New visual language

NEW

VISUAL

L ANGUAGE

Issue 1 May 2014

FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION

“Good design is obvious.

Great design is transparent” – Joe Sparano

Contents 1

Street Graphics..........

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Cabinet of Curiosity....

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Earth Artifact.............

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Typography................ 16-19

Street graphics is such a broad term and I think that it was supposed to help broaden my knowledge and open up our minds, being that it was our first brief of the year. I think that its aim was to make us think up multiple solutions instead of thinking of one idea and telling ourselves that it was our best and only idea.

From the start I decided that I wanted a lot of ideas to choose from so I decided to mind map all of my ideas, but I wanted to go in depth and be able to broaden my scope so created A2 mind maps full of my ideas. In the very first briefing we were told that it is always a good idea to have 8 or 9 ideas, to then discard the filler ideas and have 3 ideas that you are confident with. To me this is so you can show you have explored several ideas and have had more options and not just what you started with. So that’s what I did. I thought up 9 ideas that weekend and then discussed my ideas in the following week.

After discussing all of these ideas in detail I then went on to narrow down my ideas to the 3 ideas, which I thought would be good areas to explore and, which were also different. My ideas were then narrowed down to branding, graffiti and litter. But they were more in depth than they seem from just the simple abbreviations of each Idea. I then went on to create mini explorations of each using lining paper, which I had made into a concertina book for my graffiti idea and a scroll for the litter, with an A5 sketchbook for branding.

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With branding it started with well known brands and then comparing 2 businesses that were similar and nearly equally successful. It then developed further into successful and unsuccessful brands, what works and what doesn’t work. This lead to advertising both good and bad and then advertising in the street and a brief thought on how advertising is affected by the seasons. After this exploration it lead to the success and failure of good businesses through not only their brand but also advertising and how the streets are constantly changing due to success and failure and thusly the streets are in a constant state of flux. A way of portraying this I found was through gradual change like the night and day photo’s by Stephen Wilkes. A possible final outcome for this project was to create a zoetrope on street development and change.

My graffiti was focused more on graffiti telling a story rather then just the average tagging. I wanted to express

graffiti being about not only where people are from but also where they are going. Graffiti can be about more then just releasing stress. It can be a life story or tell of struggle. I first looked at an artist who was injured severely and used his graffiti as way of releasing all of his pent up emotions and getting it across to the outside world in a covert way. I then looked into the berlin wall and how the citizens of Germany expressed their feelings about the wall and all that it represented, of being oppressed and their lack of freedom. And lastly I looked into the New Basford: a new typographic terrain article and took quotes from there on how a place can be expressed through the art of the people.

How it tells a story that can usually be overlooked and forgotten, and how graffiti is a way of expressing the voice you sometimes don’t have. A possible outcome for this project I considered was to create a mural showing the pretty picture on the upper levels portraying a street and then showing what is really there in the undergrounds.

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And lastly my other idea was litter and how pollution affects the streets and everyone in them. I wanted to get across the effects of littering and the affects that it has on the streets. I first looked at litter build up and a 1950’s New York representation of what litter does to the streets. I then looked at an artist called Derek Gores who created art from recycled media, such as newspapers and magazines. I found his work to be difficult to try and work with because it depends on a lot of time and research but I used Photoshop

to alter some images into the same effect, but removing the people from the work and only using the streets unlike some of Derek’s work. And then lastly I looked at some litter campaigns and a piece of work by Banksy, which was very similar to the campaigns about brushing the litter under the rug and pretend it isn’t there. Litter is a big problem and shouldn’t be ignored. A final outcome for this project was to put together a photograph showing the street but to peel away layers and show what is hiding.

Because I couldn’t decide what idea

would be best and because I was running out of time I decided to put together a timeline of my project influenced by Swiss modernist designs. The designs showed the idea which I had looked into and then using a previous idea, I put together a concertina book to showcase my timeline, so that it work as both a book and a banner. However I didn’t want to stop there and just represent my ideas I wanted to show them visually in relation to the streets so put them in a typical setting or an abstract representation of what the would look like if you walked past them in the street.

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What is a cabinet of curiosity? When I was first given the brief I was unsure of what to expect and what to make of the title however when in briefing I found the concept really interesting and I saw a lot of possibilities with this brief. In this brief the aim was to produce a cabinet of curiosity, or what I liked to call a theatre of the mind and to produce it on something that was personal to you. It could have been a childhood memory or something that we felt strongly about. I came to my own conclusion that a cabinet of curiosity doesn’t have to necessarily be a cabinet but something that is personal to me.

I again started this brief with a mind map to show all of my ideas. I found this harder then the first brief, because although in briefing I saw the potential, it was hard to pick topics that were personal and that I felt passionate about without seeing myself becoming too involved or precious over the idea. I didn’t want to be so attached that any criticism would throw me off of where I wanted the project to go. I produced fewer ideas

Cabinet of Curiosity

than the first project but they were all different but in some way personal to me.

I felt it would become too personal and I would become precious of it.

The first idea was that I have a passion for reading and I thought that using that would produce something interesting and something I could work with.

I possible outcome for that idea was to produce a hollowed out book for my ‘cabinet’ and produce a scene from either my favourite book or my love of reading. My second idea was to maybe include my family somehow, because I am from a big family and it is very much a part of who I am as a person.

A possible outcome for this project I saw was creating a book or box full of childhood memories and quotes from my past. Another idea I had was to create something relating to cancer. This is very personal to me because on the one hand my star sign is cancer, but more than that my cousin died of leukemia and it happened so fast. I wanted to create something showing either the degenerative disease or my thoughts on how devastating this can be. I however discarded this idea because

My final idea was to create something related to my trip to New York. It was a trip full of first times for me because it was my first time abroad and thusly my first time to America and so I experienced a lot things there that I hadn’t while in England. I had also collected everything that I could from my time in New York, such as napkins and receipts. My intention at first was to create a memory book and use my collected items to create pages of each day on the trip and also create a bit of collage work in the style of Kurt Schwitters, however as my research progressed my ideas changed. I then decided that I wanted to use a suitcase as my ‘cabinet’ so that it represented my travel but also on would be hidden as well, because on the outside it would look like a normal suitcase but on the inside it would be full of my memories and ideas. It would also have secret compartments and hidden messages so that it was interactive.

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Theatre of the Mind

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I then looked into work by Georgia 0’keep and her work on the Manhattan skyline and like the idea of creating something using the New York skylines.

The idea then changed to creating one laser cut skyline from each day and layering them in a box so that it built up an image of New York. I also considered having little removable panels detailing the street name underneath and so you could interact with it. But this idea again changed as I then went to look into work done by Lori Nix who created diorama sets, which I absolutely loved and this but me on a new train of thought of

creating a scene from new york, maybe showing places I had been, however under the time frame I didn’t want to set myself something to time consuming and be unable to complete the work, so I decided to use more then one idea.

I decided to create visual representations of one thing that I had done for the first time, for each day while I was in New York. I used the suitcase idea of making it interactive and not necessarily a cabinet. I then used the skyline idea partially to firstly instead of creating a cabinet; I created a frame, which had panels, which were removable. Then I

used the idea of an actual skyline part of my idea to create visual representations of china town and central park, using acrylic. And using these ideas and new ideas It resulted in me creating a framed box using wood, containing 5 panels, one for each day using my own representation of something I did for the first time while there.

I wanted it so that it could be viewed from all angles and so that it was interactive and would make curious as to what everything was but be obvious to me. My final panels consisted of, Times Square, China Town, Broadway, the 9/11 Memorial and Central Park.

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Earth Artifact

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The Golden Record, the Voyager and Carl Sagan are all words that are synonymous with our Earth artefact brief. The brief was, in my understanding to create something that we could send into space, much like the Golden Record, that we thought represented Earth. It could be anything.

For this brief I not only created one mind map but several, because every time I created one, I then tried to refine it but also ended up adding more to the list.

I came up with several possibilities, such as poverty, emotions and culture and much like in my street graphics project and decided that I would narrow it down to 3 ideas, which were emotion, evolution and language. I felt that these 3 ideas although different had links that to each other that could also be explored.

I started with emotions and I wanted to express how we express our emotions in more ways then just through verbal communication. The main points I looked at were that I looked into facial expressions, body language and sound. I did this to get across that we communicate in many different ways and I think that sometimes we don’t realise it. As a possible outcome for this idea I considered putting together a book or a video detailing emotions that we feel in different situations and possible in different cultures.

I then looked into language, which I thought linked in really well to my idea on emotions, and again I wanted to get across how we talk using more then just verbal language and also how many languages we have to communicate with. I first looked at the 10 most popular languages and also the other range of languages there are to communicate with. I looked again at expressions and body language, but I took it further and I then also looked into media which we use to communicate such as Facebook, e-mail, twitter and so on. I found this to be interesting and that the amount of technology we use to vast in our day to day life, whether it is just by using the phone or sat at our computers over Facebook or Skype, either verbally or virtually. And I also looked into animals and how they express what they are feeling and thinking without language

and I looked at animals that mate for life.

An outcome for this idea I considered was to create my own symbols for how people communicate now without words and using slang. I also considered documenting the different ways in which we communicate much like I had thought about for my idea on emotions.

Lastly I looked into evolution, which I felt also linked in with language and emotions. I first looked into the planetary evolution and how our planet was formed and how it evolved. I had done geology last year in A-level and so I knew quite a lot about continental change and the geological time frames and tried to incorporate this into my research. I then looked into the moons cycle and how we have noted the progression and how it is constant. I then looked into how we as people have changed and evolved, looking at our hands and feet and our bodies as a whole. I found this to be interesting seeing how much we have adapted and I took this idea from what I had looked at in geology about the evolution of life forms from the start.

While I was going through theses stages I watched a documentary on evolution, which lead me to then along the lines of evolution, look into things that we have harnessed over time such as fire and earth. This area of research took me to looking into the 4 main elements that we need to survive, air, earth, fire and water. And I thought about creating a survival kit of sorts with visual representations of the elements for, which I looked into physical and virtual symbols. I looked into putting the representations in jars and also in vector format. I eventually created some elements in the style of 50’s tattoos and the shapes were all free flowing, which I considered animating the symbols to flow from one to another. I also thought that could make cards similar to playing cards using these element symbols and include them in my survival kit idea. I also thought about using a standard unmark wooden box for the container so that it would be like a time capsule.

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I liked both the idea of evolution and the survival kit idea and decided instead to combine both ideas and create an interactive book. I wanted the book to look almost like somebodies sketchbook/diary but with a few slightly more polished items like it had been completed over a period of time and it had room for more writing and development for others to complete, but also had parts that came with the book such as maps.

I decided to start with the history of the earth and all of the key points involved with that, such as the earth forming, mass extinction and also Pangaea breaking up. This then led on to maps of all the geological time periods and where the continents were when, which were hidden in a secret compartment.

I then moved on to the moon cycle, of which in the beginning I had stated how was formed, and created a flip book of the moon cycles and had also hidden in

a compartment. Then there was sketches of how we had evolved as people but with room for more sketches so as we continue to evolve it can be continuously added to if found in the future. Then toward the back there is another hidden compartment, which contains a pencil for these sketches and also my vector and 50’s tattoo element symbols, along with pages where others could write about and draw there own representations of the elements.

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To start this brief we were se the task of picking 3 artist images and creating our own fonts. I found this to be quite difficult as I had never created my own font before or developed typography at all. These typefaces could both be developed further and then created on illustrator, or we could start from scratch and create a new font for something different or something personal. I however liked my typefaces and I then had to choose, which typeface I thought worked better as a piece of design and related the most back to the image. I also didn’t want to create something that would be too complex and would be difficult to produce in the timeframe of our brief.

I then chose my simplest of designs inpired by a design by Wolfgang Weinheart to work with and develop further. I don’t think that it was my strongest design piece, nor do I consider myself to be a modernist, as I think that you need a bit of both, however I saw potential in my initial designs and wanted to take it further. It looked to be a challenge to make this font work and everyone that I had asked had seemed unsure about whether it would come together, but I wanted it to work and I was willing to put the time and effort into producing. I also decided that in wanted both an upper and a lower case for this font which gave me more option however mad the development harder because I wanted my upper and

lower case to have slight differences but to recognisable as the same font.

When I went on to produce my designs on illustrator, I made sure not just trace over my sketches and to use vector shapes to compose my font.

I wanted the widths and heights to match and for the letters to be even and fit together without any of the items looking out of place. I didn’t want all of the imperfections from my sketches to follow through because even though in the later stages of developing my font I had measured out the widths and heights so that they would match there were still plenty of imperfections.

I started with the lower case and decided to roughly compose my font on illustrator using my set up guidelines. I found that a good and bad thing about using only vectors was that there were things that would only work when I sketched them and so although I had to make more changes then I had anticipated, I had not started working on my font with the mind set that it was finished and I knew that there would be a lot of changes and work involved. I found It was also hard to make sure that all the letters matched and followed similar patterns in both my upper and lower case while still relating back to the original image without copying the font that was already present on that image, so half way through I went on to start producing

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my upper case because I wanted to see how the fonts would match up.

This I think helped and so I decide to work on the almost simultaneously, by working on a few letters for each at a time. After a lot of hours working on both fonts I managed to finish them to point where I was satisfied that they were the best that they would be. There is always room for more development and in the future I may come back to it and keep developing and also developing my other fonts as well. But for now I had successfully finished my fonts. But although I had finished them on illustrator I was not yet finished, and decided that I would further develop them on different media.

I decided that there was just something better about the upper case font, rather than the lower case font, that it just worked better collectively and fit together as single letters and also when put into worded examples. So I then decided to get my font laser cut onto Perspex and fiddle around with the physical representations of my font and not just the virtual font.

I found that seeing the fount and putting it together, almost like a jigsaw gave the font a new appearance. It had the stencil background and the physical cut outs, which would allow using paint and printing my font onto paper and also for making the font 3 dimensional.

Overall the brief gave me a new appreciation of type and how fonts work and come together, of how difficult they can be to produce. I am also happy with my choice of type to develop and glad that I didn’t give up on the type and stuck to it to try and work it out.

I consider my font to be both modern and postmodern, and not just either/or.

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