HEROES & HEROINES 27th April 2009.

THIS IS MY RESEARCH FOR THE HEROES & HEROINES PROJECT.

KYLE COOPERFilm Director and Designer of motion picture title sequences. Has worked on over 150 films including Spiderman, Dawn of the Dead, The mummy etc.

Founder of two film design companies,”Imaginary Forces” and “Prologue Films.

Studied at Yale School of Art for M.F.A in graphic design and earned the title of Royal Designer for Industry from London Royal Society of Arts.

He was greatly inspired by the opening sequence of “To kill a Mockingbird” (1962)

DAVID CARSON American graphic designer born Texas 1952. Travelled the world with his family before taking work as a Sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 70′s.

1983 went to Switzerland to train for part of his B.A. in Sociology and here met his inspiration in Hans-Rudolph Lutz. 1989 became an art director for music, skateboarding and surfing magazines.  Gained his fame at Magazine Ray Gin where he was art director 1992-95.

His mixed typefaces and fractured imagery led him into corporate work for the likes of Nike, Levis and Citibank.

Has won over 170 awards for his work in graphic design.

MARJANE SARRAPI  Born 1969 in Tehran, Iran where her family were involved with communism prior to the Iranian Revolution.  1983 went to Vienna to flee the regime but returned to Tehran to study for her Masters Degree in visual communication.  She then moved to France where she still lives working as an illustrator and author of childrens books.  She became famous for books Persepolis 1 and 2 which described her childhood in Iran and won awards at The International Comics Festival.  These were then made into film which won awards at Cannes Film Festival.

Lauren Child.   A great welcome screen to her website!  She has concentrated on childrens books.  Born 1967 she studied at Manchester Polytechnic and London Art School but interrupted her studies to travel and decide which path in life she wanted to travel.  She started a company making exotic  lightshades before writing her first childrens book “Clarice Bean”, which came with a complete range of commercial products.  Her artwork was selected to promote the 2002 World Book Day.

  Susan Kare.  Born  1954 in New York she was instrumental in creating interface elements for Apple Mackintosh during the 1980′s.  She went on to design typefaces, icons and graphical tools e.g. lasso, paint bucket etc. working independently for such as  Microsoft and IBM etc.

Jane Campion

Peter Saville

Paula Scher.   A graphic designer born in Washington 1948.  Designed many album covers before becoming involved with magazines.  Has won many awards for her work.  Now owns design company Koppel & Scher and is head of Pentagram design consultancy..

Saul Bass.   Was an American graphic designer and award winning film maker.  I liked his Alfred Hitchcock’s movie poster book cover.  Died 1996.

Michael Gondry      James Ware

Vaughan Oliver       Chris Jarvis

Erik Spiekerman

The above mentioned are only a few of the very inspirational people who have contributed to this industry.  I thoroughly enjoyed viewing their work and reading their life stories and from doing so was able to choose the one I wanted to study.

JOHN MAEDA

I have always loved and been drawn to vibrant colour, so I found his use of colour such great fun and especially when combined with the simplicity of his design subject matter.

His use of simple techniques and visual approaches has enabled the industry,( which was regarded as being far too complicated to most people,  unless computer experts and designers)  to open itself up to all, including the likes of me!!

I first studied his book “Maeda @ Media” and used some of his illustrations as work for my presentation project.  I brought the required pages into photoshop and added text etc. to each, then in the flash programme I provided the first page with a bookmark which when clicked took me to page 2. This sequence continued on to page 8, each time the page turned the bookmark changed colour.

I really enjoyed this project.