In this talk, artist and designer, Sarah Boris will talk about her shifting practice from being an in house designer and art director for some of the leading art institutions in the UK, to setting up her own studio in 2015. She will present some of her personal and non commercial projects that have shaped her practice and are informing new directions including self-published projects such as ‘Global Warming Anyone?’, or her artist book ‘Le Théâtre Graphique’ and her latest sculptural heart shaped bench design.

Sarah Boris is an artist and graphic designer based in London. After working for over ten years for organisations such as Phaidon, the Barbican Centre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, she set up on her own in 2015, with a focus on visual identities, editorial design and developing her personal art practice. Her clients include The Photographers’ Gallery, Tate, The National Gallery and Christie’s to name a few.

In parallel to commissioned projects Sarah creates screenprinted artworks during artist residencies. Her work was acquired by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and was exhibited at the Design Museum in London and at Une Saison Graphique, Le Havre, France. She was judge president for D&AD book design in 2016 and is on the graphic design jury for the Latin American Design Awards 2022.

In the 1960s the modern canon began to be questioned. Social unrest and countercultural movements found their way into graphic design. A new aesthetic far removed from the Swiss grid gave way to playful typographical compositions that connected with the “words in freedom” of the artistic avant-gardes of the early 20th century, especially Futurism and Dadaism. Robert Massin in France and Corita Kent in the USA mastered the use of the printed word in their creations.

Modernism and Postmodernism are the driving forces that have shaped 20th century architecture, art and design.

The Modern Movement began at the end of the 19th century, ran vigorously through the century and began to be questioned at the beginning of the 1960s, before finally fading away in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and the paradigm shift it brought with it.

The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.

Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.

Influenced as much by feminism as Swiss typography, Lucienne will share her graphic design journey from utopian zeal to dystopian dilemma. She has always considered graphic design to be a political act. In the early days this message was greeted with incredulity but when her book Good: An Introduction to Ethics in Graphic Design hit the streets the subject was inching onto the agenda. Since then, she and colleagues have curated / designed exhibitions about graphic design in health and politics:

(Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? and Hope to Nope: Graphic Design and Politics 2008–18), worked on multiple NGO campaigns; helped spread the word about climate change; and most recently developed the installation Perhaps it’s not you, it’s me. in which Lucienne contemplates ‘leaving’ her long-standing partner Graphic Design. Here she explains why divorce was an option, argues for the value of graphic design and ponders on what we all need to do next.

Lucienne Roberts is founder of design studio LR+ and co-founder of advocacy initiative GD&. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Lucienne’s practice is characterised by her abiding interest in ethical design. LR+ work spans exhibition design, books and corporate identity. GD& creates vivid books and exhibitions that explore how graphic design connects with all other things. Projects include the originating and co-curation of two critically-acclaimed London exhibitions: Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? and Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008–18.

Lost in Translation

Serge Rompza

After graduating from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Serge Rompza has co-founded the Berlin and Oslo based design studio NODE in 2003, together with Anders Hofgaard.

The two offices collaboratively focus on identity, print, exhibition and interactive work. Clients include Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Vitra, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), Lithuanian Pavilion / La Biennale di Venezia, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Since 2004, he has regularly been teaching at art and design academies across Europe.

Swiss graphics led the international scene after the Second World War. In the 1950s and 1960s the Swiss style, a refined version of the New Typography, had become the universal solution to any visual communication need from book design to poster design to advertising and corporate image. Max Bill and Karl Gerstner, among many others, created a sophisticated language rooted in the avant-garde to communicate with the consumer society.

Modernism and Postmodernism are the driving forces that have shaped 20th century architecture, art and design.

The Modern Movement began at the end of the 19th century, ran vigorously through the century and began to be questioned at the beginning of the 1960s, before finally fading away in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and the paradigm shift it brought with it.

The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.

Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.

Systemic Type Design

Martin Lorenz

might as well have become a cook, a comic artist or an architect, were it not for an internship at Müller+Volkmann. Lorenz studied Graphic Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt and the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague. After working four years at the design agency Hort, he moved to Barcelona to found TwoPoints.Net with Lupi Asensio and do his MA and PhD in Design Research at the UB. Lorenz has taught since 2006 for Elisava and still likes to cook.

This lecture talks about the diverse trials faced when attempting to expand the range of our capacity within web environments by questioning standard web design templates. The talk features Anti-User-Friendly, an ongoing project that challenges the concept of user-friendliness by creating a content-focused website.
Web tools work as a bridge connecting the user and the device-website to narrow the world wide web down to a ‘village wide web’ and transform the web into an extended space.

Yehwan Song is a graphic web designer. She runs her own independent design studio focusing on the strategic use of technologies. Her work involves projects with multiple cultural organizations, including ifa, LIMA Media Art, Rhizome, Typojanchi, and Seoul Museum of Art.
She has participated in a number of exhibitions—Venice Biennale (Korean pavilion), Seoul Biennale(SBAU), and others; and her works have been featured in such magazines as Étapes, Monthly DESIGN, It’s Nice That, among others.

Yehwan Song Studio is a web design and a web development studio questioning standardized design and interface conventions that frame users’ behavior and the templates that make them lose their content awareness and become accustomed to oversimplification. We construct outside-the-frame devices and interfaces in order to challenge the notion of user-friendliness. We pursue diversity and variety in the web environment above efficiency.

We will reflect from some projects elaborated in 131 during the last years, in which starting from typography we work to recover the local and collective memory.

Esteve Padilla.

Barcelona, 1983
Graphic designer, half of the 131 studio and occasional teacher at various universities. Graduated in graphic design at Eina (UAB).

131

(Pau Llop, Esteve Padilla) is a graphic design office based in Barcelona and Lleida. Typography understood as image, form or letter is a substantial element in all the projects we do. Our work includes art direction, identities, editorial projects, websites and typography.

Pràctica: Process

Pràctica does not have a style, but it follows a process; In this session, we will analyze, through the case studies of the latest studio projects, the process that Pràctica follows to develop its work.

Anna Berbiela

Graphic designer based in Barcelona. Anna founded the studio Pràctica together with Javier Arizu, Carlos Bermúdez and Albert Porta in 2018. With offices in Barcelona and New York, Pràctica is a studio that works for institutional, cultural, and commercial clients, developing communication projects in printed, digital, and environmental matters.

Pràctica is a full-service design studio based in Barcelona and New York. Working for institutional, cultural, and commercial clients, always seeks powerful concepts, bold visual codes, and customized solutions for each project. This is translated into a very eclectic job; Their style is the lack of one, it’s finding the best solution for each project.

The act of making something public

This session addresses the methods, tools and implications of publishing activities. 

— What does the publication does/mean? And how is it going to exist/circulate?

— How does it achieve its aspirations through form?

— How do content, editorial concept and design come together?

— How to think publishing as complement and supplement to working practices?

— In which terms can ‘making public’ act as a tool for bringing common shared interests and concerns?

Book Bindery

The BB allows the production of books and publications in small editions and specific manipulations of paper and cardboard. All processes are always done entirely by hand and pushing the limits of what is possible.

Next to being a technical workshop, the BB functions as a cross-departmental point in our institution. We believe the publishing practice is an emancipatory process. We support project such as: PUB.sandberg.nl, Radio Rietveld and Rietveld Journal.

Miquel Hervás Gómez

(Terrassa, 19 April 1985). Handy graphic design freelancer based in the www. Running as a workshop manager at the BB. Tutor for Disarming Design at the Sandberg Instituut and Preparatory Course at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, while being member of fanfare and Carne Kids.

fanfare was established in the observation of a context, a network, within which design and art interactions resulted in projects not suiting within the existing platforms for presentation. fanfare creates a framework to connect already existing structures. What organically happened in this context was the creation of new structures, new networks, new initiatives. We allow ourselves in the context of today to speak about fanfare as framework for (non)physical publishing.

fanfare is a platform and design studio for cross-disciplinary collaboration and visual communication. Through an active programme, fanfare generates, explores, and curates environments for visual interactions.  

Since the start in 2014, fanfare has created a unique space for experiments, explorations and collaborations in the realm of graphic design and related disciplines. Through their research and design practice, fanfare sharpens and challenges the notion of visual communication. 

Miquel Hervás Gómez

(Terrassa, 19 de abril de 1985). Diseñador gráfico autónomo afincado en la www. Funcionando como jefe de taller en la BB. Tutor de Disarming Design en el Sandberg Instituut y del Curso Preparatorio en la Gerrit Rietveld Academie, a la vez que miembro de fanfare y Carne Kids.

Ruben Pater (1977, NL) (he/him) works between journalism and graphic design. Under the name Untold Stories, Pater creates visual narratives that support solidarity, justice, and equality. Pater finds himself being a designer at a time when design is last thing the world needs. Until more ethical approaches present themselves, he designs, writes, and teaches. He is a tutor at the BA Graphic Design, and the MA Non Linear Narrative at KABK. The Politics of Design, is his first book about cultural bias in graphic design. His second book CAPS LOCK looks at the role of graphic design in capitalism.

CAPS LOCK

Capitalism could not exist without the coins, notes, documents, graphics, interfaces, branding and advertisements; artefacts that have been (partly) created by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social design and speculative design are being appropriated within capitalist societies to serve economic growth. It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources.

CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system.

CAPS LOCK is an inspirational book full of sources for design students, educators and visual communicators all over the world, just like Ruben’s first book The Politics of Design.