer was something that Davis keeps trying to do, particularly getting his hands dirty. After programming some new patterns he decided to draw these directly onto skateboards, by hand, in marker, ‘no undo’. He enjoyed the process of introducing the slight imperfections and errors back into the design, that were missing from those precise vectors. He did this again with several murals, this time enlisting the help of volunteers from the public to help him colour in these creations (another important lesson – embrace collaboration!).

He gave some advice, which any designer should take notice of, “the type of work you make, is the type of work you you will get hired to do”. In other words, don’t produce work you think other people want you to make, otherwise you will be always be stuck in that particular unrewarding rut.

I came away from this talk feeling inspired, wanted to experiment more, take more risks, and yank myself away from the computer more often, looking around a lot more for inspiration, and well play more. To re-quote Mark Twain: “Work and play are used to describe the same things under differing conditions.” Amen.

By Ian Moore, @ian1pm

• More about the work of Joshua Davis.