Rob Enslin's posterous

Rob Enslin's posterous

Rob Enslin  //  User Experience Designer, Product Design Manager, Head of UX by day and User Interaction Design Kingston University Masters student by night/weekend.

Oct 10 / 2:23pm

Typographica's food for information design

I've never visited an art exhibit, however today I attended a UX Field trip event, organised by Alice, exploring local art. Today's trip took us to the Kemistry Gallery to see Typographica (11 September – 31 October). I walked away feeling inspired by the cleverly curated collect photographic pieces and like-minded folks from our local London UX/IA social group http://london-ia.ning.com

The journal (Typographica) was founded by a 25 year-old Herbert Spencer, who went on to become one of the most influential British communication designers and typographers. Typographica’s pioneering content included concrete poetry, avant-garde type experiments and photo-documentary, all highlighting Spencer’s ability to fuse images and words in meaningful new relationships, and featured the work of, among many others, Dieter Rot, Robert Brownjohn and Alexander Rodchenko.

We spent time admiring and 'seeing' the stories from snippets of the 32 publications (two 16 series: Old and New series) presented as re-prints around the gallery. I particularly enjoyed Hernert Spencer's "Mile-a-Minute" edition as well as his "Piet Zwart" piece too. Robert Brownjohn's "Street Level" was seriously inspiring too. I managed to take some sketch notes of interest bits found myself thinking a little harder about the "juxtaposed, accidental or design" question posed after a photo appeared of a shop sign 'ACCESSORIES' with the first 'C' lying at an odd angel provoking that very question (juxtaposed, accidental or design).

After the viewing we spent some time catching up on studies, work and our mobile worlds... with special attention being played to the new social network iPhone/Android app, Foursquare.