By: Terry Levin


In this he is undoubtedly a national treasure. Allowing us to laugh at ourselves through the last 13 years, regardless of whether the news was good or bad, is no mean feat.

Mighty as any sword

Also wielding a pen as mighty as any sword, Tobias Frere-Jones is well-known in insider circles of the gentle art of typography. A bit like bartender Larry, to be a typographer, says Frere-Jones, you have to be part engineer, psychologist, designer, historian and literary buff. All these skills are demonstrated in his case study for Retina, the font commissioned to revamp the stock pages of the illustrious Wall Street Journal.

Discovering that while rhythmic patterns in fonts work well at headline sizes, they become very hard to distinguish at small sizes, Retina takes into account such factors as ink bleed on newsprint, an aging readership and the need to save trees. His message: you owe it to yourself to allow yourself to be nagged by questions, to treat yourself like one of your clients, use your questions as projects, make teaching yourself a habit, not a special occasion.

That these New Yorkers sure do have a magnificent work ethic was again demonstrated by Georgie Stout, from multi-disciplinary design studio 2x4. Responsible for the designing of a vast array of books, broadsheets, spreadsheets, posters, tabloids, exhibition catalogues, charts, websites and visual research systems, as well as architectural commissions for the Brooklyn Museum, breathtakingly comprehensive ongoing design, display and promotional solutions for the Prada’s NY flagship emporium and super clients Vitra and Knoll, are just all in a day’s work. See it all at one of the cutest websites ever stumbled upon at http://2x4.org/

Sharing is the new caring

Three local designer already reaping some of the rewards of “designing as if it really matters” are Heath Nash, Maira Koutsoudakis and Haldane Martin, who shared bill in the Friday afternoon session. Nash’s recycled flower lights have become icons of a new aesthetic, but his genius with paper engineering was little known until their debut to an suitably awestruck Indaba audience. Nash says designers should lead by example in their communities.

From local architectural outfit Life [don’t even try googling that], Koutsoudakis showed idyllic island décor and eclectic interiors – our favourite, handcrafted wallpaper and the alien wood log stools that are blasted, bleached, blowtorched and bespoke to look desirable everywhere, from boardwalk to boardroom.

The fact that the mother archetype is somewhat lacking in our Western culture inspired Haldane Martin to create the Zulu Mama chair. When we go into café for a tall whipped latte, comments Martin, it is actually the mother that we are really looking for.

Obviously deeply inspired by his environment, the chair uses our own traditional coil baskets, formed in collaboration with Esther from the Limpopo region to go global, ranking alongside his Weightless plywood collection and Ostrich feather lamp as examples of contemporary South African styling to be taken seriously.

With the responsibility to, in effect “redo our whole planet”, it seems there has never been a better time to be a designer or to employ one.

[27 Feb 2007 11:46]

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