8.2024
Welcome dear reader, and thanks for visiting! This site exists to present my designs, and to express the kinds of work I do and would love to undertake for future clients. But more than that, it’s a place to explore the design philosophies I want to adopt now and into the future. The broad concept that excites me the most is the intersection between art and science – forming a craft out creative discipline. I think few figures represent this area better than computer scientist Don Knuth (on the left in the first image) who, unsatisfied with the quality of printing in his first volume of ‘The Art of Computer Programming’, went on to write both TeX (typesetting software) and Metafont (type designing software designed to work with TeX). His correspondence with Hermann Zapf, and his discussion of the mathematical curves of the letter ‘S’ (both of which can be found in ‘Digital Typography’) both reveal a rigorous intertwining of human and machine, expressing the confident, vigorous strokes of the type-cutter in mathematical code.
My wish is to practice and to study in this space, and perhaps to help others through doing so. I love working with CAD models in illustration workflows, for instance: this is a page by areyoshi where we produced models that could be manipulated to add some perspectival rigor to the art. The tag-line of the site is ‘Illustrative Graphics For a Modern Age’ – I love the idea of working illustratively in a graphic field, using models, math, and automation to make such undertakings more efficient and economically viable.
I want to undertake projects like these as a craftsperson rather than an artist, concentrating on exercising skill and following briefs methodologically with an attention to detail – but I also want to explore new ideas and means of personal expression. I’ve made a number of attempts in the past (Icons in Ink, Scruffy, and Dwelt), but they’ve all remained unfinished. I have some thoughts as to how to synthesise all of my thinking in this area, and am looking forward to sharing more in the near future! In the meantime, thanks again for taking a look.
