Hort Talk

Following the typographic workshop that ran on Monday and Tuesday, Eike König gave a talk on his career and his work with Hort studio. Hort – the creative brainchild of Eike – is a world renowned graphic design practice with clients such as; Nike, Microsoft, Bauhaus, and Disney. The studio began in 1994 with Eike as its sole contributor, building up a solid client base and collaborative relationships over time. At the heart of Hort’s work is it’s mission to cultivate a creative playground. Hort is an environment designed to learn, grow, and to have fun as a designer. Eike preached the importance of working on the projects that you are really passionate about, working with clients, learning all the time, and building up relationships.

Of the projects Eike spoke about in his talk, the one that I took the most from was Hort’s work with Jazzanova – a well known German DJ collective. Eike showed a multitude of work that Hort did with Jazzanova in all stages of development and shared anecdotes about the production of these ideas and work with the band themselves. It was inspiring to see the development of a piece of work from a professional studio of that calibre. The final piece is designed around a logotype scheme, that changes certain elements for the release of each single of the album while maintaining a clear visual direction.

Briefing

Unit X: Publishing
Magazine Art Direction

Working in groups of no more than five, we have been asked to devise the concept for a new magazine.
The starting point of our magazine will be given to us by a respected industry practitioner. This may be the title of the magazine, a word, a theme, or a phrase. This is only a starting point, and the direction of the magazine will be decided by us, based on our research and development.

We have been asked to consider the audience, tone of voice and aesthetic approach before producing our magazine, with an emphasis on the generation of content for our magazine.

At the end of the project, we will be given the opportunity to pitch our idea to a panel of industry experts with the opportunity to have a magazine taken to print.

My group consists of:

• Myself
• Lee Fleming
• Amber Pinfold
• Aidan Hughes
• Tom Jones (of 3D design)

 

Hort Typographic Workshop

This week Hort came in to lead three workshop sessions on 9 and 10 March. The workshop I took part in was the ‘typographic elements’ workshop. We were randomly assigned a type of element (organic or geometric) and a specific number of elements we were allowed to use to create a typeface. I was told to create a typeface using 3-5 organic elements.

I wanted to create a typeface inspired by geometric stencil typefaces using organic shapes. I tried to loosely base my elements on shapes that I could see within the room. After a lot of trial and error, I came up with four organic ‘water drop’ elements that worked really well both as capital letters and as lower case letters.

I didn’t finish my entire typeface, as I spent a long time developing my organic elements. I’m normally really intimidated by working with typography, but the restrictions we were given on this task really pushed me to think more about creating shapes that work.