New Visual Language 001/May 15

New Visual Language Issue 001 May 2015

FORM Follows FUNCTION Exploring modernism and Post-Modernism

CONTENTS

Issue 001 / May 2015

CITY IN FLUX

EARTH ARTEFACT

Page 4

Page 12

TYPE TRANSCRIPTION

art history

Page 8

Page 16

timeline

NEW VISUAL LANGUAGE

City In Flux O

ur first brief of the year was entitled ‘City In Flux’ and it was based around the city and how it is always changing, with flux meaning ‘being in state of constant change or movement’.

As part of the research process I stumbled upon the work of Martin Roemers. Roemers is a Dutch photographer known for his documentary photography of landscapes, events as well as personal stories. His most recent project, Metropolis, saw him look at some of the worlds biggest and most populated cities - as the worlds population grew towards seven billion.

This inspired to look at the population of Leeds. Leeds is Yorkshire’s biggest city and one of the most populated cities in the UK. Looking at population it seemed logical to think about visualising this data using infographics.

Researching into infographics I looked into the work of David McCandless, designer and author of Information Is Beautiful, whilst his work was interesting I didn’t think the style was appropriate for the approach I wanted so I looked at the work of Feltron (Nicholas Felton) which includes a less abstract, more representational style, which occasionally included maps - which I felt was more relevant for my work.

Once I had settled on a style, I began to research into the statistics for the population of Leeds, this process took longer than I had anticipated as I struggled to find information that was already compiled for the whole of the city, as well as the different areas and suburbs within the city limits.

During this I learned that it was hard to do so because as the city grew the ward boundaries had to be constantly updated, and occasionally new wards would be created. This led to some inconsistencies as the population is taken from census data, which uses the most up to date ward boundaries available at the time. So instead I had to look for data for each ward individually and compile the data in my own data set (in this case an Excel spreadsheet). I also had to calculate the percentage change in population for each ward between each census taking.

Once this stage was complete it was onto the data visualisation part of the project. Initially I used a more literally approach using a map with the ward boundaries, but as I began to experiment I developed this into a more abstract approach as the ward boundaries and locations weren’t particularly relevant to the point I was making.

^Data collected for use in my population inforgraphics.

Source: visionofbritain.org

Once all the data had been interpreted and put into the infographics my thoughts turned to how to present them all as a collection. Leeds being the modern city that it is I felt that using a website to hold them would be an appropriate outcome.

Once I settled on a style and design, I began researching into web development and watched a few Dreamweaver tutorials before creating the website. Website design, as well as user interface and designing for web are all areas of design I would like to learn more about, as I already have a keen interest in this areas, and I believe that having as many varied and wide-ranging skills as possible can only be a good thing for a designer as it means you are more flexible and more valuable as an employee and person.

Having struggled with the layout and position of the infographics on each of their respective pages I finally figured it out and got the layout I wanted for my infographics.

Selection of “mock ups� of my website and two (of seven) of my infographics.

Part of my final outcome for the City In Flux brief. v>

TYPOGRAPHY TYPOGRAPHY

Its allANDa FONT MAKING Matter of time type As part of our process and production workshops, we are asked to create letterforms inspired by works of well known artists and designers.

Firstly we were required to sketch out ideas for the letters a, e, n, s, and g, drawing inspiration from the work of 3 designers.

I chose work by El Lissitzky, Josef M端ller-brockmann, and in this case artist Laurie Rosenwald.

I was inspired by the concentric circles that she had used in her work. Because of this I used a series of concentric circles as

a basis to get all the curved lines before using straight lines for the vertical and horizontal lines.

Where the curved lines and straight lines met I joined them together with a right angle, to add more style to it.

I chose to make it all lowercase because it was much more readable and was easier to be creative with a lowercase as well as the curved aspect I wanted to include within this type face.

I think this font is light and modern, and would be great used in a more decorative role.

Here you can see the influences on creating these particular typefaces. The example on the far right is inspired by the over and under extended arc segments from Josef Muller-Brockmann’s ‘musica viva’ series.

The font inspired by his work, was created by using concentric circles in illustrator using the pathfinder tool to cut out the inside circle, leaving a ring.

From the centre of this ring I would draw lines out to where I would like to cut the circle up.

I would repeat the process with a slightly bigger set of circles, which were small enough for the smaller one to fit inside snugly. When creating the arc segments on the bigger one I was more careful as I had to chose to overlap in certain places to create the correct bowl shape in the middle of a b or g for example.

TYPOGR

RAPHY

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Earth Artifact

T

he second project of the year was based around NASA’s Golden Record which was part of the Voyager project during the 1970’s.

The Golden Record was created in the event that another sentient race, other than those living on Earth, would encounter the Voyager probes. The Golden Record contained various pieces of information about life on Earth incase another space faring race was curious about life on Earth.

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We were tasked with re-inventing or updating the Golden Record. I decided to take the premise of encountering an extra-terrestrial and take it a step further. Many scientists believe that encountering an alien race would not end well for us, so I decided to create a guide that would allow aliens to take over the world with as little bloodshed as possible, but the first part of the guide was aimed at persuading the aliens that there was hope for us humans, and the planet, by pointing out all the cool things and awesome people we have on Earth.

This is part of the front cover of my guide.

The title of the guide uses a similar format to that of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and the cover for Monty Python’s life of Brian was a visual starting point for creating the cover art.

It uses a 3D extrusion effect which I created by drawing triangles from each edge of the letters and converging them at a single point, before colouring them up and altering the transparency of the text to show the extrusion effect in the best way, altering the transparency also gave it a bit of movement, as if it had been travelling through warp speed.

Taking inspiration from films such as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Monty Python, I attempted to add humour into my guide

About THE GUIDE This guide is your handy essential guide to your time on Earth. Whether you want a tourist guide to sightseeing around our lovely little planet, or you need a little help enslaving the human race and destroying the third planet from the sun, this is the guide for you!

So sit back, relax, and put all four of your feet up whilst you learn a little bit about planet Earth before you make your next move.

by the way I wrote the introduction and about the guide pages.

However, there are sections where it was hard to add humour, and there are also sections that are designed to be informing rather than humorous.

Also included in the guide was various landmarks that showed off some of the natural and man made beauty and unique parts of the Earth that isn’t available anywhere else in the universe.

The Great Wall of China, Mount Everest, Mariana Trench, Christ the Redeemer Statue, Stonehenge and the Eiffel Tower were all included, as sights for any potential alien overlord to look at before destroying our lovely blue marble.

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I also included a list of powerful, influential and inspiring human beings on the list of the must see’s.

These included world leaders such as Barack Obama, and Vladimir Putin, and celebrities such as Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates. Will Smith is also on the list because he is well known for his films where he fights aliens.

I then collated all the information relevant for finding each of the locations and persons I had mentioned in the list and plotted it on a handy map for our little alien friends. I did also include the longitude and latitude of each of the locations on the pages where I went into more depth with each of the locations and world leaders.

One of the most challenging aspects of this project was filtering a list of potential content down to what was interesting and the most important. It would have been easy to fill more pages than what I did with information that was interesting but might not have been that important to the objective of the guide.

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Another challenge was getting the balance right between all the content, I wanted to include an equal balance of everything to give a sense of balance in terms of natural and man made, political and non political but also in terms of representing the different parts of the world, Asia, Europe, north and south America are all included in one way or another.

One of the hardest parts of this project was getting the layouts of each of the pages right so that it

would look great, include what it needed to in order to be informative as well as not feel like a

textbook. But this was also the most rewarding when it came off and each page, as well as

each spread looked great, and contained all I wanted it to in terms of image and information.

At the end of the guide there was a small section that listed all the useful military targets one might want to destroy should he want to take over the world, if the guide hadn’t done a good enough job in persuading he/she that Earth and humanity is worth keeping as it is.

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Su

De Stijl

Dada 1916-1922 Constructivism

1 Cubism 1907-1915 Fauvism 1905-1910 Post-Impressionism 1885-1905 Impressionism 1870-1890 1870

1880

1890

1900

1910 Abstract art

Post Modernism In visual arts post-modernism is identifiable as works that contain no formal structure, often using a mixture of style and media, post modernism is much more expressive and increasingly abstract than modernist creations, a huge departure from Modernism art was created to be creative and experimental, leaving the scientific approach behind.

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1920

Modernism

urrealism 1924-1939

1917-1931

A term used to describe a collection of movements within the arts, that make more focus towards functionality rather than aesthetics, departing from traditional art styles. Modernists often believed that there was meaning and rational behind life and their work.

1913-1930

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1907 Abstract Expressionism 1946-1956 Pop Art 1954-1970 Minimalism 1960-1975 Conceptual Art 1961Op Art 1964-1970 Post-Minimalism 1971Punk Art 1975-

18701890

18851905

19051910

19071915

Impressionism Post Impressionism Fauvism

Cubism

Impressionist paintings can be easily identified by their subject and technique.

They tend to be landscapes of modern or suburban life, painted in a hurried fashion usually outdoors.

Post Impressionism is an both an extension and a rejection of Impressionism, Post Impressionism is much more expressive than impressionism that was more of a documentary process.

Established in Paris by artists that were rejected by mainstream establishment, including Monet, Manet, and Renoir.

Many Post Impressionists had begun as impressionist but wanted to become more expressive such as Gauguin, Cezanne, and van Gogh.

Fauvism, characterised by its unnatural colours and distorted landscapes, was initially criticised for its ‘wild and beastly’ nature (this is where the name comes from) but became one of the major influences in 20th century art.

Cubism was started in Paris in 1907, and broke the tradition of painting from one viewpoint.

Cubists aimed to document multiple viewpoints and present them all at once, and was inspired by African Art.

Leading artists involved in the movement were Matisse, and Braque.

The leading lights in this movement were Picasso and Braque.

1907-

1946 -1956

1954 -1970

1960 -1975

Abstract

Abstract Expressionism

Pop Art

Minimalism

Abstract art is one of the broadest genres of art, and often overlaps with other movements. Abstract art does not attempt to give an accurate representation of an object but uses shape and colour to carry its message, usually standing for virtues such as purity, or elegance.

Abstract Expressionism began in 1940’s New York, and made art by the use of brush strokes and texture, harnessing the power of chance, all works explored the freedom of expression.

The Pop Art movement aimed to reflect the popular culture of wealth following WW2, celebrating everyday now mundane objects such as soup cans, and celebrities.

Being influenced by Dada it mocks the established art world.

Minimalist art became popular due to its celebration of simplicity, both in form and content, removing any hint of personality and expression, allowing the viewer to enjoy it intensely without any distraction.

Hamilton, Warhol, Johns and Lichtenstein are all well known pop artists

Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd are well known Minimalists.

Malevich and Gabo were pioneers of abstract art.

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The works of artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning vary greatly in style and perhaps scale but both share the common theme.

19131930

19161922

19171931

19241939

Constructivism Dadaism

De Stijl

Surrealism

Constructivism was grounded in modernity, and lacked emotion as artists sought to reject the past which led to WW1. Pieces were often experimental, reduced and geometric in nature.

Dadaism was a radical, anarchic revolt against WW1, emphasising the unpredictable and the uncontrolled, with art created by chance and the subconscious rather than thought out pieces.

The De Stijl movement began in Holland with art that favoured abstraction and simplicity, using geometric shapes with a limited colour palette yellow, blue, red, black and white.

Surrealist painters were dedicated to expressing their imagination, and their dreams, creating pieces that would often be paradoxical by using sub or unconscious thought to make their art.

El Lissitzky, Josef Albers (of the Bauhaus) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were all constructivists.

Famous Dada artists include Marcel Duchamp, Otto Dix, Jean Arp, and Hans Richter.

1961-

1964 -1970

Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesberg and J.J.P. Oud were all members of the De Stijl movement.

1971-

Surrealists such as Magritte and Dali are some of the most well known artists in history.

1975-

Conceptual ART Op Art

Post Minimalism Punk Art

Conceptual art is similar to minimalism in that it only expresses an idea/theory, emphasising the thought behind art rather than the physical pieces, by doing so the art lived in the mind free from the confines of any gallery.

Op Art or Optical Art is a term used for paintings or sculpture that create the sense of motion and other visual effects just by their form and are in fact still. The effect can be achieve by the layering of different colours or the use of patterns.

Post Minimalism was a term introduced to describe works that were influenced by minimalism but used a different aesthetic, often being more artistic than its predecessor, taking on a ‘purer’ aesthetic using simple objects and materials.

The work of Manzoni, Beuys (amongst others) have been influential following its peak.

Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely are noted for their optical art illusions.

Eva Hesse and Richard Serra are both prominent post minimal artists.

Punk Art is closely associated with the punk sub-culture within the 70’s and 80’s and remains to a certain extent today. It uses a less formal, and more anarchical approach to art and design, often creating statement or protest pieces that stand against the establishment.

Jamie Reid is a well known punk artist.

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New Visual Language May 2015 Matt McGough 20