Neville Brody

Neville Brody (born April 23, 1957 in London) is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director.
Neville Brody is an alumnus of the London College of Communication and studied at Hammersmith College of Art under Ruskin Spear (alumni include Glenn Tutsell, Michael Peters and Howard Milton) and is known for his work on The Face magazine (1981–1986) and Arena magazine (1987–1990), as well as for designing record covers for artists such as Cabaret Voltaire, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails.
He was one of the founding members of FontWorks [1] in London and designed a number of notable typefaces for them. He was also partly responsible for instigating the FUSE project an influential fusion between a magazine, graphics design and typeface design. Each pack includes a publication with articles relating to typography and surrounding subjects, four brand new fonts that are unique and revolutionary in some shape or form and four posters designed by the type designer usually using little more than their included font.
Initially working in record cover design, Brody made his name largely through his revolutionary work as Art Director for The Face magazine. Other international magazine and newspaper directions have included City Limits, Lei, Per Lui, Actuel and Arena, together with the radical new look for two leading British newspapers the The Guardian and The Observer (both newspaper and magazine).[citation needed]

Brody has consistently pushed the boundaries of visual communication in all media through his experimental and challenging work, and continues to extend the visual languages we use through his exploratory creative expression. In 1988 Thames & Hudson published the first of two volumes about his work, which became the world's best selling graphic design book.[citation needed] Combined sales now exceed 120,000.[citation needed] An accompanying exhibition of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum attracted over 40,000 visitors[citation needed] before touring Europe and Japan.
Neville Brody continues to work as a graphic designer and together with business partner Fwa Richards launched his own design practice, Research Studios, in London in 1994. Since then studios have been opened in San Francisco, Paris, Berlin and New York. The company is best known for its ability to create new visual languages for a variety of applications ranging from publishing to film. It also creates innovative packaging and website design for clients such as Kenzo, corporate identity for clients such as Homechoice, and on-screen graphics for clients such as Paramount Studios, makers of the Mission Impossible films.
Recent projects include the redesign of the The Times in November 2006 with the creation of a new font Times Modern. The typeface shares many visual similarities with Mercury designed by Jonathan Hoefler. It has been widely reported that the newspaper had only changed typefaces four times. This is not the case, the newspaper had changed typefaces countless times during the age of handsetting. The original Daily Universal Register was set in a Caslon like typeface from the Fry Type foundry
The company also completed a visual identity project for the famous Paris contemporary art exhibition Nuit Blanche in 2006.
Brody’s team launched a new look for the champagne brand Dom Pérignon in February 2007, having been appointed in 2004 to help the brand with its strategy and repositioning. 
 A sister company, Research Publishing, produces and publishes experimental multi-media works by young artists. The primary focus is on FUSE, the conference and quarterly forum for experimental typography and communications. The publication is approaching its 20th issue over a publishing period of over ten years. Three FUSE conferences have so far been held, in London, San Francisco and Berlin. The conferences bring together speakers from design, architecture, sound, film and interactive design and web.


Chase

These guys are very inspirational.

Why not associates is a British branding and graphic design company who create vivid designs for clients in business, government and the public sector. For almost two decades (at this posting), why not associates has been creating innovative works in many different media on many types of projects, including corporate identity, digital design, motion graphics and television commercial direction, editorial design, environmental design, publishing, and public art and art installations for specific communities. Impressive and thoughtful work.

Designers Republic

Initially, Ian Anderson founded tDR to design flyers for the band Person to Person, which he managed at the time. His first ideas were inspired by Russian constructivism. From their beginning, the works should be viewed in contrast to the current understanding of design (Quote: tDR is a declaration of independence from what we perceive to be the existing design community[citation needed]).
An early client was Leeds band Age of Chance, for whom they developed a series of striking record covers from 1986-1987. The sleeve of Don't Get Mad ... Get Even was one of Q Magazine's 100 Best Record Covers Of All Time (2001).[1]
The Designers Republic were introduced to a larger audience by their record covers for the English electronica label Warp Records. They designed the covers of CDs by Autechre and Aphex Twin, but also for artists such as Fluke, Funkstörung, Supergrass, Pop Will Eat Itself and Towa Tei.
Outside of the musical sector, tDR created the visuals, packaging and manual for the PlayStation/Sega Saturn game Wipeout, the interface for the PC game Hardwar, and packaging and posters for the first Grand Theft Auto. They cooperated with the Swatch company in 1996 to design their own watch. They also designed the packaging for Sony's Aibo.
The book 3D → 2D: Adventures In And Out Of Architecture, released in 2001, was an architectural examination of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia presented in the graphic style of their previous work. The book was preordered by over 3,000 fans[citation needed], but fell short of the expectations of some due to a lack of seemingly innovative material.
Current members are Ian Anderson, Darren Pascoe, Richard Wright, Antony Smith, Tom Smith, Nick Tymn, Nicole Jacek, Lydia Lapinski, Richard Wilson
Past members include: Nick Bax, Matt Pyke, Michael C. Place and Sanderson Bob.
[edit]Influence

The work of tDR had great influence on the development of graphic design, especially in the fields of web and cover design in the electronica scene.[citation needed]
[edit]Style

The Designers Republic's works are playful and bright, and considered Maximum-minimalist, mixing images from Japanese anime cartoons and subvertized corporate logos, with a postmodern tendency towards controversial irony, featuring statements like "Work Buy Consume Die", "Customized Terror", "Buy nothing, pay now", or indeed ""Made In The Designers Republic"". They also celebrated their northern roots with phrases like 'Made in the Designers Republic, North of Nowhere' and 'SoYo' (referring to Sheffield South Yorkshire - stating they were not from London's design community in Soho.

Kyle Cooper is a designer of motion picture title sequences. His work includes the opening credit sequences of Se7en (1995), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Flubber (1997), The Mummy (1999), Spider-Man (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Godzilla Final Wars (2004); and the video games Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001) and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004).
He has also directed a film, New Port South (2001).

Lauren Child was born in 1967 and grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire. She studied Art at Manchester Polytechnic and London Art School, after which she worked in a variety of jobs, including assistant to Damien Hirst. She also started her own company, 'Chandeliers for the People', making exotic lampshades.

In 1999 she had two picture books published, I Want a Pet! (1999) and Clarice Bean, That's Me (1999), the latter being shortlisted for the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. In 2000 she won a Kate Greenaway Medal for I Will Not Ever, NEVER Eat a Tomato (2000) and a second Nestlé Smarties Book Prize in 2002 for That Pesky Rat (2002). In the same year, she wrote her first children's novel, Utterly Me, Clarice Bean (2002). Her second book in this series, Clarice Bean Spells Trouble was shortlisted for the 2005 British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year.
Lauren Child's humorous illustrations contain many different mediums including magazine cuttings, collage, material and photography as well as traditional watercolours. As well as being author of several highly successful books, she is the illustrator of the Definitely Daisy series by Jenny Oldfield.

A television series based on her 'Charlie and Lola' books has recently been made into an animated series for CBBC, and she has written several books recently which are based on these tales.
Lauren Child lives in London, where she works for the Design Agency 'Big Fish'.

David Carson

He was born September 8th, 1952 in Corpus Christi, Texas. Carson and his family moved to New York City four years later. Since then he has traveled all around the world but has maintained New York as his base of operations. Carson now owns two studios; one in New York and another in Charleston, South Carolina.

Because of his father, Carson traveled all over America, Puerto Rico, and the West Indies. These journeys affected him profoundly and the first signs of his talent were shown at a very young age; however, his first actual contact with graphic design was made in 1980 at the University of Arizona on a two week graphics course. he attended San Diego St. University as well as Oregon College of Commercial Art. Later on in 1983, Carson was working towards a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology when he went to Switzerland, where he attended a three-week workshop in graphic design as part of his degree. This is where he met his first great influence, who also happened to be the teacher of this course, Hans-Rudolph Lutz.

During the period of 1982–1987, Carson worked as a teacher in Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, California. In 1983, Carson started to experiment with graphic design and found himself immersed in the artistic and bohemian culture of Southern California. By the late eighties he had developed his signature style, using "dirty" type and non-mainstream photography. He would later be dubbed the "father of grunge."
Carson went on to become the art director of Transworld Skateboarding magazine. Among other things, he was also a professional surfer and in 1989 Carson was qualified as the 8th best surfer in the world. His career as a surfer helped him to direct a surfing magazine, called Beach Culture. This magazine lasted for three years but, through the pages of Beach Culture, Carson made his first significant impact on the world of graphic design and typography with ideas that were called innovative even by those that were not fond of his work. Not afraid to break convention in one issue he used Dingbat as the font for what he considered a rather dull interview with Bryan Ferry.[1] From 1991-1992, Carson worked for Surfer magazine. A stint at How magazine (a trade magazine aimed at designers) followed, and soon Carson launched Ray Gun, a magazine of international standards which had music and lifestyle as its subject. Ray Gun made Carson very well-known and attracted new admirers to his work. In this period, journals such as the New York Times (May 1994) and Newsweek (1996) featured Carson and increased his publicity greatly. In 1995, Carson founded his own studio, David Carson Design in New York City, and started to attract major clients from all over the United States. During the next three years (1995-1998), Carson was doing work for Pepsi Cola, Ray Ban (orbs project), Nike, Microsoft, Budweiser, Giorgio Armani, NBC, American Airlines and Levi Strauss Jeans.

From 1998 on, DCD started an international career and worked for a variety of new clients, including AT&T, British Airways, Kodak, Lycra, Packard Bell, Sony, Suzuki, Toyota, Warner Bros., CNN, Cuervo Gold, Johnson AIDS Foundation, MTV Global, Princo, Lotus Software, Fox TV, Nissan, quiksilver, Intel, Mercedes-Benz, MGM Studios and Nine Inch Nails.
In 2000, Carson opened a new personal studio in Charleston, South Carolina. During this period, Carson became a father, a fact that affected his design and work. In 2004, Carson became the Creative Director of Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston and designed the special “Exploration” edition of Surfing Magazine and directed a television commercial for UMPQUA Bank in Seattle, Washington.

Carson became interested in a new school of typography and photography-based graphic design, which came from the academic explorations of Edward Fella at Cranbrook Academy of Art and California Institute of the Arts. Carson is largely responsible for popularizing the style, and was an inspiration for a generation of young designers coming of age in the 1990's. His work does not follow "traditional" graphic design standards (as espoused by an older generation of practitioners such as the late Paul Rand). Carson has a part of himself in every piece and he is emotionally attached to his creations. Carson's work is considered an exploration in thoughts and ideas that become "lost" in his (and his target audience's) subconscious. Every piece is saturated with visual information that could easily be considered too heavy for the eye to interpret, but Carson still manages to communicate both the idea and the feeling behind his design. His extensive use of combinations of typographic elements and photography led many designers to completely change their work methods and graphic designers from all around the world base their style on the new “standards” that have distinguished Carson's work. Carson is most famous for his ability to create spreads that even with little content seem to be substantive.

Carson's work is familiar among the generation that grew up with Raygun Magazine and its progeny such as huH and xceler8, and in general, the visually savvy MTV generation, but his work still receives criticism from a generation that refuses to engage with his connotative excesses.

Metadesign or meta-design is an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. It extends the traditional notion of system design beyond the original development of a system by allowing users to become co-designers. Metadesign is grounded in the basic assumption that future uses and problems cannot be completely anticipated at design time, when a system is developed. Users, at use time, will discover mismatches between their needs and the support that an existing system can provide for them. These mismatches will lead to breakdowns that serve as potential sources of new insights, new knowledge, and new understanding.
A fundamental objective of metadesign is to create socio-technical environments that empower users to engage actively in the continuous development of systems rather than being restricted to the use of existing systems. Metadesign aims at defining and creating not only technical infrastructure but also social infrastructure in which users can participate actively as co-designers to shape and reshape the socio-technical environment through collaboration.