Abram Games.

'Maximum Meaning Minimum Means.'    - Abram Games

Taken from postalheritage.org.uk

Taken from creativereview.co.uk

Abram Games (born Abraham Gamse, on the day World War 1 began) belonged to the Golden Age of British graphic design where commercial artists produced hand crafted concepts and combined traditional techniques to create innovative styles. Games worked for an astonishing range of clients in his day inlcuding; Shell, London Transport, Guiness, The Times and The Financial Times. Abram Games' reputation as a graphic designer is based on his ability to weave together layers of ideas with a great economy of means. He realised that if you combine several images in one iconic design, the result involves the spectator in a visual game to unravel the layers of meaning within. Games explained, "A poster with a measure of intrigue engages the mind of the spectator and he looks again. You have to take him along with you so he follows your line of thought. The best way I can describe what happens is to say that as the designer you wind the spring, and it is released in the mind of the viewer." (Artyfactory.com and estate of Abram Games.)

During our trip to London we had the real pleasure of visiting Noami Games in her lovely home situated near Kilburn. Noami Games is the daughter of the late Abram Games, keeper and co-ordinator of all his outstanding work. I cannot express how wonderfully inviting she was to a group of complete strangers waltzing excitedly into her home and entrusting us with precious originals. We even sampled coffee from an early Cona model (if you don't know what the hell one of these wondrous inventions is you can take a look here ) that Games designed, not only a Graphic designer but his inventive mind came in handy for functional objects too. The coffee was delicious if you're wondering, and that's coming from someone who's made coffee for a living for 5 years now. Noami's reasoning behind being so open and welcoming to was simple, it's what Abram would have wanted. His work was made to be seen, to inspire and educate as many people as possible and a lot of the delicate drawings and developmental paintings never get shown to the public, which is a real shame since they're usually the most interesting and raw. 

Photographs I took, with permission from Noami, of two original pieces by Games.

It was overwhelming the amount of work she had filed for us to look at, since half of the finished pieces and inventions are included in various shows, a real eye-opener into a true designer's thought process and methods of working. Noami shared some beautiful stories of Paul Rand (a family friend) being incredibly fussy at dinner, how Abram would always ask her as a child, whether she understood his work...if she didn't he would scrap it and start again because if a child didn't understand it, it wasn't simple enough and chances are nobody else would understand it. He made work for the companies he believed in, on topics he felt passionately about. They hold an undeniably strong message yet delivered through simple design. Something that gets lost very easily in today's overly critical and mistakenly complex generation.

One of the greatest experiences of the year, thankyou so much to Noami Games, what an honor.