28.11.2019
This is James Langdon
Isomorphs
A series of public events accompanying the exhibition Off the Grid, organised by the staff and teachers of Graphic Design at KASK – School of Arts Gent.
There is a contemporary consensus that graphic design should have something to do with its content. Historically speaking, this was not always the case. Even 50 or 60 years ago, prominent European designers idealised generic page layouts and typefaces intended to be suitable for any and all content. But, for now at least, we seem to agree that it’s good to make design decisions with respect to content. James Langdon will talk about examples of graphic design that go much further than this, and make relations with the content — by technical, material, or graphic means — that are so absurdly specific as to make them practically illegible.
James Langdon is an independent graphic designer, writer and professor in communication design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Since 2004, he has worked closely with many artists designing publications and exhibitions. From 2008 to 2018 he was a founding director of the artist-run contemporary art space Eastside Projects in Birmingham. He is presently working on a biography of English designer and teacher Norman Potter, and is a PhD candidate at RMIT University in Melbourne.
