Lucienne Roberts is the founder of LucienneRoberts+ and principal founder of GraphicDesign&. She completes studio-based work as well as writes, lectures and publishes on her subject. She teaches and lectures internationally and her term as external examiner for BA Typography and Graphic Communication at Reading University has recently finished. As of 2014 she will be an external examiner MA Graphic Design at the University of Lincoln. Lucienne is also a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale.[1]
On Wednesday I attended another "Curated By..." lecture organised by my university. This
week the guest speaker was Lucienne Roberts. I had never heard of her before I got an email about this talk, but I am eager to attend as many of these talks as possible to develop my knowledge and hopefully be inspired by what I see and hear. Before attending the talk I went on her website (http://luciennerobertsplus.com/) and found a lot of print based projects. I was immediately drawn to her work because of my interest in print design and traditional graphic design and knew that I was going to benefit from her presentation.
As expected I loved every minute of her presentation and found it thoroughly enjoyable. I loved the examples of her work she included in her talk, but what I found really interesting was that for the first portion of the presentation she took the time to identify herself as a person. She described her character and personality and how she got to being that person, and going beyond that, she has identified many examples of inspiration and influence from all aspects of life as she has grown up. I think that designers, especially at student level in university, concentrate far more on the brief in front of them than identifying the person that they truly are and really using that to their advantage to create some truly unique design. I feel that because Lucienne can talk so confidently about her inspirations and influences, both in her work and those that shape her as a person, she can create some really strong designs that have clearly been driven. On Wednesday I discovered that knowing who you are and accepting who you are is a powerful tool when it comes to designing and I find that fascinating.
Lucienne talked a lot about designing for society - for purpose and for benefit. She talked about the leadership campaign she designed for David Miliband, which I thought was a particularly interesting story. During the campaign Miliband was accused of spending more money on his campaign than other candidates; his campaign stood out from the others. The other campaigns were all fairly similar, an image of the candidate filling the leaflet with a block colour along the bottom containing a statement. Miliband's, although it followed the same layout of using an image of him for the central focus with a statement in the bottom half of the leaflet, somehow looked a lot more professional than the others. However, he did not win, his brother did. After this happened, the graphic design for his campaign once again got scrutinized and was blamed for the reason he lost his campaign. Neither of these accusations have ever been proven - nobody knows whether he spent the most money on his campaign, nor can the design be blamed for his defeat, but the experience proved to Lucienne just how big of an impact graphic design can actually have on society. This reminded me that design can, and does, have an impact; as designers we need to be conscious of what we produce and what the repercussions could be.
Lucienne gave an inspiring and thoroughly enjoyable presentation and I am glad I got to see it. She seemed like a wonderful woman and is definitely a talented designer. Her self-confidence is inspiring and her talk definitely made me look at design in a different way. I recommend that anybody that hasn't heard of her head over to her website http://luciennerobertsplus.com/ now!
Citations
[1] LucienneRoberts+ (2014). About. [online]. Last accessed 12th August 2014 at: http://www.luciennerobertsplus.com/about.html
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