Matthew Carter (UK)
Matthew Carter is a type designer with fifty years’ experience of typographic technologies ranging from hand-cut punches to computer fonts. After a long association with the Linotype companies he was a co-founder in 1981 of Bitstream Inc., the digital typefoundry, where he worked for ten years. He is now a principal of Carter & Cone Type Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His type designs include ITC Galliard, Snell Roundhand and Shelley scripts, Helvetica Compressed, Olympian (for newspaper text), Bell Centennial (for the US telephone directories), ITC Charter, and faces for Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic and Devanagari. For Carter & Cone he designed Mantinia, Sophia, Big Caslon, Alisal and Miller. For Microsoft he designed the screen fonts Verdana, Tahoma and Georgia.
Carter is a Royal Designer for Industry and a Senior Critic on Yale’s Graphic Design faculty. He has received a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, the AIGA medal and the Type Directors Club medal, and a MacArthur Fellows Award.
Petr van Blokland (NL)
Petr van Blokland (1956) studied at the Graphic and Typographic Design Department of the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague. In 1979 he graduated cum laude (with distiction) and worked as an intern at Total Design in Amsterdam and Studio Dumbar in The Hague. From 1980 until today he was designer and partner in Buro Petr van Blokland + Claudia Mens in Delft. To specialize himself he studied for serveral years at the TU-Delft department Industrial Design. From 1984 untill 1989 he taught at the Academy for Visual Arts in Arnhem. Recently he continued his study at the Technical University in Delft on Industrial Design and Artificial Intelligence to apply for a Master Degree. Since 1988 he is a teacher at the Graphic and Typographic Design Department and the post-graduate course Type & Media of the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague. Since the start of 2003 he is co-founder and until 2006 CEO of The Health Agency, publisher of on-line medical information.
Photo © Marc Eckardt
petr.com
Erik van Blokland (NL)
Erik van Blokland (1967) studied Graphic and Typographic Design at the Royal Academy for Fine and Applied Arts in The Hague, Holland. Erik started to collaborate with Just van Rossum under the name ‘LettError’ in Berlin, while working at MetaDesign. After experimenting with computer programming in connection to type design, they came up with Beowolf, the first typeface with a mind of its own. It was released by FontShop in July, 1990. The radical approach of Beowolf caused a lot of publicity for LettError, and of course fame and fortune. Well, fame anyway. After stints at several places in the world, including David Berlow’s FontBureau, van Blokland settled in The Hague as an independent designer, working together separately with van Rossum. Their work now includes type design, illustration, magazines, corporate design, interactive design, animation, music, and websites. And lectures.
Henning Wagenbreth (DE)
Henning Wagenbreth was born 1962 in Eberswalde, Germany, studied from 1982 to 1987 at the ‘Kunsthochschule Berlin’ in East Berlin and is mainly an illustrator who does his own graphic design with a great affinity to self drawn typefaces. He also did a lot of newspaper illustrations, book and poster designs, postal stamps, animation, comics and even a stage design for an operetta. Since 1994 Henning Wagenbreth is also teaching the illustration class at the University of the Arts in Berlin.
Richard van der Laken - Designpolitie/Gorilla (NL)
The Dutch graphic design studio Designpolitie (Richard van der Laken and Pepijn Zurburg) is celebrated for its fresh, deceptively simple and direct approach to graphic design, which often implements bright color and sans-serif typeface in a lively and fun style. Among other projects, Designpolitie (‘Designpolice’) is behind the review column 'Gorilla' in the Dutch newspaper ‘De Volkskrant’ and weekly magazine ‘De Groene Amsterdammer’, in which the team reacts to current affairs with word-and-image graphics.
'The ABC of De Designpolitie' is an index of Designpolitie's reflections on design, catalogued in humorously alphabetical order (with failed projects filed under ‘Damn,’ or an account of their simplified methods under ‘Rocket Science’). More of a workbook, a process book or an inspirational resource than a portfolio, The ABC collates Designpolitie projects (implemented and otherwise), schemes, photographs, musings and articles in a style that is both serious and replete with irony and self-mockery--a natural extension of the firm's own ethos.
Richard and Pepijn are also the initiators, curators and designers of a major international designconference about the impact of design, called What Design Can Do in Amsterdam.
Angelo Wellens & Karel Van de Peer (BE)
As young interactive designers, we are interested in actual evolutions, developments & complications, and we are passionate about it. Technological progresses in particular have radically altered our world. Changes with a positive and a negative impact. Technology can stimulate creativity, a sense of community, even art and love, but can also destroy them just as easily. By ‘Sex & bytes & rock ‘n’ roll’ we wish to show this impact on our society by an eclectic mix of old and new techniques. A critical view on technical means with instruments as symbols of unbridled perfection.
The death of things: organic, poetic, utopian. Countering mass media as the ultimate carrier of digitization, medialization and materialisation. Are we at the source of a world of boredom, repetition and monotony? Did ‘we’ create this globalized world in which strongly individualised people are feeling increasingly insignificant and less powerful? A world in which humanity runs the risk of being replaced by a transhumanist existence? Shall mankind ever be replaced by machines?
Developments in digitization do not ensure as proportional progress in quality of life. This powerfulness of technology could be just an illusion. As perfect, precise and efficient as the people who created it. Mass media might create a dream-like world which looks increasingly more real and better than the real world we all live in.
Pieterjan Grandry (BE)
Pieterjan Grandry is active in many fields. Graduated in 2009 as a Master in Graphic Design at Sint Lucas Antwerp, he is working now as a graphic designer & visual artist who likes to experiment with furniture and design, who organizes competitions and curates exhibitions, makes websites, builds instalations and robots and writes about all of this on his blog ‘Crap = Good’. Currently he is developing a new interest to the new field of aquaponic science. Pieterjan works and lives in Berlin.
Paul Sahre (US)
Graphic designer, illustrator, lecturer, educator, author and current World Graphic Design Foosball Champion Paul Sahre established his New York studio in 1997. While consciously maintaining a small office, Sahre has nevertheless built a large presence in American graphic design. The balance he strikes between commercial and personal projects is evident in the physical layout of his workspace: part design studio, part silkscreen lab, part classroom. In one room he designs and prints posters (some of which are in the permanent collection at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum) for various off-off Broadway theaters, while in the other room he is busy designing book covers for authors such as Rick Moody, Chuck Klosterman, Ben Marcus and Ernest Hemingway. Sahre is also a frequent visual contributor to The New York Times.
He is the author of Leisurama Now: The Beach House for Everyone, 1964-_______, a loving look at a short-lived product of early '60s consumer optimism: affordable middle-class summer homes.
Sahre received his BFA and MFA from Kent State and teaches graphic design at the School of Visual Arts. He lectures extensively all over the world. He is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale.
Jacob van Rijs - MVRDV (NL)
Jacob van Rijs (Amsterdam, 1964) is one of the co-founding directors of MVRDV. In 1990, he graduated from the Technical University of Delft with a degree in Architecture. The work of MVRDV/Jacob van Rijs is published and exhibited worldwide and received many international awards. The monographic publications FARMAX (1998) and KM3 (2005) illustrate the work of the Rotterdam based office. Projects of MVRDV are among others the design for the Netherlands Pavilion at the Hannover World Expo 2000, the innovative business park Flight Forum in Eindhoven, the Matsudai cultural centre and the Gyre shopping centre in Japan, the Mirador building in Madrid and the Silodam building and Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam. Jacob van Rijs regularly lectures and teaches at schools and institutions all over the world (e.g. TU Delft, Architecture Academy Amsterdam, Architecture Academy Rotterdam and, AA London, Cooper Union New York, Rice University in Texas, TN Probe in Tokyo and Universities of Madrid and Barcelona).
Julia Hasting - PHAIDON (CH)
Julia Hasting (born 1970 in Bremen, Germany) is a designer who lives and works in Zürich. She is the design director of Phaidon Press, striving to challenge the boundaries of a book as an object.
After graduating from the HfG in Karlsruhe, Germany, she has been designing posters, books and identities for international clients in the cultural field, before moving to London in 1998, where she began working with Alan Fletcher, designing books for Phaidon Press. In 2000 she moved to New York to start Phaidon’s new design department, and since 2007 she is the leading creative of the company. Hasting’s book designs have garnered international recognition and numerous awards. She is a member of the AGI since 2000, and she taught at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. She has been a juror in major design competitions, and a lecturer at international conferences. Since 2003 she has been contributing illustration work to The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine.
Young Ones National Neograghic
Those who had the chance to attend Integrated2009 were blown away by the success of our inbetween mini-conference: YONN (Young Ones National Neographic), curated by Michel Van Beirendonck. YONN can be described as ‘a brutal burglary on the official Integrated conference’ where young Belgian creatives & artists will be performing or presenting all kind of quirky and mind blowing projects. The YONN conference will take place each day during lunch break in the ‘blue hall’. Each presentation will take 20 minutes. Next to that several installations will be shown in the newest part of the deSingel building.
Martin & Thomas Poschauko
The twins Thomas and Martin Poschauko were born in Rosenheim (Germany) in 1980. From 2001 to 2007, they studied Communication Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Würzburg. Since 2007, they have been running their own studio in Au near Bad Aibling in the Bavaria region, located in the southeast of Germany.
As designers, they work in the areas of illustration and graphic design. As artists, on painting, drawing and print. The Poschaukos are extremely interested in exploring creativity and design and share their knowledge and approach by lecturing at several conferences or by doing workshops. They are also the authors of the amazing book ‘Nea Machina’, edited in 2010 by Verlag Hermann Schmidt in Mainz.
Hermann Wolfram Kloeckner - ART+COM (DE)
By the mid-1980s an interdisciplinary group of designers, architects and artists coming from various departments of the Berlin University of the Arts and hackers from the ChaosComputerClub foresaw that the upcoming digital technology was not only a tool, but potentially a (mass) medium. Therefore ART+COM was founded as an non-profit organisation to explore the new mediums applied possibilities in the fields of art, design, science and technology.
In 1994 when ART+COM received commissions of commercial projects the organisation became officially a company with limited liability. Since 1998 the design studio is owned mainly by its employees, board members as well as the former organisation members.
From the very beginning ART+COM has pioneered the development of this medium, and has conceived and realized communication formats, design principles and technologies that have become pervasive concepts in today’s world. Ranging from artistic installations and design-focused projects to technological innovations and inventions, ART+COM’s work includes different kinds of formats: Autoactive, reactive and interactive objects and installations, media-based environments and architectures.
Although often very complex, the projects are always driven by the content and not by the technology. Despite having grown and professionalised its operations, ART+COM remains dedicated to its original cause from nearly 25 years ago: to design innovative and original projects to pave the way for the future of media-based communications.
Lucas Nijs - Experimental Media Research Group (BE)
EMRG (Lucas Nijs, Frederik De Bleser, Tom De Smedt, Lieven Menschaert, Stefan Gabriëls) is involved in various research projects bordering between art, science and technology. We draw inspiration from domains such as AI, cognitive science, linguistics, biology, toys, in an attempt to define the nature of creativity.
Serge Verstockt - Champ d'Action (BE)
Over the past few years, Champ d’Action has organically evolved from a platform for contemporary music towards a flexible production house for contemporary music with a strong focus on the use of electronics and new media on one side, and the collaboration with musicians of different backgrounds and with artists of other disciplines on the other. Today, the organization is still a pioneer in the by now drastically changed music scene. Champ d'Action has been residing in arts campus deSingel for eight years, where it occupies Studio 3 - the former recording studio of Radio 2. Champ d'Action was founded in 1988 by Antwerp composer Serge Verstockt and formed the first Flemish structural subsidized ensemble that solely focused on contemporary music.
Donald Beekman & Liza Enebeis
Typeradio (NL)
Now we are talking. Typeradio, the radio channel on type & design. Typeradio is a Microfm broadcast, a MP3 internet radio stream, a podcast station and occasionally a live show. Since 2004 Typeradio (which is Donald Beekman (dbxl.nl), Liza Enebeis (loveliza.nl) & Akiem Helmling, Bas Jacobs, Sami Kortemäki (underware.nl) is visiting different design events around the world, to meet designers and to talk. So far there are more than 200 interviews that you can listen to and download for free. So stop talking and start listening!
Pazuzu (BE)
Pazuzu is a new illustration agency representing the best talent for hire, specialized in colorful, humorous, slightly off yet commercially suitable Belgian illustration with a capital B! Currently representing: Sebastiaan, Khuan+Ktron, Kolchoz, Ellen & Sam.
Laura Broux & Nico Couck (BE)
Laura Broux (°1989) graduated from the graphic design department at Sint Lucas Antwerp in 2011. In March 2010 she joined ‘Tales of a city, a graphic journey in Istanbul’, an international workshop (Istanbul, The Hague, Antwerp) where literature was taken as a starting point for the project to make a visual analysis of the city Istanbul. This experience has triggered her interest in audiovisual art, as she experimented for the first time with video and audio. In March 2011 she participated at the LAbO III workshop, a project of Champ d’Action, deSingel and the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp (Artesis Hogeschool) that immerses music students (both performing musicians and students in composition) six days in contemporary music and contemporary sound art with a strong focus on the use of electronics in new music. Together with Nico Couck (guitar student Royal Flemish Conservatory Antwerp) she performed at the final concert/happening in deSingel on Saturday, March 19, 2011 as part of the festival Ars Musica Antwerp. With this performance she won one of Champ d’Action’s first three LAbO prizes. Come and see her amazing performance together with Nico Couck at YONN!
Manuela Dechamps Otamendi (BE)
Manuela Dechamps Otamendi, of Spanish origin, is today a Brussels based graphic designer where she runs her own company since 2006. She teaches at the Faculty of Architecture of The University of Liège since 2007 as well as at ERG: École de Recherche Graphique, the institution she graduated from in 2000. Prior to her current occupations, she co-founded the studio SalutPublic in 2002. She mainly works for the cultural sector and holds a special interest for architecture. Her unique approach is guided by the quest for an inextricable bond between form and content. Her research process incorporates sensitivity to materials and production methods. The last 3 years she focused on editorial design and won several awards including a bronze medal in 2009 for ‘Best book design from all over the world’.
Brusatto (BE)
Geoffrey Brusatto (°1979) started working freelance on different graphic projects in 2004 and opened his graphic studio BRUSATTO, located in Hasselt, in 2007. Besides working for a mostly cultural clientele (both national and international), he teaches graphic design at the Hasselt MAD faculty. His passion for books (design) culminated in a PhD research project about the formal aspect of the book and its place in current (digital) society. After contemplating an architect or product design study, his passion turned out to be graphic design, yet a tactile and dimensional influence can still be found in his work. His pure and typographic design ethos is driven by a thirst for creative liberty within a well-defined structure, where concept leads form. Defined as minimal classic with an edge he enjoys the design process, but always with "labore et constantia"!
Boy Vereecken (BE)
Boy is an editorial designer, researcher and publisher. He runs a studio in Brussels and is a part of the ‘Slavs and Tatars’ art collective and an advising researcher in the design department of Sint Lucas Antwerp College of Art, where he founded the ‘Monitor Memex imprint of MER paper kunsthalle. Vereecken is interested in design and editing as the study of signs, not in isolation but as part of semiotic ‘sign systems,’ which differ according to medium or genre. This is, in other words, the study of how meanings are made - concerned not only with communication, but also with the construction and maintenance of reality. By deconstructing and contesting the realities of signs, we can reveal whose realities are privileged, and whose are suppressed.
Dan Perjovschi (RO)
Dan Perjovschi (Romanian, b. 1961), who lives and works in Bucharest, has transformed the medium of drawing, using it to create an object, a performance, and an installation. In the last decade, Perjovschi has made his drawings spontaneously in museum spaces, allowing global and local affairs to inform the final result. For his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, the artist will draw witty and incisive political images, in response to current events, on one wall of The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. Two weeks before the official opening, beginning April 19, Perjovschi will draw on the wall during public hours, allowing visitors to observe the creation of the work. The project is accompanied by a pamphlet created by the artist.
Julia Kahl & Lars Harmsen - Slanted Magazine (DE)
Slanted is a magazine and weblog about typography, published by Magma Brand Design from Karlsruhe, Germany. Founded in 2004, it has grown to be one of the most important design portals and discussion forums in the German speaking area. Published quarterly, Slanted magazine, complements the blog by combining typography, graphic design, illustration and photography as a reaction towards the shifting of borders and the transcending of categories.
Julia Kahl studied graphic design at University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt and graduated in 2008. Since then she is working for Magma Brand Design as managing editor and graphic designer of Slanted Magazine & weblog.
Lars Harmsen is one of three executive directors of Magma Brand Design (with Ulrich Weiss and Florian Gaertner), founded in Karlsruhe 1996. The focal point of his work is corporate and editorial design. He taught corporate- and editorial design at diverse design schools and is professor for editorial design at University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund.
Lernert & Sander (NL)
The work of Dutch duo Lernert & Sander straddles film, installation, events, and print. With little regard for existing borders between contemporary art and commercial projects, Lernert & Sander present a highly esthetic and humorous challenge to existing assumptions about media forms. Their work has featured on numerous international film festivals around the world.
Jer Thorp (CA)
Jer is a generative software artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada, currently living in New York. A former geneticist, his work explores the boundaries between science, mathematics, and art using custom-written computer programs. Thorp is currently Data Artist-in-Residence at The New York Times, Visiting Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) of NYU, and a contributing editor for Wired UK. His award-winning software-based work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Els Vermang - Lab[au] (BE)
LAb[au] (= laboratory for architecture and urbanism) is an art studio found in 1997, based in Brussels, Belgium. The name merges a phonetic and a written meaning; that of the French/Dutch pronunciation ‘labo’ and that of the German word ‘bau’ referring to its projects’ experimental approach (labo) and construct (bau). The technological developments of the past fourty years have given rise to a major shift from the industrial to the post-industrial information society, where the unit of information, its processes and systems, increasingly define the notions of body, matter, space and time. According to this technological progress, LAb|au| examines the transformation of architecture, art and design within a practice entitled ‘MetaDeSIGN’. Metadesign [meta = information about information + design] displays the theme of space- and time constructs relative to information processes. It concerns the transposition of inFORMational processes in n-dimensional (visual, sonic, spatial, ...) form.
Thomas Verstraeten (BE)
Thomas Verstraeten (°1986) creates videos and performances in public space at the interface between registration and staging, between documentary and theater. He studied Drama at the Herman Teirlinck and Fine Arts at Sint Lucas Antwerp. Besides his own art practice, he is working together with Matteo Simoni, Bart Hollanders, Stef Aerts, Joe and Marie Vinck Agemans at the theater company FC Bergman.
Alessio Leonardi (IT)
Alessio Leonardi (IT) was born in Firenze and has lived in Berlin, Germany since 1990, where he runs the Studio Lion&Bee together with his wife Imme Leonardi. Many of his typefaces were published by Linotype and Fontshop, before starting BuyMyFonts.com in 2002 - his own Type Foundry and online shop. Alessio writes articles for type and design magazines worldwide and gives lectures at international conferences. After a book on the history of writing, 'From the Cow to the Typewriter: the (true) History of Writing', he recently realized 'A Line of Type: 120 Years Typographical History'. He was visiting professor for Corporate and Information Design at the University of Art and Design in Halle and he is now professor for Visual Communication and Illustration at the University of Applied Sciences and Art in Hildesheim.
Tim Enthoven (NL)
Tim Enthoven is a Dutch visual artist who works on illustration and graphic storytelling. His graphic novel 'Binnenskamers' received the Rene Smeets Award and the Blend talent award 2011. Amongst his clients are NY Times Magazine, Vice and Philips.
Jo De Smedt (BE)
Jo De Smedt studied Fine Art at Sint Lukas Brussels where he graduated in the atelier 'printmaking'. A lot of descriptions already marked his work. From a 'young angry post-dadaist' to 'a multiple re-user of stolen images'. There are no hidden worlds in his work, everything is there, if you want to search for it. Jo’s work is inspiring, refreshing and he likes to discover the limits of semiotics & significances. Although he paints, draws, sculptures, makes prints, he’s not a painter, nor a sculptor or a printmaker. He’s a real multimedia adept, not in the technological way though, yet straightforward and with a sparkling view on today's reality and cultural, social & artistic environments.
Indianen (BE)
Indianen, a creative studio founded in 2008 by Andreas Depauw, Steven Holsbeeks, Tim Knapen and Wout Bosschaert. Constantly searching for new ways of approaching a project, we like to work with new technologies as well as traditional materials. We happily move from well-designed print to interactive projects using custom software or electronics. From small projects to huge productions, we get excited when we can create something truly new and build up a consistent story with the visuals and objects we create.
Do you remember the poster from the Irish artist Les Levine, showing George Bush senior holding his hand up, shouting: “No new artists!” ?
Was this supposed to portray Bush’s ultimate attempt to stop artistic activism, or his final endeavour to dictate other people’s minds?
Can it be true that it is our Western semi-religious craving for the sublime originality of individual ‘art’ and ‘design’ that has been leading us toward elitism? (Just in case this proposal sounds like a dictate: out with it! No more dictates!)
Instead of declaring allegiance to either the artists’ flag or the designers’ flag, we might consider marching under one and the same banner, as autonomous designers and functional designers - as well as designers who are both? Would that be plausible? And above all: isn’t it about time to move on from this obsolete, outdated contentious issue? (Just in case this proposal sounds like a dictate: out with it! No more dictates!)
Studio Integrated
A creative collaboration between:
organisms.be
visionandfactory.com
Gif animations:
Sean Loring-Smith
Christophe Clarijs
