Alun Cocks - dust

Today we had a Graphic Designer Alun Cocks from Dust come in to speak to us. Alun Cocks is a former student from Stockport College who later went on to study a Graphic Arts BA at Leeds University. Dust is a small company that was established in 2000 because of this it is quite hands on.

The talk today was merely about the different actions the Dust team take from starting a project to finishing it. He started with a project he had worked on for Manchester United - this was a very illustrative piece using mainly mark making, figures and facts, this included goals and who scored ect.




There was a lot of research that had to go into this design which consisted of watching a lot of Manchester United games and studying the goals.

The next piece of work he shown us was for Penguin books to celebrate their 70th Year. This piece of work brought a lot of business Dusts way, they found a lot of clients commenting on how they like this. Alun explained " we would rip this up if we could," this made me laugh. I noticed how a lot of the work shown was very illustrative. When asked Alun said that he did not see him self as an illustrator however him and his partner do enjoy this area of design. A lot of screen printing was shown throughout his work, this is something that is not as common in Graphic Design anymore. It was different to see how he worked, as he explained the work that he does is very hands on, he selects everything right down to the paper stock used. Many of the projects he shown experienced a lot of time just simply finishing off rather than designing.

Although a lot of illustration was applied it was obvious that a lot of time went into type setting. This was apparent on a lot of their work. I found most of the work shown was very similar. Having this range of work lead on to Dust designing a book for the king of Bahrain.