Books that Fly Conference

Last week I attended a Conference held at the University of Brighton called 'Books that Fly'. The day was organised as a series of six speakers, each of whom demonstrate their art/skills and writing via the medium of handmade, or 'artists' books. Each speaker was there to spread the word about the medium to a broad audience and to encourage awareness and development of it. Question and answer sessions encouraged the sharing of ideas between the speakers and the delegates.

All of the speakers were passionate about, and dedicated to, their work. The speaker whose work I found the most intriguing was Sam Winston. Find out more at his website here: (http://www.samwinston.com/).

He spoke incredibly eloquently about his projects describing how he examines the connections between language, vocabulary, print, type, image, emotion and punctuation. He writes stories and analyses classic text, deconstructs it (semantically and by chopping it up!), categorizes it, reassembles it and produces beautiful images and sculptural forms which is exhibited in galleries all over the world.

In the context of graphic design, his work crosses over and challenges the understanding that we have about words, image, comprehension and format. Listening to him explain his work was fascinating and reminded me of how graphic design is often about understanding the rules of typography, layout, sequence, perception, observation and proportion and then distorting or breaking those rules. Clarity, logic and simplicity in design are nearly always the result of good observation, careful analysis, clear comprehension of the brief and the application of rules to provide structure. Breaking these rules, to me, is styling. Designers use styling effectively once all rules have been established. Styling design personalises graphics, either as the designer's work or to fit the 'personality' of a brand.