OUGD502 - Studio brief 01 - Saul Studio

Recently we had a visit from Leeds based designer Dan Saul Pilgrim, the studio he runs embraces a minimalist, pared back aesthetic that is heavily down to contemporary and clever typography. His talk started with him talking about graduating from Leeds university and the short time after that, but it was captivating to hear about his self initiated project Coffee Shop North which combines his two passions of design and coffee. Coffee Shop North was made possible by Kickstarter which is the world's largest funding platform for creative projects, in total the process of setting the Kickstarter up and getting the book published took one year. Since its release the book has been extremely successful and it was cool to learn that its even being stocked in a coffee shop in Tokyo.

What I got from the talk was seeing how he applies typography to a certain project, it was evident that he uses new and contemporary typefaces within all projects such as Druk which is becoming more common within cooperate graphic design. I related to his focus on typography and was intrigued to know where to find some of these typefaces he used on projects such for 'The Hubbards' and 'Salvation'. He later informed the class that a majority of the typefaces were from an independent french foundry called Velvetyne who supply free fonts. He concluded the talk with advice such as getting yourself in the right position and finding your niche such as he did with the food and drink sector.