Thoughts from Design Indaba 6 - Day 1

Alan Fletcher

Laconic British humour so early in the morning/career objective - a life of seamless flow between work and play/design legend &founder of Pentagram Design in 1970's London/"Design is not fancy layout, but a means of effectively communicating an idea from one head to another"/17th century philosopher Morgenster: The thing that always astonishes me is that cats have holes cut in their fur in exactly the same place as their eyes/drawing a Greek coffee with greek coffee/ making "pizzas" out of price tags/typographic collages out of waste objects/ his book "The art of looking sideways"/ simplicity of seeing/ handscript/found objects/ delicate ink flowers/visual wit/unique message: "a typeface is an alphabet in a straitjacket".

Irma Boom

Lessons in design from the Netherlands - annually produced catalogues of their best books selected purely for their design and not for content/ telephone card packs impregnated with perfume/the cultural institutes that have been singled out for annual subsidies by the Arts council are listed in a designed annual report/Amsterdam based holistic book designer Irma Boom/BOOM!?tree/ plys her trade with a tenacious purity of intent and breathtaking mastery/ Butterfly stamps/books cataloging the history of Ferrari engines/charles eames chairs/financial, institutional and cultural commissions (often with open briefs)/ the simple vocabulary of alphabet, colour and form add meaning and emotion to their content/stories of finding a printer who would print shadows in olive oil/standing her ground to no lesser client than Ferrari in an effort to to achieve the desired effects of her vision/Boom rocks!

Sujata Keshavan

The empire strikes back /India in a nutshell/for everything you can say about India the opposite is also true/long tradition of craft/f"fearless" in their use of colour/ mag cover such as Femina and seventeen live alongside timeless traditional costumes/100 new biotechnology companies are opening every month in Bangalore, dubbed the Silicon valley of the East/emerging India - high tech, upbeat and optimistic where a new generation of entrepreneurs questions the relevance of business and their awareness to social responsibility /eg the children at the Spastic Society were not just the passive beneficiaries of IT comapany Braintree's profits, but were actively involved in designing the company logo with design painted by hand and foot. Braintree Company motto: Imagination, Action, Joy! Now there's a company press release worth writing/ Design can change the world after all/Namaste!

Jonathan Barnbrook

"The poetry of abstract letter shapes represents all human thought"/typefaces the basis of all graphic design and communication/"Fonts speak in the spirit of the time"/"Design has become the profession of solving very small problems, large problems are left unsolved because everyone is too busy designing"/Creator of fonts: Bastard (based on original gothic font used by Gutenberg in the world's first print job) / designer of popular fonts Ma(n)son/exocet/virus/prozac (once ordered via email by someone expecting the pharmaceutical/designer of Sir David Bowie's latest Album cover - Heathen/collaborator with Damien Hirst (you know the severed cows in formaldehyde)/ - fonts ma(n)son had to have the name changed because it was named after a serial killer however typeface Exocet named after a missile is not required by anyone to be changed - is mass murder more acceptable than one-on-one? Beauty without cruelty.

Garth Walker

Putting aside his own designs to show us that Local is lekker, fontographer and designer of I-jusi magazine goes bus/Helvetica se moer/entitled one man's love affair with type from the streets/on the trail of the 1970's ~letraset catalogue floating around the outskirts of S.A's commercial enterprises / a cultural history ofour very own legacy of typographical heritage (who's Gutenberg anyway) / featuring shots of handpainted, cut out, welded, spray painted and plastered typographic design,from a collection of 200 slides showing the use of lettering in the lives of everyday South Africans/a charming and eye opening antidote to digital dtp/Don't stop!

David Doubilet

"What does design mean underwater?"/ Well perhaps the same thing that it means up here - in order to survive and succeed you have to have a strategy for survival/Design to survive/In a world beyond the imagination, a world without corners or straight lines and only blue or green light/"There is no writing on fish"/Awarded national Geographic photographer pits himself against the deep in a moving, beautiful and passionate visual plea for us to respect our oceans.

See you tomorrow at the Indaba - www.designindaba.com