I watched the OFFSET 2015 presentation about Andy Altmann who is the Co-founder of his design group, ‘Why Not Associates’. He works alongside David Ellis who he met when studying at the Royal College of Art London in the 1980’s were Altmann’s love for typography started. Although when he had finished his studies he set up Why Not Associates with Ellis and Howard Greenhalgh accidentally as they were experimenting different approaches to design.
Their first official partnership work was with Next who wanted them to create typography for the men's section of their catalogue, a project they turned down and ended up working on the redesign of ‘The Next Directory’ cover instead. Their design for this cover called ‘No.5’ was created using 2 cut outs of the number 5 positioned at different angles and distances from the camera lens with no photoshopped involved to create the final product. This allowed them to be playful with the placement and experiment how small changes affected the overall design.
The company also started doing typographic work for advert and television titles such as numerous typographic advertisements and branding for First Direct Bank and the typographic programme advertisement for promoting the channel 4 show, Dispatches: Unseen Gaza. It is so powerful how just using a simple sans serif font over moving image can great such an impact and impression to someone watching.
One of their best known logo pitch was to Canvas, a Tv channel in Belgium. They approached Why Not Associates asking them to redesign their logo but when Altmann saw their original logo he saw a frame so simply got rid of the middle rectangle and pitched them to just use a simple square that reflects a clean canvas. Another example of how something so simplistic can be symbolic.
Although the topic that intrigued me the most was his Altmann working along Artist Gordon Young to create the comedy carpet in Blackpool which won the Tokyo Grand Prix design award in 2012. This place holds a special place in my heart because it lies outside the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool, somewhere I admire and have in fact been to.
It was built in a cross shape using 160,000 granite letters embedded into concreate and put together like a puzzle on the sea front. The idea behind it is expressing the history of British comedy as during the industrial revolution people from Manchester started to be able to afford holidays and would visit Blackpool to relax and have fun. Comedians would also visit there to entertain the holiday-goers. Their inspiration for the typography, colours and overall look for the carpet came from the various ‘old style’ letter pressed posters and programmes that would be displayed and given out when a comedian was visiting. However when the council priced the art it would of cost them 5-6 million pounds and they deemed it too expensive so Gordon Young created his own construction company for the project and created it himself for a fraction of the price.
I think it really is incredible piece of art which is a homage to British Comedic culture and the comedic history of Blackpool and has been produced brilliantly reflecting the ‘old style’.
