Fraser Muggeridge at Spike Island

Last night I went to see a lecture by Fraser Muggeridge at the Spike Island campus in Bristol. Rightly or wrongly I had never heard of him before but later I realised, I had seen his work all over London.

Firstly, the venue itself was in a strange location, sort of semi-industrial but nor far from the SS Great Britain ship. When we were led into the space for the talk it was like entering some sort of bunker. Initially I wasn't that impressed trying to sit on a small wooden chair that belonged in primary school and felt I was part of some hippy poetry reading session instead of a design lecture. Venue aside, I was glad I made the journey.

For the last 10-11 years, his studio practise has been about packaging artists work. Trying to find a way of presenting their work in an appropriate fashion. His main premise is to, 'create something from nothing'. His studio output is broken down in the following steps:
1  Visual Campaign
2  Publication
3  Books
4  Artwork
5  History and Research
6  Collaboration
7  Operating as an Artist

The first piece he talked about illustrated how with very little information or most times, even a formal brief from an artist, how he would create a piece of design. As I stated earlier, I have seen plenty of his work on the London Underground as he has produced numerous poster campaigns as part of the Art on the Underground series. The one he chose to explain was Life Is A Laugh by Brian Griffiths. All he had to conceive his idea from was a part sculptured panda head and a lot of scaffolding.

He talked about being confident enough to push your own ideas and try to be enticing instead of obvious with a design. A keen typographer, it may be of no surprise that he researched the posters of the London Underground and wanted something to look like it had always been there. The final piece was conceived by using a background which was copied from an old book with bits of mould just showing and making the type worn and distressed using the method of enlarging and reducing the image on a photocopier. At this point I smiled to myself as i had tried the same technique a few years ago whilst studying at Stafford College. As you can see below, the final poster looks authentic and fits into its surroundings beautifully I think.

Another project was for Bookworks. A series of books entitled Semina. The covers for these were developed from repeated scans of found objects from wigs, old photographs, slides and signs. These for me had a feel of the old Penguin titles in their approach and style. He made literally hundreds of different covers to show the clients with obviously most of them being rejected for one reason or another.

At this point he talked a bit about dealing with clients and rejection. It is something that all artists and designers have to cope with. You can only push your point of view so far but ultimately, the client is always right.

I am intrigued by the covers probably because it is a direction I probably would not have considered but it is a good example to use. Not everything should be created digitally as using craft skills along with found objects creates an original solution every time.

One of his other projects that I found interesting was for the artist, Anna Barriball. Again, more posters for the London Underground art series. using the original Johnson typeface, he explored what happened to the font when it was magnified, again to make it look more weathered. What he discovered was the fantastic shapes of the punctuation. The full stops took on a diamond appearance and the apostrophe's looked like a claw.

Some of his other work, especially when it comes to research is his discovery of Ken Briggs. His wealth of poster designs for the National Theatre in London are fantastic. Again, I have never heard of him but now have discovered another wonderful breadth of visual treats for the future. After some more research myself, I may write more about his work as it needs more recognition.

His final piece was about his development of a new typeface which developed from taking an old 1920's typeface and seeing what happens when you superimpose one letter in front and behind another one. For instance taking the letter I and putting behind it the letter H and see what you are left with and visa versa. It is an interesting experiment and when shown the full list of possible characters, it has proved to be a successful development. The finished typeface will have an amazing characteristic. Instead of using the same two letters every time when you type a word it will superimpose the following letter underneath the preceding one. For example if you typed DAVID, the D would have an A behind it and the A would have a V behind it and so on. So the different combinations are numerous.

To conclude, it was worth making the trip down to Bristol to listen to, see some different designs and to hear a different approach to making artworks. Whilst it hasn't necessarily made me an avid fan of his work, it has reminded me to think away from the screen and to think sometimes of a more abstract solution to a brief.