Posts Tagged ‘decoration’

visual snacks: matchbox labels from Japan/China

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

matchbox label

No Phillumenist I, nor proper collector of anything, but like most graphic designers I love a nice bit of printed ephemera. I bought these matchbox labels in Thailand, and as far as I can tell they are mostly (all?) Japanese, made for the Chinese market and stone lithography printed. I can’t read the text (which might explain much) but the use of flags in some puts them in the  second and third decades of the 20th century – beyond that my ignorance is complete, not that that hinders my enjoyment of them. What is going on in the example above for instance? A diminutive husband and wife extending hospitality to an outsized westerner? or two smartly-dressed children welcoming Daddy home (wondering why he could not afford a full-sized house)? Either way – the drawing, pattern, texture and colours are beautiful.

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eye-snacks from archive corner

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

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charm/offensive

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Artwork, print and cheap uncoated paper – 1950s/60s comics’ matchless charm (pic via Half-man Half-static).

Forty years back (in the Life on Mars era) the fashionable aesthetic is an informal, natural look. There is lingering hippy talk of ‘getting back to nature’. These are lean years for the high street hairdresser, ‘male grooming’ is a laughable concept and clothes are mostly cheap and nasty or homemade. Design is still a cottage industry but it is looking to the future: Michael English’s Hyper-real airbrush illustrations seem new and extraordinary. Robert Moog’s synthesizer is the future of music (although he hasn’t yet worked out how to keep it in tune)…

March 2010, Farringdon. I’m in a tube carriage near an extraordinary-looking young woman who appears in no way real. Her hair, nails, makeup seem somehow beyond human and her high brow and flawless surface reminds me of the actor/digital hybrid as the Red Queen from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Blankly shiny, expressionlessly ‘perfect’, she is the HD-ready paradigm of contemporary beauty. Music seeping from headphones is also soullessly bright, sampled, virtual, autotuned. All of this is in sharp contrast to the immediate noise and grubby texture of London, where illustrators, designers and musicians, bored with software slickness are increasingly going ‘wonky’ (surely the most irritating/overused phrase of 2009), working with the look and feel of handwork, crafts, ‘outsider art’ and forgotten technologies to rediscover ‘charm’….

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bottling decoration?

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Functionality, clarity and rationality reign supreme in contemporary design.  The Bauhaus casts a long shadow and analysis of function, distillation of meaning and removal of the inessential gives us the calm spaces, ordered structures and clear interfaces that we need to navigate our complex modern lives.  It could be argued that decoration is anti-design.  Style is inevitable, but ‘decoration’ is just for cakes and wallpaper, no?

There are areas of design where indulgent visual richness remains desirable and appropriate, a signifier of value and/or emotion. Decoration blooms sporadically now – our rapid cultural turnover often rendering it ‘tired’ before it can establish itself.  It may not be a dirty word any more but beyond the confines of fashion and interior design, decoration often coexists uneasily with cool minimalism and rational typography.  Are we are in danger of losing the art of decoration?

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