Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

Although I am a Web Designer, I was educated as a Graphic Designer, and have always had an appreciation for the great Graphic Designers of our time. Paula Scher, Paul Rand, Art Chantry, Lanny Somese, David Carson…the list could go on.

When I was in college at Mississippi State, we were able to arrange to have Fred Woodward come and give a 1-day workshop and talk. Fred was, at the time, Art Director of Rolling Stone magazine. He is now at Esquire, and the style of the magazine reflects it. Fred was also a MSU Alumni, which was how we were able to talk him into coming. The amount of energy he put out just talking about the process of coming up with covers and feature spreads blew me away.

Today, the Birmingham AIGA chapter held a talk with Doyald Young, who is well known as a type and font designer. The talk went well. Doyald has a great passion for what he does, and it comes through not only in how he talks about it, but in the examples of work he presented and his process for producing that work.

Doyald produces custom logos. He hand-draws about 99.9% of what he produces for clients. The slides he showed with hand-drawn versions of fonts such as Bodoni, Optima, and Times New Roman were just spectacular. I could not imagine working with the patience it takes to produce that level of work. The hand-drawn scripts and cartouche’s are absolutely extraordinary.

He has produced logos and logotypes for The Grammy Awards, The Tony Awards, The Art Directors Guild, The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Hilton Hotels, Prudential Insurance, and Cal-Tech, among hundreds of others.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talk and hope that the local AIGA chapter is able to arrange more like them. It is always a special occasion when you can sit and listen to a master explain their craft, what it means to them, and how they go about producing it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 at September 28,2004 @ 9:52 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.