Francois Smit
(director / designer / illustrator/ video editor)
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visit franco.is
Francois Smit was born and grew up in Namaqualand. From 1986 - 1988 he studied Fine Art (Painting) at Port Elizabeth Technikon. He was employed by The Sunday Star newspaper in 1992 (the first digitally-produced paper in South Africa) and then moved to the The Star newspaper where he continued working as a graphic journalist, illustrator and deputy art director.
In 1995 he was seconded to work on the launch of The Sunday Independent. He illustrated the weekly Dispatches cover story from its launch in 1996 until April 2010. During this time he produced around 800 works for the paper. Some of the illustrations were exhibited at the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg in 2006. Conceived as a celebration of the close relationship between newspaper and artist, the exhibition showcased the best of his works – many of which have become part of South Africa's visual discourse.
Vivian van der Merwe, his former teacher, mentor and the curator of the exhibition, says Smit is widely respected for his "formidable imagination, skill and artistic rigour, and especially for his idiosyncratic pathos" which "somehow manages to balance on that almost impossible edge between sharp conceptual narrative and beautiful visual forms." Critic Mary Corrigall likens Smit to a cunning journalist with a "talent for capturing the essence of a story and building it into a fascinating and absorbing product".
In 1996, Smit established QUBA Design and Motion, a design company which produced many books of photography including David Goldblatt's Photographs (2006) and Some Afrikaners Revisited (2007), Then & Now: Eight South African Photographers (2007), a collection by Paul Weinberg, Mimmo Jodice's Lost in Seeing (2007), and Jodi Bieber's Soweto (2010). He designed Pierre Crocquet's books, Enter Exit (2009) and Pinky Promise (2011). He worked with photographer David Goldblatt on the design of his book, Particulars, which won first prize at the photographic festival in Arles, France in 2005.
He has worked on many magazines and since 1995 has designed and art directed Enjin Magazine. The magazine has won several Pica awards, including Best Overall Design. He has illustrated for several publications, including Millennium, Living Africa, the Rhodes Journalism Review and most recently was commissioned to illustrate the cover of Art South Africa.
He works in Johannesburg as designer, illustrator, artist, website and electronic publisher and video maker for local and international clients.
Read other articles about Francois here...
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Debbie Smit
(writer, researcher and designer)
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visit www.haywire.co.za
Debbie joined Quba in 2004. She does the production, layout and design of various publications for Quba. She has added writing and research to her repertoire and was responsible for producing a weekly page for The Sunday Independent newspaper which began as a small column called Haywire that grew into a much bigger page called Haywired and a website.
Apart from the skills gained from working in a public library for 17 years (patience and communication) and 18 years of motherhood and marriage (patience, communication and love), Debbie has a particular affinity for unbundling the complexities of the projects that are handed to us so that they can be packaged in an accessible way for any audience.
At heart, Debbie is a farmer.
– April 2010
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