Portfolio Samples by Matt D Woodman [MISTD]

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Portfolio Samples

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Portfolio Samples

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Portfolio Samples

Portfolio samples / For the attention of / Unlisted At / Unlisted Design Studio

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Portfolio Samples

A Subject Of Matter designing conversations

‘A Subject of Matter’ is a brief publication conceived as a response to a sixty minute dialogue, in contact with two non-creatives. It addresses matters of; physical science, astrology, the ethical responsibilities of theoretical physicists, technology and the future, questions of reality and philosophy, divine creation, perception, unified theory, conscious and apocalypse theory. The document was produced as an exploration of the above subject matter in preparation for a period of extended self-directed study. The content looks to interrogate these issues in great depth, through discussion with participants, giving the material a sociological context and opening the ideas up to fresh insight from the perception and understanding of others. The printed narrative is led wholly by the full transcription, flowing organically from start to end in a single seamless and unbroken discussion. Quoting the prose in verbatim allows for an authentic linear discourse and line of enquiry, free from the restraint of editorial influence, which may potentially dilute the content. Each of the ten sections is denoted only by the inclusion of a small printed question which helped to further inform or feed the discourse. The varying voices of contributors can be identified by a distinct typographic style allowing a continuous flow of copy which is integral to the publication’s concept. The use of colour is minimal and deliberate, relying on the impact of grayscale photography in full single and double page spreads to convey a sense of grandeur and scale. This notion of contrasting proportion, associated with the two primary schools of theoretical physics [quantum and astrological], is further communicated through the implementation of small and large typographic detail juxtaposed. As the publication has been produced primarily as a research document: commonly recurring words were then identified by processing the copy through a frequency algorithm, providing sources for further research and exploration. These ‘keywords’ are highlighted throughout the content and also featured in an alphabeticised glossary on the final page. These words provide a summary of material discussed but also present the reader with an interesting pattern of words redacted from the text.

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Portfolio Samples

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Portfolio Samples

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Portfolio Samples

03 – 04

TEN The everyday narrative

‘TEN’ is a monthly research publication allowing me to curate, design and produce content relevant to any project on which I am currently working. Whilst the overarching theme of the ten catalogued ideas changes from issue to issue the main premise is that it helps me to visualise and interrogate ideas, thereby strengthening my understanding of the currently explored topic. Making such a document represents an engagement with the subject matter and a depth of research that produces definitive results, whilst I am in the process of informing myself. Furthermore, I can begin to develop and test viable solutions to further direct future study, projects and solutions. Much of my work is very strictly typographical and I find that the best conclusions are drawn in design when I am able to distill a concept down to a rational, simplified idea. ‘TEN’ affords me an opportunity to experiment with those ideas and practice those skills of reduction. This particular issue ‘The Everyday Narrative’ helped inform decisions that I have recently made regarding a proposal for a period of extended self-directed study, for assessment at university. Having compiled a list of ten interesting words, topics and subject areas for potential self directed study I began researching in national newspapers looking to find a statement or argument of interest relating to each of the words in content. Each news story was then interpreted into a simple typographic piece that demonstrated playful abstraction of the headline.

07 – 08

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Portfolio Samples

Poster art 150 150 years of london transport

This white and metallic gold silk-screen print, on GFSmith Colorplan Sapphire, was created in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the London Transport System, as celebrated by the London Transport Museum in early 2013. Inspired by the Swiss typographic movement the print takes recognised cues from established London Transport iconography and reinterprets them in a contemporary and original manner. The colour palette, in conjunction with typesetting in P22 Johnston Underground, alludes to London Transport signage subtly whilst the inclusion of the roundel is understated and avoids being contrived or overt. The piece manages to avoid the dangers of finding dry creative solutions fraught with cliché when the subject matter already has a strong established visual language. In preparation for the design of this print primary research was undertaken in situ on the London Underground platforms. The slash motif was conceived as a response to a number of visual and aural stimuli, as well as conceptual ideas, observed during this time, including; direction of movement [tubes and commuters], the individual as part of a network, energy, flow, population, dynamism, air movement, the sounds of luggage wheels on the platform and the tube on the tracks. In particular the slash motif became fundamental as a visual metaphor to describe the constant stuttering of tube carriages moving across their tracks. The poster is best seen in person, unfortunately because of the nature of the optical illusion, it has proved difficult to photograph.

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Portfolio Samples

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Portfolio Samples

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Where does the time go? A question that many of us are left pondering on a daily

COLOUR KEY

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Socialising by phone Social networking

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Working at university Working in a retail store

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Eating Toilet

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Awake Asleep

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Sum of all design work Design work from home

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Working as a bartender Cycling

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Boiling the kettle Showering

basis. This project endeavours to explore precisely what periods of time routine activities can amount to over a 15 day [360 hour] interval with the goal of identifying wasted or neglected time that can be better managed. Each measurable degree of the circular diagram corresponds to a unit hour visualising a wealth of data with

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At a screen

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Designing with movies on

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Collecting prints and errands

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Washing dishes

a clean and unfettered complex simplicity. Fields of data are placed in situational

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Watching terrestrial TV

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Designing with TV on

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Spending time with girlfriend

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Cleaning and chores

context, running parallel to signify simultaneous activities creating relevant overlaps

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Watching movies Using mobile phone

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Listening to music Outside of the house

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Night out clubbing Spending time with family

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Cooking

of data, maintaining high accuracy and a consistent flow of ordered information.

288

264

A MATTER OF TIME

21 16 8

19 2 Text Email

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Leave the house Trip to university Clean teeth

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DAY 01

DAY 02

DAY 03

DAY 04

DAY 05

Hours 0 – 24

Hours 24 – 48

Hours 48 – 72

Hours 72 – 96

Hours 96 – 120

DAY 06

DAY 07

DAY 08

DAY 09

DAY 10

Hours 120 – 144

Hours 144 – 168

Hours 168 – 192

Hours 192 – 216

Hours 216 – 240

DAY 11

DAY 12

DAY 13

DAY 14

DAY 15

Hours 240 – 264

Hours 264 – 288

Hours 288 – 312

Hours 312 – 336

Hours 336 – 360

14 12 10 08 06 04 02 00

Toilet Cup of coffee Cup of tea Washup Meal

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Portfolio Samples

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a matter of time data visualisation

Where does the time go? A question that many of us are left pondering on a daily basis. This project endeavours to explore precisely what periods of time routine activities can amount to over a 15 day [360 hour] interval with the goal of identifying wasted or neglected time that can be better managed. Each measurable degree of the circular diagram corresponds to a unit hour visualising a wealth of data with a clean and unfettered complex simplicity. Fields of data are placed in situational context, running parallel to signify simultaneous activities creating relevant overlaps of data, maintaining high accuracy and a consistent flow of ordered information. Each of the fifteen lower diagrams gives a daily break down of data and is rotated to correspond to its position in the 15 day cycle. A smart-phone software application called Daytum was used over the data collection period to record the frequency of certain routine activities. In addition to this a second application called Timer++, which allows for multiple stopwatches running simultaneously and event logs recording at what point clocks are started or stopped, was used daily to record data for as many as 34 different activities. At times 8 or 9 digital stop-clocks would be running in parallel to record multiple tasks performed and measurements needed to be manually notated on a daily basis. This project became laborious and particularly difficult to integrate around a daily working routine for such an extended period of time. However, the data does make for interesting reading.

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Portfolio Samples

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Portfolio Samples

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Apostle xiii type modul ar t ype design and unholy bible specimen

‘Apostle XIII’ is an ornate and decorative display typeface inspired by the angular geometrics of historical black-letters, Schwabacher and Fraktur German gothic fonts. The main composition of the glyphs take heavy inspiration from the crucifix of Christ, whilst the ornate features are reminiscent of antique Bible display type, decorative church script and gothic architecture. The modular typeface was built using Fontshop’s online pixel based font editor Fonstruct and features both; a full ornate upper case for display and lowercase with punctuation for typesetting body copy. The typeface was met with critical acclaim by the online community and shortly after was featured by Rob Meek, of Fontshop [the world’s largest distributor of type], as a ‘Top Pick’, a position which it has held now for two years. ‘The Unholy Bible’ a sinisterly playful one hundred page type specimen, perfect bound with gold gilding, was the produced to showcase the typeface and its capabilities, featuring chapters on; blasphemy and cursing, defamation of the Ten Commandments, an alphabet of profanity, antigrams, original sin and The Book of Revelations. In addition to this a large wooden model alphabet was constructed to depict the origins of the typeface and the context from which the idea was conceived.

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Portfolio Samples

temporal isle a geographical enigma

On the 24th of September 2013 an earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Moment Magnitude Scale [M] struck the remote Southwestern Pakistani province of Balochistan. A surprising consequence of the seismic activity was the appearance of an island 380km from the quakes epi-centre, dubbed ‘Zalzala Jazeera’ [Quake Island] by national media, which rose out of the Arabian Sea, approximately 30 minutes after the quake impact, several hundred metres off the Southern port city of Gwadar, along the Jhanda coastline. The birth of this islet was a rare and captivating event galvanising the scientific community and prompting an instant global reaction. The world’s media were quick to give widespread coverage to the story, eclipsing the tragedy caused by the initial quake. Zalzala Jazeera became an object of wonder, captivating imaginations and raising extensive public interest. Unfortunately, despite its most puzzling appearance, the scientific community now commonly agree that the island will not exist one year from its initial conception. It’s fine-grained sedimentary muddy matter will quickly start to erode due to the repeated motion of the Arabian Sea and weathering from the oncoming monsoon season. The publication ‘The Temporal Isle’ utilises a number of metaphorical and visual devices to portray the sudden appearance and eventual demise of the islet. Throughout the document the colour black is used to represent the island’s temporality, page by page black moves from top to bottom waning in intensity, with subtle gradients applied across all images, until it eventually vanishes from the page replaced by the figurative ocean. Images of the island are always depicted wholly in black until the final two pages of the book. In addition to this the featured typeface, Gestalten Sensaway, was used purely on the nature of its fading disjointed aesthetic. A wave motif, rising slowly up the pages headers, has been applied sparingly to intensify the concept of the island vanishes beneath the water’s surface and also as a metaphorical time-line on the centrespread. Overall the colour blue makes a general transition up the page, with pull quote underlines gently rising up their owning copy, as the reader moves from the front to back of the publication. Finishing touches have been applied such as the staining of blue book binding thread and the use of multiple paper stocks. Overall the visual narrative of the publication is designed specifically to reference the time-line of the island’s existence.

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Portfolio Samples

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15 – 16

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Portfolio Samples

Homely but not at home an analysis of the shining

In preparation for the writing of his 1980 horror screenplay, The Shining, adapted from Stephen King’s original novel, Stanley Kubrick and novelist Diane Johnson read Sigmund Freud’s seminal paper ‘The Uncanny’. Kubrick’s intention was to create a film in which the entire aesthetic and architectural construction was guided by Freud’s text. The result is an artifact of cult horror cinema laced with hidden tropes such as; patterns and figures, duality, symmetry, reflections, continuity and intentional subliminal errors, spacial impossibilities, foreshadowing and symbology. The publication ‘Homely but Not at Home’ pays homage to Kubrick’s genius and looks to explore, interrogate and subtly visualise all of these tropes in the context of Freud’s work. ‘The Uncanny’ is described as being a complex human experience stemming from repressed infantile and animalistic beliefs, differentiated from fear it is determined by a feeling of disquiet or unease when the familiar, taken out of context, suddenly becomes strange and deeply unsettling. In Freud’s native tongue the term uncanny can be translated to the eerie ‘homely but not at home’ a phrase of disquieting and odd ambiguity. The numbers 12 and 24, and their mirrors 21 and 42, are integral to the subliminal themes of Kubrick’s film and the document has been intentionally crafted to reflect this. Margins, page widths, column sizes, the number of images in each chapter and type sizes all adhere to the strict code of figures, in addition to the entire publication bearing 12 leaves of Fedrigoni Sirio Lampone red stock placed at exacting intervals to denote the beginning of chapters. The folios run uncomfortably down the spine of the book and range from 1 to 42, at the centre, before reflecting and decreasing back to 1 towards the end of the publication. This allows each chapter page to be marked on one of the significant figures 1, 12, 21, 24 and 42 and then the same numbers mirrored from the centre. Spreads are often designed to be symmetrical across the book’s spine and many images are doubled and overlayed to create intense and unnerving collages of cinematography. Four different Fedrigoni paper stocks have been implemented to subliminally suggest central concepts, such as a centre tip-in chapter about mirrors printed on a reflective gloss paper. A sense of foreshadowing has been compounded by a very thin ultra-white paper which allows text, images and mirrored page headers to bleed through onto other spreads. Futura was selected and used purely on the basis of it’s symmetry, though research transpired that it was in fact Kubrick’s favourite font, and hue has been used to delicately make reference to colour symbology prevalent in the film. Every minute decision has been rationalised for a specific purpose and the resulting document successfully reflects the unnerving and subliminally challenging nature of The Shining.

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Portfolio Samples

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Matt D Woodman Third Year BA(Hons) Graphic Designer at UWE Creative // Thinker // Typographer Bristol info@mdwoodman.co.uk +44 7730176226

Matt is a passionate, adept and dedicated graphic designer with a technical prowess for typography and editorial implemented across both print and digital media. A perfectionist he lingers on detail always looking to rationalise and contextualise communication and the applications of design. Principled, community minded and morally aware Matt believes that graphic design should be used with integrity as a tool for social empowerment and positive change. Fuelled by a sense that visual communication carries impetus and cultural impact he seeks to gain worth from the cultural captial of his work. Savant, night owl, realist, cyclist, libertarian, culture vulture, beard enthusiast and analogue synthesiser fanatic @MattDWoodman