Towards the end of August 2014, while attending the screen-printing of the Hone Tuwhare Trust poem project, and having only just said “yes!” to designing the November cover for Japan’s advertising and design magazine, BRAIN (thank you, Masayoshi Kodaira), I received a phone call from the Alliance Française here, asking if I would design a poster representing the city of Auckland for the 2015 Fête du Graphisme, Paris. It was type designer Kris Sowersby who put my name forward, in their last minute call under an extended deadline. Three weeks on, after mountains of drawings and many hours (on top of a park design, a small book, and the Japanese cover), I settled on this design. I love the feeling of it — the atmosphere — and the way it shifts and changes with scale.

A note on the design

As if seen from high above, through a passing long white cloud, or mists of spray drift, the scattered coordinates reference the city’s position between a gulf and a sea, and the narrow isthmus on which it lies. Auckland — Tāmaki Makaurau — is built on a volcanic field. The myriad cones, visible as small mountains and islands including the iconic and symmetrical Rangitoto, are described by the circular marks and forms, also symbolic of the land, rain-forest, and the people. Our tiny pin-point location in the vast Pacific Ocean. The marks read as punctuation — speech marks, commas, fullstops — and acknowledge the many voices of our multi-cultural city, represented in the simple geometry of colour, texture and woven pattern.

#50
#volcanoes
#isthmus
#sea
#pacific
#ocean
#cloud
#mist
#topography
#typography
#scattered
#coordinates
#time
#distance
#geometric
#pattern
#speech
#punctuation
#voices
#māori
#european
#polynesian
#asian
#cosmopolitan
#auckland
#newzealand
#aotearoa

With thanks to Jean-Marc Dépierre and colleagues at the Alliance Française in Auckland, and to Kris for his typeface, Calibre. And to Mark Harfield for the photographs, merci!

/ Catherine Griffiths, September, 2014