Footloose designer shows us the way

They may call them flip-flops where he lives but London designer and artist Noma Bar looked down at his own two feet to inspire his “thong couple” campaign urging us to relax on WA Day.

The Israeli-born Bar, 42, also created the raised-hand relaxation pledge artwork and the guitar-girl logo for the State of the Art Music Festival in his series of WA-themed designs for Celebrate WA.

Visiting Perth for the first time, he also is involved in several public showcases of his work over the WA Day long weekend, including an interactive street art experience in the Perth Cultural Centre from noon to 2pm today.

Bar’s quirky double-take logo portraits and graphics grace international magazine and book covers and campaigns for Google, Sony, Nike, Coke and the New York Times. As a sculptor and printmaker, he has held major exhibitions in London, New York and Paris. His two books, The Many Faces of Noma Bar and Negative Space. have become a must have for the design industry.

“It was a really fun campaign,” he said of his first Australian commission. “It was about relaxing and forgetting everything.”

“I didn’t realise (thongs) were so iconic here but my brief was about relaxing, summer fun and going out. So I looked at my own flip-flops and suddenly I saw two arms, although the first sketches looked a bit weird.”

Bar is a master of the use of “negative space” and the double-take image, in which faces and simple emblems often reveal two things at once to become a sign language for a bigger idea. The iconic ET moon-cycling image becomes the face of Stephen Spielberg, a hotel reception bell transforms into John Cleese and a guitar head morphs into Bob Dylan among many of his ingenious celebrity portraits.

A teenager in Israel during the first Gulf War in 1990-91, Bar's career was kick-started by the unlikely figure of Saddam Hussein.

Pictures of Saddam abounded at the time, as did radiation warning signs in Israel. In Bar’s mind, the radiation symbol looked like the bushy eyebrows and moustaches of the Iraqi despot.

After studying graphic design at the Jerusalem Academy of Art and Design, Bar moved to London where his images of radioactive Saddam attracted his first commission, a job with Time Out magazine.

With English being the second language for the native Hebrew-speaker, he said he found greater confidence in communicating through images.

He loves Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese ideograms. With author ShaoLan Hsueh, he has created memory-aid images for the Chineasy teaching system to help student worldwide better get a handle on the notoriously tough Mandarin language.

“Even a lot of Chinese haven’t seen what I discover in the characters because I am coming from a lack of knowledge.

While he does a lot of research, a certain unfamiliarity helps him see things differently, an approach he used for the WA campaign.

Bar also is working on a new book about the rise and rise of the emoji as a means of communication.

“There is something ancient and fascinating about emojis,” he said. “I don’t know where it is going to go but I see emojis are extending more and more into our language so that we almost don’t need to write anymore.

It may go against expectations about such a high-end, innovative graphic artist but Bar steers clear of the computer until late in his working day. His main "office" is the Highgate Wood in north London, where many of his ideas are sketched out while watching the world go by.

“I have created my own way of working,” he said. “My first touch of the computer is around 4pm to 5pm. Every day from 9pm to 4pm it is sketching. I feel there is something about a computer that is like the blinkers in horseracing."

“It is my cut and paste life. I look like someone who has been cut and pasted from somewhere else to the wood."

Celebrate WA chief executive patria Jafferies said Bar’s quirky artwork had made this year’s WA Day awareness campaign the most exciting yet.

The organisation had hired overseas rather than local talent to draw on Bar’s global knowledge and have him share his expertise with WA artists, she said.