A definitive edge through a subtly profound approach.

This is one of the many idioms through which Glyph creates art and conducts business. The idea behind it is this: Real, groundbreaking achievements in marketing don’t happen based upon bold, in-your-face advertising, and business empires are not established through being louder and cleverer than competitors. Truly effective brands are brands which possess a slight edge.

Through identifying the nuances which make your business unique, and the strengths which render your services more desirable, Glyph helps you to attain that slight edge; that almost inexpressible set of values and practices which accentuate your company in an ocean of competitors. It is not the case that you broadcast a crude message of how you conduct business to anyone who is listening. Rather, with Glyph, you tap in to subtleties of your culture; the things which set you apart but cannot be communicated through a simple pay-off line or piece of design, and communicate these subtleties to both internal and external audiences.

Through an established and consolidated culture, everyone from your sales force to your receptionist will be better equipped to communicate your brand, simply by possessing a greater insight into your culture.

Over and above the most striking results of this holistic branding, your company will enjoy the profound benefits of more subtle results: a salesmen who is 10% more secure in his ability to operate through your brand; a greater sense of belonging amongst your staff; or a PA who is just slightly more confident that she is able to say and do the right thing. These almost intangible benefits may not be immediately measurable, but as they become compounded, you will notice just how much more positive and powerful your business has become in the public eye.

Additionally, aside from the practical benefits of the solutions we offer, there is a distinction in owning an identity which has its foundations in original works of art; an unparalleled precedent in aesthetic beauty, detail, and sheer magnificence.

You should ask yourself this question: is my brand a legacy?

Or will your brand be like so many others – rootless and transient, its survival subject to trend, and its effectiveness contingent upon visual cognition alone? Does your identity assume that the world at large will make the barely congruent leap from an emotionally empty graphic to the core ideals and purpose of your company?

It is true that art is an expression of self, and therefore an expression of the culture to which the self belongs. Glyph has embraced this concept, and we believe that an effective brand does not only communicate the purpose of the enterprise to which it belongs, but also expresses the culture; the actual soul of that enterprise. A brand should promote an all-encompassing, holistic perception of your business; manifest as a set of communications which cover the basics and the obvious aspects of your company, through to the subtleties and intangible constructs which make your business unique, marketable, and effective.

The highest echelon of the Art Integration Process is Brand Integrated Corporate Art, whereby our artists create a definitive art piece which establishes a business’ brand and subsequent identity. Although there is a distinction in an identity which has its foundations in original works of art, our integrity demands that we do not call for an overhaul of already entrenched and effective brands.

Integrated artworks provide a range of solutions through the same process. The versatility of Fine Art Integration has seen artworks acting as the foundation for brands, interior décor, internal and external communications, and going so far as to differentiate between product hierarchies and value structures.

Our process is the best means by which to establish your culture in your interior environments. Interior design and décor for the sake of decoration alone is not enough. Ask yourself if you want to ‘decorate’ with various prints and pieces by various people, or should your environment be an extension of your culture, established through beautiful, custom crafted art and strategic use of style, colour, and content.

Finally, the process is also applied to design and identity development. Even these most fundamental aspects of a brand should be tailor-made and aesthetically remarkable, and entirely specific to you. Tapping into the things which make you unique and harnessing the artistic flair of fine artists, our approach to design and corporate identity development is beyond compare.

Step 1: Blank Canvas

The Art Integration Process begins with a blank canvas – the artworks we create are, first and foremost, original.

Every artwork we create is a unique never-before-seen visual innovation created exclusively for you – we do not employ stock photography, downloaded design elements, or trend-based design techniques.

Step 2: InVolve Session

We don’t wait for a brief. We formulate one with you by identifying your core culture.

Because they come naturally to you, your intrinsic strengths are often the hardest things to communicate. We build brands from the inside out, defining what your culture truly is rather than what it might appear to be.

We also establish a communication interface; touch points which allow our clients to concisely express who they are and what they do. In order to achieve such diversity in your visual communications, you need a fine art touch.

Step 3: Stylistic Refinement

We define the essence of your culture, refining a style and execution which is distinct and significant to you.

During this development phase, we present style and execution options. We do not pursue concepts based on trend or fashion – our clients are unique, and so is the artwork we create with them.

Step 4: Evolving the Canvas

The canvas evolves with our clients – we present weekly progressions to our clients, where we share input and insight as the artwork develops.

Step 5: Finished Artwork Presentation

We present a framed and finished artwork to our clients, along with all derived collateral.

The finished piece and all derived collateral belong to you – our work is archived and digital copies are handed over. Unlike many creative agencies, we don’t need to withhold anything or charge for disks to obligate clients into working with us. By this stage of the process, we will have established a great relationship. Every one of our clients has been amazed at the work we create for them, and our client list is a testament to our 100% success rate.

Ultimately, we don’t want to be recognised for our artworks, we want our artworks to be recognised as an embodiment of your culture. If anyone recognises Glyph as the creator of one of your art pieces, it will be because your culture has been effectively and artfully captured by the artwork you display.

A couple of days ago I found myself mixing paint on my left arm. I had a perfectly good palette, but I got so lost in the canvas in front of me that when I ran out of mixing-space, rather than stopping I continued to paint furiously, using my sleeve to blend swabs of colour. I paint in a grappling gi (super-comfy) that gets pretty spattered but never like this – the paint had seeped through, stained my skin and I was left holding my arm at an odd but convenient angle. Whilst I felt a little ridiculous, it was also one of the most intensely concentrated moments or minutes or hours (I couldn’t quite tell) I’ve had and I felt great for it. The resultant work had a sweet balance between what I envisaged and a bit of surprise technique. At Glyph we try to be aware of these serendipities but trying to verbalise this kind of thing is hard.

It’s always great when you go looking for something and it finds you first. That same day, I went home, a little woozy from my turpentine wash down, thinking about my rather unusual time in the studio. I turned on the TV and found Shaun Tomson, talking about exactly what I had experienced. He was being interviewed on “Bustin’ Down the Door”, a documentary on the groundbreaking work he and his contemporaries did to establish surfing as a professional sport. For those of you who haven’t heard of him, Shaun and a group of South Africans and Australians transformed surfing from a recreation into an internationally recognised sport. The documentary is brilliant, but what really got me hooked was Shaun describing his uberstanding of the phrase “keep the stoke”. The ‘stoke’, according to the way Shaun described it, seems to be more than the surfers ‘zone’. From what I can tell it covers the instinct for knowing within a millisecond that you’ve caught a wave, the exhilaration of catching it and the itch you are left with to do it all over again, knowing that there is a perfect wave out there. Maybe I read too much into it, but the way Shaun Tomson described this state was like ocean chi!

I know what it feels like. I may not look as cool as a surfer punching through a barrel, but damn, when I find my stoke it feels that good. It is the mark of spontaneous, natural and uninhibited work. It is when you are most yourself; most together, but also most outwardly receptive. I have never surfed, but I feel like I get Shaun Tomson in this regard.

I have to ask why artists, illustrators and creative types in general haven’t found a name, let alone proliferated their own brand of stoke. Shaun Tomson has expanded this concept into the Surfers Code, a set of ethics and a life philosophy that honours the fraternity and the environment which supports what he calls the “sport of kings”. He has expanded this ethos into a book, which I have recently ordered.

So much of the work that goes into art is focused on a concept or idea that I sometimes wonder if we have exchanged intellect for intuition. We seem to labour over the cleverness of works that are smart for smart-sake instead of perceptively creating art for arts-sake. That’s not to say I am advocating old-school traditionalist work or that I only recognise painting and sculpture, but when your objective is creating to be clever instead of being clever with your creativity you lose something.

Damien Hirst, famous for briefing other artists over the phone on how to create *his* work, says this of briefing other artists to execute his “spot” pictures: “I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it”. This is ironic, when you consider that his recent attempt at exhibiting his own paintings was met with damning reviews. Still, no one seemed to link his attitude to his work. It makes you want to say to the likes of Hirst: If painting means so little to you why would you expect it to mean any more to anyone else? Hirst has also said “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it”. Can you imagine how long surfing as a pro sport would last if surfers turned around and said “I really can’t wait to get so famous that I can surf badly and get paid for it?”.

Being the pioneer of the sport, Tomson was asked if surfing has been or ever will be over-commercialised. He maintains that pro-surfers, like him, started out with nothing but the love of riding waves – their primary objective being to become good enough at surfing that they could make a living out of it. Their financial drive existed purely to enable them to do what they loved. That hasn’t changed. I think it is the same for a lot of artists and creatives. The trick is to love it not lose it. Today Shaun Tomson doesn’t get paid to surf, but between running a clothing company, serving several charities and environmental groups and being a motivational speaker, he will still surf for up to eight hours at a stretch.

One of the lines in the surfers code is “I will pass my stoke on to a non-surfer”. I think it’s sad that surfers have a code that says: help the guy who brought the longboard just to look the part and is now drowning at the backline, but artists have never tried to help the affected concept artist who’s selling fart-in-a jar or the (sm)art director who has to tell young designers what to do to hide his own ineptitude. And how many times do we hear people saying “I can only draw stick men” or “it must be nice to have that talent”, without an artist replying “but you can create art too!” Not all creative ability comes naturally, but once attained it feels like the most natural thing in the world – if only we, as artists, can help identify it and share it.

So I will leave you with two words we came up with: use em’, change em’, or come up with your own. For us it’s about phluke-ups and phlow: it starts with that serendipitous mistake, the Phluke that somehow reveals the picture you had in your mind, unravelling all the tension in your hand and letting you naturally phlow through the task. Get lost in what you are doing, but when you come back, be proud of the half-crazed, half-calm state you were in and share that with someone else.

Don’t be afraid to Phluke it up and let it phlow!

I have posted links to the code below along with links to Shaun Tomson – should you want to buy his book or if, like me, you are suddenly overcome with the urge to take up surfing!

http://www.solitudeclothing.com/surfcode/index.html

http://www.surfrider.org/

http://www.solitudeclothing.com/philosophy/index.html

http://www.bustindownthedoor.com/

http://www.surferscode.com/

Here are the latest artworks in Naum’s series. Enjoy.

There are so many factors to consider when buying an artwork, and personal taste is perhaps the most important. But when it comes down to actually valuing an artwork, there doesn’t seem to be many guidelines for the potential art buyer to follow. And unless you hold some sort of art degree, you won’t even know how to begin to technically appraise an artwork. Add to this the festering intellectual elitism of the art world today (by this I mean the trend of art buyers to passively accept that any artwork which makes it into an exhibition is innately honest, valuable, and meaningful) and you have yourself a climate in which people are easily duped – and don’t think that this is not intentional.

So how do you decide whether or not an artwork is valuable? How do you know that the price tag the artist has attached to his or her creation is justified? And how do you know that your friends and family aren’t going to be laughing behind your back over that new sculpture you just bought (you know, the one with the blind dwarves and the kumquat)? Well, answering the following questions before you invest in an artwork should help:

1. How long does it take to discover meaning in the artwork?

Some artworks are abstract. Others exude meaning at first glance. However, there are artworks out there which possess about as much meaning as the French Monarchy possessed public favour during the storming of the Bastille.

If you have spent more than ten minutes staring at an artwork, your mind so open that an Airbus with whales strapped to the wings could fly through without scraping the edges, and you still cannot figure out what an artwork means, then the artwork is probably meaningless. Or, the artist was on some type of hallucinogen at the time, and unless you’re prepared to hand out LSD to all your guests at dinner parties, no one’s going to understand it but the artist.

2. How does the artist describe his/her own artwork?

Read this:

“My artworks seek to capture an omnipresent sense of transient civil migration and mitigation; I wished to express an ever-expanding sense of self, enthralled to complete and utter ego death, perhaps as a result of society’s banal need to deviate from non-conformist ways of being”.

You know when you go on a road trip, and every once in a while you drive past some long-dead thing, and think to yourself “I wonder what the hell that was?”

Well, this unidentifiable carcass of words is the road kill of artistic pseudo-thought. Perhaps at some point in time, long, long ago, this excretion of thought was true and meaningful. But now, it means nothing, and you can safely assume that the artwork it describes means nothing too.

3. What is the artwork made from?

Today’s world has seen very many different forms of art, executed through very many different mediums. I have seen art pieces constructed from Lego, spaghetti, and beer cans. All of them honest artworks, in the sense that they actually conveyed some sort of message, or at the very least stood as a testament to human ingenuity and imagination.

However, I have also seen ‘artworks’ constructed from decaying fish guts and cow poop. Suffice it to say, if your prospective artwork is so long passed its expiry date  that it has developed a central nervous system and now plans planetary domination, or if your artwork involves the termination of a metabolic process, then its only value lies in fertilization.

4. Does the artwork actually exist?

Ever heard the phrase “a fool and his money are soon parted?”

Technically, I shouldn’t even be mentioning this one, because anyone who would buy an artwork which could, at a stretch, be referred to as fictitious deserves to be parted from their money.

A relatively recent development within the art world is a rise in the “exploration of the intangible”. In other words, people are trying to sell you nothing for something. You can’t buy rainbows people. And the actual act of selling and buying a rainbow is not art either. It’s just wanton stupidity.

5. Is the artist known for brilliant work, or for trying to be brilliant?

So many artworks are sold on the basis that the artists who created them are “going somewhere”. This “somewhere” seems to be a magical world of suspended disbelief and institutionalised nonsense, which would make even Lewis Carroll raise an incredulous eyebrow.

If you can’t find meaning in an artwork, no one else can. But the artist is relying on the man in the cheesecloth kaftan, the woman wearing square brimmed glasses, and the androgynous humanoid carrying an embroidered satchel all pretending that they know what the artist is saying, just in case one of them is the only one who can’t figure it out.

If the artist has resorted to descriptions of his or her artwork which proves nothing more than their ability to use an online thesaurus, or if the description contains the words “banal” “eclectic” or “irreverent”, then the artist is faking it.

If you view an artwork, and the first thing that pops into your head is “I’m sure glad I didn’t step in that”, then you don’t even want to get within ten feet of the artist, let alone give it your money.

And finally, if the artwork doesn’t exist, then neither does the artist. Perhaps the person trying to auction fresh air during a recession is just a good businessperson. Immoral, but still talented at selling things that aren’t really there. Or the artist is the by-product of a stagnant pond which has formed next to the gene pool. Either way, they are not someone you would want to be affiliated with.

Seeing as the third season of the South African Survivor series is soon to hit TV screens, we thought it would be appropriate to share this T-shirt design with you. Andy did it a couple of years ago for his brother’s themed bachelor’s party. Although the rules seem straightforward, out-drinking was apparently more difficult than it sounds.

Here are a few images of the UMT Consulting SA year end function, a client for whom we recently completed a Corporate Art Piece (which you may view HERE) The artwork, entitled “Architects of Change”, was unveiled at the year end function, and our Business Director, Craig Hazle, was kindly invited to the event and asked to speak about the piece.


Additionally, UMT Consulting SA required a medium by which certain employees could ‘sign up’ for the core values which UMT Consulting SA upholds. To serve this purpose, and as an effective tie-in to the fingerprint texturing of the primary art piece, we had a secondary, black and white art piece printed. UMT Consulting SA members were then invited to mark the canvas with their own fingerprints in black ink, and sign the prints. This innovative concept was well received by the UMT Consulting SA team.

Another fantastic artwork completed by the talented artists at Glyph, this was delivered under a tight deadline, but quality, concept and execution remains the phocus of the team! Please see Zananda’s awesome feedback in our client testimonials.