Brief 5: TDR Brief

Brief 

give me something i'll want to keep forever.

Tip 

remember this is primarily a design communication design thinking workshop.

researching me to make informed decisions
lateral thinking — what is it that I (ME) would / could cherish forever

if it's made / realised then all the better.
if it needs explaining, then you should find a way to explain it in the context of the piece rather than as a note attached to it as an excuse for not putting that thinking into the work




Ian Anderson 

The Designers Republic's works are often playful and bright, and considered Maximum-minimalist, mixing images from Japanese anime and subvertised corporate logos, with a postmodern tendency towards controversial irony, featuring statements like "Work Buy Consume Die", "Robots Build Robots", "Customized Terror", "Buy nothing, pay now", and "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's county of South Yorkshire) — affirming they were not from London's design community in Soho.

Initially, Ian Anderson founded The Designers Republic to design flyers for the band Person to Person, which he managed at the time. His first ideas were inspired by Russian constructivism.

An early client was Leeds band Age of Chance, for whom they developed a series of record covers between 1986 and 1987. The sleeve of the 1987 12-inch "Don't Get Mad... Get Even! (The New York Remixes)" was selected as one of Q’s "100 Best Record Covers of All Time" in 2001.

In 1994, Emigre magazine devoted a whole issue to the Designers Republic, a copy of which was bought by NY MoMA. This issue is still Emigre’s best-ever seller and is now sold out

The Designers Republic was introduced to a larger audience by their record covers for the English electronica label Warp Records (also based in Sheffield). In addition to designing the covers for much of Warp's roster of artists, such as Autechre and Aphex Twin, tDR has also created covers for other label artists such as Moloko, Fluke, Funkstörung, The Orb, Pulp (and Jarvis Cocker), Pop Will Eat Itself, Supergrass and Towa Tei.

Outside the musical sector, tDR created the visuals, packaging and manual for the PlayStation–Sega Saturn game Wipeout (1995), the interface for the PC gameHardware (1998), and packaging and posters for the first Grand Theft Auto (1997). They cooperated with the Swatch company in 1996 to design their own watch. They also designed the packaging for Sony's AIBO.

LF: Where did your vision of a “future” aesthetic come from?

IA: The aesthetic was a visual shorthand distilled from sci-fi films, television series, comics and books, from The Lost Planet to Doctor Who, to Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, UFO, Joe 90 and Captain Scarlet. It was the moon landing and every airbrushed paperback cover for a Robert A. Heinlein or Isaac Asimov novel. It was NASA, and optical character recognition. It was everything in that realm filtered through one person’s taste, choice, vision and understanding, and presented as a consumable, digestible, inclusive visual language. We aimed to create stuff that immediately “looked” futuristic.

The inspiration, motivation, drive, starting point for my work is pop culture: why people do what they do, why they believe what they believe, what enriches their lives, and why and how that can be tapped into – what makes people tick. Then the question is, how can visual communication detonate that, and how does the role of the designer work as a sponge for information, and a projector or a megaphone to present that information in a targeted, desirable, consumable form.

After doing a bit of research i realised he started his career by creating sleeves for bands he knew, and so i thought that he could maybe have a vinyl sleeve that was like a one off edition with a montage of some of the bands he had made covers for. 

Using these 3 photos i used overlay to create a vinyl sleeve, and thinking about his work which was bright and colourful i used brights colours.  

Final Design 

This is my final sleeve design, i have added a circle in the middle that again is overlaid so it adds more context and resembles more a vinyl sleeve. I think the design fits there work well and is maybe something he would like to keep seeing as its a montage of bands he must like or has worked with and is something that he wouldn't have had before. 

Vinyl Sleeve mock up