In this interview Simon Esterson, art director and co-owner of Eye Magazine, kicks off with an impressive list of rituals and superstitiousness. Simon continues about how perfection may be a dangerous thing for designers. We would like to know if four issues of Eye per year is enough and how they select content. He gives us a beautiful insight in how he balances every day as an art director, owner, paper lover and design-geek. In his extensive career as a freelance magazine and newspaper consultant (he doesn’t call himself a graphic designer), he found out that designing a newspaper is quite similar to building up a huge lego-set and that ads aren’t just undesirable pages in a magazine. Recorded at Facing Pages 2012, Arnhem, The Netherlands.

Eye Magazine

Simon Esterson Associates

We had a talk with graphic designer Rejane Dal Bello at the What Design Can Do-conference in Amsterdam. This strong visual designer never stops working, drawing and visualizing ideas. We asked her why she left her home country Brasil to study in New York and The Netherlands. She tells us that all of her decisions regarding life and design are based upon the ability to develop herself and to add something to the world. This is the reason she doesn’t mind working pro-bono for projects that matter, like developing a visual identity for a Peruvian Children’s hospital. We also talk about her heroes, teaching and if she calls herself a Dutch designer after working at Studio Dumbar for 8 years. She tells us life happens and that she can never really plan ahead, recently that brought her to work in London at Wolff Olins. Recorded at the What Design Can Do 2012, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Rejane dal Bello

Paz Holandesa - children's hospital project

Studio Dumbar

Laura Meseguer is a Barcalonese type designer, known for her custom lettering and joyful typefaces. She started to play with letters at a very early age in her father’s letterpress-company. In the early 90’s she moved on towards playing with digital letters and started her own foundry called Type-Ø-Tones. She definitely became a type designer after studying at the post-graduate Type]Media course in the Hague. We talk about her typo-mags series and how this project came together. And she shares her views on how type design is evolving in an age where everyone with a computer has the tools to create a typeface. Recorded at Facing Pages 2012, Arnhem, The Netherlands.

Laura Meseguer

Type-Ø-Tones

Laura's fonts on MyFonts

At the Facing Pages festival 2012 we talked with organizer Joost van der Steen, who’s quite an enterprising person. This interaction designer is partner in design studio OK Parking – together with graphic designer William van Giessen. To celebrate the first birthday of a blog they were keeping up, they surprised their contributors with the publication of OK Periodical magazine, which eventually led to a series of eight issues. Driven by their love for independent magazines, on top of that they decided to organize the OK festival in 2010, about independent magazines powered by crowdsourcing. We talk with Joost about all his initiatives and we ask him if he has some advise for people who want to start up their own magazine. We end the talk by reflecting some nice lectures that were given at the first edition of the festival. Recorded at Facing Pages 2012, Arnhem, The Netherlands.

OK Parking

OK Periodicals

Facing Pages

We had a talk with Charlotte Cheetham, founder of the Manystuff-blog which she initially started in 2006 because her boyfriend studied graphic design. Being a communication-student herself she was intrigued with graphic design, especially books, and started to collect and publish projects and designers that she liked. Besides updating the blog almost daily, she also curates exhibitions and researches the field. She finds it necessary to create this extra dimension to her work, next to the flatness of a screen. We asked her some big questions about the changing and maybe generalizing world of graphic design and the way different countries approach design-education. She shares her opinion about the matter with us, even as her plans for the future. Recorded at Facing Pages 2012, Arnhem, The Netherlands.

Manystuff

Charlotte on Tumblr

During a year of teaching English in the Czech republic, the Eastern European typography on book covers caught Gabriele Wilson’s eye. When she came back to the States she started a study Graphic Design at Parsons. Nowadays she’s a teacher there and runs her own design studio in New York focused on book cover design. We asked her if she sees trends in book design, not only in the visual sense but also in the way designers are approached for jobs. She shares her extensive experience with us. The journey towards the design is the most interesting part of the job for her. She loves to read the manuscripts and to do research about the diverse subjects of her projects. We think this kind of explains why she secretly wants to work for the FBI. Recorded at Tÿpo St.Gallen 2011, Switzerland.

Gabriele Wilson Design

book cover archive

Parson’s New School for design

In Sankt Gallen we had a talk with none other than Jost Hochuli, the legendary Swiss graphic designer and typographer. He is an expert in book design and also well known for his writing. In his long and exceptional career he got the opportunity to study and work with a lot of design legends, such as Adrian Frutiger. We want to know all about it! He explains how he sees book design as a ‘Gesammt Kunstwerk’ and what he thinks about badly designed books. He shares his remarkable career with us, including how he cofounded the VGS, the Sankt Gallen publishing house. And how he (being almost 80 years old) only recently got the opportunity to actually teach in his own field. Recorded at Tÿpo St.Gallen 2011, Switzerland.

VGS - St.Gallen publishing company

Jost Hochuli at Hyphen Press

Typeface designs Allegra / Alena

‘Detail in typography’ book review

The busy Tina Roth Eisenberg (aka Swiss Miss) had a talk with us at her birthplace Sankt Gallen. Although she was born, raised and educated in Switzerland, she found in New York a place that actually adapts to her speed. She is the curator and composer of the swissmiss-blog, that started out as a personal visual bookmark archive in 2005, but reaches more than a million viewers per month nowadays! Her blog has so much impact that she can actually launch an upcoming designer by the exposure of a single post. We are wondering if this acquired power makes her nervous and if there are certain Swiss things that she misses in the States. In the end we talk about the other concepts, products and brands she created, that originated from her need to be her own client. Recorded at Tÿpo St.Gallen 2011, Switzerland.

Swiss Miss blog

Teuxdeux app

Creative Mornings

Tattly

Studio Mates

We had a critical and insightful talk with Dan Perjovschi, visual artist from Romania, about the role of art in society. He is well known for covering museum walls with his humoristic yet critical political cartoons. The fall of communism in Romania gave him the freedom to travel, but did it also take a part of his artistic identity with it? 
He shares his need for changing perspectives in this materialistic society and how it took him ten year to move his work from paper to the wall. His need for perspectives eventually led to a retrospective exhibition of his work, together with his wife who’s also an artist. Did it bring him what he was looking for? Recorded at Integrated 2011, Antwerp, Belgium.

Dan Perjovschi

TEDxBucharest talk by Dan

Thoughts for aces - free downloads of a set of drawings

This is the second time we meet Martin Tiefenthaler, who runs his own studio, teaches ‘typography and semiotics’ in Vienna and is the co-founder of the Typografische Gesellschaft Austria (TGA). Six years ago he just set up an educational system regarding typography, now he shares the results of this first harvest with us. We ask him why he thinks he’s a good teacher, but a bad designer.  He tells us how he was always into type, while he thought he was into art and how a book totally changed his life. At the end of this interview he leaves us with an untold story about his statement that typography is actually a political issue. We should start planning a third interview with him soon. Recorded at Tÿpo St.Gallen 2011, Swiss.

ID IID IIIDesign

Typografische Gesellschaft Austria

die Grafische