Text: The Poetry of the Commonplace
Posted: February 12, 2019 Filed under: Texts | Tags: Articles on graphic Design Comments Off on Text: The Poetry of the Commonplace 
Jack Self (JS) is a London-based architect and writer. He is the director of the REAL Foundation and Editor-in-Chief of the Real Review, a magazine that explores, through a variety of topics and lenses, what it means to live today. The text below is an excerpt taken from a 10,000-word transcript of an hour-long conversion between Richard Baird (RB) and Jack Self. This covered architecture, graphic design, publishing and the review.
RB—I spoke to Jack Self about my desire to create an unexpected material object from the work I do for BP&O. That I did not know what form it would take, although the LogoArchive zine is now folded into that project. I would use words like performance or sculpture when speaking to people about it, to move the conversation beyond, say, an annual; a common suggestion (although it was always going to be material) as a way to draw people into a worldview. This is what Jack had to say about that and how Real Review creates new relationships with space and develops a dialogue between text and image, outside of their literal reading, by way of a vertical fold.
WeWork by Gretel
Posted: February 11, 2019 Filed under: Business, Banking, Law and Finance, Graphic Design Reviews | Tags: American Design, Brand Identity Reviews, Branding Blog, Branding Reviews, Design For Print, Design Opinion, Design Reviews, Designed by Gretel, Designed in New York, Graphic Design, Graphic Design Blog, Minimal Design, Minimal Logos, Minimalist Brand Identities, Poster Design, Sans-serif Typography, The Best Brand Identities of 2019, The Best Graphic Design Work of 2018, The Best Logo Designs of 2019, The Very Best Brand Identities of 2019, Typography, Uncoated Papers & Cards Comments Off on WeWork by GretelOpinion by Richard Baird
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in New York, WeWork began as a workspace provider and has grown to offer a broader infrastructure of community management and support, event programming and virtual network management for small and large businesses, entrepreneurs and freelancers.
With significant and rapid growth WeWork worked with Gretel to align its visual identity with its purpose. “Framework”, a graphic route that functions as a visual metaphor for WeWork itself, replicating its activities and behaviours, is a responsive and dynamic structure that responds to any spatial format in new and interesting ways, on screen and in print, governing and linking, alongside a simple colour palette and imagery, all of WeWork’s communications. These include small and large format posters, signage, magazine and website design.
The Best of BP&O — January 2019
Posted: January 31, 2019 Filed under: The Best of BP&O Comments Off on The Best of BP&O — January 2019Selected by Richard Baird.
Five projects that stood out in January and have made it into BP&O’s Best Of Series. Between them, these typically balance a strong singular concept or an appropriate confluence of ideas with a compelling visual character and clear communicative intention that appropriately play with form, colour, type and layout, as well as material, texture, image and print finish.
BP&O, in this end of month review, tries to recognise both the smart use of small budgets—those that channel spending into the most appropriate assets—and those projects with a broad and holistic quality, establishing a continuity (conceptual and/or visual) across multiple touch points. Many of the projects share a concise aesthetic expression, yet there is nuance and strategic weight to these, so do click through and read more about each of these. Alongside reviews BP&O introduced a new text series, the first of which Collation & Curation, experiments with two interwoven narratives; the delineation between the practice of collation and curation in design publishing and how the new metrics of the net impose themselves on today’s design work.
