Tag Archives: “graphic design”
Projects | 14 | Economics is orange.
Project: Personal branding
Personal branding for former colleague Valentin Manivel, who teaches economics & social science. I somehow managed to convince him that he absolutely needed marketing himself (and his academic career) as a world-class brand, starting with a logo. And colours.
Some people ‘see’ colours in letters, months, days of the week, numbers… Others, perhaps as a result of being so conditioned by their jobs, see colours in school subjects, as strange as it may seem.
I was reassured to find out that I was not alone in thinking that Economics is definitely orange.
Projects | 12
Stealth | Logo project
© Copyright Michel Poitrenaud
Projects | 09
Project: Logo + Laptop & Cell phone wallpapers | Company: MP Design
Cell phone wallpaper | home screen
Cell phone wallpaper | lock screen
Laptop wallpaper
© Copyright Michel Poitrenaud
Joyeux Anniversaire
In 2010, a colleague of mine, Eric Rosa, sent me the birthday card below, created after Peter Saville’s colour-coded back cover design for New Order‘s ‘Power, Corruption & Lies‘.
Projects | 06
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Design and Music
The Peter Saville Show was held between 23 May and 14 September 2003 at the Design Museum in London. It traced the career of the graphic design legend who created artwork for Factory Records, including record sleeves for, among others, New Order.
It was therefore natural that the latter composed the score.
The Peter Saville Show Soundtrack is an atypical, 30-minute atmospheric and instrumental piece of music which has little to do with any material released by the band before or after that.
If the usual New Order line-up was not complete, Peter Hook’s basslines are easily recognisable, alongside drummer/keyboard player Stephen Morris and guitarist Phil
Cunningham, who had just joined the band as a touring musician.
I was not lucky enough to see the exhibition at the time or get the soundtrack, but I ordered one of the 3,000 CD-only copies from a website selling rare vinyl records and CDs.
As you can read on the disc, it was designed, as well as the show in itself, by the
London-based graphic design agency Graphic Thought Facility.
Front sleeve:
Back sleeve:
Apparently there was no official exhibition catalogue, but the book Designed by Peter
Saville was published by Frieze when the exhibition opened.
Typography, from record sleeve to headstone
In 1990, the independent, Manchester-based music label Factory, created and headed by Tony Wilson, released a four-piece boxed set featuring its major artists such as New Order, Joy Division, the Happy Mondays, OMD, James and many more. Typography and graphic design always were of prime importance at Factory. The typeface used for the sleek, uncluttered cover design was Factis 90, a font based on the Sans Serif version of Otl Aicher’s Rotis, which had been published two years before.
Rotis was quite innovative at the time, and has since been used by many firms or organisations for their brand identity. Based on my own experience, I think Rotis features some of the most beautifully designed letters taken individually (i.e. a, e, p, b) but does not really work for paragraphs or as a fully fledged typeface, as stated by type designer and author Erik Spiekermann.
Anyway, the Rotis/Factis version used by Factory, and the overall Palatine design owed to John Macklin worked very well, as did the new factory logo designed by Julian Morey. It perfectly matched Factory’s minimal approach and refined style created over the years under the artistic direction of Peter Saville.
In 2010, three years after Tony Wilson’s death, Peter Saville and Factory-era associate Ben Kelly designed his headstone. The clean and modernist memorial may look a little bit like a stationery product or even a giant business card, but it definitely looks great, particularly thanks to the use of the right layout and typographical elements.
Cemeteries would probably look less bleak with such well-designed gravestones…