The Design Museum

I visited the design museum, the other day as I was looking for the 50 years of Helvetica exhibition. However this appeared to be a small exhibition in the Cafe area. I had a look but most of the images I had seen on the blanka website that I had recently discovered. I must admit I did like the way the work was positioned in the cafe area, it suggested that this place was serious and enthusiastic about design as it was filtered everywhere. I found the display obscure. It based its ideas

Therefore I led myself to the two other main exhibitions Zaha Hadid, Architecture and Design, as well as a graphic design exhibition names Friendly Fire by Johnathan Barmbrook. Both are rather influential and interesting.

I first saw Zaha Hadid's exhibition. The first room her later work was in a darker room with spot lights, that I felt created a good atmosphere for her Russian constructivist work. Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950, and came to London in 1972. She has created 'Urban master pieces to domestic objects and furniture.'




Her work uses radical geometry, which is formed from the influential period Russian constructivism. I found her paintings rather abstract considering they where based on architecture. This may be due to the sheer amount of detail, the angles of the work, and how the architecture is stretched across the entire canvas. She manages to go beyond basic forms, which almost makes the work hard to look at. Work I particularly liked was ‘The Divers,’ as it showed the designs in use. It seems that the paintings are the basis of her architecture designs that are then drawn up using layers of acetate and then models are created.

Upstairs in the museum the exhibition is extended. It appears more contemporary than the selection down stairs. The curve seems to be embraced, where before Sharpe angles appeared to be the trend. I preferred these designs. They appear more fluid. The design bellow almost appears living.



The second exhibition was called Friendly Fire by Jonathan Barmbrook. His work made rather admirable bold statements about rather serious worldly issues. I felt inspired by the strength of this work, It makes you desire such graphic jobs to work on yourself, however such strong ideas need to be expressed well and loudly to be successful. 'And this designer doesn’t hesitate when offered the opportunity to dive into ideological waters and deliberately swim in political ponds.' http://www.fontshop.com/features/fontmag/002/02_barnbrook/. He espiers to 'graphic design having a vital role to play in influencing ideological landscapes of society.'

A particular piece of work I liked was his magazine ad busters 'a graphically-designed magazine devoted to numerous political and social causes, and run by an organisation aiming to 'advance the new social activist movement of the information age' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Barnbrook. One image I saw was a straight image comparison on a beer gut belly and a young Childs belly from Africa, the images were very hard hitting without any effort.



He suggests that 'designers should not separate their own beliefs to those that they express in their work.' He is very expressive with colour, he mentioned on a concept board of his for Damien Hirsts book design, that white is used within design a lot because there is a pretence to be tasteful. However as much as I can see his, point, it very hard to appear tasteful and not use white, it so commonly used and does appear fresh to the untrained eye.



He also is extremely experimental with his use of type. Which seems to express 'Visual Energy' http://www.fontshop.com/features/fontmag/002/02_barnbrook/. I would like to look further in to how he develops such fonts, and where he gains such influences.