The Neutral Swiss

Stuart was invited to speak at the Lebanese American University in April 2005 for the first typographic conference held in the middle-east.

His lecture: "The Neutral Swiss: Modernism fails through the prescription of photography" was derived from his research into visual communication.
Stuart is working on his PhD based on the paradoxical premise that less realism in an image equates to more accurate communication.

Return soon for more on this …

Joondalup ‘Airborne’ Splash

This was the opening page of the City of Joondalup’s festival website for 2003. Music is by the very wonderful Icelandic band Sigur Ros.

Sustainable Illustration

It’s not every day you get a client enlightened enough to commission some illustration, let alone a whole series of complex illustrations to represent complex systems. But then it’s not every day you find a business working hard to try and find ways to save the world. These people are among our favourites here at Lightship Visual; it’s RISE or the Research Institute for Sustainable Energy. Keep an eye on us and them in the new year as we’ve got some very hot irons in the (non-fossil-fuelled) fire.

Small link in a big chain

Website design for a revolutionary technology to prevent waste in the oil & gas industries.

The images were made by Sam Landels from 3D models by Clive Williams built to the specs from design engineer/inventor Derek Hall at Testlok. Testlok and TestPup logos are from us here at Lightship Visual, as is the site design which is in Stu’s High Swiss style: lean and mean and hopefully functional.

This device was featured on the ABCs ‘New Inventors’ show and is currently being promoted with Sam Landels’ very slick DVD for which Lightship did the animation and music.

Merry Christmas!

Click around to find the hidden presents … well, sound effects. And a happy and prosperous New Year!

Running the gamut

Now, I know there’s only two colours in each of these logos but they run a figurative spectrum from one end of town to the other. It’s been a very interesting month at Lightship. Here’s two logos Stu designed in the same week. One for Warwich Resources, a mining company, and one for The Slowbeings, a local band featuring the amazing talents of … well go here and find out. All Perth musical aristocracy but very much at the other end of town. We’ll leave you to figure out which is which.

U.N. Disaster Management Doc

Lightship Visual’s good friend, Toby Gibson, recently got us to help out with the United Nation Asian Region’s ‘Disaster Management’ document. Toby landed the job just before jetting off on holiday. He had already broken the back of the design (i.e done all the hard work) and all we needed to do was get the rough typesetting out of the way. We were happy to help an old mate from uni and very fortunate to be involved. In fact, we were so excited about more-or-less having the UN as a client (twice removed) we couldn’t wait to post a sample page from it even though it has not yet hit the presses.

Fake miniatures

I don’t know about you but I always wished the world was as cute and controllable as it appeared to be in Thomas the Tank Engine or Thunderbirds or those pictures on the Scalextric boxes (that I could never afford to buy).
Was that just me? It was? Oh OK. Well, anyhow, it’s that kind of nostalgia that really grabs me about the Tilt Shift Miniatures you can see over at the Flickr blog. The idea also comes from a conversation I had with Dr Robert O’Shea in the Psychology Department of the University of Otago. One of his many strands of research is concerned with visual cues (one of which is blurring) that lead the brain to the conclusion of focal depth. I thought I’d have a go at it and here are the results. This is a photo taken by Samantha (I was at the wheel) when we lived in New Zealand. We’re driving back from a brief stay in the snow in Central Otago on the South Island. I’ve doctored the pic up using blur and colour adjustments in Photoshop to, hopefully, give it that table top appearance. You can check out further experiments along these lines in the illustration gallery (I didn’t know where else to put them really). All are from our years in NZ and it certainly helps that NZ locations look too ideal to be real in the first place!

A lot of Axo

This image was made in response to a commission from AGDA to make a flyer for George Hardie’s flying visit to Australia. The flyer is constructed as if it’s a record dust-jacket. This was a sincere and reverential homage to one of Prof. Hardie’s memorable illustrative styles, and also contains a nod to his trademark ‘G’ signature. However ‘A Lot of Axo’ (my title) is a terribly glib pun (on Axolotl) to try and sum up decades of work by one of the great design thinkers and illustrators! Just as well he’s unlikely to see it.

George Hardie coming to Perth

The great British illustrator and designer, George Hardie is coming to Perth as a guest of the Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA). Professor Hardie is probably best known for his wonderful cryptic graphics for the Hipgnosis album sleeves and dust jackets of the 1970s for such rock luminaries as Pink Floyd, Genesis and 10cc.

But his career spans four decades of what he modestly describes as ‘jobbing illustration’. The UK President of ICOGRADA and Professor of Graphic Design at Brighton University, Hardie’s ‘visual wit’ is on a par with the likes of Milton Glaser and Seymour Schwast.

In our opinion his illustration work is the embodiment of design thinking. His approach is one of problem solving for the client but with the twist of problem making for the client’s audience: Hardie’s graphics are little visual puzzles that need answering to be fully understood. Each piece shows a remarkable respect for the intelligence of the viewer and a keen understanding of the viewing situation.