Generative Logo: Seed Media Group

Stefan Sagmeister, Matthias Ernstberger, Richard The

Generative logo using a custom web-based software with ready-to-print vector export.

Seed Media group is a scientific publisher of magazines, books and films. As we worked on the identity it became clear that the end result should constitute a visualization of science and media. Science is culture, it surrounds us, it is part of everything we do. We were looking for something open ended and flexible, a vessel we could fill with new meanings as they developed.
Formally the identity is based on phyllotaxis, a form found everywhere from Seashells to Greek architecture, from pineapples to the Sydney opera house, horns of Gazelles to the optimum curve a highway turns.
Looking at the world through this scientific lens of the phyllotaxis, we developed an identity like a chameleon, it always takes on the form of the medium it is put on. So for example on the business cards it shows a version of the portrait of the bearer or in the logo in the magazine has the colors of the months cover.

As the logo has to be changing whenever it is applied we build a web-based logo generator. You can upload an image, the colors are analyzed and a vector, ready-to-print file is exported.

Art Direction & Design: Stefan Sagmeister, Matthias Ernstberger

Conversations with Paul Rand

"When you say design, everybody has their definition that does not correspond to yours, there are many good definitions. The synthesis of form and content. In other words without content there is no form and without form there is no content. A work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable. When form predominates meaning is blunted but when content predominates interest flags.Genius comes in when both of these things fuse.Without the aesthetic means that its not done for love, that its done for some ulteria motive, because it sells, because its popular, beacuse its crazy - all this stuff.

Graphic design is one of those phrases that doesn't mean anything, cause anything thats graphic is graphic, painting, dancing, writing, if you see it its graphic. The genre of art, painting, graphic design is art. That's the genre. Its all art.

The vocabulary or language of art, or of aesthetics. Order, variety, contrast, symmetry, tension, balance, scale, texture, space, shape, light shade and colour. This is the language of form.

Don't try to be original just try to be good. That sounds sort of naive but its true. Without aesthetics you can't find the truth to do things with quality. I think this is in a big sense of what aesthetics means.

Art is an idea that has found its perfect form. There is too many possibilities. No matter how perfectly you do something it can still be improved."
Paul Rand.

www.paul-rand.com/thoughts_hallofFame.shtml

JOYOUS MACHINES: Michael Landy and Jean Tinguely

This exciting exhibition will focus upon the connection between the work of Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), one of the most radical, inventive and subversive sculptors of the mid twentieth-century, and renowned British artist Michael Landy, who has been significantly influenced by Tinguely and his constructive and destructive tendencies.