STUDIO: PATRICK THOMAS TALK

Today, graphic designer/activist/lecturer Patrick Thomas came in and gave us a talk about his practice and gave us some further explanation into some of the projects he was currently engaging with. Here is a brief list of things I took from the talk.

• Teaches in southern Germany
• He's from Liverpool
• Got into design through music
• Attended St.Martins school of art
• Had his first mac demonstration in 1984
• Exhibited a stencil instead of a print in a university exhibition 
• Set up studio LaVista in Barcelona
• Inspired by things designed by non-designers 
• "Design should always be a political act"
• "A banner is more engaging than a poster"

From this, I learnt a lot about design for activism and about how we should always design fro a purpose, not just because it looks nice. He expressed his opinions on this quite strongly and was very stuck in his way regarding his own social and political beliefs. He expressed this in nearly every aspect of his work. This lead to some confusion in the class I believe as some people seemed to think he was telling us we had to be like this but in natural fact, he was only passionately explaining that thats how he worked and perhaps we could benefit our practice by applying it to something more political. 

Something I appreciated about one part of his work was using old newspaper as stock to print on. I believe this is a sustainable way to print by reusing old and forgotten stock. His reasoning for this was to make each and every individual print unique. Having prints on this stock also adds a shock factor to it, causing people to stop and look at more then whats been printed on top. This technique also highlights certain parts of the articles featured and covers others, perhaps creating new realities and scenarios within the images and reading. 

Something I will take away from this was his distaste for poster design and how he expressed that banners proved to be a more successful format for sharing a message. Banners exist longer and attract more attention and are usually designed to spread an important message unlike posters, which are mainly for advertising purposes. This doesn't mean I should totally disregard poster design, it is obviously a contextual decision.

I was glad I went to this talk even though I did not fully agree with everything he had to say. I thought he helped me develop as a designer and it made me think about how I could use my design to benefit others. I will now continue using this idea in my work but perhaps not executing in the same way as Patrick has.