Note: I am currently hustling to wrap up work on a book about the new minimalist, brutalist and modernist typographies. I have a few entries on designers left to write and since I find blogging less initimdating than Microsoft Word I will be writing these last entries on jnamdevhardisty.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks, Namdev
All images from Hudson-Powell.com
Hello Kitty’s Wizard Mirror for “Kitty’s Secret House” exhibition, Hong Kong.
Hudson-Powell occupy a truly unique place in contemporary design practice (aside from being a partnership of two brother, Luke and Jody Hudson-Powell) being known equally for the elegant print design they craft for restaurants, cultural institutions and fashion and generative digital artworks and applications. Considering the typical chasm between those two practices, it comes as no surprise that the studio do a little of everything in between as well.
Canteen opening invitation
Much has been made of such digital projects as an art-generating program for the Barbican London, children building Rube Goldberg-esque constructions in Nickelodeon TV spots or Hello Kitty’s Wizard Mirror installation (a fun-house mirror kind of project where viewers could see themselves with an ever-changing abstract head) but little has been said about their print work which seems to come from a completely different mind. Their work for Canteen, a restaurant opened with the aim of celebrating British cuisine and design is just that, a celebration of British design with references to the classical typography of 1950’s Penguin book covers and the iconography of shields. The exterior signage set in Johnston Light (a pre-cursor to Gill Sans) is a thing of beauty that feels like its been sitting on the building for the last 60 years while the individual print pieces consitute a kind of elegant Modernism—serif type organized in a grid of rule lines and white space. A shocking contrast to the neon colors and explosive imagery that is in much of their digital work.
Canteen exterior signage
In projects like the fashion newsletter Letters From London and a record sleeve for the band Men-An-Tol (designed in collaboration with Jethro Haynes) a similiar tension between modernism and tradition is at play. Both designs luxuriate in their deep blacks while making use of a fairly agressive modern composition but the use of humanist sans serif typefaces softens the effect. Instead of appearing technical there’s an ambience of some other time in history. One that we don’t know first-hand but are sure it exists. The closet comparison I can make between the brothers’ print work and another designer would be the early work of Peter Saville. Hudson-Powell, like Saville, are masters of creating works that evoke contradictory themes, times and places and it is for this reason that the work is so striking.
Letter From London newsletter
But what to make of the aesthetic schizophrenia of their print and digital work? I believe it is simply a matter of context. There is a clear context for the Canteen work that places it in within a certain historical trajectory, there is not such a trajectory or even a need to acknowledge a trajectory when creating your own software to produce self-generated images or making an installation for a celebration of Hello Kitty. Its context, of course, that grounds their work in graphic design practice while leading to so many interesting end-points. As the brothers say, “if we had just wanted to do any our own projects and work on our own style, we probably would have ended up as artists instead of designers.”*
* Interview in +81 Magazine, Japan. Vol. 40, 2008.
