JAMES FALCONER

Aside from being a talented designer, James Falconer is making a name for himself because he seizes opportunities when they arise, and makes them himself if they don't. Take the exhibition that he and three friends – who collectively go by the name Ill – staged at an old wig shop in a Nottingham shopping centre.

"We printed loads of flyers using a black-and-white printer from Uni," he explains, "and then screen-printed images relating to hair over the top: scissors, hair dryers, clippers. It was an opportunity to do some self-promotion, and exhibit work before the degree show. We felt we needed to do something together before leaving University."

It's often self-initiated projects like this that can get young designers noticed outside of the college environment, and even staging a full-blown exhibition is feasible if you know where to look. The infamous Wig Centre cost the guys just thirty quid to hire out for a week. Having recently graduated from Nottingham Trent's graphic design BA course, Falconer is now looking for freelance work, hopefully in type or layout design, perhaps installations – but his initiative is such that it shouldn't be long before he's enjoying regular income from his creativity.

Last year he gained valuable experience at London advertising agency The Bank, working on a billboard design pitch for beer brand Peroni. And he made no bones about literally getting his hands dirty: "I had to dip my hands in red and green paint and create an Italian flag on the wall for a photo-shoot, probably because nobody else wanted to do it," he smiles.

Falconer's college work ranged from colour-theory projects – such as the Grand Day Out brief, where he produced a record of a day out in London by taking a colour sample of each building or object that he encountered – to relocating his Ill collective to the Chaumont Festival in France to design posters in a three-day workshop. Study his huge infographic Colour of London chart and it's obvious that Falconer approaches projects from a unique angle.

Nowhere is this more clearly manifested than in his book jacket project. "The idea came from one of the University's 'in-house' briefs, but I changed it into more of a personal project," he explains. Originally the brief was to design three book jackets for one contemporary author in a consistent style. "Instead," says Falconer, "I decided to choose a particular book – The Architecture of Le Corbusier 1946-1952 – one of many that had lost its cover whilst sitting on the library shelf over the years."

Keen to reference Le Corbusier's architecture of the period and, in particular, his L'Unité d'Habition building in Marseilles – one of the first projects on which the architect imposed his system of proportions called Le Modulor – Falconer took the brief to the next level. "I created an image that showed the qualities of this particular building in terms of structure," he explains. "I made a typeface in a similar shape to this main image, and then created an identity to be used throughout the book, and on posters and flyers." He even went as far as promotional material for a fictitious book launch.

While at Nottingham he'd been encouraged to experiment, and to recognise that mistakes were an important part of the creative process. But it took a visiting designer to inspire his love of changing tack. "The illustrator Marion Deuchars gave a guest lecture during my first year, which really inspired me to play with hand-rendered type," he reveals. "We were drawing with the ends of paintbrushes... anything that made an interesting mark." Falconer himself looks set to make a unique impression very soon, and hopefully he'll show – as Deuchars did, flipping her paintbrush around – that it pays to do things differently.

CONTACTS

www.hellojim.co.uk
james@hellojim.co.uk

Text: Mark Sinclair
Studio Photography: Dave Remes