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