Designing Word Art: The Game of Meanings

08.06.2024

This design is for someone with the initials SP. They have just started a position in Ops. So the first game is playing around with the three letters S, P and O.

The second game is with the bird. The eyes also imitate the eyes/feathers of the peacock. That’s why I have coloured the image in as blue.

The third game is with visible and invisible birds in the word art. Some are obvious, some are more subtle. Hence one is the peacock – known for its visibility. And the other bird is ‘invisible’, a deliberate contrast to the peacock.

There is a game with the S letter – There are two S letters that can be discerned.

The four eyes around the sides also have a symbolic meaning based on a certain Indian idiom…

So, this word art is a code.

Design Heaven: London College of Communication Shows 2023

13.06.2023

Show Two – Design and Screen: 14-17 June

I sauntered down to the London College of Communication Shows 2023 to see the animation videos. I sat in a packed theatre for a while recalling what it was like to be in that space and at a physical university again. However, after about two hours I wandered out and immediately outside there was a delight that I hadn’t expected – books and design projects created by the students. So I decided to have a look and to pick out some of the projects that I especially enjoyed. All of the projects were beautifully presented, lovely to look at, all stimulating. The students in this country’s university are blessed with great creativity and inspiration, as well as dedication and hard work.

Ananya Dalmia – Maachis

https://www.ananyadalmia.org/

A project by a fellow Indian from Delhi about the visual designs on Indian matchboxes. Ananya collects the matchboxes and has a considerably sized archive of the things. The matchboxes have to communicate visually because India is a visual culture and also because it has a high proportion of illiterates and people that have very different languages from each other, so any text-based message becomes problematic. My favourite in the show, for obvious reasons. I loved her drawings of the goddess Kali and the eyes with the bindi in the middle – it is an obvious fact that a lot of these matchboxes would be in a religious area for lighting incense. Ananya writes ‘these pocket-sized time capsules not only document historical and cultural themes but also embody the kitsch style of India’ and that they embody ‘a visual language that celebrates culture, uniqueness and vibrancy’.

Kate Ruscher – The Game of Life: America Edition

https://www.kateruscher.com/

On her website, Kate writes that she began her creative journey at just two years old. The design she put forward was dark, unique and thought-provoking. Her board game design is based on the premise that life is precarious in America because of guns, so ‘what do you want to do IF you grow up?’ The scenarios in the game are based on real tragedies. As she writes ‘While the board is full of colorful tiles, the black background reflects the dark reality of this uniquely American problem beneath the surface’. This was perhaps one of the most political of the designs and the one that tackled social problems the most (although, in fairness, there was another design about how beauty standards affect women, too). As a transformative message that brings the lived reality of gun crime immediately to the viewer and reader, this was a very successful piece.

Helen Greenwood – This is time for us

Instagram – helen.greenwood_design

This project explored how time could be represented through depictions of the motions of the solar system, but also how Helen’s ‘personal time has been shaped by love and loss’. The book that she presented was done in black with very ordered and controlled illustrations dominated by geometry. This was an interesting project because, of course, for aeons, humans have charted their passage through life with reference to celestial bodies, astrology being one of the main examples. Of particular interest was how a modern-day individual was trying to make a relationship to the wider cosmos through a frame of reference that was non-mythological and non-religious, that was scientific in scope and intent. Can we only relate to the whole of the existence of time and matter through such a rational lens? Or was the non-rational (and rebellious) part the inspired creation linking text and image, which relies on imagination and the linking of things that modern day, secular society has deemed as largely non-related?

Tung Dang – Bloom

https://www.behance.net/songsongtung

A beautiful book full of botanical illustrations by a designer originally from Vietnam. The book is based on the 5 stages of grief theory and is intended as a ‘spiritual friend’. The style struck me as quite restrained, subtle and sophisticated. However, there was substance, since Tung says that the flowers represent resilience: ‘not matter how damaged they are, they will grow and bloom again’. This design is interesting because we live in an an age of environmental disaster, with an ‘instability and uncertainty’ that Tung references when he talks about the survival power of the flowers. Yet we can always look to the power of nature for inspiration and, yes, healing. Anyone that has felt the healing power of trees, plants and animals will love this design and feel an emotional connection with the human being connected with earth, his home. This was one of the most universal and enduring messages in the exhibition, a message of survival against the odds.

Tszka Auyeung – Technology Sobriety

Instagram – @_ousansui

Beautiful designs of furniture, resplendent with all the colours of the rainbow, which contrasts with the transparency of glass. Perhaps we should call it ‘prismatic furniture’ for it reminds me of Newton’s discovery that a transparent prism contained within it all the colours in the spectrum. This project combined AI to create home environments, so it is very current and demonstrates how a responsible and controlled use of AI can transform design possibilities, and ‘lead to more creative and innovative designs’ as Tszka writes (and demonstrates so wonderfully). The future of AI must be that it is subject to human control and inspiration. It is a tool, not a substitute for what makes us uniquely us.

Jingjing Lu – Visual Horizon of Life Philosophy

https://julielu720.wixsite.com/atalanta-jing

This design was intended to make philosophy more comprehensible by presenting it in visual form, a departure from verbal and text-based communication styles. We often use visual presentation in the form of pie charts and bar graphs for maths to help us more readily understand what is abstract, so why not apply the same principle to philosophy, which is also abstract and complicated? What made this project unique for me, was not only its brave originality, but also the fact that it combined Oriental and Western philosophy, so it had that global frame of reference which is so attractive to me. The book and materials were beautifully presented in pink and also relied on a subtle and sophisticated aesthetic.

Michelle Liu – Shapes of Fortunes

http://www.michellelnt.com/

Michelle’s design is ‘a brand that provides a range of shapes that are associated with different types of good fortune’. As form, each shape was unique and visually interesting – they are formed out of plastic, I believe, and are models or sculptures. The contemplation of each shape should be interesting. Michelle studied in Hong Kong and is influenced by Chinese art, which makes me think that the shapes draw a resonance in the long historical tradition of the Chinese looking at oracle bones and their shapes in order to determine the future and success, a message of comfort for the human from the non-human. Why is it that a shape – or any inanimate thing for that matter – can be associated with the idea of luck? Luck exists – we see it all around us (call it fate or what you will). Can it be materialised in concrete form and how? The shapes show us why someone would think this is the case and why they believe that they can capture the fleeting and elusive forms of luck (or fate).

Dora Batty Poster Parade – London Transport Museum

07.04.2023

You can see all of the posters in the Poster Parade here:

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/the-collection

1^st Floor, London Transport Museum

Adult ticket: 24 pounds, Concessions including students: 23 pounds (ANNUAL PASS)

REVIEW

While I have many interests in life, there is one game that has always captivated my attention. My friends, it is THE Game. The game of interpretation: finding meaning, making connections, excavating the context, trying to understand what others are trying to express underneath a rigmarole of deceptive diversions. I have played this game quite seriously, having studied for an English Literature degree and then having pursued doctoral studies in the subject (then publishing books and articles). The game is all-consuming and unending. I lie in bed at nights replaying conversations, working over sentences for half an hour at a time if they are important enough to warrant it in the conversations I have during the day. To play the game, I have studied all these subjects at university level: legal studies, English literature, history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, criminology, sociology, psychology, the history of photography, feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, Postcolonialism – and now – art history. Besides forays in my spare time into mythology, archaeology, cryptography and the decoding of languages, language learning, politics, animal intelligence, evolutionary psychology, biology, and the physical sciences which reveal how humankind attempts to fathom the cosmos.

Why do I mention The Game? I survey the posters in the London Transport Museum Poster Parade because I love to play it. And above all, the most enticing thing is a mystery, a puzzle, a seeming dead-end, what first comes as a blank wall. As I have admitted so much, it will now do to admit more. It was a genuinely exciting moment to encounter an unknown female artist who has not received much critical attention and about whom I could make a big contribution towards understanding. The subject was the enigmatic Dora Batty…

Little is known about Dora’s life. She is known only for her professional roles and her output. Like other women artists, she has been neglected, never achieved the fame of her male compatriots… As a result, one cannot bring biography to a study of her artwork. Neither can one be misled by what others have written, which seems to be a particularly abhorrent current practice of the scholar, the interpretor and the guide. One imagines a woman that never made much of an impression. One cannot even visualise her appearance because a photograph has not even been recovered. For a moment, I had a fantasy of tracing her family genealogy so that I could try and contact any living descendants that might have a diary, a photograph, written records or objects of some description so that I could have something else than the art. In the game, it is permitted to cheat… What a delicious daydream: an expedition, an adventure, new people to meet, new avenues to pursue, a quest of interpretation…

But I am left to just looking at the work and thinking. Justice demands a scrutiny of the woman artist’s works, a redressing of her dismissal by (White) Man. Let us begin.

The first exhibit that meets us in the Poster Parade is ‘The Underground brings all things nearer’. We are in the conventional grounds of Greek Myth. As it clearly states, the poster celebrates ‘The Return of Persephone’. She is being rescued from the underground by Hermes. Dora loves to tease. The obvious play is upon the concept of the ‘underground’. While it signifies Hades and hell, it is also obviously referencing the Tube. For a poster commissioned by London Transport, this is clearly a subtle bite at the hand that feeds her, the delicious tease of a mocking and ego-defeating woman. From the Underground, hell and the tube, Persephone is emerging. The concept of the poster is that from the Underground, which we imagine as the realm of the dead, life and fertility is emerging in the form of Persephone. But there is a moment of feminism in that period of emerging women’s rights and the Suffragette movement – Persephone (woman oppressed, captured, imprisoned) is rescued from her controlling husband (the LAW, Death, Sovereignty, POWER…) Now, there is the question. What is the biographical aspect, what is the women’s movement? The Suffragettes were around at this time and they were fighting against the patriarchal laws of marriage, with its enclosure of the woman in the domestic realm. But is there something else in Dora’s life? Bearing the hallmarks of its time, Persephone is rescued by Hermes, a man… There isn’t total emancipation of the woman. Is there a new man in Dora’s life at this time, an extra-marital affair…? However, one also remembers that Hermes is the protector of travellers, the god of roads… He is dressed as a traveller, of course, with winged sandals. There are subtle resonances for the highly educated and the classicists in this poster about travel. Dora is clearly classically educated… The game, my friends. One has to learn the mythology of the world to play it…

The tragedy with the poster is that Persephone still had to spend months of the year in the Underworld – there is no ultimate freedom from MAN AS KING AND DEATH… Ambiguity and despair is always there in the background. Is this a realistic assessment of women’s politics at the time (and still now?) Or is it the acceptance that Dora cannot release herself from her marriage (was she married, or is the poster simply about a fantasy of emancipation)?

Now, let us talk about the flowers. Flowers flood the posters. Persephone is also holding a flower. Is the flower sex (the flower is a sexual organ which is ‘penetrated’)? Are we witnessing sexual liberation in Dora’s psyche? The implicit love triangle in the first poster – Hermes, Persephone, Hades. Travel itself as sex (a holiday romance, perhaps?). The fantasy of sex rather than its achievement from a repressed woman? Dear Dora, why do you not write what is the case? If the hypothesis that the flowers are sex is right, can it be confirmed by some of the other posters? [It is worthwhile to mention here that there are other suggestions. Not only have female artists painted flowers throughout art history, as a ‘woman’s genre’, but also that women themselves have been described as flowers throughout history and particularly guilty were the Victorians and those around at the start of the twentieth century – flower as woman herself in this art, or rather her sexual body and her body as a body of desire…)

In ‘Bluebells are out’, an anonymous female caresses the flowers lovingly. Her lips are upon them, her hand clenches them. Her senses are engaged. She smells them. So we have touch, the sexuality of a kiss, intoxication with the scent. Full sensory engagement. She also looks directly into the flowers. Is this look at the flower and sex what the viewer is expected to understand and echo? Woman playing with her own sex and sexuality? Is this the revealing mirror of subjectivity at the heart of the image? Let us be Freudian and make an insinuation about how the hand is holding the phallic bunch of stalks of flowers at the bottom of the image…

In ‘Crocuses are out’, woman swoons over the flowers which she caresses again with her hands. With her eyes shut in ecstasy and Lacanian jouissance… The flower she smells is pinkish red – the colour of sex…

So, perhaps we have an exhibition of a woman artist that is pursuing liberation, including sexual liberation. Perhaps we are seeing a woman fighting against the Law and the figure of the King for a new tomorrow and for ownership over her own body and desires… Perhaps we see Dora the fighter. But a jaded fighter. After all, what is the fight of the artist? It is true that many of the Suffragettes were artists, a disproportionate amount. Was the main fight in the visual arts and against the visual culture of the Law and the King, Oppressor Man?

Let us leave identity politics for a moment. Let us talk about Dora as she is in my favourite works of hers. I will write first about the interesting pattern in ‘Whitsuntide by Underground’. The artist has woven together many moments of leisure into almost a textile pattern (she worked in textiles). The composition is crowded and flooded with energy. People are joined in small communities by their pursuits, families, friends, athletes. They are also integrated in nature and the countryside through trees, fields and water, animals. There is a harmony of leisure and nature, life and the world, an inter-connected and unbreakable pattern. And let us not forget the female body’s interaction with the flowers in the early posters – nature is a body that unites with woman’s body. Woman is nature, humankind is nature – the celebration of the animal self that we have come from that lived in trees…

Similarly, ‘There is still the country’ shows the woman’s body wedded to the (phallic, it must be said) tree. The whole scene is blown about from a strong wind and enriched with the sun which seems to emanate from the woman’s head, her creative force and mind. There is pure energy, enlightenment (emancipation)… The leaves fall from the trees – there is transformation, the relentless but cyclical turning of the time as in Hindu thought… What is dead and dying is to be shed to make space for what is living….

So is this Dora? Or is this merely Suneel’s Dora? One makes an argument. One seeks to persuade. But more than that, one seeks to know. In the absence of clues, one looks to a Suffragette context. In the absence of a photograph, one tries to plumb a mind. The Dora exhibit is interesting and important because it brings these thoughts to mind. It asks why a woman of such talent has no place in thought. It seeks to rectify this wrong. Dora’s art is stylistically very Art Deco. I do not know if she followed the movement, or how much she contributed. I do not know how important she is in the history of Women’s Rights for making art that explores women’s issues and attempts to rescue them from the ills of sexual repression (if sex is the theme that I have not invented for our Dora). And finally, one makes an admission. The interest, the thread that I have followed is that Dora is Modern Woman. Someone that I do not understand – if anyone does. To understand the mind of this challenging and reticent creature, one often has to gaze at the expressions that she leaves about her in the world. And to form an opinion, one has to dare a conjecture, even as a man – which might wholly be wrong and is entirely contestable, of course…

You can see all of the posters in the Poster Parade here:

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/the-collection

List of Posters:

Dora Batty, 1923 – The Underground brings all things nearer
Dora Batty, 1925 – From country to the heart of town
Dora Batty, 1924 – Foxgloves, Kew Gardens
Dora Batty, 1925 – From town to open country
Dora Batty, 1921 – Travel with the children
Dora Batty, 1930 – Season ticket, travel cheaply, save money
Dora Batty, 1927 – Bluebells are out
Dora Batty, 1927 – Blackberry time
Dora Batty, 1935 – Special shows of tulips
Dora Batty, 1927 – Crocuses are out
Dora Batty, 1927 – Daffodils are blooming
Dora Batty, 1932 – Regents Park to see the rose garden
Dora Batty, 1928 – Buy a season ticket
Dora Batty, 1924 – Survivals of the past, Painted Hall
Dora Batty, 1932 – RAF display, Colindale station
Dora Batty, 1936 – Trooping the colour
Dora Batty, 1924 – Survivals of the past, Yeoman Warders
Dora Batty, 1934 – Easter
Dora Batty, 1938 – Out and about by London Transport
Dora Batty, 1926 – Make yours a General holiday
Dora Batty, 1931 – Whitsuntide by Underground
Dora Batty, 1926 – Hampton Court by tram
Dora Batty, 1926 – There is still the country

Tom Eckersley Poster Parade

09.11.2022

London Transport Museum, Covent Garden

Price – 21 pounds annual pass regular ticket for the museum (20 for students)

REPRODUCTIONS AVAILABLE AT THE MUSEUM’S ONLINE SHOP.

ALL ECKERSLEY WORKS ACCESSIBLE ONLINE AT:

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/the-collection?f%5B0%5D=collection_type%3APosters

Although many Londoners don’t realise it, Transport for London has one of the biggest collections of specially commissioned artworks in the entire world. At the London Transport Museum, the thousands of posters in the archive are narrowed down to a select few for the Poster Parade which can be found on the first floor of the museum, behind some of the historic vehicles. It is one of my post Art History Open University degree ambitions to write a monograph on the collection of posters which bear illustrations and advertisements concerned with the world wars, destinations inside and outside of London, architecture and seasonal greetings which nestle amongst safety warnings and ticketing offers.

Most alluringly, the current exhibition boasts the work of Tom Eckersley, a twentieth century poster designer. The introduction to the exhibition summarises his signature style: “bold, bright colours and flat graphic shapes”. Personally, I think Eckersely owes much to Matisse the master, including the use of cut out colours in collages, the simplification and stylisation of figures and the obsession with the brightest hues.

Eckersely worked through the 1930s to the 1990s and managed to design over eighty posters for London Transport. At first, he worked in collaboration with the artist Eric Lombers. The exhibition describes him as ‘transforming commercial art’.

When Eckerseley was working in the 1930s, ‘posters were a hugely effective form of publicity’ the exhibition relates, although the challenge was to compress information so that it could incite further curiosity and relay compressed information in milliseconds: ‘a strong message with a simple design’. To quote the exhibition again, to achieve these ends, Eckerseley employed ‘minimal text’, conveyed messages ‘through pared-down graphic elements and bold blocks of colour’. My personal view, however, is that the posters play quite complicated visual games. I don’t see them as a visual reduction of information. They take quite a bit of decoding to understand the message shown and to understand the flight of imagination that Eckersely took to create the design.

Overall impressions of the Poster Parade? The artworks are visually stunning, richly coloured and immensely memorable. Eckersely really is a master of the poster genre. It is a delight to see the things. However, the short exhibition suffers from repetition, where nearly identical posters are displayed, and there is a certain fragmentariness where a fish poster is shown with the other half (another poster) missing. Having said that, the final word must be that the posters are beautiful, historically significant and therefore interesting because they deal with issues raised by the World War and show how heritage in London has been promoted before.

Finally, from my perspective as a digital artist that often uses flat, bold colours in my compositions, the exhibition is successful in that it shows how beautiful art can be when it uses simple geometic elements to build up its own language and communicate with the viewer. Although Eckersley uses a much more polished style than my own spontaneous ‘calligraphy-art’, the affinities are astounding, as you can see from a poster I designed recently below, and which I will finish this short summary of my impressions with: