Designers

1. David Carson

          

David Carson (also known as ‘The Godfather of Grunge’ in the Graphic Design world)       has to be one of my top favourites of all time. I came across his work during my Foundation Course last year, and I have loved his work ever since. It has a sort of structured chaos that seems to fuse together in order to create the desired finish. He an American Designer and was the art director for Ray Gun magazine. He is well renowned for his creation           of ‘grunge typography’. David Carson also had an interview with Computer Arts Magazine in the summer of 2008

2. Jamie Reid

I stumbled upon Jamie Reid during my Printmaking Project. He’s a British Artists             and a true Anarchist. Most of his work features letters that are cut from newspaper headlines in a similar style of a ransom note; he also came very close to defining the image of Punk Rock, mainly in the UK. Jamie Reid’s popular works involve ‘The Sex Pistols’.

3. Harry Beck

I came across Harry Beck’s work during my foundation course, and I loved his work ever since. The simplicity, legibility and readability is easy to understand.                                   His work is visually digestible, and has become a universal language for all to understand who travels in the London Underground. Beck was an English engineering draftsman best known for creating the London Underground Tube map in 1931. Beck drew up the diagram in his spare time while working as an engineering draftsman at the London Underground Signals Office. London Underground was initially sceptical of Beck’s radical proposal —         it was an uncommissioned spare-time project, and it was tentatively introduced to the public in a small pamphlet in 1933. It immediately became popular, and the Underground has used topological maps to illustrate the network ever since.

4. Lewis B Tiffany

Notorious for designing the NY cap logo in 1877, originally made for a medal to be awarded by the New York City Police Department to Officer John McDowell, the first NYC policeman shot in the line of duty. The NY cap logo first appeared in 1909 on the uniform of the American baseball giving the team a very classy look capturing the 100 years history of the team.

5. Ken Garland

Ken Garland is a famous British graphic designer, author and game designer. Garland then established Ken Garland Associates in 1962. I also attended a presentation that he presented at the University of Wales Newport, City Campus on the 17th October 2011.

“…we have reached a saturation point at which the high pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise. We think that there are other things more worth using our skill and experience on. There are signs for streets and buildings, books and periodicals, catalogues, instructional manuals, industrial photography, educational aids, films, television features, scientific and industrial publications and all the other media through which we promote our trade, our education, our culture and our greater awareness of the world. …”

—Ken Garland 1964.

6. William Morris

Morris was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist. I love his work because he is technically one of the very first designers, also I love how the colours compliment the designs he’s created, not too empowering, and not too dull, giving it a natural atmosphere. Also his use of mirroring the images to make one continuous pattern is genius, this then led Morris to create tapestries, wallpapers, carpets etc.

7. Saul Bass

Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and filmmaker, but he is best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences. I enjoy the simplicity of his work, yet it is also very effective and bold.

8. Paul Rand

Rand was an American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Westinghouse, ABC, and Steve Jobs’ NeXT. He was one of the originators of the Swiss Style of graphic design. I love his whitty designs that has become very iconic and monumental, the clinical and simplicity of his works is very awe inspiring.

“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”

– Paul Rand, 1997

9. Milton Glaser

Glaser is an american graphic designer, best known for the I Love New York logo, his “Bob Dylan” poster, the “DC bullet” logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005. I love his work because it is clean and fresh, and pleasing and easy to the eye.

10.  Leonardo Da Vinci

Da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter,sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician,

engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of “unquenchable curiosity” and “feverishly inventive imagination”.He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and “his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote”. Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.