We are asked to go to east London to document Crimes Against Design in a thoroughly convincing manner. Photography and video are often used as ‘evidence’ in different investigation methods to speculate and implicate specific truth claims about what we are seeing. The challenge through critical reflection is to decide what is good and bad, useful and not useful about the design work you see. The final outcome should tell the story between location, space and audience and how the design intervention has responded to the crime against design you initially identified.
We walked around east London mainly including Spitalfields Market, Brick Lane and Redchurch Street and took photos of good design and bad design. It can be all kinds of design: graphics, exterior and interior design of shops, advertisements, window displays, banners, products, logos and
so on. In this task, sometimes it is diffcult to tell whether the designs are absolutely bad or good. Because some designs bad but in a functional and eye-catching way, and some designs good but they are just a useless practices.
Considering the good or bad principles of design that tutor provided, we analysed the best one and the worst one we chose from numberous photos we took in east London. The photo below shows the workshop we did to analyse design and find similarities of good or bad designs.
With critical points of view, we start from ‘Metro colour’ as the worst design to improve. ‘Metro Colour’ is a printing store located at Shoreditch High Street overground station. Though it has a perfect location, the signboard is almost invisible and unnoticeable when people pass by. Also, the colour seems faded a lot, and the colour scheme doesn’t scream its function out. What’s more, the text is unbalanced that it could be better arranged.
New colour scheme needed to scream out its function - a printing store.
It is probably a tube shape with four parts of rectangles, we will keep this basic shape.
It may need a new font to make it more remarkable.
Without separating ‘metro’ and ‘colour’, the design can be more united.
Here are some experiments we did for the logo design. We tried two different shapes, some have the separated parts as the original one. And different colour schemes and fonts are attempted in the experiments.We expected
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the new logo can be more remarkable. With the elliptical shape, the text can be designed in curve that looks more malleable.
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The inspiration is from vintage shop signs. They have several parts distincted from different colours, shapes and fonts. If there is too much text, this is a good way to organize information.
IMAGES SOURCE [1] MI CASA: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/METAL-SIGNS-Humerous-Quotes-27-CHOICES-Retro-Vintage-/200586131270 [2] Emporium: http://juniperandroses.blogspot.co.uk/2012_03_01_archive.html [3] L’an: http://kids-myshot.nationalgeographic.com/photos/view/39657/vintage-shop-sign-shot-by-crazyboutyellow
This is the new design for Metro Colour printing shop. The most focusing part is the name of the shop. The colour scheme, we choose CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) which are the colours of ink of printers. Second important information is the contact number. Then is the service details. So, in this layout, the information will be more readable and clear for audiences.
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This piece of graffiti is created by Mr. Camera, an artist from Taiwan. He painted an actual size of train station on the wall. This is what inspired us to create something on wall. Since it is a printing shop and it locates
at Shoreditch where is the heart of street art in London, so we decided to create a graffiti art of a professional printer related to this shop’s function on the wall.
before
IMAGES SOURCE Inspiration images from left: [1] photograph by Cancan Huang, 2012 [2] http://forum.pchome.com.tw/content/56/61197
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