Jim Buell

This is a collection of personal projects involving explorations on form, texture, and lighting. I did both the CAD drawing and rendering for each. 

As Senior Graphic Designer for the UK music/technology startup ROLI, I lead the design of product packaging featured in every Apple Store worldwide. The products, BLOCKS, are a modular music creation system that works with iPhones.

Each product in the BLOCKS family performed a different function — 
melodic play, beat-making, loop manipulation, etc. Each package was given a particular color accent to help differentiate its function. 
In addition to doing the design and layout, I produced the product render artwork for each package.

I was responsible for producing photographic renders of ROLI’s new music products for all communications channels. In this role, I established a coherent style for showing our minimal products in a realistic, yet whimsical way. An overarching goal was always to show that the products were inherently complex, innovative, and ahead of their time, yet they were still approachable behind their sleek, 
minimal appearances.

MA Graphic Design 2014
A parallel approach
 

This dynamic display proudly presents the work of forty-eight full-time and twelve part-time MA Graphic Design graduates from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Emerging from a challenging research-led site of enquiry, our graduates invite you to join them in an experience that stands somewhere between an action, a test, a showcase and a conversation.

A parallel approach is a place of action, not of exhibition. It is an opportunity to associate fragments of research, experimentation and realisation; to contemplate aspects that are foreign to one another; to encounter new findings for some that are reminders for others; to activate and interpret; to formulate and consider; to build transitions and justifications; to wander and to ponder; to stop and to think. Much like our graduates, you are invited to resist convention, administer caution with assumption and suspend established habitual modes of engagement whilst making your way through this rich, divergent and sprawling terrain of theoretical, conceptual and practical endeavours. 

Acknowledging the contingency of culture, the complexities of society and the sprawling matters graphic design engages with, this graduating body of students has set firm foundations in place that will carry them forward into new, speculative and productive futures. We advise you to keep an eye out for this resilient, nimble, critical and imaginative bunch. 

Paul Bailey
Course Leader, MA Graphic Design

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Art Direction and Concept: Dario Gracceva, Sarah Krebietke, Jim Buell, Cleber Rafael de Campos, Katia Alissa Mueller

Graphic Design: Dario Gracceva, Sarah Krebietke

Project Management: Jim Buell, Katia Alissa Mueller

Special thanks to Paul Bailey

Today’s media landscape includes news organizations which are delivering news content that is largely unverified or manipulative. This questionable information is available to a growing legion of smartphone uses who have become addicted to their phones and to this kind of content. 

My goal in this project is to design an object which expresses our culture’s addiction to news and other information even when that information is of dubious quality. These books were designed to explore the background behind this project by examining the relationship between our always-connected culture and the content we consume. The books are companions to the electric device Blink which can be also be viewed on this website.

Some PR firms conduct surveys that they use to write news articles. These survey articles, often modified and reprinted in newspapers, are little more than advertisements masquerading as news. 

As these dubious articles undermine and distort the idea of journalism, my idea in this project was to undermine and distort the PR survey stories that run in newspapers. I selected seven of these survey articles from various UK newspapers and compared the similarities in the newspapers’ stories to the text of the original PR stories.

I then ran the newspapers’ version of the stories through a text-distorting program I wrote in Processing. I printed the results in a newspaper as a critique. The percentage of characters that are distorted in my newspaper is equivalent to the percent of the story that the newspaper directly copied from the original PR source.

These two books document my visual research that took me from my initial research question involving dynamic identities to one concerned with critiquing the public relations industry and its involvement with journalism. Using generative techniques, I began to formulate a visual language I'm calling “Degenerative Design”.

In this series, I compared elements of science-fiction film posters from the 1950s to posters from the contemporary era. I looked how color, men, women, and villains are represented in posters of each era. 

To explore colors, I used the Processing programing language to reorganize each pixel of the posters by hue.
I then ran the resulting images through a blur filter in Photoshop to simplify the output, resulting in images that give an impression of the color palettes.

I used Photoshop to cut out and overlay the other elements. The elements of men, women and villains are overlaid to show the original position of each element on its respective poster.