Visual Thinking by Liz Salisbury

Visual Thinking

Content The N word

3 - 14

Nails

Noodles and Ninjas

Numbers

Postcards Explosive Drawing

Ooh Aah Mmm

Propaganda

Essay

Letters in the landscape

23 - 28

Photographing

Layout

French Fold

Screen Printing For the Love of Graphics

29 31 - 34

Logos

Exhibition

Sources

N The brief for this project was to select a letter at random, and recreate it to represent a word begining with the same letter. For this project I was in a team with Daniela Osorio. We selected the letter N, to be 300mm tall. We had to come up with a lot of words begining with “N” and surprisingly there aren’t many. We came up with about 50 words that could be represented visually, some were debatable, someone came up with “ner ner” to replicate the noise of an ambulance. So obviously at this stage visuals were not being considered, just anything, anything at all begining with “N”. After about an hour we were flaking, looking at our phones for ideas, cheating using the dictionary, and for the rest of the week if anyone said anything and we heard an “N word” we’d frantically try to remember it. At work somenoe came to buy a Nilfisk pressure washer, and still looking for Ns I went “NILFISK. That’s an N word. I must text Daniela. Not clever. Projects and word Do Not Mix.After a few days of considering “N words” it was time to actually do something with them. Scrap the rubbish ones (Nilfisk. Boy was I desperate) and highlight the words that had some potential. Daniela liked Noodles. I liked Nails. Daniela liked Numbers. I liked Ninjas. We had a lot to work with.

Our ideas are as follows, Daniela wanted to fill a hollow plastic N with cooked noodles. She also wanted to create a letter N using numbers. I wanted to bang a lot of nails into the shape of an N. And see if I could draw some ninjas in the shape of an N. So far pretty basic ideas but all sounded pretty fun to make.

Making my N with nails. Not one of my better ideas, it took about a week for the aching in my hand to go away. I went to B&Q to get some materials. Lots of nails and some MDF board. I drew up a nice N, not too plain, it has seriffs and a little flick for decoration. I then proceeded to spend about an hour banging nails (loudly) into the shape. It was a nightmare. The nails I used were tiny, the MDF board was thick and compact so difficult to get the nails in very deep. It got really fiddly to get the nails in close together, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d bought the materials but fogotten to get pliers. I hit my thumb about 12 times, very comical, you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expect it to hurt as much as it does because you never realise how much force youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re putting behind the hammer, even for tiny nails. Completing the N was very satisfying, throwing the hammer and left over nails back into the toolbox never to be seen again was even more so.

Photographing the N was the next part, the easy bit. I wanted to experiment with the shaddows of the nails as these made it look a lot more interesting, it was also interesting to play around with the macro setting on the camera and shoot from different angles. Annoyingly the best photographs (in my opinion) were the photographs in which the letter was not as clear, these being the ones taken from an abstract angle focussing on one park to the photograph but blurring out the rest. I had to try and take a photograph that kept the letters integrity but also looked more interesting and was taken at an angle where you could see that the letter was made out of nails.

The noodles idea was a brilliant sounding one, Daniela uses the laser cutter often so it was the perfect idea for her. Shed used the cutter to make the structure of her hollow N in clear plastic, which she then assambled using clear silicone and filled with noodles. Unfortunately the physical outcome wasn’t quite as we’d expected, putting the N together with the silicone was fiddly and difficult to do neatly, so the silicone dried leaving some mess on the plastic which showed up in the photographs. The idea was perfect though, it was very tempting to do it again and try and figure out ways of keeping the silicone neat. In tutorials we came up with other things begining with N that we could put in the plastic letter, someone said it’d be cool to put some fish in, I suggested putting a clown fish in for “Nemo” and then conversation turned to the subject of animal cruelty and that idea was quickly abolished.

My idea for Ninjas was an “alright” one. It wasn’t something that I felt I had the time to do properly, I planned on just illustrating the idea, but given more time I could have found some voulenteers and done the letter as a photograph with people posing in the way that’d make an N out of ninjas. Illustrating the idea took long enough anyway, I had to figure out how I could position 3 figures to make an N, but in positions that could be fighting, using swords, feet and fists. I also wanted to put some “baddies” in amongst my ninjas to give their fighting positions more purpose. Putting the ninjas into position took about 10 attempts. Once I’d decided where one would go and was really pleased with the outcome I had to find a way of fitting the other two around him to make the rest of the N but also make sense. I ended up giving them swords to lengthen their arms when I needed and so I had to go back and find a way of putting a sword in the other ninjas hands without ruining their position. It took a while. The end result I was quite happy with.

The photographs taken at different angles that only focussed on a few nails looked the nicest but you couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see that it was of a letter N.

The N for numbers was the final idea that we decided to continue with as our final outcome. It was a surprise to me to begin with as I didn’t know Daniela was going to do it until I saw the finished N. She’d done it with the laser cutter using thin sheets of wood, the edges where the laser cutter had cut had burned giving the letter outlines. She’s put together a length about two numbers thick of the numbers, and then used the lenths to make a regular, no frills, N shape. It looked (and smelled) wonderful, like something you could pick up as wall art in a department store, really professional and perfectly made.

Photographing took ages. Me with my obsession for shadows wanted to see shadows of the image. Becase I thought that’d look good and emphasise the detail in the N. We shot it with all the studio lighting set up and could only make light shaddows without it then becoming too dark. We also tried separating 3 of the wooden Ns and standing them in a row to give it more depth. We also shot just one standing up, very plain, very boring but still looking clean and professional.

Setting up PhotoShop and InDesign ready for print: - Select image - Open a blank photoshop document, in the page set up window make sure the document for your image is bigger than your indesign file will be. My InDesign file was 105mm x 148mm, so my PhotoShop document was 111mm x 154mm. This is so that the edges of the picture will sit on the bleed marks of the InDesign document. - Make sure the document is set up in CYMK colour for print. RGB is for digitally displayed work. - Edit your image. - Save image as a TIFF file, as this is better for printing. - Make sure when saving, that nothing is compressed, and configure it for a Mac of PC.

- Open a new InDesign document. - Set up in print mode, no facing pages if you’re doing a postcard. - Postcard size is 105mm x 148mm, no collumns necessary unless you’re planning on writing a lot. - Set the bleed, usually this is 3mm around the edge, this is to prevent any inacuracies when your work is cut that could leave untidy white edges. - Set the slug, this is usually 10mm around the edge and is for colour bars and registration marks.

- Make your postcard. To put an image into InDesign go to “Fiile”, “Place” and open the image up. - Save the image as an InDesign and make sure you keep your sources for images and fonts together. - Go to “File”, “Export” and select Adobe PDF for print.. - Keep the bleed marks and slugs so you can check everything is ready for print. Make sure nothing is compressed.

13 - Export.

Metal letters were first made in Korea in the early 1200s, and were developed in Europe in the mid 1400s using the same metals still used to make metal letters today. Fonts were created using the metal blocks, the material being more durable than wood blocks and allowing more precise shapes.

Explosive Drawing Throughout the term it was required of me to attend some workshops and some lectures given by different courses in the university. The first of these was a workshop lead by the Illustration department called “Explosive Drawing” which I attended with my friend Ravina from my graphics course. The workshop was an all day thing, on the last Friday in January starting at 9am. We arrived, prompty got lost in the Illustration building, found a lady who said she knew where it was and took us to the other end of the department from where it was and arrived at 9.30am. Not a great start for what looked like the only graphics students attending the workshop, but then everyone else was lounging around taking their time to take their coats off at the time we arrived anyway. No harm done to the departments reputation. The workshop was lead by a young teacher who was confident with the workshop saying she’d done it all over the UK and that it was a brilliant workshop. We began by covering the floor and walls of the centre of the studio in big pieces of white paper. We’d been asked to bring in our own art materials, so I’d brought in some pastels, paints, pens and biros. Ravina had brought in her water colours, more pastels and

pencils. The idea of the day was to cover the massive “canvas” in whatever imagery entered our mind in response to an audio book that would be played throughout the day. The lady was confident that at the end of the day we’d be left with an awesome canvas of explosive responses from this audiobook. We were to spend 10 to 30 minutes on one area, then we’d move somewhere else, we could work from the previous occupants work or find a gap to work in. We were not to get precious over one piece of our own work because other people in the group might change it or scribble it out or add to it. And so on. Everyone would contribute their own style. And so it began. Me and Ravina were tucked in a quiet corner eagerly awaiting to hear what we’d be drawing to. We’d been told it was something along the lines of “the curious case of the dead dog” or at least that’s how I remember it, quickly google searching it now, a good month later on, I know it to be “The curious incident of the dog in the night time”. If you don’t like reading I’ll give my verdict and you can skip to the end. It was the most boring thing I’ve ever had to try and draw to. Now I’m not saying anything against the book, when I google searched it

after about 2 hours to find out what actually happens I was quite shocked because it sounded like a really good book. But listening to what sounded like a 6 year old gabbling on about a dead animal for hours when you want to make something amazing was a bit of a disappointment. So the tape began to play. To give it its due credit, it did get straight to the point. There was a dead dog. A very dead dog. So I drew a dead dog. I draw pretty quickly so by the time the dog was described as a black poodle, I’d drawn a yellow labrador. Quite a big one. A few people laughed at it. The narrator, as said sounded like a 6 year old boy, a pretty annoying 6 year old boy, the kind that goes to a private school and doesn’t get excited about very much. Anyway by the time I’d drawn my labrador/poodle cross breed dog with a fork sticking out of it’s side some police officers had come along because they’d decided that the 6 year old had killed the dog and they’d come to take him away. I drew some coppers. Someone on the otherside of the room had done a humongous angry black scribble in charcoal and was using chalk to try and write the words “anger” and “fear” in big scratchy writing, but the white wasn’t showing up so he’d basically just created a mess.

As it turns out, our 6 year old dog killer is infact a 15 year old. I laughed out loud. I got a dirty look from someone, it was at this point that I looked up the book on google and found out what was going on. 15 year old boy has a type of autism. So I had to pipe down a bit and respectfully draw pictures of what was being describled. The boy goes about trying to find out who killed this dog because it bothers him greatly. He calls it an investigation and while in school his teacher tells him it’d be an awesome idea for him to write a book. So he’s going about his days writing his book and overcoming all the obstacles in his way of finding the culprit - that being the uncooperative owner of the dead dog, and his dad who doesn’t want him getting involved. He meets lots of people on the way, makes friends with a neighbour, inverviews a lot of people but no one really knows. You find out that his mother died from natural causes. It’s all looking very sad. Not much really that you can draw to it though. The student with the black scribble across the room had massively impressed the lady running the session because of how expressive he was being. I’m still just seeing a mess but I can sort of tell what he was trying to do even though the narrator wasn’t really displaying much in the way of anger or fear. More that he seemed a bit miffed about how a dog of all things had been murdered. But each to their own. I’d

started picking out random events and drawing them out in small cartoons at the bottom of the paper. By this time we’d moved around a bit. More characters were being introduced. It was helpful that each new character was described very thoroughly for me to draw. It had become apparent now that the narrator had autism because he’d let on that he went to a special school and he’d told us about how his parents used to get frustrated with him and say horrible stuff. I drew a picture of him getting yelled at by his parents, with each parent on each side of him and speach bubbles with examples of things they’d say. Of course, students across the room had their red paint and big paint brushes out and were splashing paint around and writing in big capitals some of the things that this poor boy had to put up with. Around about now my cartoons will be getting recognisable. I’d decided what each character looks like and replicated it with each scene I was drawing. The boy I had decided had to be tall. He also had to look a bit like my ex boyfriend because I found him a bit boring too. So tall, stick thin, hunched over slightly, slim pointy face, massive nose, massive ears, thick glasses and thin floppy hair. Since he was nearly an adult but still too skinny, he wore trousers done up above his waist, with a baggy tucked in shirt and of course, carrying his detective note book. Literally an exact replica of my ex boyfriend and no, I don’t

know what I was thinking either. I also made a point of creating the dogs owner. She seemed like a typical old lady but not very friendly. Reminded me of my old neighbour. Really ratty unless you were nice to her. So this lady was short, plump, flowery summer dress, salmon cardigain, slippers, curled white hair, permanent frown. Perfect.

The students that attended the session the next week got to draw to Wuthering Heights. Theis video was posted online. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FV13-X9XvYQ

Around about lunch time we stopped to stand back and admire what we’d created. In comparison to the big splodges of colour and angry writing, I think I’d failed the brief. My little cartoons remained unnoticed. The task was to then fill in any white gaps with coloured paint. The resulting canvas was a bit disappointing. Having signed up to an “Explosive Drawing” session I was expecting a result with lots of beautifully done illustrations and little works of art. Instead were a few pictures of dogs with masses of red scribbles errupting from the middle, lots of angrily scrawled words, a few swirly lines, and some diagrams. The narrator had emphasised throughout the story that he loved prime numbers so every metre or so would be a list of prime numbers, I too was guilty of listing prime numbers but it was emphasised so much that it felt rude not to include some. Someone had set up a camera in the corner of the room that would record a timeframe of the session.

Lectures Of the three lectures I was required to attend throughout the term, two of them were run by Kirsten. This was cheating a bit because I think that these lectures and workshops were set up for me to see what other courses are doing and get some experience from other areas in the university. Kirstens lectures are awesome thoug. Kirsten if you get to read this - your lectures are the best, I reckon everyone who went to your lectures not already in graphic design will have left thinking “damn. I wish I was studying graphic design”. The first was called “ooh aah mmm” and was about taste for material things, why we like the things we like and why we buy the things we buy. It was bloody good. Kirsten makes power points exciting. We even had props to pass around. Kirsten makes you look at everything in a different light. She can find some of the tackiest rubbish and make you think “my god that’s brillaint”. Examples of the stuff she’d brought in a set of two ketchup bottles - cheap yellow plastic with

a moulded face and googley eyes, a giraff shaped toilet brush and holder, silver disposable cuttlery and some interesting washing up brushes. She talked about trending items, pointless items, items and brands that you take for granted but would miss badly if they disappeared - like post-it-notes and car fresheners. She talked about different styles of products, what pointless stuff went into fashion and went out again and why they were there in the first place. She went into detail about how we, as consumers, judge the design of items, what’s important to us, why some brilliant designs never catch on and why some ridiculous ideas end up being popular. She talked about function, form, ergonomics, materials, technology and colour and how these things all contribute to the desirability of items.

piled up with Stuff. All imaginable forms of random Things. The packaging table, the washing up brush table, the fur table, the tin table, the toy appliance table, the clothing table. It was a lot of items borrowed from the universities museum, lots of it was quite old and delicate and except for the fur table we were required to wear gloves. The fur table was essantially 15 minutes of stroking dead animals and admiring how soft they were before reluctantly writing things down. This sounds weird but unless you know how soft the items were you can’t rightfully judge us.

The seminar following the lecture was wonderful. Everyone sat around tables Products by Alessi.

Next up was Kirstens lecture for Propaganda. This was relevant to the work I was doing on an essay, so extra especially useful. Again, a wonderful lecture to attend. Propaganda I believe is one of Kirstens favourite things, she’s very enthusiastic talking about it. Another power point, a brilliant powerpoint. Kirsten can always find images and information that you’ve not seen or heard before, if her lectures were terrible it’d be fine because you’d still get to see all these new photographs and images that you can’t find easily and might have not seen before.

Essay It’s going to be difficult to write about my essay without just writing it again. If I start to ramble on a bit, by all means skip a page. I was given the wonderful task of writing an essay in the second term of my first year at the university. Luckily it was only a short essay I had to write. 2,500 words, give or take 10%. The brief was pretty vague, write about propaganda, ethics, passion and conviction. Talk about how a designer or company use imagery to promote their strong beliefs of a subject or cause. There’s a lot you can take from this, pretty much every company or group and every designer has strong beliefs about something, McDonalds strongly believe that their food is “all good”, it’s probably the worst kind of food you can put into your body but the imagery they use says otherwise, and Bam. You’ve got your essay. No I didn’t write about McDonalds. But that goes to show how easy it should have been to have come up with something to write about. Actually it took me about 3 weeks before I reluctantly sat down, read the brief 4 times and then thought “right. What on earth am I going to write about?” And then another week before I

sat down and got on with it. I was initially going to write about Barbara Kruger. Out of the list of suggested designers she was the only one I recognised. I recognised her from some artist research I’d done in college but I also remembered not really understanding her work. I spent an hour looking through her work, trying to understand it, resorting to my usual introduction of writing about where the designer grew up and what her parents did for a living before scrapping it and then waiting another week worrying about it. I don’t think I mentioned that essays terrify me. In the end something Kirsten said reminded me of Benetton. I have looked at Benettons campaigns so many times since starting graphic design and had to kick myself for not thinking about them before. I LOVE Benettons campaigns. I also love their clothes. Not that I could ever afford them but they’ve got their advertising down to a T. Ignoring their United Colours of Benetton work and just looking at their clothing campaigns with the models sat in groups showing off the clothes, their products look amazing. Writing about Benetton was a brilliant idea and I thank

Kirsten from the bottom of my heart for using them as part of a sentence and giving me the idea. It is so easy to write about something that interests and inspires you. The essay, minus the research, was done in about a day. There are so many subjects you can branch out on when writing about them. I wrote about Toscani, I wrote about the time in which the campaigns were released and I wrote about my 3 favourite campaigns - the 3 hearts, the AIDs campaign called “La Pieta” and I wrote about the UnHate campaign. For each paragraph I talked about how the images put the message across, how they might affect different audiences, how and why they might upset the audience and how they can change the minds of the audience. During this I did a fair bit of research, research is not my strong point but for Benetton there is endless amounts of interviews, blogs and articals available. I found a lot of online blogs that were incredibly useful to me, different people said different things, I found the blog of one lady that talked about how impressed she was with her experience shopping at a Benetton store, and how she’d spent over $200, and then saw the Benetton campaigns and took the whole pur-

chase back to the store and won’t go there again. I wish I’d kept hold of the web address for her blog because I’d have liked to have used what she’d said in my essay. Interviews with Toscani were all over the place, he seems to have spoken to everyone and he sounds like a pretty amazing man, his attitude towards his work is brilliant. Sticking to the 2,500 words would have been difficult to stick to, had I actually started earlier like a responsible student) I’d have automatically written about each and every piece of work done for Benetton by Toscani, and then all the other campaigns for Benetton, and I would have enjoyed it too. So maybe leaving it to the last few weeks was a good idea, since once it’s written it’s more difficult to decide what to delete than it is to decide what to write.

This image removes all of the pre misconceptions from the viewers mind, the image shows nothing more than a man dying from AIDs and all of the ugly things that go with it, and sends the message that no matter what you think, no matter what information is being spread be it true or made up, this is the bottom line and nothing else should cloud your judgment. Of course, due to the nature of the image, Benetton received nothing but negative reactions from the viewers.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;A number of AIDS activists believed that the photograph and its use in advertising actually painted AIDS victims in a negative light, spreading fear rather than acceptance. Others perceived the campaign as a vindication of homosexuality. For some there was sensitivity about the implied connection between the deaths of David Kirby and Jesusâ&#x20AC;? Macleod (2007)

Letters in the Landscape

Letters in the landscape. Continuing with the letter theme here. The aim of this project was to end up with a booklet filled with lots of photographs of letters in alphabetical order. It was to be created in a group of 4, myself and 3 other students, those being Daniela (from the N project), Ravina (from the Explosive Drawing workshop) and Helen. On the first day of this project, we took a bus into Poole, to the quay, to take as many photographs as possible of letters. These could be obvious letters, like on signs, posters, billboards and road markings, or they could be things that “look like” letters, like buildings, stones, clouds and cranes. The day was freezing. Sunny-ish, windy and cold. We started off taking photographs of all the obvious stuff that was near us, then branched out across the Quay photographing anything and everything that could look like a letter. After a while we got a bit bored and hungry and Helen had been going on about

wanting a cidre all morning, so we (and what looked like a few other groups) went to a restaurant and got ourselves some big English breakfastsand Helen got her small cidre. We warmed up for a bit then ventured back outside. Full of hot greasy microwave food we were a bit more adventurous this time, going inside pubs and shops to find letters. At 1.30 we were due to arrive at the museum to have a look around there. We’d gotten there early. Helen, Daniela and Ravina spent a good 20 minutes looking at the small tubs of icecream in the gift shop. Not being overly interested in gifts or small tubs of icecream I actually went into the museum to look for letters and also look at the exhibitions. I photographed all the letter look-alikes I could fine,some and left in the time it took for the girls downstairs to decide not to buy any icecream. By this time the rest of the class had arrived so we all went back in, more photo-

graphs, this time I spent more time looking at the items, mainly the artwork, while the girls took their photographs. We then sat in the foyer and tallied up how many photographs of each letter we had. Once we’d decided we had a sufficient ammount we headed back for the bus station.

Editting the photos was the longest part of the project. We selected all of our favourite images, editted them in PhotoShop to make them perfect for the book. We then did plan after plan for the layout of the book. During this time Helen and Daniela went to Germany, so Ravina and I did our own version and when Daniela and Helen got back we changed the whole thing again. We were all pretty happy with the results.

French fold book binding. This method was used so that thinner paper could be used in the book and the printed images would not show through. It involved folding the paper in a certain way so that each page was two sheets of paper thick. It meant that when laying out the pages on InDesign you had to get into the habbit of thinking of the middle of the InDesign page as the outside of the page in the book. It got pretty confusing.

After folding the book, the book was bound using a strip of cloth and some PVC glue, then clamped and left for a few hours. To attach the front cover we cut down some card to size, put folds down on the edges where the book was bound, and another fold about 7mm into the front cover from the spine, then attached this to the book with more PVC glue, clamed again and left for 4 hours. Done.

Screen Printing

This workshop was put together so that myself and other students could take the introduction class for screen printing, to save us from having to take it again later on when we might need to use it. It was only a short class, lasting a few hours and taught us the basics of how to create a stencil and then how to use the screens and print images.

I got to have a go at printing an image onto paper, it was more difficult for me than it looked, probably because my arms are like twigs, everyone else pretty much succeeded first go and I went and made a royal mess of it.

For the Love of Graphics This was the exhibition put on to show collections of graphical things we love. It was organised and promoted by the students in the graphics first year class and held on the 17th of February in the main graphics studio. For my piece I’d gone online and collected as many logos related to motorcycles as I could think of. I’d clubbed together with Helen in the first instance so we worked together to clean up the logos and put them into black and white. We found hundreds, logos for bike manufacturers, models, race teams, clothing, performance parts, tracks, riders, tools, maga-

zines and helmets. The idea was to then put all the logos together into a poster, preferably an A2 or A1 poster with black logos printed on white paper. The logos all worked well together, not surprisingly the majority of the logos were of a similar style, most logos made up of text were slanted to the right, most likely to represent speed. This was possibly because I know sports bikes, if I’d known of any parts specific to touring bikes and choppers I might have found logos that had upright text. So when I went and put the winged Harley Davidson logo in amongst the slanted sports parts logos it just

looked a bit strange. This problem continued throughout laying out the logos. Some of the logos were enclosed in circles so I had to make sure those were evenly distributed. Some logos, like track logos and the Michelin logo were more difficult because the shape was completely irregular. Lots of students brought in things they’d collected over the years. Life would have been easier if I collected things but I don’t, and the poster took a whole day to arrange. Once finished I thought it’d be an idea to include a splash of colour. Out of all the logos the most

common colour was red. In many cases there was only a small ammount of red, so I started filling in the red parts and in most of the poster they were evenly spaced. Except for one big bit in the middle. The only way to get some red in was to colour one of the whole logos red, but this looked wrong since so far every logo coloured only had a small part of it in red, so it made the whole poster lopsided. To overcome this I’d have to move everything around again, and after a day of negotiating where everything was going to go, I wasn’t touching anything. So it stayed black and white.

The exhibition was a success, the studio was full of displays of different collections including a Thomas the Tank Engine display with about 30 little metal Tank Engines. There were a lot of different displays of books and comics and vinyl records, even a record player working away throughout the day. One group had collected a lot of board games and spent the day in a corner playing them. My poster went on a wall by the door. It would have been interesting to have been able to get some actual bikes into the exhibition, but it was questionable as to whether or not mine would have fitted in the lift.

List of images not my own: Essay - http://www.photoguides.net/10-powerful-photographic-ads-from-benetton Letters in the Landscape - http://www.google.co.uk/ maps Explosive Drawing -http://www.totally4women.com/ wp-content/uploads/2013/06/TheCuriousIncident_ post.jpg Lectures - http://alessi.es/en/azienda/alessi-in-breve Exhibition - http://4theloveofgraphics.wordpress.com For the love of Graphics poster created by Charles Rodriguez