Photograph by Amy McAuley with special thanks to Rachel Hood and Alice McKee

It’s ‘Show time’ folks! Yes, it’s that time of year again and with the final year degree shows fast approaching the Faculty is a blur of activity. An atmosphere of excitement, hysteria and exhilaration prevails and once again this year promises a show par excellence so come along to York Street Belfast between the 7th–19th June for this inspirational event.

Photograph by Amy McAuley with special thanks to Rachel Hood and Alice McKee

A special thank you to Amy and Rachel our placement students at ‘Seed’ for being invaluable members of the team. Amy has worked tirelessly throughout the year to ensure the exacting standards of Design for Visual Communication are met and her professionalism is evidenced by the design work she produced for the Ulster Festival of Art & Design. Although Rachel has only been with us for a short time this dynamic duo have worked over and above the call of duty and we wish them every success for their final year!

Drawing Unlimited promotes and celebrates the experimental drawing work of UU students across courses and across year groups.

The Drawing Unlimited Project (School of Art and Design) took place in November 2009 and March 2010. Students used drawing to motivate, challenge, inspire and make links.

The workshops were designed to explore traditional drawing methods alongside digital methods e.g. drawing over still and moving imagery projected onto large rolls of paper, using paint, ink, crayons, pencils, drawing directly onto video footage via a drawing tablet and collaborating with others to devise drawing methods, improvise tools and solve problems.

Very special thanks to filmmaker Brian Davis: brianphilipdavis.com

Bad news everyone! The Bryan Edmondson (SEA) Lecture that was to take place on the 22nd April (this Thursday) has unfortunately been postponed due to problems with flights within the UK. It is hoped that this event will take place in the next semester, we will keep you posted.

For more Information Contact:
Cultural Development Office
T: (028) 9026 7285
E: k.gordon@ulster.ac.uk

John Simmons is an independent writer and consultant, and a director of The Writer. His latest book 26 ways of looking at a blackberry explores the creative power of constraint in business writing.

On Wednesday January 20 at 6.45pm, John Simmons will confabulate, natter, converse powwow, ruminate, parley, communicate, chitchat, spill the beans, discuss, orate, present, cajole and sweet talk an invited audience at the University of Ulster, Belfast.

Spaces are limited, so please contact Kelly Gordon to purchase tickets and reserve a place.
Tickets are £4, concessions £2

‘A School of Design for Belfast 1849-1960′
Written by Mike Catto
Designed by Seed Studio

The Ormeau Baths Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition to celebrate the 160th anniversary of the School of Art and Design Belfast. The exhibits present an exciting visual record of the excellence produced by past staff and graduates from 1849 to the present day.

To mark this auspicious Mike Catto’s ‘A School of Design for Belfast 1849 – 1960′ was launched concurrently and will be available for purchase at the OBG. The exhibition continues until 30th January, for more information please visit the OBG website.

The event was held in Logan hall, London and the entire theatre was absolutely packed. The interview was very informal as questions had been ‘tweeted’ in the lead up to the event and were put to Brody on stage – the audience was also allowed to pose questions and at the end decide either ‘genius’ or ‘wanker’ in a ‘ready-steady-cook’ style vote. (Despite the image below the over-whelming result was ‘genius’) Topics revolved around the future of graphic design, the growth of a global culture, the role of the graphic designer and how graphic design is taught in universities.

More details and better photos can be found at Research Studios. The event was filmed by D&AD and will be available at the link above very soon.

On Monday 16th November Channel 4 launches its celebratory 3D week, an event which will host a varied range of programmes from classic movies to magic tricks. Although 3D movies have been around since the 50’s the practice is currently being hailed by some as the next big thing in cinema with 15 3D movies being released this year.

In Episode 13 (12th Nov) of the Culture Show, movie guru Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo discussed the pros and cons of the 3D experience. To quote Kermode “Its fun and trashy for certain individual experiences” and “what you shouldn’t forget is that its a gimmick”. Mark Kermode doesn’t view 3D as being the future of cinema, what do you think? Can 3D genuinely make a good film better?

For more of Mark’s views you can still view this episode of  The Culture Show for 2 more days here: Episode 13 (film review begins 43:23).

You can pick up your free 3D glasses in your local Sainsbury’s.

Friday 25th September witnesses the launch of Belfast’s first ever Culture Night. Located in the Cathedral Quarter this event provides a unique opportunity for the you to enjoy a variety of cultural activities including workshops, performances, tours, music, outdoor cinema and much much more.

So come along and enjoy this extravaganza !!

Visit Culture Night Belfast website for full details.

I attended a talk by world-renowned typographer Bruno Maag at the University of Ulster.  It lasted a mere hour, but it was probably one of the most informative and interesting hours of my life.  Maag is a very talented speaker; he was extremely talented at captivating the audience and presenting his ideas and thoughts in the most interesting and humorous way possible.

His presentation dealt with the issue of noise in the visual word: type and design shouting to be noticed. Examples of this were billboards with large font trying to stand out from other large font billboards and the same with posters pasted onto walls all overlapping each other with large type vying for the most attention, but all these fail miserably and just create noise for the senses.  We are just overwhelmed with fonts, all large and bold, all at the same size screaming out at us, nothing jumps out.  He questioned why designers fear using white space and smaller font to stand out within lots of large font advertisements.  I thought that this was an obvious choice once I thought about it, go against the grain and the norm and that design will surely stand out.   I found this to be an extremely inspiring piece of wisdom.  He continued to show us some woeful hiccups in typography out there, from street signs, to restaurant signs and even to a underground sign that was erected with the wrong font and wrong symbol, these were all ‘sackable’ offences Bruno kept referring to.  He showed great annoyance towards the incorrect and absent use of punctuation, which I was very happy to listen to, as it is one of my pet hates too, that and the use of slang on advertising.  If we allow slang and miss out apostrophes, then grammar will slip.  It is a designer’s job to educate the world and not dumb it down, so I was extremely please to hear that Bruno had the same beliefs.

Bruno took us through some of his own work from his beautiful work for Urban Splash, which was quite playful and informal to his Toyota work.  His Toyota work was probably one of his most interesting he talked about.   He had created a sans and a serif font.  He hoped for the company to chose the serif font as through his research he realised that all but one car manufacture use sans serif fonts, the only one that didn’t is Mercedes a luxury car manufacture and so he thought that the use of a serif by Toyota would raise its overall package to the astir level of Mercedes.  Unfortunately Toyota did not listen and left the choice up to market research, in which the feedback was all for the sans serif font.  I thought that this was an extremely interesting story and just shows how unaware companies are to the power of type.  Bruno then brought us through his design process showing us initial sketches to the tidying up of the lines on computer.  He also showed us some failed attempts, which was when he was creating an Arabic font and owned up to lack of research as the reason for failure.  I thought his honesty was very admirable.

Before I knew it an hour had past and Bruno finished his presentation, some of the audience though were not letting him go that easily and quite a few questions were thrown to him.  In this time we quickly learned how much he detested the font Helvetica, which he claimed to just be a very ugly font.  He also shared his detest for the Helvetica film, saying it was 45 minutes too long, and couldn’t understand why a film would be made about a single font.  He also shared his dislike for David Carson, which I totally agreed with.  I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation I was captured from start to end and I would go back to another of his talks in a heartbeat.  I had my eyes opened to so much inspiration in one hour.  I cannot wait to get stuck back into my projects.

1. Sleep girl tee
2. Screen Print
3. Trans