When I was a kid I used to absolutely love spending time on the sofa, headphones firmly stuck to my head, listening to a wide variety of LPs that were stacked in in the corner of our living room. I’d spend hours listening to a wide variety of music staring intently at the album covers as the music drifted into my ears and allowed my mind to create stories influenced by the pictures on the album art in front of me.

Now… I’m not going to confess what albums I used to listen to as a child, although am sure if my sister read this she would happily divulge the musical crimes of my youth (Mr Roboto by Styx may appear in that list of crimes), but one of the many album artists that had a profound impact on my imagination growing up was the incredibly talented Storm Thorgerson.

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You get a great feeling of pride when you see your work appearing in a book. It’s like that nice feeling you got when your Mum put that picture you did at school on the fridge for all the family and relatives to see. I knew when I received my copy of ‘Touch this, Graphic Design that feels good’, that I had a piece inside it… it was only when I flicked through the pages that I was amazed to see three pieces of work I did with my then Art Director, Simon Rowlands, had been chosen to appear in this fabulous book.

Compiled by Designer Scott Witham, who has worked for global clients including Sony, Virgin, Orange and the Royal Bank of Scotland, ‘Touch this, Graphic Design that feels good’ features intriguing projects that incorporate a gamut of “you can’t print on that” materials, including pleated, Issey Miyake type forms and razor-thin metal business cards; X-ray film; heat-sensitive inks; ceramic tiles; and carpet samples. In short, there are design solutions in this book that use any and everything, except plain paper.

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Call to actions. They are those pesky things that designers hate because the client always wants them bigger… and the designer wants it to be tucked away so the masterpiece he/she has created won’t be ruined by commercialism. But what if the advert itself was the call to action… and by simply taking a picture of the advert you can automatically be connected to a website where you can get more information or call a number where you can give your details and more information.

Sound daft? Well believe it or not those clever people at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have developed a mobile phone app for iPhone and Android that turns a multitude of items; from DVD and CD covers to Film Posters and Adverts into call to actions… so the design is the response device! Designers rejoice!

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Barbara Kruger was the first truly postmodern artist that I discovered as an art student. Being a fan of thought-provoking art and literature and having experimented with text and image collages I was immediately struck by the power of her work. Barbara Kruger is a conceptual artist known for her stark photo-and-text collages that appropriate the language of consumer culture to comment on it. She became an artist in the early 80’s after working as head art director on Conde Nast magazines. Her art continues to speak the language of magazines and advertising, and, in addition to appearing in galleries and museums, it can be found on billboards, T–shirts, and shopping bags. She used the skills she gained as a commercial art director to stunning effect with her provocative ‘found’ black and white photographic images, slashed with red stripes of text bearing now instantly recognisable slogans such as “I shop therefore I am” and “Your body is a battleground” delivered in her trademark Futura Bold Italic typeface. These iconic works masterfully employ the look and feel of propaganda, but directly raise questions with the viewer about values, taste, stereoypes and materialism.

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Imagine a museum of British Design and Art that has over 100,000 items for you to view… but rather than walk round this museum, you can get round it with a few clicks from a computer mouse! Welcome to the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS)… the online resource for visual arts and design.

VADS has provided services to the academic community for 12 years and has built up a considerable portfolio of visual art collections that are freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research in the UK… and now this entire collection is available to view online.

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Abram Games was one of the most influential Graphic Designers that this country has ever seen. He created some of the most memorable designs of the 20th Century by following his own personal belief of: Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means… and back in the early 90s, maybe ’92 or ’93, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by this true great of design at Icograda (the International Council of Graphic Design Associations) Conference.

To be honest, when I attended Icograda that year, I had absolutely no idea who Abram Games was. In fact as far as I was concerned he was just a warm-up to the main attraction… Neville Brody. Yet as I entered the Odeon Cinema where Icograda was being held that year and was greeted by his work… it soon became clear that even though I did not know the name Abram Games… I certainly knew his work.

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The N50. Beautiful.

There’s a lovely quote by John Masefield from his poem ‘Sea Fever’ that I’m incredibly fond of. It goes ‘And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by’. Every time I hear it, it reminds me of my own thoughts with regards Creativity. In my case it’s ‘And all I ask for is a pad and a pen’. Or to be more specific… a Pentel N50 Marker and Goldline Layout Pad.

Computers are wonderful things. They have given the masses the power to be creative in ways that we never dreamed. Yet without an idea, all that technology simply goes to waste. And where does that idea start… for me it starts with that pad and a pen, locked in a room with my Creative Partner giving birth to seemingly endless ideas.

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In the Summer of 2008 Red C Marketing were invited to Pitch to become a roster agency for the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC). The Pitch involved looking at the Design and Branding for Integrated Working and it was a Pitch that would ultimately see Red C being successful in becoming a roster agency.

One of the ideas we presented in the Pitch owes a great deal to Tony Hart. It was an idea that would see several Art Directors, and myself, creating designs that involved us sticking down feathers, cutting strange shapes out of foam and generally using whatever we could find to bring our idea to life. 

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