PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH • APPNOVATION
Inspiring Women in Design
PRESENTATION • APPNOVATION
Inspiring Women in Design
As part of my 'Monday Motivations' session at work, I put together a presentation that looked at my female role models in the design industry.
Within the Appnovation design team, every Monday we have a session called "Monday Motivations", in which we take turns to talk about something new and relevant that we are interested in or have been inspired by. My session fell the week after International Women's Day, and so I thought it was apt to compile information about and examples of the work from some of the most influential women in the design industry.
Who's in the video?
Designer, author, educator, curator and podcast host, Debbie Millman. She has been hailed as a legend of design (by Vanity Fair), her work includes redesigning the Burger King logo, branding for 7up and Haagen Dasz, hosting “Design Matters”, and many TED talks.
Apple’s first designer Susan Kare, best known for her UI and typeface contributions to the first Apple Mac., including icons, typefaces, and other graphics that gave the Apple Macintosh its character, look and feel.
Some of the icons she designed are still present in many computer graphics programmes today, including the paint bucket and the lasso.
Typographer and graphic designer Margaret Calvert, who (with her former teacher Jock Kinneir) designed timeless work we see everywhere - the road signage system across the UK
Graphic Designer Louise Fili, who was the Art Director of Pantheon Books for 11 years, and takes her inspo from Italy. She keeps an archive of Italian memorabilia - like restaurant menus, specialty food labels, business cards and matchbooks - in the room she designs in so she can spin on her chair and come face to face with design inspiration. She says to create your own personal projects, and combine design with something you’re passionate about
Carolyn Davidson who designed the Nike swoosh logo when she was a student.
Morag Myerscough - who has been named the leader of the maximalist movement. Her work is characterised by big, bold, supergraphic installations. She manages to bring spaces to life with grand scale installations, pop-ups and wayfinding graphics all designed with her trademark bright colours. In 2017 she was awarded the RDI, Royal Designer for Industry (the highest accolade given to any UK designer).
Paula Scher
Brand identity, typographer and graphic designer, Paula Scher is a partner at Pentagram - the first woman partner to join, and has been there for 30 years.
The Public Theatre is her most well known and potentially longest running project. The Bring da noise, bring da funk project for the theatre put Paula Scher on the map. It consequently influenced many posters following its success (which she hated). She then made a 360 turn with poster designs, using serif fonts, and simple designs
Her work includes:
- Citi - after merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group,
- Windows 8 - she brought in the angled view of the window, taking it from looking like a flag to looking like a window
- The Shake Shack
She also paints maps in her country home out of the city. They're less accurate, and more expressionistic - the world as she sees it. They're filled with type and convey the spirit of place as we understand it.
She’s always aimed to design things that “moved design a bit” and has previously made the distinction between serious and solemn design. Solemn design answers the right questions, it does what it’s supposed to, it toes the line; serious design is rebellious, it’s different, and it can happen when you feel entirely unqualified to do something (potentially because you’re not bound by the rules you don’t know yet).
Her tips:
- The strategic part is absorbing all the information from the client.
- Use past experience to illustrate and give strength to what you’re suggesting (I think you should… That’s what we did with…)
- Work out who has the decision making power and interview them first, make sure they are in the meeting, included in the process and set up the right relationships. Understand the power structure.
Her quotes
“Typography is painting with words. That’s my biggest high, it’s my crack” - Abstract: The Art of Design
She says in Debbie Millman’s podcast that she started off terrible at typography, and she couldn’t figure out how to marry typography and illustration, until a lecturer told her to “illustrate with type”, and that’s when she realised that type had character
Since then, she’s been able to “come up with more ways to make type talk than anyone” (according to design legend Michael Beirut)
“You’re not changing somebody. You’re making them a more perfect vision of where they started”
You need to be able to get an individual or whole corporation to be able to see. The client will want proof that this is going to work, but the problem is that there isn't proof. It’s how people see and perceive and accept things.
She also says “You have to be able to teach other people how to see, because most people don’t understand what they’re looking at”.
Explain what’s important, what’s going to make their identity sustainable, how the audience will understand what they’re seeing. Important to be able to explain your work.
“Keep exercising, keep trying to break boundaries. … Accidents are the best way of learning. Keep putting yourself into a position where you’re allowing yourself to make terrible accidents that look ugly that you can learn from.”
“Creativity is this small, defiant act of misbehaving”
Es Devlin
Stage and set designer Es Devlin creates large scale installations and runs her own studio. A lot of her work uses light, mirrors, mazes and cubes.
Her process always starts with paper, pencil and research.
Like Paula Scher considering every channel a brand will be recognised on, every entry point to a brand, Es Devlin also has to consider every point of view from a stage. Thanks to audience members viewing the show from every viewpoint and sharing their experiences on Insta, Es and the artist understand their work more than ever before.
Her work includes
- A mirror maze in Peckham, made in 2016. as a partnership with Chanel and iD magazine. It was filled with scent and raised the idea of complex structures that all of us create around ourselves.
- A structure for the Bregenz Festival in Austria. Projections on the cards made them look like they were moving, and actors performed in, on and around the structure. Es said the success came down to researching & fully understanding the play.
- Set design for Miley Cyrus, on which she entered on a slide made of her own tongue.
- The giant man she created for Take That in 2011
Her tips:
- Allow your research & brainstorming to take you as far as you want, allow one thought to lead to another, don’t be afraid to go down a rabbit hole of research. Let the smallest, most tenuous hook of connection lead from one piece of research to another, but leave breadcrumbs and traces of research.
- Then try setting parameters - what if it can only be white, what if we’re only dealing with form, what if we have to use a box etc.
- Iteration is sometimes about boring yourself - keep drawing until you bore yourself into drawing something interesting, draw the same thing 40 times but with something different every time, how has this sketch forced my thinking on?
- When you sit and let ideas brew, make sure you have some paper and a pencil in your hands
- Always chase the why - find the poetry in the piece, listen to the lyrics, find a story, what supports this message?
Her quotes
“The piece made has to be seen as the tip of the iceberg of the research that went into it” - Quarantine Masterclass, YouTube
“If an artist makes you reflect on something that’s in your everyday life, then that was a piece of art worth making” - Quarantine Masterclass, YouTube
“You can design nice things without having a clue how they f*cking work” - Abstract | Art of Design
