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This book is a collection of projects done during my second year at The Cass School of Art and Design studying Graphic Design. The collection will show research and outcomes for the different projects of my modules and is a part of the module Creative Industry Practice which focuses on designing for the industry through briefs meant to be a stepping stone for future practice. Happy reading! Lisa Wallius
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DIALOGUE
Dialogue Studio focuses on graphic, data and digital design thinking about user experience and interaction. Generating ideas through conversation with our peers and the world around us to create design with purpose.
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NARRATIVE MAPPING
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In this workshop we looked at different ways of mapping something and making it personal. The shape of this map comes from the places I visit most in London based on Harry Beck’s map of the underground.
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PROTOTYPING Translating images of commuters into lines, this prototype represents the emotions of Londoners on the go. 8
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ARMIN HOFMANN Experimenting with collage techniques, creating posters in the style of designer Armin Hofmann.
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MARKMAKING Mapping London through sounds and smells, this workshop had us translating things you cannot see and making it into drawings. 12
The smell of rice
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THE WORLD IS MY GRID A photography workshop on finding grids and order in the world around us. Photographed and then printed with Risograph. 14
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TYPE Drawing and creating type in different ways, thinking about how a letter is constructed and how it can be altered. 16
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MAP OF ME
Through exploring narrative and storytelling, this project’s aim was creating an application that illustrates our experiences in London. Experimenting with both abstraction and literal interpretations the app would be a personal response to the city and the concept of a map and mapping.
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LONDON POETRY
My app is based on poems I have written about my experiences in London and to start out I researched architectual minimal photography, both in black and white and more muted colours as well as in really bright and strong colours. I took a lot of inspiration from Jessica Walsh, perspective and altered type and signage for this and decided that my app needed to be bright and happy. As the app is about poetry I wanted type and experiments with type to be the driving theme in the visual identity of it and thought about how I could alter type to make it look more like images.
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ENGAGE
To inspire social change in the local community, at relevant moments, locations and audience mindset. The Engage project driven by Google data gave the opportunity to explore Digital Out Of Home using screens and data to convey our passions.
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THE WATER PAVILION My topic of choice was our exploitation of animals and specifically in the leather industry. Researching previous animal cruelty campaigns and finding lots of images made to shock and scare, I took another direction and opted for a friendlier campaign based on facts and other aspects of the leather industry that isn’t animals. I discovered that it takes incredible amounts of water to produce leather producs and made that my focal point, designing something that would work as an interactive art piece. I looked into works using light, scale and projections to create my own pavilion that explains the connection between leather and water.
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MOVEMENTS
Investigating and researching the elements of an art or design movement and creating work through different workshops that represent that movement. This project main focus was experimenting and really diving into your chosen topic to get a comprehensive understaning of what lies behind its development.
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ZERO The movement I chose was Zero, which is more art inclined than design but taps into sculpture and architecture as well. The key elements of Zero are light, vibration, movement and the monochrome but experimentation plays a huge part as well. Emerging in the late 1950’s as a reaction to the end of World War 2 the group wanted to re- invent our views of art and pushed the boundaries of what art can be.
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MARKET READY
Engaging in the business side of graphic design and learning about pitching work to clients, building a brand and setting up a small shop, the Market Ready project’s aim was creating a small business from start to finish. Working in groups we created a brand identity and collaboratively designed products and planned the process to be able to sell our designs at the Christmas market at The Old Truman Brewery.
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NEAT! As a group we decided to create a stationery brand for this project that focused on personalised notebooks but offered other products as well like notepads and pencils. I approached the task by creating a moodboard that summarised everyone’s ideas about the brand’s visual identity and also incorporated our personal style as individuals. Looking at this we could decide the tone of our brand that we named Neat for it’s indication to the clean, cool and uncluttered which was what we wanted.
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Work with our product development became very reliant on our colour scheme of primarily blue, orange and green and our product range expanded to bags and posters as well. Many things went into the work of the brand as we apart from the products also needed to design social media platforms, promotional things such as flyers and business cards and thinking about how we could present everything for our stall at the market. As our personalised notebooks would be assembled at the market, we had a lot of components that needed to be thouroughly thought through beforehand such as the printing of different types of patterned paper to go inside the books, ordering paper for the book covers and also making the rest of the products so everything cohesively represented our brand.
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PASTICHE 1560
For Pastiche 1560 the project aim was demonstrating critical thinking about someone of major personal creative importance and/or influence by making a 15-60 second long video clip commenting on the peron’s style or way of working.
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ALEXANDER CALDER Alexander Calder’s work is all about scale, motion and gravity. His sculptures look like they have been painted into place, his wire art makes the heaviest of objects feel light and with his mobiles he reinvented the notion of sculpture. Art no longer had to be static and still but could funtion as a moving piece that breathes a life of its own.
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Working with this project I experimented with making my own mobiles to get an understanding of the process it takes to create them. There are many small pieces that need to be balanced just right to make it work and it is time consuming and patience trying. Initially thinking about focusing on only mobiles, I ended up aiming to capture more of Calder’s work with colour and motion as well and my final video is made digitally to enhance the brightness of the colours and white space.
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KICKSTARTER
Developing a project plan and page on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.com. By working in groups we extended the collective brand created for Market ready and created a project page from within Kickstarter including a promotional video. For this we also had to propose a marketing/social media plan.
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OUR CAMPAIGN Researching campaigns proved that the most important thing to cover when doing a Kickstarter is the video as it is the best way to explain your idea and make people interested. Therefor we decided to put most effort into that and used both stop motion, film and animation to make the Neatbook breathe and inspire creativity.
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Preparation is key when doing a stop motion animation and the most important but also most time consuming part is getting the lighting right as we wanted a clean, crisp white background for our video because that would compliment the Neatbook the best. Getting every shot to have the same colour balance is tricky but worth the effort and after some re-doing we finally got the result we wanted. The final outcome for this project was a presentation; presenting our Kickstarter page and our brand so it was important that everything felt cohesive. Colourful and clean to match the concept of Neat.
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Pledges for Kickstarter campaign
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ON DESIGN
Throughout the year we have been looking into current practitioners of design to get an understanding of how they work and their insight on the industry. Following are some examples of designers I chose to explore further.
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ALAN FLETCHER
KATE MOROSS
Creating layout can be much the same to making a storyboard for a movie. Some parts are busier than others but most important is the pace.
Colourful and funky, Kate Moross works with her interests such as hand lettering and geometry to create designs that really reflect her personal style.
NATASHA JEN
MASSIMO VIGNELLI
Pentagram partner, Natasha Jen is an expert on designing with type. Her playful yet super controlled aesthetics are sleek and timeless.
Type is defined by its pauses. Its breath is the white space flowing in between its body giving the characters rythm and life.
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TALKS & VISITS
In our modules we have been visiting different museums in London as well as been visited by different designers and worked with different companies to get more of an insight to the industry.
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SOUVENIRS
This essay written for Critical and Contextual Studies discusses souvenirs as memories and proposes an alternative souvenir for London called The Cube Series made up of small cubes that explores the city through its sounds.
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Souvenirs as memories “The production of tourism is in part a process of encounter, with space, landscape and its visual cultures of representation.”1 These visual representations are what we refer to as souvenirs, the usually miniature objects we buy to remind us of a place visited. This essay will discuss the links between souvenirs and memory, different conventional souvenirs and my own proposal for an alternative souvenir of London; a souvenir exploring the voice of the city. Sébastien Marot connects souvenirs with memory in his book Sub- urbanism and the art of memory, Architecture landscape urbanism 8 by stating that “Memories are attached to places. Souvenirs help us
remember those memories.”2 A person is made up of her experiences. Our memories are what shape us and without them we have difficulty finding our identity, because our personality and our opinions are based on the things we have experienced and the life we have lived so far. This may well be the reason we buy souvenirs, keep mementos and take photographs; they help us remember who we are and what has shaped our sense of self. Susan Stewart describes souvenirs in her book On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection as the following: “The souvenir distinguishes experiences (…) we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that
1 Crouch, David and Lubbren, Nina,Visual Culture and Tourism, (Oxford: Berg, 2003) Introduction 2 Marot, Sébastien, Sub- urbanism and the art of memory, Architecture landscape urbanism 8 introduction
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thereby exist only through the invention of narrative.”3
An alternative souvenir of London, The Cube Series
The souvenir gives form to memories so that we do not lose them, and most conventional souvenirs use sight and the miniature to convey this memory. In the average tourist shop in any country or place we will probably always find a miniature of a famous building in that city or images of specific tourist sites. What souvenirs also do, as Stewart explains further, is telling the narrative of the person who bought it: “The souvenir moves history into private time”4, and by doing so it is also telling the story of the person that possess it for there is a reason we bought that specific object, why we keep it and what it makes us remember.
I have created a souvenir that works as a series called “Cubes of London”. The series are made up of “talking cubes” that by the press of a button play sounds from different places in London. This souvenir is decorative but triggers the imagination as well as you are made to visualize the place you are listening to yourself. In the book Visual Culture and Tourism the authors describe tourism as a term “popularly referred to as ‘being there’.”5 and my souvenir will take this even further as you will be transported to the place through sound. The cubes will not be recording any speech so as to let the place and the technology talk in its own
3 Stewart, Susan, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1993) p.135 4 Stewart, Susan, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1993) p.138 5 Crouch, David and Lubbren, Nina,Visual Culture and Tourism, (Oxford: Berg, 2003) Introduction
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voice, directly to you - for you to form your own sense of it, your own sense of the city. This is also how the souvenir works as an alternative one - by not telling you about the iconic places in London, but rather makes you form your own opinion about them through hearing them. There is in fact no way of telling which city these souvenirs come from except by looking at the broken down image of Harry Beck’s map of the underground6 covering “The Tube Cube”. The three cubes I have made are “The Tube Cube”, with sounds from the underground; “The Street Cube”, with sounds from Oxford Street; and “The Park Cube”, with sounds recorded in Hyde Park. In the creation of my souvenir I have had to stop and listen to the city and in doing that, I’ve
come to notice that not once is the city really quiet and even in the less trafficked, more sparsely populated areas there is always some form of noise - be it from the commercial airplane going above you or the boiler kicking into gear as the neighbours turn on the hot water. Thinking about infrastructure, there are also sounds our ears can not pick up, sounds of buildings and technology, that are breathing on a different spectrum than our ears are designed to hear. In the article Infrastructural Tourism, Shannon Mattern writes that “sound can give a kind of presence to infrastructures we’re unaware of, even when we’re inhabiting them.”7 For hearing people, sound is such a big part of our everyday that we do not even think about how much we are constantly listening to and what our ears
6 <https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/culture-and-heritage/art-and-design/harry-becks-tube-map> viewed 2016.11.21 7 Mattern, Shannon, Infrastructural Tourism, <http://designobserver.com/feature/infrastructural-tourism/37939> viewed 2016.11.16
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absorb. My souvenir works in a way to make you think about the sound we usually filter away, the everyday background noise and what visuals we can build from the journey that the “Cubes of London” take us on. Sound artist Bill Fontana has for many years made the sounds of infrastructure available to us by recording audio from bridges and trains8, giving these otherwise rather static machines or contraptions that exist to serve us a voice and an identity of sorts. Likewise, artist Christina Kubisch has designed headphones that convert electromagnetic signals into sounds9, taking something that is around us at all times but we cannot see, feel or hear and making it into audio so as
to get some understanding of what exists with us, without us paying it any mind. This is something I also want to capture with my souvenir, but focusing on the sound we actually do hear but do not give any attention. The connection between sound and memory is also a very interesting one. As Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck writes in the book Sound SouvenirsAudio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, “Sound and memory are inextricably intertwined with each other”10 and this is maybe most visible when we think of how we can listen to a song and then connect that song to a specific person,
8 Mattern, Shannon, Infrastructural Tourism, <http://designobserver.com/feature/infrastructural-tourism/37939> viewed 2016.11.21 9 Mattern, Shannon, Infrastructural Tourism. <http://designobserver.com/feature/infrastructural-tourism/37939> viewed 2016.11.21 10 Bijsterveld, Karin and Van Dijck, José, Sound Souvenirs- Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009) p.11
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time or place. Sound is a very powerful instrument when it comes to memory and therefore I believe it is very fitting as a souvenir, considering souvenirs as memories. Further development for Cubes of London The Cube Series will be for anyone interested in a souvenir that shows a different side of the city. It works visually but also as an experience where a group of people can listen to it together and discuss what they hear and what visuals they see. The souvenir also provides an interesting and alternate impression of the city for anyone who has not visited it or any city at all and not being familiar with these sounds. Further development of The Cube Series could be to make the series not exclusive for London, but for several different cities as well and research how or if the city sounds differ. One could also play them together and in doing so, placing parts of
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the world that will never meet next to each other creating a harmony in the respective citiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; own voices; a choir of cities of sorts. Another way to develop the series further can be to make new recordings of the same places every year to see how the voice of the city might change with time. The Cube Series would be made available for as many people as possible, ideally sold in all types of tourist shops so as to promote the production of alternative souvenirs and get people to take a different piece of a city with them as a memory that they can interact with in a different way than, for example, a postcard. This is a souvenir that not only works as a narrative of the person that possesses it but also as something that triggers the imagination of the person who has never visited the place at all. A souvenir telling the story of a place and at the same time lets you form your own story of it, whether you have the memory or not.
Conclusion As we will always collect memories, we will likewise collect souvenirs to remind us of the memories we have made. Collecting souvenirs that do more than just remind us of a place or point in time but also makes us consider that specific place and likewise the area around us that we inhabit and use everyday, is considerably more interesting and will hopefully become a more common practice with time. Sébastien Marot writes this about the city:
With souvenirs like The Cube Series we could maybe start unlocking the various layers of the forever changing city to help us understand it better and our place within it.
“The city can be effectively analyzed like a mental organism: an organisation whose previous states of existence are accessible to varying degrees, and whose spatiotemporal depth, now transparent, now opaque is more or less available to the voyage of memory.”11
11 Marot, Sébastien, Sub- urbanism and the art of memory, Architecture landscape urbanism 8. (Spain: SYL.ES, 2008) p.32
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Bibliography
Articles:
Books:
Henry Beck’s tube map https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/cultureand-heritage/art-and-design/harry-beckstube-map viewed 2016.11.21
Bijsterveld , Karin and Van Dijck, José, Sound Souvenirs- Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009) Crouch, David and Lubbren, Nina, Visual Culture and Tourism (Oxford: Berg, 2003) Marot, Sébastien, Sub- urbanism and the art of memory, Architecture landscape urbanism 8. (Spain: SYL.ES, 2008) Stewart, Susan, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1993)
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Mattern, Shannon, Infrastructural Tourism http://designobserver.com/feature/ infrastructural-tourism/37939 viewed 2016.11.16
The Park Cube, The Tube Cube and The Street Cube
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