Copyright Barbara Glauber.Last night was my first Australian Graphic Design Association event at The Baracks Palace Cinemas.  It is a great venue for a talk as I previously went to the same venue (not possibly the same room) for the Brisbane Advertising and Design Club Richard Maddocks talk.

Barbara Glauber started by thanking the designers who helped her. When she used the same typefaces in their invoices for her credits, I knew instantly that yes, she loves her work. She injected stories of her own life into the talk including a touch of American stories and cultural myths (from Walt Disney being rumored to be buried at her school to buffalo wings). Barbara including sketches from her high school days shows that creative development starts at a young age - I still keep the images that I made on Photoshop from 2000 despite a few PC crashes.

Copyright Barbara Glauber. Image from AGDA site.Rather than using the word 'clients', the Dutch would use the word 'commisioner'. Throughout the talk, Barbara adopts this and refers to her clients as commissioners.  It makes sense to me - if you start seeing your clients as commissioners, would the way you approach your work change?

Self-Imposed Limitations are Liberating

Some of her strategy in her work include: not using the same group of elements, using different typefaces for each work, mix and edit type and therefore not using a typeface 'out of a can', used white space to react to the rest of the elements and she would look at the use of form if she cannot engage with the content.  Making a clean presentation of a work would frame it.  Looking at how an artist would do the work (she designs those artist books) would mean that the resulting design would be appropriate to the artist. 

A relationship with the typefaces becomes more evident - describing typefaces as being "precious", "formal", "sentimental". 

Throughout it, I was also reminded of other designers from a previous event, Semi-Permanent Brisbane.  The way she pays attention to the detail reminds me of Timba Smits of Wooden Toy Quarterly and her work in illustrations to show statistics and trends reminds me of Scott Dadich's work in Wired News.

Barbara certainly delivered an interesting talk.  For some reason, I am not sure if it's due to my note-taking (every time I looked up the page I kept on losing track with what she was saying) but that is because she jumps from work to work.  However, she parted with some interesting insights and this great phrase:

May the form be with you.

The end.

Written by Hannah Suarez

Event Name: Barbara Glauber - AGDA International Speaker Tour

If you loved this: Semi-Permanent Brisbane Personal POV (event write-up), IdN Onair with the peoople who produce IdN Magazine (interview), The Future of Digital Art with Jaymis Loveday (interview)

Interesting resources: marksimonson.com, www.typographyapp.com, typophile.com/typowiki, new.typographica.org, welovetypography.com, ilovetypography.com