Graphic designer Curtis Rayment communicates clearly by working with subtraction

Curtis Rayment is a graphic designer through-and-through. A graduate of Winchester School of Art’s Graphic Arts BA, when asked what specifically interests him in the field, typography and communication take centre stage.

“Ever since I was introduced to Swiss graphic design, the minimal aesthetics of designers such as Josef Müller-Brockmann, Karl Gerstner, Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder when it came to typographic design have always inspired and influenced me,” he tells It’s Nice That. Fascinated by how such a “minimal aesthetic could communicate such concise ideas and behaviours through type and image or type and shape,” it’s these elements that now reverberate throughout Curtis’ own portfolio.

He came to graphic design through product design. Influenced by his “father’s DIY nature”, at a young age, he “developed a passion for physically making and designing things with functionality from various materials.” In his work today, Curtis brings together his love of Swiss design and product to produce projects that explore the material possibilities of graphic design.

“It inspires me to see typographic visuals being printed and presented upon different materials and objects as part of an identity,” he explains. “As designers going into 2020, we should push the applications of good design.”

While studying, Curtis produced Beyond the Screen, a publication exploring the “digital behaviours of an interface screen through physical materiality as an approach”. He took the all familiar actions of drag, drop, copy, paste and minimise and embraced them as physical actions within the design of the book. “With the format of the publication taking the same shape as a 13 inch MacBook screen, the de-bossed and screen printed front cover provides a tactile aesthetic that references to the physical procedures of craft,” he outlines. Curtis also worked on the identity for Acts of Making, an exhibition celebrating his graduating class.

Winchester School of Art has its own in-house design studio, 3015, and it’s here that Curtis now works having previously undertaken an internship at Our Place. The studio works with internal and external clients to produce visual identities and publications for shows and events, exhibitions, degree shows and research-based practitioners.

Whatever the project, however, Curtis explains that is simple and raw communication which takes precedent for him. “My practice tends to focus on and stay routed to a simple and formal typographical aesthetic,” he concludes. “How I get to these simple designs involves a lot of research, through discovering the meaning of a project’s true values. I then like to work with the idea of subtraction, cleansing a visual to its basic and key form that communicates exactly what is wanted.”