My design hero

From Le Corbusier to the Mexico Olympics; Fellini to Mother Nature – designers involved in the Offset creative festival tell UNA MULLALLYabout the people and things that inspire them most

Conor Nolan and David Wall

Conor & David design studio, Dublin

There are so many influences to the way we work, and to how we try to approach graphic design. So picking just one hero is difficult. We settled on Lance Wyman, identity designer extraordinaire.

His best-known project is the identity for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. He surprised and delighted the world with a futuristic, dynamic and exciting visual solution. The identity captured the spirit of the games and the aspirations of the organisers. Part of the allure of the solution was that he was able to design everything, from advertisements and publications to tickets, uniforms, and even a huge graphical treatment that was painted on to a stadium. The way that Wyman envisioned the identity as a single solution with many facets is a big influence on our working practice – establishing a central idea from which all other things emanate.

We saw Wyman speak at Offset 2010 — he talked through an amazing career with great charm, wit and humility. Seeing someone with such a long career behind them still loving what they do is heartening and gives us something to aspire to.

Richard Gilligan

Photographer, Dublin

As I am more of a photographer than an actual designer I feel it makes more sense for me to pick one of my favourite photographers, who may be unknown to the greater general public: John Gossage.

I am specifically referencing his groundbreaking book The Pond, which was published in 1985. It presents the viewer with 52 black-and-white photographs taken around and away from a pond situated in an unkempt wooded area at the edge of a city.

The photographs in The Ponddo not aspire to the "beauty" of classical landscapes in the tradition of Ansel Adams. Instead, they reveal a subtle vision of reality on the border between man and nature. Gossage depicts nature in full splendour, yet at odds with both itself and man, but his tone is ambiguous and evocative rather than didactic.

Gossage envisaged The Pondas a book from the outset, and its a medium he has continued to favour over exhibitions. With the designer Gabriele F Götz, he set out to create a narrative landscape. "In literature, landscape inevitably becomes the setting, the background to the story," he says. "It isn't easy to do with language – landscape just isn't a literary mode. But it's a natural photographic mode – in photography, the landscape can be the primary subject."

Personally, I love the book’s simplicity and the quiet beauty of his photography which at first can be a slow burner, but it is a body of work that I find myself drawn to over and over again, which is usually the sign of something magic.

Niall Sweeney and Nigel Truswell

Pony Ltd, London

We are a little undisciplined at Pony, allowing more of a ribald circus of characters in through the door marked “hero” – it is very unlikely to be a designer who comes through that door. For me, it is in cinema that heroes lurk. And every year, new ones come along to rescue me. We recently worked with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and he immediately became a super-hero; he is a beautiful dark beacon at the heart of the jungle set to a techno beat.

To choose one, it's Federico Fellini, and two that breathe divine breath down the back of my neck are La Dolce Vitaand Roma. These films – the way the edits frame, the camera moves, the music cuts, the lyricism of the city, the swoop of character, the unseen undercurrents, the humour and tragedy, the staccato of Italian, the lapidary tenderness in the street light – have certainly informed how I may deploy objects, words, inks, narrative (abstract or literal) and time into a design in order to draw out more of its soul and unique beauty. He paints cities on the move, full of ghosts of the past, present and future, and I like to think of some of our work to be haunted, just so.

The opening footage of La Dolce Vita– where a giant Jesus statue is being flown over a Roman aqueduct, slung low under a helicopter, buzzing three roof-top sun-bathing beauties – could be a description of many of our posters. Fellini deploys images that at first can seem all giddy about themselves, which they certainly relish, but soon you realise that image is in fact a smoking gun. You are already hit.

I actually think of Dublin when watching Roma. I mean look, it's Ulysses. He re-imagines the city as a fecund, voluptuous, historic and erudite leading character, and then projects our dreams and desires into its streets and doorways, and re-arranges places and people and buildings in order to fulfil the rituals and pleasures of, well, all the desperate glamour of life itself. And as for the papal ecclesiastical fashion show . . .

Antoine+Manuel

Designers, Paris

To name a few, we can say Hector Guimard, Aubrey Beardsley, Antoni Gaudi, Le Corbusier, Alexander Girard, Ettore Sottsass; these are the first design “heroes” who come to our minds. Despite their difference of generation, most of them are multidisciplinary artists with a strong creative vision. They are all good in terms of graphic design even if they are most known for architecture or furniture design.

Hector Guimard, the major representative of the Art nouveau movement in France, is famous for his “vegetal” architecture in the 1900s (such as his Parisian metro station entrances and buildings) but he also designed furniture, typefaces, wallpaper, ironwork and fabrics; this approach is almost identical to Antoni Gaudi in Spain, with his Modernissmo style. Still related to the Art nouveau movement, Aubrey Beardsley was an illustrator, writer and art director.

Even if the style is radically different, Le Corbusier brings the same creative strength to a huge building as to a bungalow. He brings the same creative generosity to an interior-designed space as to paintings or drawings or type. Alexander Girard (1907-1993) who was the head of the textiles division at Herman Miller in the 1950s and 1960s, has created extraordinary fabrics, as well as furniture and objects and elements for interior designs.

Closer to us, Ettore Sottsass had the same talent, and designed industrial objects as well as limited-edition ceramics. They are “touche-à-tout” and visionary designers. Their humorous and courageous works reflects a limitless creative freedom.

Steve Rinzen

Graphic designer, Australia

Nature is my all-time design hero. Designers come and go, with their derivations and repetitions of previous generations. Our best attempts aim to mimic and improve the creative process we witness everyday in the natural world. We even try to document what nature is and what it means to us in our specific historical moment.

To express the scale and complexity of nature is nearly impossible. Our best efforts are the essence of creativity. This is why I choose nature as my ultimate design hero. The originator. The all rounder. Sights, sounds, actions and even smells.

Most often, our creativity attempts to appease only one sense, not all at once. I particularly thrive on the role nature plays once our best creative efforts have taken physical form. Signs that fade, peel and crack. Road markings that, over time, become illegible fragments. Solid metals rusting to fragile traces of structure. Concrete overcome by moss. Sculptures coloured and shaped by rains, or resculpted by layers of snow. Cities reduced to the disconnected rocks they were produced from.

The infinite process of improvement continues within the natural world. Rocks shaped by rains. Rivers changing course, dividing dry lands. Beaches shifting shape with each tide. The colourful drama of seasonal change. Nature puts us in our place and gives context to our existence. Nature is always there, like the ultimate mentor, trying to show us how to improve our work, reminding us that the creative process is ongoing and beyond the scale of our individual efforts. Nature provides an endless resource of inspiration.

Offset 2012 is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre today, tomorrow and Sunday.

[ iloveoffset.com ]