Typo 2012 Rian Hughes

What typo 2012 say

Dividing his time between illustration and design, Rian Hughes has provided design, custom type and illustration for advertising campaigns, CD and record sleeves, book jackets, graphic novels and television. Notable work includes the animated on-board safety film for Virgin Airlines, a collection of Hawaiian shirts, a range of watches for Swatch, a BDA International Gold Award winning brochure for MTV Europe’s Music Awards penned by Alan Moore, and numerous comic book logos for mainstream comic publishers DC Comics and Marvel. He releases his font designs through his own label, Device. Recent publications include CULTURE: Ideas can be Dangerous, Lifestyle Illustration of the 60s, and Yesterday’s Tomorrows, a collection of his comic work, which was recently launched at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and is now available in paperback in the US

What I think:  A Kenneth Branagh look alike, eloquent Intelligent speaker.
At the time I had no idea who Rian was I assumed he was a writer but have since discovered his amazing Illustration and Design work on his website

Culture : Ideas can be dangerous
Culture is your local consensus reality; your clothing, cuisine and hairstyle, the music you listen to, the films you see; your values, ideas, beliefs and prejudices. Culture, unlike race, is not quite an inevitability of birth, but ultimately, in its choice of statements, an intellectual position. Today culture has a powerful new vector: the internet. Ideas – from a YouTube video to a viral marketing phenomenon or a fundamentalist religion – are travelling further and faster, and changing the cultural landscape like never before. In a new electronic democracy of ideas, cultural power is devolving to the creative individual. Soon, we will all have the power to create. We just have to decide if it be art or bombs.

 The talk was basically a run though of the ideas surrounding Culture in his book Culture: Ideas are dangerous.  He covered a lot of ground so much so it was difficult to keep pace with him.

Rian Hughes is a man of many sides. Comic book artist of 2000AD fame, accomplished illustrator, graphic designer, type designer, “prolific rummager” and most recently author of a book entitled “Cult-ure: Ideas Can Be Dangerous”. Hughes’ talk today at TYPO focused on the later, offering a thought-provoking 45 minutes on the concept of culture, and how (for better or worse) it shapes our perception of the world.

 Interestingly, the motivation to produce of the book was born out of a close brush with fate aboard a flight on route from Moscow. After the hydraulics on the plane failed, Hughes, contemplating his own mortality, thought “… what was that project I never got around to?”. An hour and a half later when safely on the ground, the seed for ‘Cult-ure’ was born. Drawing from a vast collection of scribbles and notes in his box of Moleskines, Hughes started work on the book.

 Visually, Hughes described the book’s design as a reference to a manifesto, bible or other “source of authority”; using gilded edges and an authoritative typographic style. Beginning with the quote, “culture is roughly anything we do and monkeys don’t”, Hughes took the audience through a selection of topics from the book. Ranging from the simplification of symbols, to the theme of resonant objects (the idea of an object having it’s own meaning, plus it’s cultural baggage), to the human skill / need for pattern recognition (Hughes provided the example of the famous ‘face on Mars’), the talk was fantastically thought-provoking.
Perhaps the best snippet from the talk, was Hughes concluding response to the question

“How do you kill an idea?”. The answer? “Have a better one”.

Got some free stickers too!