Giorgio: the ephemeral

As I mentioned before, the goal of every designer is to be remembered for long time, and with luck becomes a classic. We can find this pattern on every design field except one, something interesting happens in "the fashion field ".

Design serves a propouse, makes our life simpler, and it’s utilitarian; we can easily get what a company do just by watching his web site, we have a better grip of our cooking utensils from IKEA, we love the simplicity of our iPhones and we love the comfort of our couch.

In fashion, all other design disciplines join forces for just one thing: To make unique the current season or trend. Advertising, Photography, Multimedia, Web, Print, Marketing, all the world-class creatives together for just one season; it’s really a great phenomenon to view this kind of design, but the less evident and most important is how typography serves the fashion industry and how typefaces born from it.

On August 2004, the New York Times launched T: The New York Times Style Magazine, which is dedicated to fashion, design and living coverage; and in 2006 the art director Chris Martinez decided to get a new headline typeface for the magazine. So this huge enterprise was commissioned to Christian Schwartz –which I think is the new prodigy on type design– with the mission of: capture the current moment in fashion, embody intricate tailoring, slender silhouettes, minimalistic, 1930s look, high contrast and strange with pretty eccentric details, in other words, a perfect job. Finally it will to serves the magazine for just one year, then phase it out.

In contrast of any other kind of design, create something for using just it just a season sounds like designing against the designs nature… but no; it’s just the most strange design we can enjoy, it’s quick, beautiful, fleeting, ephemeral.

The result was Giorgio, a skinny, tall and sharp typeface with high contrast that looks terrific on black and white photos.

What is funny is that this typeface was designed for the intention to be used for just one year it’s still used.

If you want to know more about the making of this typeface, I totally recommend to watch this Schwartz’s lecture. Also it will help you to realize how typography influences the personality of a magazine and your life. Cheers / Santiago Orozco

Giorgio: the ephemeral

A Rant about Iconic Design

"A classic is an object with a symbolic value that greatly exceeds the actual value."

John Maeda

It’s on our nature to create, most of the times we just replicate unconsciously because there's so much images on our life that makes it harder to stay one step ahead of the current trend, but even if we know how to design we never stop trying.

There are big names whom transcended with their creations, and now they are considered "classics"; one of them and for me is Otl Aicher. Otl Aicher was the design director for the Munich 1972 games, he designed the pictograms used for the first time at that olympics with such elegance an clarity that never would be topped. These had been redesigned every olympic.Then the madness begin… this idea was so well executed that was used on every possible signage, advertising, poster, t-shirt.

Then became ICONIC, CLASSIC, something so great that it's part of our lives; this is the goal of every designer, to be remembered, to be a "classic", transcend.So, we see all the design community –not just graphic, also the fashion, industrial, interior, type– struggling and trying to create the next big thing on they area for just one reason, to be an icon.

Another iconic-breathtaking designer is Stefan Sagmeister, which has set a new design bound with the infamous poster for AIGA Detroit (right) by cutting all the type on his skin to represent the pain that seems to accompany most of his design projects.

And what about Lou Reed's poster "Set the Twilight Teeling " ?(bottom)

So, pretty much there are a lot of iconic people, Sagmeister, Spiekermann, Maeda, that probably will be classics on the design field and inspire the new artists… but is no reason to feel intimidated by the great designers, because every artist start as an amateur, first emulate their environment then adapt it to his personal preferences and finally creates; not because wants to replicate something or be with the mainstream. Once on this stage, it's all downhill for a nonstop creating creature in the searching to become a classic.
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Finally, if you have an idea, there’s nothing
better that rant about it. 

Cheers./Santiago Orozco

A Rant about Iconic Design