4 Oct 2010

Gastrotypographicalassemblage & other cool things from the London Design Festival

I'm now at Kingston, living in university halls in Surbiton. Having an amazing time, and its so great to be living sort of in London but sort of out of it, we've got the best of both here. When the London Design Festival was onlastweekend, i went up into central with a group of classmates and we explored the Shorditch/ Brick Lane area. None of us had ever properly been around that area before, so we took a whileto find stuff, but when we did there was some really really interesting work on show in small galleries and shops as part of the design festival and the anti design festival.
One of them we found at theKemistry Gallery, it was Lou Dorfsman's Gastrotypographicalassemblage. Just the name in itself is pretty impressive. It was designed and created for the CBS Cafeteria in 1965. Dorfsman mapped out a selectionof different typefaces, spelling out the food on offer in the cafeteria. The letters were cut out of wood and sprayed white to unify them. The result was a 40 foottypographic mural.

Original sketch:


Things we saw when just walking around Shorditch:


I like how some joker graffitied 'break' on the building underneath of 'TEA,' you can only see it from this angle as well.


Little exhibition we found in a random street that was part of the Anti Design Festival


This alphabet was cool, but its missing a W.. don't know if that was to make it fit more nicely on the page, or if there was some meaning behind it?


And we also went to Emerge, which is a platform for selected graduates from all different graphic design BA courses to exhibit and get their work out there.
This was one of my favourite pieces, its a typeface made from people with glow in the dark arms forming the letters, it looked so effective when you saw them all together.