just rambling

Sticking Up For Singlish

It took a semester away from Singapore for local graphic designer Ray Han to begin to wonder what it meant to be a Singaporean. While on exchange as a student at Maryland Institute College of Art, the recent graduate of NTU’s School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) realised how little people understood and knew about Singapore. This is why she created A Piece of Gum. A Peace of Gum, an illustrated book about Singlish, for her final-year project that was showcased in the recent ADM Grad Show 2010.

“I decide to work on Singlish. because I believed that it is the only non state engineered piece of culture and is an organic fusion of the diversity,” says Ray over an e-mail interview.

Putting together the English reference to “bubble gum” which is banned here, along with the similar sounding Hokkien word “gum”, meaning the ability to live in harmony, Ray has put together a visual book with minimal text but lots of visual metaphors to tell the story of Singlish — a language created out of the diversity of peoples here, and has helped to bring them together.

This book is Ray’s first step in a quest to create a timeless design that represents the collective identity of Singaporeans. “I think Singaporeans born and lived in Singapore will always have their identity with them, because we grow, breathe, talk and eat here,” she says. “I believe the identity is formed without them knowing.”

She hopes that this book will help readers discover Singapore culture from a graphic designer’s point of view, and she’ll love to see it publish one day. For Ray, infusing national identity into their design is a matter of choice. “The decision to represent the collective identity excites me, and designers who are equally interested in this area can help bring knowledge for the world to understand and appreciate our roots, and stories,” she says.

Now that she has graduated, designing will have to take a backseat for Ray. She is on a Ministry of Education scholarship, and will be teaching for the next four years. However, she will continue designing and one day start up her own design label.

Find out more about Ray and her book, A Piece of Gum, at <http://theraybit.com>

Kult: A Visual Archive of Our Time

The magazine market with its quick turnaround and fierce competition has always been a fertile ground for creativity. This is a latest incarnation (ok, I’m a little late in discovering this) of a magazine: Kult’s ArtCade Machine — 3D Magazine. It merges a magazine with a 80’s arcade machine!
KULT

Kult, is a free printed quarterly magazine by a local creative agency of the same name that uses visual culture to explore issues of our society today. The ArtCade was created for its launch issue last year that explored the theme of “Trust”.

In its second issue, Kult looked at the “Artificial” and also created an interactive online version of its magazine. Unfortunately, it is offline currently. The magazine edited by Brendan Graham and art directed by Steve Lawler recently published its third issue, which features some 29 illustrations by artists from all around the world that looks at the health epidemic AIDS. Compared to the first two issues, which came in forms that explored new boundaries in magazine publishing, this is a little bit more regular, but still an interesting read.

KULT

Kult isn’t the first local magazine that devotes itself to use visual culture to explore issues. In fact, its art director Steve worked on the last issue of a now defunct local magazine FL.ag that runs on the same concept. Interestingly, the issue of FL.ag that Steve worked on also looked at AIDS and its cover image is the same one done by Austin Cowdall found inside this issue of Kult.

FL.ag

A lookback at THE LASALLE SHOW ‘10

This was my first year attending graduate showcases of graphic design students. My first visit was to NAFA’s Be A Good Creative, which was disappointing. It didn’t help that my designer friend had warned me beforehand that local graduation shows were a waste of time. So, I didn’t expect too much when I visited THE LASALLE SHOW ‘10 for the graduates of LASALLE College of the Arts. And, I’m glad I did. To be fair, LASALLE seems to have a much wider pool of graphic design students judging by the number of exhibits. Their Design Communication certificates, which you can specialise in Advertising Communication, Graphic Communication and Image & Communication, begin from diploma level and go up to a Master of Arts in Design.

The show left me with the impression that LASALLE graphic design graduates were educated with an approach to graphic design that was more conceptual than mere ’styling’. Their Diploma level students worked on real-world problems, such as designing way-finding systems for People’s Park Complex and Toa Payoh bus interchange, and advertising concepts for National Museum Singapore and Yellow Pages. Their graduates’ work brought that to another level by tackling the issues of graphic design’s application in the real world.

A project that literally stood out (left) was Richard Phua’s White Ink, a series of visuals that shows the negative spaces that one usually doesn’t “see”, but is all around us. One thing he did was to print a book of newspaper pages on transparencies. This eliminated the white space and made you realise how difficult reading is without white space! Unfortunately, Richard’s website hardly says anything (actually, nothing).

Stella Clarissa’s Dyslexia: I See Words Differently (right) introduces graphic design to investigate a community’s specific problem — reading. Even as graphic designers constantly argue about legibility issues, we often forget that the argument is based on the vision of a normal person. Her work inserts this community’s concern to nudge graphic design towards a more inclusive form of communication.

The Papercy Project (left), by Benjamin Koh, brings alive the medium of paper in a series of posters that are just beautiful and interactive. As part of this project, he created an astronomy calendar and posters that celebrate a origami typeface and the year of biodiversity. In an era where it’s so easy to do design digitally, it’s great to still see graphic designers showing the beauty of what a pair of hands can do.

While the graduates works showed the possibilities of graphic design, LASALLE’s Masters students used it as an intellectual tool to understand our culture. Aditi Bhari’s Impressions of a City: Singapore created a visually exciting book of what shapes this country. He’s managed to appropriate images of our everyday visual culture and matched them with observations from some of Singapore’s best intellectual minds. I’ll love to get hold of the book!

Finally, Sanchita Jain’s Decoding Culture combines graphic design with intervention in public spaces as a kind of experiment to pin down India’s culture. She created a series of public signs that are beautiful, hilarious and sometimes puzzling (as viewed from a different culture) and put them up in India to see how people react. This was all cut into a short film. She actually created similar signs for Singapore, but unfortunately she did not have time to conduct a similar experiment here. Although, I wonder if she might get into trouble if she carried out such a Situationist act here.

And that’s my take on THE LASALLE SHOW ‘10. In a way, it’s restored my belief that students’ work can be exciting and great. Plus, it was only a year ago when I was a student, so I can totally understand how comments, both good and bad, can shape the journey ahead!

In Need of A Pioneering Design

Here’s a graphic design project I hope someone will take on in the years to come: A system of design guidelines to brand the public service.

The Singapore Public Service is  a vast and diverse entity containing some 15 Ministries and over 50 organisations. They differ in terms of age, what they do, who they are made up of, and also who they serve. However,  in recent years, the public service  has been championing a “whole-of-government” approach to how it serves the public. To some extent, it has tried to brand itself this way too. Just today, they launched a coffee table book Pioneers Once More, “the first about the Singapore Public Service as a whole”.

Yet, the design of the book cover is disappointing. It is an abstract kueh lapis that doesn’t say much to me. It hides the interesting stories and photos inside, and lacks a stature that you would associate with history books. It looks like one of those diaries you may find at Popular bookstore. I’m guessing the design team faced the problem of who can be the face of the public service? How can we present the public service as one when the reality is that people don’t see it as that?

The final product is an lost opportunity to visually define the public service as one for the first time. So, the issue remains out there for our local designers to take on, and it’ll be interesting to see what solutions exist.

What is a book?

In the past few months, Borders Bookshop in Singapore has literally “cheapen” books with its seemingly never-ending weekly offers. It’s got me really curious about what is actually going on in Borders. Is it closing down? Is this a sign that people will no longer pay for good books? Are books going extinct?

While I have no idea if Borders is closing down (my guess: yes), I’ll suggest you attend a book art exhibition just a 5 minute walk from the Borders in Wheelock Place to find answers to my other two questions. In Centre to Periphery at the Japan Creative Centre, you will find no bookshelves. In fact, you might not even find books — those with a cover, spine, page and words on them. Instead, you find yourself lifting up an empty book to capture text projections…

Enlightenment (2009), Goh Qidi Jonathan

… staring into a pinhole camera made out of a book to find out its ending…

Shin Mitsu (2001), Miyuki Kido

… wondering how solid books can be…

The Ground Book (1998), Rie Takeuchi

… seeing a book scene come to life…

All About Her Story, Masako Kobayashi

… going through the “elements” of what makes a book’s character…

The Ele men tal In ter ludes (2009), Hazel Lim

… and contemplating how 10,000 years of life is so efficiently reduced to a tome you can carry home.

Byo-Koku-Tetsu-Cho (2002), Hirose Tsuyoshi

You won’t find any discounts for books at this exhibition organised by the Japan Creative Centre and La Liberia, but you will find, for free, that books are much more than just for your reading pleasure.