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.

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.

Flying Machine

This is a sample image from our work for the City of Joondalup.

This was one of a series of four large posters (450 x 900mm) for the Perth metro trains during the Joondalup Festival of 2003. (see the illustration folio for the others)

The images for these show the influence of a mispent youth reading Euro sci-fi comics, watching ‘Yellow Submarine’ (see also the animated version of one of the festival images) and drawing dazzle ships.

Dazzle Ships

Here at Lightship we’re keen on good communication design and most things nautical. Never have the two been combined in such a weird and wonderful way as they were with the ‘dazzle ships’.

During the first world war, to protect shipping from the torpedoes of lurking submarines, naval officer and artist Norman Wilkinson hit upon the idea of painting the ships in crazy stripes of dazzling colours. The design idea was that you can’t hide a ship but you can confuse the enemy as to which way it’s going and where the bow and the stern are.

Consequently, a whole navy of Britain’s best graphic designers were pressed into service to concoct a wide gamut of ‘dazzle’.

The image/type continuum

We prefer ‘communication design’ to ‘graphic design’. While still a young discipline, graphic design has been too closely alligned with ‘typography’. Of course, we pay very close attention to all things ‘type’ and indeed have been known to bore dinner guests with our font-geekery. But our expert attention to text is never at the expense of image which we understand better than most (we were invited to talk about image and type education at the first ever communication design conference in the middle-east http://typographicbeirut.lau.edu.lb/ )