Description

This issue marks the beginning of something of an experiment for us. The theme is Design and Place, and it is a Mind issue—so far so normal. The experiment is that we will keep this same theme for the next two issues as well. The aim? A triumvirate of Mind, Soul and Body issues all considering Design and Place. So welcome, to Ligature Journal Issue Seven.

The two-way interaction between Design and Place creates a vast landscape to traverse. Even by devoting three issues to it we cannot hope to provide a definitive survey of that terrain. We place no explicit constraints on our contributors, and they never fail to amaze us with how they meet the challenges we set them. This issue is no exception, so we are excited to offer you a collection of sometimes quite left-field responses and musings on the more intellectual (Mind) connections between design and place.

So, what’s in this issue?

We have an impassioned call to us as designers to reframe our relationship with our world before we kill it, and us. We follow up on two Sydney Design Festival presentations—a project involving extreme users and place from digital agency ustwo, and a virtual exhibition of very physical objects from a group of creatives from UNSW Art & Design. And we caught up with Annette Harcus, one of the 2018 inductees to the AGDA Hall of Fame, to get her thoughts on design in Australia.

As always, we include our regular items. Our Question interrogates designers with a close connection to another culture on how that influences their work in Australia. Our spotlight on young designers brings us the wonderfully titled ‘The Home with the Rotten Heart’ from UTS graduate Rachel Cronin, and not one, but two, emerging (twin sister) designers—an illustrator and a jeweller. And be sure to check out the invisible designer for this issue.

Finally, we are proud to have gathered our team of five interns from three Sydney design programs—Billy Blue, UTS and, for the first time, Enmore Design Centre. We’re sure you will agree that the subtle variations in approach gained from their respective colleges has resulted in another exciting issue.

The Cover

After the positive response to our letterpress printed cover for issue six, we decided to letterpress this cover too. A laser-cut sheet of acrylic provided the ‘artwork’ for printing the grid. Our barcode is a magnesium block. The metal and wood type is handset. All other elements are carved lino.

Printing was done on a hand operated proofing press entirely in-house. While the inking rollers are powered, they require frequent manual ‘topping up’. The net result—every cover varies slightly and therefore is unique.

Featuring:

Annette Harcus, Graham Rendoth, Jodie Richards, Carly Vickers, Alia Parker, Bic Tieu, Harriet Watts, Nina Drakalovic, Rebecca Lourey, Rachel Cronin, Sally Leung, Stellar Luna, Lawrence Hanley, Danling Xiao, Nadine Beyrouti, Becky Chilcott, Karen Kwok, Heidi Seeman.

Specifications:

88 pages
Grange Offset and Board from Ball and Doggett
4C process and letterpress
Print managed by SEED Print Group

About the Journal:

Ligature Journal is a title owned by Tiliqua Press. The design and publication of the magazine provides real world experience opportunities for communication design students and recent graduates. For each issue interns find and/or create all the content. They design, lay out, create imagery (both illustration and photography) as needed and take the publication through production process.

If you haven’t already visited the Ligature Journal website you can see more spreads here.