November 2005

By Jenny Brown
The Age Monday 7 November 2005
P2 Creative & Media Section

The Roman alphabet has 26 letters, symbols that are made into words by mental connection in the mind of the beholder. St Kilda graphic designer David Pidgeon is so entranced by the apparently limitless scope of the way these symbols can be made legible as words that in his spare time he designs new typographical styles.

He plays with architectural forms, maths and geometry, “notional ideas of what typefaces could be. I use the type as a form to experiment with.”

In his explorations, letters dance in form and shadow, enticing the eye into a puzzle that suddenly becomes a meaningful word. The computer, of course, is a brilliant tool to accelerate this process, and right now he’s fooling with parallelograms.

Pressing a few keys on his computer keyboard, he makes one of the typefaces he has conjured change shape, colour and line three or four times. Strokes drop in and out of the foreground highlights of the type, the lettering remains legible.

Pidgeon, 33, sees that the whole show of letters could be pushed way beyond their current format. “It’s still basically a two-dimensional thing that sits flat on a surface,” he says. “Yet type and signage doesn’t have to be 2-D. It could have 3-D form and become almost sculptural.”

In Melbourne graphic circles, Pidgeon is at the top of his trade. He shares studio space and partnership listings with one of Australia’s top architectural photographers, John Gollings.

Pidgeon and his five-member design team also share some of the most interesting graphics projects going around.

The studio does the branding work for whole projects, such as Federation Square and the Heide Museum of Modern Art; precincts such as Docklands and Southgate, and entire cities such as Moreland and Geelong.

Pidgeon’s team recently rebranded the City of Wodonga and for the purposes of regional character and distinction, Pidgeon invented a unique typeface “that is a very stylised representation of a community in a countryside of hills and rivers and buildings. It’s very playful and flexible,” he says. “And it’s been designed so it will not run out of steam in five years. It’s pretty radical.” He was surprised, in fact, that the town’s burghers went for it without the slightest hesitation.

Though young, Pidgeon has, in a way, been building his career since he was 14 or 15, when he attended open days at Swinburne University with his father, who was the deputy head of the school of business. He wandered into the graphics design department and saw people having fun and knew he had found what he wanted to do.

“I figured that if you’re going to be doing something for a large part of your life, you’d rather be having fun.” He trained in graphics at Swinburne and since graduating at 21, has been “basically getting paid for my hobby. The first time I saw a billboard that I’d designed, I got the most fantastic feeling.”

While the business and administration of a busy studio now takes up much of his time, and while he swears “I can’t paint or draw to save myself”, Pidgeon has remained so obsessively intrigued by the plasticity of typography that it is his time-out hobby and the essential workshop of his creativity.

“It has always fascinated me,” he says. “I still don’t know all there is to know about it so I still play around with it.”

Having studied physics, chemistry and maths at secondary school, he understands how to play with cubes and hexagons. “I’ve done a typeface based on a cube and it’s just fascinating the way you can get that many iterations out of one precise element of geometry.”

Pidgeon says he makes a decent living out of what he does, yet money is not the sole motivation nor is it the primary source of work satisfaction.

He has a philosophy that to push himself and his craft further, the voluntary “sabbatical” of invention is essential. “Because what I get out of it provides me with new processes that I can feed back into my commercial work.” From the joy of discovery for its own sake, “the money follows”.

“It’s the creative food. There is no client. I do it for myself.”

Graphic trickery is a skill that of necessity needs to stay at the leading edge of fascination and invention to push though the ocean of bland visual information that assaults people every day. To Pidgeon, it has to be much more than aesthetics or surface effects.

“To me, effective communication is more about the idea than the aesthetic. I’m not that hung up on aesthetics. In fact, some of the typefaces I do are ugly.”

“I think it’s more about the idea and communicating the idea. You have to grab people’s attention and you have to do it quickly. So there has to be strength in the idea rather than just a surface prettiness.”

“As Pablo Picasso said, ‘Good taste is the enemy of creativity.’ It’s relatively easy to make something look aesthetically pleasing. But it is an idea that gives it strength.”

Giving strength to conceptual ideas is not a matter of adding more drop shadows or colours. “It’s a matter of digging deeper and deeper. Once you get a strong idea, you can then extrapolate different layers of it. In essence, it’s very mathematical.”

Pidgeon is on several peak graphics bodies and his agenda is to push the craft in Australia to greater prominence. Against the successful renaissance of Australian film, architectural and industrial design, he says “the graphic design industry is massively under represented. We’ve got a long way to go because I think the (graphic) design industry here is not asking what it should be doing.”

To him, it should be doing much more than creating pretty wrapping paper.

A series of collectible cards developed as a gift for the attendees of a gala dinner to celebrate the Year of the Built Environment in 2005. The cards, using the famous Eames interlocking House of Cards format were produced on license from the Eames Office and displayed 50 significant built environments from across the State of Victoria. The project was made possible due to the support of John Gollings, who provided the photographs featured on the cards.

Warwick Fabrics is a family run business which was established in 1966 and has offices across Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

The large scale rebranding included development of a new logo with wide ranging applications across stationery items, product and collection brochures, advertising, fabric packaging, showroom signage and showroom fabric hanging systems.