Today I attended a guest lecucture from scottish typographer & graphic designer Hamish Muir. In the lecture Muir unraveled the story of his journey as a practicing designer, from developing an interest as a child painting air fix models, to his current work teaching at various design establishments including the London College of Communication.
Scottish born Muir lived has lived out most of his life in England. Beginning his art education in the South West at Bournemouth & Poole College of Art, Muir progressed to undertaking a graphic design degree at Bath Academy of Art. After graduation and a stint working in london Muir continued his study at the Basel school of design. It was here he found himself being tutored by designers including Armin Hofmann (colour and basic design), Wolfgang Weingart (typography), Kurt Hauert (drawing) and André Gürlter (type design).
In 1984 Muir met up with former Bath degree students Mark Holt and Simon Johnston. Holt and Johnston had already undertaken various freelance jobs together under the name 8vo. Muir joined 8vo and together they opened a studio above a small sandwich shop in Convent Garden, London.
In the lecture Muir described the london design scene as being very ideas orientated, with projects relying on puns, witty copywriting, gimmicks and visual jokes. The typographic trends tended to be much conservative and traditional with type only really being secondary to image. 8vo set out to change this. Inspired by techniques more commonly associated with the typographic practice's of mainland europe designers. Essentially 8vo wanted to liberate typography, making dominant letterforms and type the focus of their work. Muir describes the relationship with clients then as being different to the traditional client designer relationship structures of today. Clients would have much more trust in designers, in some cases work would not even need to be second checked or signed off before print production.
The work produced at 8vo was subject to processes that didn't rely on the use of computers. It wasn't until several years after the birth of the macintosh 8vo invested in desktop publishing, a technology described by Muir that allows 'anyone and everyone to become a graphic designer'. Muir went on to tell the humorous story of how expensive it was to own and operate a macintosh and for many years 8vo produced all of their work using only two typefaces, Helvetica and Univers.
8vo made their name in the 80's and 90's by producing album art work for various bands signed to British record label, Factory Records. Some of their more famous works include the annual birthday posters for the famous Manchester based night club the hacienda and their branding for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Within the design industry 8vo are universally remembered for their self published typographic journal called The Octavo International Journal of Typography. Octavo consisted of eight issues (7 A4 print based and 1 interactive CD-ROM) all released between 1986 and 1992.
8vo disband in 1992 with the three founders each perusing new creative ventures. Today Muir divides his time between designed books and teaching at the London college of communication, Ravensbourne college of communication and Basel school of design.
