CONTEXTUAL
PORTFOLIO Septermber 2014 - April 2015
Welcome to my contextual portfolio in which throughout this years lectures I plan to learn and record pockets of information to gradually build up a wealthy portfolio of different designers, theories and practices. Design theory to me has always been something I have initially avoided in my personal studies however this is a fantastic opportunity for me to delve into designs raw history and increase my knowledge outside of contemporary design. In light however of the 4500 word limit I have chosen to fill it to the very brim with my favorite subjects we have covered through the year whether this be lectures , seminars or workshops. Overall I think I have provided a diverse body of information that could have easily doubled in length if I wasn’t restricted to 4500 words. Despite this I hope you enjoy!
By James Betts
Modernism and the industiral revolution To begin building our initial understanding of modernism we studied a range of modernist pieces strongly related to the industrial revolution. And thus this has naturally meant learning a thing or two about the revolution ourselves. At the start of the 1800’s England was going through some huge changes! With the construction of canals, railroads and mills, England was becoming am interwoven web of industry. Towns became populated with terraced houses accompanying the huge mills and the inclusion of train tracks meant produce could be taken throughout the country.
Image reference : http://jto.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/wn20130615f1b.jpg
Glossop my hometown is a fantastic personal example of how the industrial revolution changed England. There are two huge apartment blocks in Glossop which once upon a time hosted a grand cotton industry. Initially cotton was very much a local industry, in which small farms houses in the country could produce, spin and then sell their cotton on local markets. However once the railroad met Glossop the cotton industry became institutionalised with many of these farms either running out of business or forming to the corporate control of the country and working in the huge mills. With this vast swerve in the English way of life many modernist artists began capturing the raw essence of change and began literally recording what was to become the new England. Possibly the most famous works are that of both Lowry and Camille. Both artists depict truthful perspectives of what the industrial revolution was doing to the world however despite this realistic perspective they both had very different approaches to what it was they focused on within their pieces. With the institutionalisation of the vast majority of the population Lowry’s pieces focused on the movement of people through vast towns and cities. These pieces are often if not always accompanied with a bland colour scheme and some of his most striking images the huge mills loom over the people like a shadow. This style to me seems very reminiscent of the times with the dark quite musty atmosphere. However Camille took a very different approach, focusing on the changes from rural England to the grand industrial cities. His work is illustrations the booming industrial revolution from the perspective of those country houses who were losing out to the corporate redevelopment of the world. Similar redevelopments can be seen around this period across the globe, not just in England. Examples such as 18050/70’s Paris in which a grand redevelopment of the city too place, implementing a grand grid system interlinking the city with a web of roads. This was in light of the recent French revolution as the new grid system was designed to help troops cross the city at speed, prevent barricades and make room for the up and coming industrial revolution.
Design and Emotion Today we learnt a great deal about how design and emotion are interlinked due to our own perception. As we grow from babies to adults we development a whole variety of senses, but in this aspect it is sight that has had an effect on how we as humans perceive design. There ranges of evidence in which as we grow and our brain develops an understanding of how to perceive written dialogue we in some ways become too good at reading to notice errors or even in some cases particular letters! Examples of these can be found all over the internet and just show how our minds have developed to become almost overly confident when reading text. I found these two examples at www.dailycognition.com 1) Count how many ‘F’s’ are in the following statement FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS... It is common to count three in the whole text, rare people will count four but in fact there are six in the whole paragraph! This is because when we read texts connecting words such as ‘of ’ become almost invisible and we don’t perceive them. 2) Now read this next statement. A BIRD IN THE THE BUSH Most people reading this statement will have read ‘A bird in the Bush’ However not many people will have realised the duplicated ‘The’. These are all due to our human perception of text and how we are so used the reading in a particular manor our brains will instantly skip out ‘false’ details. Another example of the link between design and emotion is that of when we see faces in completely unrelated places. Cars, plug sockets even the occasional rock! This is again down to our human perception and theorisied to being related to our view of faces as a baby. As a baby you spend a huge amount of time being cradled and it is likely this ability to see faces in certain objects is due to being so close to people’s faces as a young child! This whole idea can be incorporated into design in many different aspects. One advertising campaign that instantly comes to mind relates on the idea of faces being reconisable is that of the Pittsburgh zoo!
Pittsburgh zoo & ppg aquarium This logo subtly hides both a lioness’s head and a gorilla’s in with the logo which I think is a fantastic way of branding this zoo. The whole style really arches back to the idea of the human mind being able to spot faces even when they are hidden in an image. I’m sure many other companies use a same technique, even as a scare
tactic. Despite not being able to find the example I seem to be able to remember to yellow eyes watching from a huge black poster. This idea of someone watching I believe was used in a home security campaign and the way we subconsciously spot faces would allow this poster to stand out even in our peripheral vision!
Image reference : https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress. com/2011/08/pittsburgh-zoo-and-ppgaquarium-logo-large.jpg
Image reference : http://img-teknosa.cubecdn.net/TeknosaImg/ productImages/1024x783/125071340-2-iphone_6_plus_16gb_gold_akilli_
Form Follows Function Form following function links nicely to my guest lectures and is something I feel is incredibly important in modern day design. Louis Sullivan (1890’s) explained this is a design law, similar to the laws of nature. If the design has now function it shouldn’t have a form. This is still applicable to modern day design as design has become a very expensive industry. Because of the huge expenses that are pumped into it every year it is important that what we spend our money on won’t go to waste. Thus a function must be devised before applying the form.
However this isn’t just from an economic stance. Form follows function is perhaps equally important in typography. Some type may look incredible, although when it’s put into a set of body copy you’ll realise it doesn’t function well at all. And thus despite being binary opposites in many respects function is the dangerous supplement. My personal example to this is that the iPhone 6+ has a huge phone screen, way too big for me. Thus its form has hinders its function. And in this example you can see how ergonomics become so important and that terms of averages must be considered in many aspects of design!
the sKILL lIST Being my first year at university it is incredibly important I develop myself as an individual. Thus in this seminar we were sat the task to develop ourselves as individuals and see both what we are good at and what we need to improve upon. I feel from already four years of academic practice I am gradually learning the trade at a healthy rate and from comparing work I can see a definite improvement in my work which obviously I am hugely happy about! Since then I have been given a job semi related to the design industry in which I create a range of digital assets for a local classic vw manufacturer which makes me incredibly happy that my work is out in the real world. However there are still many elements I need to develop upon. This task was quite personally constructive for me as I feel there are a range of aspects I would love to develop through the year. One of which is a relation to effort. Throughout my life I have been academically successful, Achieving acceptable grades throughout school, college and now hopefully university. However despite this I have always felt I’ve been able to do better. Specifically in college I left deadlines until last minute, or didn’t even start work when I was supposed to and this was to almost a sense of arrogance I’d earned from being able to wait until the very last minute and pull it all together and still receive a grade I was happy with however not what I could have got. The reason I want to amend this in the year ahead is due to the fact the graphic design industry is an incredibly competitive one. And with new briefs you are expected a much shorter turn around than that of the briefs we get academically. Thus it is incredibly important no that I turn around my briefs as soon as they are set but that I put in the amount of effort expected from a timescale that is set , thus to achieve my preferred grades. The third part of this task relates to my own personal aims in life. Throughout my education I have always aspired to work in a design industry but often fluctuated between which one I actually wanted to work in. Thus with this course I aspire to learn a huge variety of different animation and design techniques so that when the day comes I am pursuing my career I will the appropriate skills to do the job!
Consumer culture In modern society we can begin to identify distinctive patterns that we as people have developed ourselves. Advertisers are will often use consumer culture and aesthetic theory to create a certain appeal around a product and use it to bring in the identified target audience. “Popular culture is a category which floats ambiguously between the anthropological and the aesthetic” – Terry Eagleton , Oxford Professor.
Aethsteic Theory Aesthetic theory has been culturally influence throughout the years and often is the reason we do or do not like something. For example neither a beard or tomato soup are disgusting things? However if you mix them together the notion becomes un-pleasant. This can be applied to things we like as well as is thus how brands rely on them to create sellable products. However what complicates the matter is that in both different cultures and different time culture changes and thus what we find aesthetically pleasing does alongside it. Just a simple comparison between the use of the high heel. With a brief view of history the high heel was originally used in the 10th century by Persian horse infantry to help them better control the stirrups and thus owning high heels became something of a status symbol for owning a horse. Thus as the years passed high heels were used in a variety of ways , such as to simply make people taller but it wasn’t until pin up girls started wearing them did they become a fashion icon. These constant changes in culture are what make this such an interesting theory and this sleek modern design we are currently so used to seeing in examples such as apple might well change and develop over time until current conventions are almost unrecognisable! Image reference : http://swisstime.co/images/products/p176_i583_zenowatch-basel-pocket-watch-classic-numbers-pocket-lepineref--100-i2-num.jpg http://us.tissotshop.com/media/catalog/product/cache/2/ small_image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/T/0/ T063_610_16_037_00.jpg http://blogs-images.forbes.com/erikkain/files/2015/04/ apple-watch-selling-points.jpg
animation hereos In this lecture we didn’t an incredibly fun little quiz in which we had to name a set of eight animated characters! Despite not doing exactly great in the quiz I had a lot of fun as animation has always been very close to my heart! In early life I did in fact want to work in the film industry and in many ways still do! Because of this I have become a huge fan of classic Disney animation and most of all Pixar studios! Even in these two examples we can see how with the digital age upon us digital animation has taken huge turns in terms of quality. With fantastic 3D rendering software animators are now able to create the most lifelike motions and in many respects a higher quality of film. The reason to why this drive to both graphic design and animation grew is due to a documentary I watched a long time ago after my initial love for Pixar’s projects. In the documentary I learnt that a range of the successful Pixar workers In fact held degrees not in just animation, but design as well! Thus this love for both design and animation could be fulfilled coherently and within my academic studies. I think however its Disneys code of conduct when it comes to work that makes me envy the workers there so much. They have a fantastic balance of fun and effort when it comes to work and despite seeming like an incredibly stressful job I personally think working in one of these studios would be a dream come true. In light of the fact I like these studios so much for my As level final piece I in fact created a set of Pixar minimalist posters and following that sometime during A2 I revisited them and in some ways ‘revamped’ them and made them that little bit better. As you can see my love for animation has not dwindled and is something I expect to further pursue through this year with the animation course being so closely related to the graphic design course. However I really expect to follow it through in the summer of 2015 as I understand animation software is a set of incredibly complex kits thus I will has to spend a lot of time on each one and expect to spend years practicing this skill alongside my own design development!
INDESIGN WORKSHOP I spent a lot of time in the workshops during this first workshop week however I felt this was the only one I enjoyed as well as got a variety of skills from that are relevant even know and will be for the see-able future. Editorial design is one of my favourite disciplines in the graphic design industry, however before now I haven’t had much opportunity to learn from a tutor. Thus previous practises I’ve done with editorial design were done with much more simple softwares such as illustrator and Photoshop. And despite their fantastic design capabilities they are missing the core tools from InDesign to make a decent document. What I felt was most important with this tutorial was the core skills I learnt, not the overall result. Not only did we learn the important yet basic technical tools, but we also learnt a fair amount of theory behind the editorial design. After being set a set of photos to design the editorial around we then had to begin thinking of target audiences and the overall aesthetic a design would follow to include this type of image. Thus with this in mind I began sketching thumbnails that complimented a large image and followed it through into InDesign. However with my previous encounters with InDesign I began to implement vector illustrations to compliment the body copy. In my original concepts they were very brand san serif layouts, however with the inclusions of these shapes and lines I began to create quite an intricate design, which overall I was in fact happy with. Obviously none of these were professional standard. However they have provided me with the building blocks to go ahead and start developing InDesign documents. Before this my research documents were solely made in Photoshop as it is all I knew how to work at a high level. However with these new skills all my later editorial work will build of these basic building blocks to a very high standard.
logo WORKSHOP In this week’s workshop I decided to spend a lot of time on developing my ability with logo design. Alongside editorial work logo design is something I would love to pursue as a potential career thus I felt I it would be wise to apply this theme to all of the workshops I took part in this week! We mainly looked into the initial design stages of logo design through these workshops. Working on basic concepts and developing them into the early stages of a branding scheme. It became clear there was much more to logo design than creating a little vector, rather we were working out exactly what this company was trying to represent and overall developing the whole aesthetic it was looking to portray. This linked back to my design and emotion post in which I heavily looked into what the modern consumer wants from these places or products. The Aurora project stands out and has its own issue document on my blog, it stands out as this was the only group project of the three. In light of this it was very much the same format of developing a branding scheme for a ski slope. However with five people on the team a lot more progress was made in the short amount of time we had and we developed the idea from a mood board all the way up to a logo and accompanying poster! This fantastic progress was a short lesson to how when working with the correct people you can create work at a much higher rate and to a much higher quality than when working alone. This was partly due to our different specialties to accomplish a set of tasks alongside each other. Out of the two workshop weeks I feel this was the most successful as it allowed me to see a definite progress from basics to intermediate levels in logo design, where as it the first workshop week I felt I was just scratching the surface.
Sigmund Freud and Subjectivity Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) was moved to London after the German invasion of Austria and spent his time studying human dreams. Through his studies he discovered we both conscious and uncurious at different points in time, making us a divided subject (according to Freud). However the only way we can know this is through communication. Communication takes many different forms through art and communication. The same way people have different ways of talking is a similar to different people’s art styles! This is subject to the individual.
However it is communication through language which allows a more accurate form of communication. Like our own art style is subjective to a n individual it can also be said that art interpretation is equally subjective. Thus commination through language leaves much less to interpretation and allows us to communicate subjective notions such as the conscious and unconscious dreams.
The Pen is mightier than the sword With all these theories and movements we have studied and applied through the year, it’s important to ensure that we stay grounded in reality when it does come to designing. A designer’s work requires purpose, it can’t just look pretty and not have any reasoning behind it. This is applicable both academically and in the real world and is something I am now constantly considering when starting a new brief.
Image reference : https://img.washingtonpost.com/ wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https:// img.washingtonpost.com/news/ comic-riffs/wp-content/uploads/ sites/15/2015/01/hebdo-cover-afterattack.jpg&w=1484
This purposeful mentality is taken up by many designers or just people who work in creative industries in general! Daniel Eatock creates endless lists of ideas which are not always conceived, in a similar way one of my favorite film makers Casey Neistat has a huge board in his fantastic office! In this office he hosts everything he need to produce, edit and distribute a film. And in here his board hosts a list of all his possible film ideas and whether he chooses to pursue any of them is up to him.
This is especially important in visual communication. In this case the purpose of visual language was that of protest! On the 7th of January 2015, Paris shows the pen is truly mightier than the sword after the devastating Charlie Hebdo shootings. These journalists were killed simply because of their opinions against terrorism and in light of this these terrorists felt that silencing the men would end it. But simply put when you snap one pencil, two more will take its place and the whole world came together to support the loss of these 12 journalists and revolt against the merciless acts that ended their lives. This dark take on the purpose behind design struck me deeply and shows how the very best design can be a true source for world change.
Guest Speakers Both Brendan Dawes and Gary Hustwit came in and gave to fantastic guest lectures about their very own experiences in the design industry. They gave a set of lectures which I feel are very important to that skills development activity I took part in at the beginning of the year! Similar to Casey Neistat who I mentioned earlier Gary Hustwit to me is somewhat of a pioneer in the digital film and design industry. And both of these guests’ lecturers have built their careers through experience also in the same way Neistat has! I think it’s these similarities which have drawn me into both of these creative’s and absorbed all of their stories! Hustwit has passed through a range of industries through the years, starting with an independent book publishing firm which developed into a dvd publishing firm. However he wouldn’t stop there. After spending years in hid independent store he finally moved onto movie making. From this he led onto some rather inspiring life lessons, the main one being that you should never lock yourself into a career! And as a designer/ aspiring film maker I ever plan to follow in this stead to ensure I end up in a career I completely enjoy! His tips for this were to consider using Kickstarter to see if there truly is a demand for what you’re doing and with the introduction of both Vimeo and YouTube independents have the power to distribute on a conglomerate scale through the digital age! In a similar way Dawes had a similar attitude but kept his work firmly based in the design sector which equally interest me as film! He created some incredible vector based info graphs as his style of work follows form and function in somewhat an equilibrium, his work looks as good as it works. Despite both of these people being fantastic creative’s creating outstanding films and design work, to me it’s not what they’ve made that I like so much, it’s how they’ve made them and their dedication to their disciplines!
Image reference : http://citiesnext.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/brendan-dawes-01.png
lecture theories This one lecture held a variety of key theories that to me were incredibly interesting theories thus I have expanded my favorites bellows. Linear Perspective, an invention or discovery? If it was discovered it would be relatable to a new planet however a postmodernist would in fact argue that perspective was invented. Rather I’d argue it was discovered as its true to say it exists, however poster modernists think as an invention it’s neither true nor false. Relativism A relatist denies that any standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others. We would not privilege linear perspective as ‘true’. It is merely a different kind of representation. This is one of the less clear ‘isms’ in my opinion. From my understanding despite there being almost true and false perspectives I feel all are equally dependable on the art/design that is being produced. Coherence Following this idea of relative perspectives, conference follows an idea that linear perspectives are collectively accepted as the better form of visual representation. This does not make the visual narrative true however it does increase its coherence due to a more accurate representation. This follows the idea of vanishing points and horizon lines which allowed images to be literally more ‘coherent’ with reality however it still doesn’t mean the image is ‘true’ to reality. Perception An argument could be made that when we view our own ‘true’ perspective through our eyes that we are still not seeing a ‘true’ perspective and this follows relativism. This argument is made when you consider many scientific facts such as a me a blind man or even an animal such as a snake could be viewing the same bottle of water from the exact same place. However all three of us would have a different perspective. In light of this our imam perspective is not necessarily ‘true’ rather than our own labelled truth as a human being. Thus perspective could follow a binary opposite argument.
Binary opposites Despite being opposites often opposites come in pairs such as the right and the left and we then have to debate if one can be without the other? Binary opposites ads up for many debates and following the example of right and left we can study this pair together. If we only had right and had to describe left we’d thus have to say ‘no right’? However is this just us adding culture to nature and labelling something unrelated to speech? Before we used speech naturally we would have just pointed to illustrate a direction, thus s labelling them right and left or even right and not right are just relative labels. Iron giant poster Searching for our own binary opposites in an iron giant poster. In the poster we see the most obvious when being big and small. We see the ‘big’ robot holding a ‘small’ deer but even this can be argued as a relative binary opposite. Deposits in this comparison the robot is big and the deer is small, as we know an adult deer is not small at all! And in relevance to a deer and a boy the binary opposite would be switched! Thus in my opinion and due to the concurring evidence binary opposites are relative to the subject they’re being compared upon. Image reference : http://cdn.badassdigest. com/uploads/ images/22722/laurentdurieux-iron-giantposter-mondo__span.jpg
Ideology This subjectivism associated with binary opposites is somewhat a critique of human nature as a huge amount of binary opposites which should work, don’t. This can be challenged for example with mechanical compared to man. We naturally compare robots to man however why don’t we compare them to woman? This is likely due to our own cultural stereotypes. In reality we expect mechanics to be men as well as mechanical engines when really they could equally be a woman! This idea of modern stereotypes has had an effect on binary opposites and our perspectives of them.
Thank you for spending the time reading my contextual portfolio!