Amy Colli in Conversation with Yen Trinh and Ben Devlin
Ben & Yen run PIPIT restaurant in Pottsville NSW, they have a Brisbane history.
Yen is a graphic designer and worked on the logo and related design for the Symposium.
Their restaurant celebrated it's first birthday in May, reinventing themselves continually for covid and the future. Despite their impressive CVs it's daughter Penny that is in charge, as you will see.
From Therese:
Our Logo ...
Yen took a cold call, for which I am grateful, and delivered at mates rates. Thanks Yen.
We asked Yen to develop the existing G, used in the last few years, into a form that could be used into the future as a basic information logo for the Symposium generally, where a simple colour change could be made to match the logo of a particular Symposium or event. The idea was to have a relatively simple, low touch graphic that would be easy enough for future users to work without requiring professional assistance. The 23rd SAG is orange.
Yen has a particular style of illustration, and I had seen her food related drawings as a follower of her instagram accounts. In approaching Yen, I imagined a logo that was her style of illustration of one of the food icons of Brisbane , a bunya nut, or a Moreton Bay Bug perhaps.
The idea to use the pop art style blue covered orange for this Symposium evolved within a time and budget constraint, and was an existing graphic we found. It simply captured the idea of our theme - the education of the senses, in the deliberate clash of the pop art colours, and the simple conundrum of 'blue food'.
The orange is also a winter fruit, suiting the timing of the conference in July, but when stylised into the orange 'sun' and blue background it became all that is winter in Brisbane, clear blue skies, incredibly coloured sunrise and sunsets, big sun action close and low to the horizons of a big sky.
So, we had moved away then from using food icons of Brisbane or Brisbane area seasonal foods , such as Moreton Bay Bugs or (!) Pumpkins (or Pineapples) .
We also considered the bunya nut at length, again it's wonderful graphic potential , mainly for its symbolism and important role in indigenous food and social history - its bringing together of indigenous groups from a wide area around South East Qld and Northern NSW, around it's triennial fruiting, very much a symposia. We used names related to the nut in our tickets. Did you notice?
The colours also happen to reflect the official colours of the City of Brisbane (blue and gold).