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David Keshavjee - Julien Tavelli

Awarded

David Keshavjee / Julien Tavelli

'creating tools - using tools' (diploma work)

Graphic Design

Jury report

A Toolbox to Be Reckoned With
As part of their de­gree port­fo­lio for the Ecole can­tonale d'art de Lau­sanne (ECAL) David Ke­shav­jee and Julien Tavelli de­vel­oped their own new tools for con­vert­ing their ty­po­graph­i­cal works. These in­clude a com­puter pro­gramme that au­to­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates fonts, a set of wooden let­ters and lay­out-gen­er­at­ing script.
The work­ing process, which in­volves sev­eral com­plex and time-con­sum­ing stages, is at the fore­front of their con­sid­er­a­tions and is doc­u­mented in de­tail in the ap­pur­tenant pub­li­ca­tion. The cen­tral tenet is the con­ver­gence of ana­log and dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy: first, they use their com­puter pro­gramme to gen­er­ate a type­face. Then, on this basis, they trans­pose the forms of the let­ters to a wooden panel and saw them out. These are aligned in a wooden frame sized to fit the poster sheet that has al­ready been dig­i­tally printed and fixed in place by vices. The traces of crafts­man­ship and ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties that re­sult from the man­ual print­ing process are de­lib­er­ately left and in­cor­po­rated as a con­scious de­sign el­e­ment. One ex­am­ple of this pro­ject is a se­ries of 12 ty­po­graph­i­cal posters ad­ver­tis­ing fic­ti­tious mu­si­cal events.
The com­bi­na­tion of man­ual and dig­i­tal processes is re­peated at each step: in the pro­duc­tion and ap­pli­ca­tion of the ty­pog­ra­phy, in the com­po­si­tion and fi­nally in the course of print­ing. By com­bin­ing and con­trast­ing such di­verse tools, Ke­shav­jee and Tavelli have suc­ceeded in achiev­ing a re­fresh­ing and in­spir­ing re­sult in which the aes­thetic of the raw wood­cut meets the aes­thetic of the smooth dig­i­tal print.
Ke­shav­jee and Tavelli work ac­cord­ing to the prin­ci­ple that the means in­flu­ences the form and that new forms of ex­pres­sion in graphic de­sign can be cre­ated by com­bin­ing dif­fer­ent tools. This con­cept is fully vin­di­cated by the se­ries of posters they have cre­ated using this ap­proach.
With the tools they have de­vised and the work­ing process they fol­low, David Ke­shav­jee and Julien Tavelli have pro­vided the basis for a wide and var­ied range of ex­pres­sive graphic de­sign that of­fers con­sid­er­able as yet un­tapped po­ten­tial. This is a tool­box to be reck­oned with.
Au­re­lia Müller

Biography

David Keshavjee
Born in
1985
Education
Graphic Designer

also in

2011

2014

Julien Tavelli
Born in
1984
Education
Graphic Designer

also in

2011

2013

Web

www.maximage.biz

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