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UNIVERSITY FOR THE CREATIVE ARTS
ASSESSMENT COVER SHEET This cover sheet must be completed and submitted with all work including essays, Dissertations and practical work (with the exception of oral assessments). Please ensure that you complete it in FULL indicating the Unit Title and Unit Number (these can be found in your course guide and on the project briefs) and if applicable the Turnitin reference number and Word Count. You must attach this form to your work Surname Halsey
First Name Bec
Unit Title Structures & Strategies
Unit Number EGRD5001
Project/Component/Essay/DissertationTitle Structures & Strategies Course Graphic Design
Unit Leader Sophie Beard/Mark Povelll
Stage/Cohort
Submission Date December 13, 2013
&
Structures Strategies
For written work (essay, dissertation) please also complete: Turnitin Reference Number (if applicable) Word Count
For practical work please also complete: Describe the type and volume of work you are attaching eg 1 x journal, 4 x images 1. 1x Portfolio 2. 3. 4. 5.
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Bec Halsey
Biographies
“A LOGO
For me, the focus of this brief was to think about research in a different way, so I didn’t let myself fall into the normal way when researching Paul Rand. The first thing I did was to ask other people who also didn’t know him, to look at photographs of him, and to comment on what sort of person they thought he was. Secondly, instead of diving straight into just Googling him and his work, I looked at interviews where other designers spoke about him. And thirdly, I looked for quotes from him about the way he saw graphic design. So before I saw any of his work, I already had a build up in my mind about the sort of person he was and what he believed in. It changed the way I looked at his work because it oddly felt a little bit like I knew him. The response that I decided on creating was a quote from Paul Rand about design and identity, which I then placed over his identity, I wanted to get across the fact that we don’t always know an awful lot about designers other than the work that we see.
DOES NOT SELL, IT IDENTIFIES”
“Should a logo be self-explanatory? It is only by association with a product, a service, a business, or a corporation that a logo takes on any real meaning. It derives its meaning and usefulness from the quality of that which it symbolizes. If a company is second rate, the logo will eventually be perceived as second rate. It is foolhardy to believe that a logo will do its job immediately, before an audience has been properly conditioned.” “A logo does not sell (directly), it identifies.” “I do not use humour consciously, I just go that way naturally. A well known example is my identity for United Parcels Service: to take an escutcheon – a medieval symbol which inevitably seems pompous today – and then stick a package on top of it, that is funny.” “Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”
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“perception is reality, but reality is not reality” I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That’s what modernism means to me. You can’t criticize geometry. It’s never wrong. D e f i ni ng D esi g n O c tob e r 2 7, 2 0 1 3 -Janu ar y 2 6 t h, 2 1 0 4
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Biographies
After investigating Paul Rand, it made me consider how we learn about all sorts of people not just designers- but how can graphic design be applied to that. I discussed whether we are defined by how we look and what we say. I looked at some celebrities who are often seen as ‘role models’- and chose Twitter as a platform to see what these people were choosing to say to the world and what their message was. What I found definitely wasn’t on the same level as Rand’s inspirational quotes. I chose some of the worst comments and statements by celebrities, and thought about how many what they say should influence how we view their work
Mash Up
For the Shooting the Stars, brief, I chose to work with two of my friends that I hadn’t been on a project with before, because I thought it was important to learn how other people work and how to negotiate with design opinion. I found it hard to have a strong input on what was going on with this project, I wasn’t very familiar with the software, and one idea became solid quite quickly without considering other ideas. So the final video that we came out with, I wasn’t very proud of and didn’t feel much ownership of. Instead of trying to re-work it after the crit, I decided it would be more beneficial, to see what was successful from my peer’s work and apply those elements to a new idea. Below is screen shots from the first concept I considered, which was focusing on the element of ‘change or inflict the meaning of the original content’ So I found CCTV footage of people caught dancing, which obviously, the intention was that they weren’t being watched, and I’ve flipped it on it’s head and embraced it. Obviously once the brief was over I had to find other ways to critically evaluate the developments I was making, so to do this I was constantly comparing it to the work that already existed. Click herer for Original Mash up- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3VWZbjDJus&feature=youtu.be Click here for Mash Up 2- https://vimeo.com/81117978
After the video of the dancers, I considered looking at something with a little more meaning now that I had got to grips a little more with how to put the videos together. I used the music video from Lorde’s Song ‘Royals’ which has come out recently and been in the media accused of being racist. And I took an artist on the other end of the scale who is “pro-black” and has also been in the media fighting against racism. I played around a little bit more with sound than I had last time, focusing again on inflicting meaning. On the next page, are screen shots from another 2developments. These were adverts where the characters use sexual references to get your attention, and are clearly using ‘sex sells’ as their method. For the female version I used other adverts that use women in a sexual way to get men’s attention for a product to compare them against each other. But when I saw the male version I felt very differently about it, it almost felt like it could be an anti-rape advert rather for an actual product. For that version I used real anti-rape adverts to see how out of place it would feel, and it really didn’t at all, which of course is worrying. Before I made these, I used my blog as a platform to discuss with myself how I felt and what was meant by these adverts. See blog post here- http://bechalsey.gd.socd.io/2013/12/07/358/
Click here for Mash up 3- https://vimeo.com/81113509
Click here for Mash up 4- https://vimeo.com/81385722
Pechakucha I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with presenting my work, I really enjoy it now, I’ve really embraced it because I know that essentially the industry I want to go into is about communicating, and I seem to be good at getting my points across when under pressure. There are a lot of things to consider when I need to present or pitch, and each time I’ve presented, it’s gotten better, it’s the way that I feel most confident and for me, the best way to get feedback. The Pechakucha was a good brief to get back into pitching
Click here for Mash up 5- https://vimeo.com/81385146
Stories
Before starting on my actual story for the brief, I took part in the collage workshop, which was important and relevant for the brief because I realised that a story doesn’t have to be a beginning, event, end, it doesn’t have to have a narrative, it doesn’t even need a message really. A story can be as simple as things being in keeping – when collaging, I tried to make things look like they belonged together, and in a sense that was a way of story telling. For the brief, I took the mundane event of ‘people watching’ and collaged illustrations that I’d done of an old lady I had been watching in a coffee shop. I started to question, was this enough to tell a story? but decided to carry on and let the crit decide whether it communicated well enough.
Stories
The feedback from the crit told me that the work mostly made sense, but that once I had shortly described it, it was clearer. The illustrative style was popular as was the concept (which was: that when I watch people, I tend to notice small things and imagine my own stories about how they live their lives). I went back out, but this time I made little booklets so I knew I had to document four people and for each person fill six pages, so would have to pick out the most noticeable things about the people. I enjoyed it because there was an element of panic, and there wasn’t any time to critically evaluate what I was doing because I had to finish drawing before they left. I actually found it beneficial to be blind to evaluation through the process and not to do that until I had finished. To answer the crit, for each booklet, I put a small description to what I was doing.
Brandscape
Looking back, I can see where we went wrong with this brief. We dove straight into research, and when we were looking at existing brands we were only seeing the visual and product elements, rather than looking at what the values of the brands were and what message they were putting across, in the end we spent so much time on that element, that it went too far and over did it, so didn’t look very good anyway. We chose our natural form as stinging nettles because they can be turned into food, drinks and medical treatments. But what happened was that there was too much, we needed to focus in more. So after the final crit, I went back to what we had done and thought about what the actual values were of this brand. Rather than being a food, drink, beauty and health brand, I just chose to look at what would be needed for the beauty side of things. Stinging nettles are obviously something that you wouldn’t naturally put straight onto your skin- so the brand would need to be trustworthy. We also decided originally that we wanted the brand to be high end and luxury, so I worked out that visually things would need to be simple, no fuss, and clean-looking to be able to be trusted. Some elements of what we had done were still useable, like the typeface was sleek and simple and fit in with what the brand would be trying to achieve. We wanted the fact that nettles were being branded as a positive thing rather than negative as some people had taken it, because we were of the opinion that branding isn’t a bad thing, it makes the world (or design world at least) spin.
URTICA
DIOICA
Zines
I wanted to focus on the main points of the brief, that the zine needed to have a clear approach and target a specific audience. I tried a few different things throughout the morning in London, looking at different people I could focus on, I considered using something like colour as a theme, but nothing was really grabbing me, so I knew it wouldn’t grab an audience either. Then I realised that pigeons were absolutely everywhere in London, and when you actually stop to think about them, they’re funny little things, so I decided that my approach could be humour and that would then inform who my audience would be. I made the style of my zine messy but also a weird kind of delicate, because that is exactly how I see pigeons, and then tried to make the content humorous by almost making it into a little diary of what I would be thinking if I were a pigeon. I didn’t get much feedback at all from the crit, other than yes, the message came across of what I was trying to do, so I needed to evaluate what I had done individually.
Zines
The fact that I didn’t get any negative feedback meant that I didn’t really push myself to take this brief any further, although I knew there were a few thing I could have improved on, for example machine sewing rather than hand. It wasn’t until Lab week that I reconsidered the idea of a zine, I really enjoyed working with Jack Hollands on sign writing, and it made me really aware of the hand-painted type that exists, so each time I saw hand painted type from then on, I photographed it and when I got home I would look at the photos and try to paint the letters out myself. I picked up on something that Jack had said during the day and I’ve found myself starting to work by it(whether that’s good or not is debateable): “Fuck having a ‘deep message or concept’- just make sure it looks good.” So without really realising I’d started creating a little collection of really nice letters, so I put them together and created a zine, it wasn’t bound because it looked so much more comfotable when you could see all of the letters together, and do pages have to be bound to be a zine? what even counts as a zine, who defines that!
Ditto Press
This was probably the brief that I struggled with the most, but I think that the reason for that is because I was so mind-boggled with the possibilities of ‘publishing’. I got myself really caught up on what ‘counts’ as publishing. Instead of questioning what publishing could be, I worried about what it already was. Our concept started out as being a help or warning for the fact that words would cease to exist, but we ended up actually being a campaign against ourselves. We decided that if it was really happening, we would be fighting against it, not designing the graphics for it. We wanted to be a publishing company that published publishers. We put our logo and posters on the internet so that the public could access them and print and publish them where they lived to essentially, spread a riot of words.
Ditto Press
We were happy with the response that we got from Ben who set us the brief, he seemed to really like the concept, but thought that maybe we hadn’t taken it far enough. It felt like overall, none of us really explored or pushed the idea of publishing as far as we could of. Toward the end of the brief I spoke briefly with Ben about how I’d begun questioning what publishing actually is. I argued the fact that even speaking is publishing, if you’re putting something into the public, that’s publishing, which he didn’t entirely agree with, but it was interesting and definitely beneficial to discuss that with someone external. I want to create some moving image that shows the possibilities of publishing, opening a front door, is that publishing yourself for the day? Is a leaf falling off of a tree publishing itself to the ground...it can get really silly but I just really want to challenge it, and maybe provoke some opinions.
PUBLISHED.
PUBLISHED.
PUBLISHED.
PUBLISHED.
PUBLISHED.
Evaluation I’ve gotten a lot out of this semester, I’ve become much better with my time management, being able to work on more than one thing at once is something that I wasn’t so great at last year, and it meant that I let work slip and didnt finish things off properly, whearas since September, I’ve been much more ontop of everything that needs doing, which I think is because I’ve really been enjoying all the briefs since September, so I haven’t wanted to just leave them where they are after a final crit, and in general I’ve always wanted to do more and more and more development on each brief. Something else I’ve noticed in myself is that I’m becoming more aware of my peer’s work, and how I can apply things that other people are doing, to my own work. I feel much more comfortable that I’m able to ask anyone about what they’ve been doing and ask for help, and give help if I can in return. I’ve used my blog a lot this unit, it’s been good for me to quickly drop things in and write down things I’m thinking/considering/looking at, and I’ve started to be able to use it for unfinished things, sort of more like a sketchbook. It’s also been helpful for being able to critically evaluate my work, because I can put things there without thinking too much about it, and then when I re-visit it, I’m able to add to it how I feel about it after stepping back for a while.
Also through this unit, I’ve been considering more and more how my work can and will apply in a wider sense in the outside world. In a way I’m fairly anxious because currently, I don’t know where I see myself after graduating, there isn’t one particular aspect of design that I feel strongest about and that I could pursue, so I’m still pushing all the elements as far as I can and trying not to eliminate anything. This was why I enjoyed Lab week so much, I felt that there was so much to take in and keep up with, but it really opened my mind to the possibilities of graphic design. Being able to meet, and talk to industry professionals was great because I had to push myself to ask the right things and make the most of being with them in getting contact details and such. One of the main things I think I’ve achieved in this unit is the ability to question everything. I’ve found myself constantly asking myself and other people, who defines this, what’s to say I can’t challenge that, what can be pushed, and what can’t. When Jack Hollands came in during Lab week he told us “fuck having a ‘deep message or concept’-just make sure it looks good.” And then when Ben came in from Ditto Press recently, he told us “All I care about is the message, I don’t give a shit if it looks pretty”. Which has left me with the question of how I feel about graphic design, who do I agree with and which do I feel more strongly about or does it balance? This is something that I want to work towards solving, in both my independent, and studio practice next semester.
Bibliography
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, 2009. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. First Edition Edition. Princeton University Press. Jean Baudrillard, 1999. Revenge Of The Crystal - Classic Edition: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968-1983 (Pluto Classics). Edition. Pluto Press. David McCandless, 2000. Information is Beautiful. Edition. Collins. (http://www.informationisbeautiful.net) Steven Heller, 2000. Paul Rand. Edition. Phaidon Press. Derek Birdsall, 2003. Paul Rand: Modernist Design. First Edition Edition. Center for Art and Visual Culture, UMBC. Michael Kroeger, 2008. Paul Rand: Conversations with Students. 1 Edition. Princeton Architectural Press. http://pushpinzines.co.uk http://betype.co twitter.com http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15849142