Hamish Muir - A Lecture

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Today was the day of the much talked about lecture from the infamous designer and co-founder of 8vo that published the graphics journal 'Octavo'.

I left the pre-lecture research quite late (till yesterday just spilled over into the AM) and was a bit bemused by what I saw on his website. Sally had talked about him as a prolific type designer yet what I saw was spreads for architechture.

Dubiously listening with pad open and flummoxing technical hurdles crossed, I listened and it was great. I wouldn't peg him down so much as a typographer, more a graphic artist with a keen interest in type. Might not be much between it other than the fact that he's worked and is proud to show more than just numerous amounts of typefaces (although his 'portfolio' was very heavily type orientated and tangents stemmed from some typographic amusement/story).

The main aspect I took from it, even though I didn't particularly favour his style of design (Swiss-style graphics has never really 'wowed' me as such), was his reminiscence which sparked something in me (and others that I talked to afterwards about it) to make giant big prints of work totally by hand. Seeing the processes that 8vo went through to make designs that nowadays would all be click-clicking on a computer was astounding. It was like all this time I've been thinking that graphics is computer work and suddenyl realised that most (or the interesting part for me personally) is the paper based stuff, so why start on electrical to go to tangible? Start tangible and stay tangible?

Whatever questions it placed yet to be answered, I felt (and still do after the post-lecture hype) that I need to start sitting at a blank desk. Even better: a blank room and stop thinking about end points and do some more interesting processes to get to my end point even if it ends up being an A4 print.

I forget that if I stay at a computer as Hamish said "the computer becomes the process rather than a tool". And I become a tool for letting this happen.