Sai's Design Context Blog Year 1: January 2010

Friday, 22 January 2010

Wednesday, 20 January 2010

o accompany Abolish the Forest, a movie he produced in conjunction with illustrator Adam Hayes, Henry Hobson reflected the provocative title with an equally radical solution. Screenprinting with cement on virgin paper stock was the perfect metaphor for concreting over virgin forests.

The promotional material comprises a book and poster. The book catalogs the travel journal, research material, and background to the movie and the poem it animates.

The innovative technique was key to the project. By printing with such a destructive medium, Hobson felt he was able to convey perfectly the inherent tension in the title. In this way, medium and message are cleverly combined.

Printing the piece himself, Hobson’s diligent research into the optimum silkscreen method to achieve flexibility, superfine image reproduction, and color matching paid off with an Innovations in Concrete award, sponsored by the British Cement Association.

Life Size

Hyperkit
Created to change perceptions of how a book is used and how it behaves, Life Size is a collection of investigations into and fascinations with the scale of objects. It questions how the shape and size of a book governs the way its contents are presented. The book takes as inspiration home-improvement and homecraft manuals. Cutting and folding techniques are employed throughout in the highly creative presentation of a host of disparate objects—buttons, a die-cut mug, a set of perforated pull-out postcards—all presented at their actual size.

The book’s dimensions dictate how objects are displayed, whether on one page or across a series of pages. By showing these objects at life size within the format of the book, the reader is encouraged to engage with them in a different way. Readers also encounter a number of objects that can be used within real-life situations, such as a place setting at a dining table. By incorporating such objects, the designers question the function of the book and push the boundaries of what a book can be.