This documentary by Paul O’Connor and Anthony Peters is a talking shop for graphic designers and illustrators, each offering their perspective on their discipline in the wake of its having been engulfed by digital technology. It’s pretty bleeding edge – and occasionally a bit Nathan Barley – but this is certainly an area that’s yet to be fully explored. If there’s one thing that unites this disparate group, it’s their love-hate relationship with computers: they recognise how vital they are, yet bemoan their deleterious effect on the old ways. (Cut to loving, burnished shots of a printing press, and equally loving shots of paint slopping onto a silkscreen frame.) There could have been a little more insight into the distinctive post-digital design aesthetics – faux-naif line drawing, blocky fluorescent colours, hand-printed posters. These are people who occupy a blurry, still-evolving territory between commercially oriented designers and self-contained artists, and so they aren’t really in the position to analyse themselves. Made You Look is of niche concern, perhaps, but not uninteresting.
