6/25-26 LCC Show & Letterpress Workshop, also Tom Eckersley & Stanley Kubrick Archives

We saw the London College of Communications show and I have to say my absolute favorite part was the illustration. I just couldn’t get enough of it. The line quality, subject matter, and different mediums used were all so interesting. There was also some interesting web design, which I got to check out on a million different computers that were set up. There were sound-based projects that I thought were awesome, one had goldfish that would swim around triggering chimes.

The Letterpress workshop with Alex Cooper was a lot of fun, and the man is a genius. He is very creative with letterpress, and explores different uses of the type, such as using the blocks backwards to create blocks of color. He helped our group a lot, because for whatever reason we could not get the press clean and screwed it up about 4 times. Dave, Rosie Alicia and I worked together and we used a newspaper headline that read “I’m bad at DIY.” Our concept was to flip the apostrophe on the “I’M” to look like we screwed it up, but it actually looked really beautiful the wrong way.

We had a lecture by Paul Rennie on the Tom Eckersley Archive. Tom Eckersley was a prominent poster designer in the 1930’s famous for his work for Shell and the London Transport. Actually, he had a relationship with London Transport for over 50 years, his posters being very recognizable in regards to LT. I really liked one he did for the Victoria Line (shown above) I thought it was very clever. I love the graphic style he uses, I know as I continue screen printing this year I am going to draw inspiration from his work.

We also saw the Stanley Kubrick archive which was basically a freezing warehouse with everything Kubrick had saved through the years that had to do with his films, etc. Jill and I had bought Clockwork Orange t-shirts earlier in the trip and were excited to wear them to the archive but we forgot/it wouldn’t have been appropriate anyway. Oh well! It was cool to see the amount of stuff he had amassed over the years, but since most of it was in boxes we couldn’t really look at it in depth.