Gillian Bliase’s lecture VS Brouno maag lecture

¬Friday
O7th Nov 2008

Gillian Bliase’s lecture VS Brouno maag lecture
www.gillianblease.co.uk
www.daltonmaag.com

Gillian Blease studied in Castlefield for four years after which she moved to London to become an independent artist. Unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as she thought it would be. She stayed in London for a year but then decided to move to Manchester as she couldn’t reach satisfaction in terms of her design.

She studied at Stockport College doing a typing course, which she passed successfully. She took her career a step further by going to Japan for six weeks to enrich her mind with their culture, art and designs. In fact Japanese art has a great influence on her work.

Blease is more of freelance illustrator than a designer, she emphasise her creativity in newspapers e.g. the Guardian and books.

During the development of her career, she looked at lots of different images and designed with no rules or restriction. She looked at every little thing around her for inspiration and designed freely.

What I like the most about her designs is that they are fresh and have a glossy effect which is very common design wise. Her illustrations are very simple, flat and two-dimensional yet bold and narrative. In most of her designs she tends to use bold and vibrant colours to draw attention yet she uses clear graphic imagery to make it interesting to look at and still easy to read. However, this is not a restricted rule that she follows as she treats each client individually by looking at their history and previous designs whilst considering the main themes her clients want her to bring out.

In her presentation she used many to show where much of her inspiration comes from. She focused on her influences more than her own design, which I thought, was a little boring. Her main influences are illustration generally and logos, which she claims are ..‘fascinating.’. I think it was exciting to see how much research she does along with designing, and how important it was for her to look at different images to become what she is now. As a student that tells me that designing is not only about drawing skills, but also about generating ideas, researching, getting inspiration and by searching for any influential materials.

Due to her simple, colourful, stylistic, flat designs she was asked to design for the Guardian as an illustrator, where she to designed an illustration for the recipe page every week. She also worked in different columns in the Guardian e.g. food, relationship and health. After working for them she spent some time working in her own style but she was offered other work by the Guardian.

Blease likes to work with white spaces in her design work as she states ‘Space strengthens the design.’.

During the presentation Blease showed her work from when she first began designing to very recently. The work shows a dramatic change in her design as it gets more colourful and intense with a stronger stylistic touch.

The reason I chose to compare these two particular designers is firstly because of their incredible design work in their specialised area and secondly, the completely different ways that both have presented their work. Blease’s talk was the first presentation by a professional designer that I have attended.

Blease’s talk was in Stockport College with free admission. Maag’s design symposium was in Liverpool with £5 entry fee.

I thought that Blease’s talk was negative rather than positive as the artist looked shy and didn’t seem confident enough to talk about her work enthusiastically. She was looking at the screen and her computer most of the time rather than facing the audience. Through the talk I had the impression that she was putting her self down by using certain phrases such as ‘Luckily I have been offered the chance to work for the Guardian…’. During the talk she maintained the same low tone of voice, which didn’t really represent her excellent standard of work. On the other hand Maag showed how enthusiastic he is about typography by animatedly explaining each slide that appeared in his presentation. The talk was very positive and fun as Maag was making jokes throughout it. His tone of voice was changing showing his excitement about a certain piece. He also kept questioning why you would or wouldn’t do something and this involved the audience. He started his talk by questioning designs found stacked on shelves, which I found very evoking. He showed lots of examples o typography e.g. logos, brands, campaigns etc. These were not necessarily his own work but were shown to emphasise good and bad fonts. I enjoyed this as it made me aware of type. Attending both talks has raised my awareness of how much design work is affected by the way it is presented.


I found both lectures very useful as there were extreme opposites. In Blaise’s lecture, Gillian Blease was very genuine and emphasised how hard is it to find a design job after graduating as its one of the most competitive fields at the moment. She also discussed what the designer would have to go through to become recognisable. Her work was very effective and very stylistic; this is what illustration is mainly about.