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(Actress Charlize Theron improvising at the opening of Aeon Flux.)

Grazia magazine won Magazine Icon of the Year, at the Magazine Design Awards in London. Chatting with Jeremy Leslie, Group Creative Director at John Brown Citrus, he pointed out how innovative Grazia was in their use of photography, going large with celebrity images that would normally be run small, part of a series, on a single page. It was fascinating to see how that worked with one image of actor Charlize Theron shopping. The art director ran it over a double-page spread and turned what was a well shot but unremarkable image, into what looked like an observant piece of reportage, photojournalism. Without being cheap it really made the reader look as if they were getting an insight, a window, into the private world of Charlize Theron. The art director’s decision-making made me think about the extent to which great visual thinking is about improvisation. Art Direction as Eye Jazz.

The Frieze Art Fair was on in London last week and I spent an afternoon with Faye Dowling, one of the curators of New Photographers 2007, looking around the hastily constructed art tent in London’s Regents Park. It’s amazingly chaotic and diverse and utterly free from ceremony, the fact that it is like a cattle market is quite refreshing. It’s not a place to quietly contemplate art. It’s more like having an art gallery in Bloomingdales or Harrods on Christmas Eve.

Saw some great photography by Joel Sternfeld and Thomas Struth. Overall, some of the art was brilliantly unexpected, some of it made you laugh with it, and some of it just looked as sad as a lost puppy.

(Photographer Andrea Sperling, not in the Art Fair!)

In this visually noisy environment it’s the boldest art, the art with attitude that stands out. And exactly like advertsing, the work that gets your attention is not necessarily the art that shouts the loudest. On my way out, I saw a pile of posters on the floor of the space occupied by Glasgow’s Modern Institute.

(by Jeremy Deller)

I knew what Neil Young would do. I chanced my arm with the gallerist, “ that looks like a Jeremy Deller?” and indeed it was, and he gave me a poster.

Jeremy Deller is a bit like an impresario of ‘folk-art’. He collaborates with non-professional artists and re-presents other people’s work and experiences as video documents or events. In a sense he works with ‘found-art’. For his poster work he generally picks lyrics from bands, and his talent, like a great copywriter, is in choosing phrases that are so natural, that they have a zen-like quality. It’s not just that they stick in your mind they are mini-philosophies of life, like “just do it”.

“What would Neil Young do?” has that well-meaning, all-purpose flexibility that straplines like “think different” have. Its tone is a mix of the cheeky and the high-minded, serious but also a little wry.

After six hours of wandering around the Art Fair on the way home on a packed Underground train, an empty seat appeared.

(Photograph Herb Schmitz)

I gestured to a woman with a handful of bags standing up beside it to sit down. She shook her head. I gestured again, she said “no thanks” so I sat down, wondering whether I should really have insisted, whether she was just being polite, and I’m sure it sounds daft, but in my self-conscious embarrassment I couldn’t help thinking, “What Would Neil Young Do?”

It’s such a great piece of copy, the ultimate strapline, a reflective version of “just do it”, equally applicable to all situations. What do you think?

One result of the current technology revolution, with the upsurge in digital cameras and camera phones, is that non-professionals are becoming incredibly sophisticated at the visual shorthand of working with pictures and understanding how they work. But also inventing new ways to create and understand them.

I was reminded of this on London’s Underground this morning, seeing this ad for the London Times.

It’s part of series by Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe, for The Times in London, art directed by Paul Angus, and shot by professional photographer Sam Barker. It’s promoting a campaign for The Times based around the idea of the newspaper as a vehicle for debate. Most campaigns for UK newspapers have tended to focus on their star journalists, but this Times campaign captures our revolutionary moment by being so reader-focused.

What’s more is that it also gestures towards the confidence and ease that people increasingly have with photography, with reading around a picture. This ad walks us though an image of a red carpet event. It’s a visual stream of consciousness, unpicking the image as you wander around the space of the photograph.

I love how it breaks the image down, into different elements, each prompting another idea, another line of thinking. Stuff like, “What was the best car chase?” attached to the limo, or “Connery, Brosnan or Craig” beside the guy in the Tuxedo.

The ad reflects so well the mood of online interaction, gets so well inside the mind of a reader enaging in a forum, it also captures the idea of images being open-ended. It visually reflects the idea of ‘debate’. Photographs in newspapers or magazines, or in ad campaigns obviously need to nail down an idea, visually corroborate the message being told by the words.

But we are seeing something new with imagery, similar to what’s happening in journalism and newspapers. As non-professionals create and use more of their own imagery on the web we are seeing many more kinds of images that are more random, visually looser, more open in their possible meanings. And some professional photgraphers are also reflecting this. Like this image by Baerbel Schmidt. To continue the cinema theme from the Times it’s a bit Napoleon Dynamite partly because it is so open.

It shouldn’t surprise us, as people are just taking more photographs, everywhere, with digital cameras and cell phone cameras. In an article for Edit, we talked to Professor Nancy Van House of the School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley, who had just completed a study of camera phone usage. She said, “people are documenting their lives, chronicling their lives. Some did it intentionally, and some were just taking pictures for fun, and when they looked back they realized they had a record. People who did this appreciated the ability to have images of the mundane aspects of their lives and not just the special events.”

And it’s not just generating more images but also beginning to generate a different visual language. When the self-taught emerge in any art form, and you saw this with David Carson in design in the 1990s, when you don’t actually know the old rules, new rules are made as you go along. You can see the beginnings of this in photography. And though the Times ad is professionally art directed and shot, with its invitation to “join the debate”, it also reflects the new ways in which we are looking at images.

Art Directors are really hot on Beck’s new album, The Information, or at least the CD cover art. The CD comes with blank graph paper and a bunch of stickers created by top illustrators with which the listener fills in their own cover.

Creative Review quoted Big Active’s Art Director Gerard Saint saying, “It’s actually highly reflective of Beck’s idiosyncratic and creative approach to his art. It invites the listener to get involved and participate in the experience of the album.”

Dimitri Siegel writes a great piece on it at the Design Observer asking the question, “the gesture reveals a tension about where the creative act is situated: in making the work or making the rules?” In other words is it the idea that is the art, or is it how we put the stuff together?

Meanwhile, believe it or not, Beck’s album has been banned from the UK charts because this cover art is regarded as a marketing gimmick, a giveaway that creates an “unfair advantage”! Pop music has always been about “unfair advantage”. Sometimes it’s called ‘genius’, or ‘god’s gift’ or simply ‘talent’. Sometimes it is marketing, and sometimes it’s a combination of both where the marketing itself is an art form, becomes part of the larger pop process, whether it’s a Spike Jonze video for Fatboy Slim or a Julian House sleeve design for Primal Scream.

And when it comes to photography what if the cover was shot by Anton Corbjin or Kevin Westenberg or Alan Clarke? Would that be too appealing to music photography obsessives? Is this image of Beck by Julian Broad a little bit too interesting for chart sleevework? I think we should be told!

And Broad’s image, lots of vinyl, on shelves, in rows, strewn across the floor, is a simple reminder of Beck as music obsessive. His Headphones shutting out the outside world, a reminder that Beck’s music comes from that enclosed space called ‘Beckworld,’ and that his music output is a result of all those inputs. A product of information, creating more information.

But the question that’s been prodding me since I heard of this affiar won’t go away. Where does marketing creativity end and marketing gimmickry begin?

In the last few days I’ve been doing some judging for the UK’s Magazine Design Awards which are held at the end of October.

Viewing the magazines you are struck by the sheer volume of design styles. There’s cool, noisy, brash, modest, typographically extravagant, photographically hot, celebrity driven, and girl-next-door imagery.

It’s a reminder that there’s a whole variety of visual languages out there, each speaking and connecting to different people, and even to different aspects of us.

It also made me wonder whether there was a specific design language that worked for men and another for women, or whether the layouts and typography were really secondary to the image? So when I saw an image by photographer Tim Flach in a magazine story about kissing it, reminded me of a poll we are running in the current Edit webzine about whether men can truly visualise a women’s idea of beauty and sexiness?

Tim’s photo is lush and sensual. It works because it gets to grip with flesh, the pores of the skin, the roll and wrinkle of the lip, the hunger of distance and intimacy in the touch. But the question is, is this a male take on a kiss?

Its power is due to Tim’s ability to visualise the ‘animal’, animal imagery being one of his specialisms. And the image of this kiss isn’t sentimental or cute.

Flach gives it its own shape and feel, sculpts the kiss out of flesh and and teeth. Its sheer physicality reminds us of losing ourselves in the animality of the kiss. But maybe it’s because I’m a bloke.