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the process a series in discovery, research, refinement & criticism
MOLLY MAGNELL
VOLUME V: REFERENCE REPOSITORY
CAPSTONE I: FORM & FUNCTION
FALL 2017
SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS AT WASHINGTON U. IN ST. LOUIS
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reference repository Molly Magnell
Week 01 - Aug. 3-Sep. 9
Two Speeches, Two Books
Last semester in Experimental Type, I created two books for two related TEDtalks on the majesty of our planet. The first one was done by Ken Lacovara—famed paleontologist who recently unearthed a new species of dinosaur called the Dreadnoughtus. The second speech was by Robert Ballard, who spoke about the hidden world hiding in the depths of the ocean. I used semi-translucent paper in the first book to add on layers of information to build upon our knowledge of the world before us. The second book used transparencies to reveal pieces of information and subvert viewers' expectations with surprising photos. I really liked playing with the type in new ways and morphing it to the landscape of the book. I found quotes that were provocative and could interact with nature. I liked experimenting with the reveal of information as well. All the translucent pieces were outside bits of research that I compiled to compliment the story. This project made me consider the intentionality of the placement of my images and deciding ahead of the time the pacing of the book to evenly disperse the extra details. I made these two books in a final week and a half sprint because I changed my mind last minute. Usually I'm really decisive with my ideas from the beginning, but I got too caught up in trying to illustrate my own book on a three part YouTube series on the Fibonacci Sequence as it's found in nature. I cut my losses when I realized my idea was too ambitious and relied too heavily on the exisiting visuals of the video. I wish I had more time to go back into the book and nitpick more design details.
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tomorrow machine THIS TOO SHALL PASS
I discovered the project a few years back, and I'm still impressed by the resourcefulness of materials and looking at new ways people could interact with packaging and the way we prepare food.
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Week 01 - Aug. 3-Sep. 9
Top Left: Agar and seaweed beverage packaging— deteriorates with a similar expiration date to the product inside Bottom Left: Creative packaging for olive oil made from hardened sugar. Left: Piece from the Flip and Mirror series Right: Piece from the Crawler series. The making of this piece is featured on the Adobe channel.
Sakir yildirim CRAWLER SERIES
I like the eeriness of Sakir's works and how he appears to manipulate figures through time and space. They're fascinating and deeply unsettling. I first discovered his work looking through Adobe's Youtube channel under the playlist that features artists style and workflow through the Adobe programs.
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brest brest brest PARIS, FRANCE
I've unknowingly been a fan of this studio's work for a while. They fall under the heading of people whose name gets detached through the Telephone game of getting their work repinned on Pinterest. Brest Brest Brest's specialty is poster design for art and cultural exhibitions and institutions. I only discovered the studio name because I was looking through portfolio examples through Fabrik because I want to transport my website to a new company. I'm working on improving my experimental typography
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skills, and pushing the boundaries of the grid. I like their work because there are a lot of scenarios where the text gets treated like an image. I like the bold, graphic qualities of their work. I'm starting to love Illustrator more as a means of laying out shapes in a visual language, and I'm trying to get more comfortable with adding in shapes and letters as decorative components. I think I'm good at creating clean layouts, but so far my side experiments this semester have focused on distortions and loud colors.
Week 02 - sep. 10-Sep. 16
Left: 4/31 posters made for the collective La Souterraine Top Right: Cannes Film Festival poster Bottom Right: Visual of the Arsène 2016 festival
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Week 02 - sep. 10-Sep. 16
Left: You Are Dust Below: Hero, Self Portrait Series
thirst CHICAGO, IL
I've been thinking a lot about Thirst since the Chicago Roadshow last Fall. I liked how digital the work felt and how they created these liquidy, glowing, hazy, sharp, vivid imagery that you could only create using a computer. I've especially thought about their work when I was making my initial 72 images. I considered the way they push the limitations of the images and straddle the line of legibility. Hearing John Pobojewski
discuss his tenacity to constantly design and constantly find time for personal projects inspired me to explore being experimental. Right now I'm playing around with preset actions and effects in After Effects to see what they do. I also want to get into character animation, so during meals I watch YouTube tutorials on how to rig shape layers.
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Week 03 - Sep. 24-Sep. 30
Stills from the campaign video for the Fall 2017 collection
Yeaaah! studio PARIS, FRANCE
I've been following Yeaaah!'s work for a few years now. I was initially drawn to their poster and patch designs, which harken to American Traditional tattoo styles and vintage comic books. Their style has evolved over the years from being highly detailed and carefully rendered to more flat and graphic. This video from their Fall 2017 campaign is an entirely new direction, and it's their first piece involving motion. The different scenes are based on vector versions of some of their old and new pieces of clothing on the same two models. I like how the scenes create these frames within the composition to tell multiple stories at once. The figures also aren't contained within these smaller elements, and break out of the panels. The transitions and actual animations are simple—panning through larger scenes, repeating figures to the rhythm of the song, and changing the colors of figures. I usually look at Yeaaah!'s work for typography and poster inspiration, but now I see this video as a resource to exemplify the power of simple animations in After Effects.
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vasjen katro TIRANA, ALBANIA
Vasjen Katro is famous for his Baugasm poster series, in which he created a poster a day using Illustrator, Photoshop, and later Cinema 4D. His pieces are highly digital— using gradients, generated shadows, and offset distortions to create these posters that feel surreal. All of his pieces incorporate text in some way, which I think is helpful for me to think about how I can engage the entire page. I also admire his use of color— I often restrict myself to a
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limited palette when I can because I get overwhelmed with making a cohesive color scheme. His pieces integrate a variety of colors—ones I'm often afraid to use—to create vivid and energized works. He revisited some of his previous poster and then animated them to music. Katro separated various elements and timed their appearance, disappearance, and distortion to the changes in the music.
Week 03 - Sep. 24-Sep. 30
Days 185, 219, and 305 from Vasjen Katro's Baugasm project
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Week 04 - oct. 1-Oct. 7
drew struzan UNITED STATES
Drew Struzan is the mastermind behind some of the most iconic movie posters of our time. He's made over 150 posters, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones sagas, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Back to the Future, and Pan's Labyrinth. His work is iconic for capturing the characters' likeness in a compressed visual summary of the movies he depicts. To me, Struzan exemplifies the perfect marriage between illustration and design. All of his posters feature a clear hierarchy of characters and props to capture the essence of the films. There's an atmospheric quality that stems from his non-digital practice of moving back and forth between airbrushing and colored pencil to develop a sense of space and setting. His careful compositions and attention to the frame of his works inspires me to craft better, more dynamic stories through my designs.
A glimpse of Harrison Ford's career: Left: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) Right: Blade Runner (1982) Bottom: Triptych poster for the release of the Star Wars special edition episodes (1997)
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From Ghost Goes in the Door (2016)
jon klassen LOS ANGELES, CA
I finally had the chance to go to Books of Wonder when I went back to New York last weekend (turns out my office was just two avenues away). I rediscovered one of my favorite illustrators, Jon Klassen, when I looked through the contemporary section. I think what's most impressive to me is that he manages to make such whimsical drawings using these dark color palettes. I love the textures and his use of traditional media, which feels unusual to me in this era that so heavily emphasizes digital means of production. Initially I learned about him because of his book I Want My Hat Back, but I've discovered that beyond children's book work, he's also done concept work for movies like Coraline. I think at some point I'd like to do illustration work in the realm of animation. Bonus: I'm writing this while listening to Chip Kidd's livestream on the future of book cover design (through the New York Times Facebook page).
Week 01 - Oct. 15-Sep. 21
Top Left: From Triangle (shape trilogy) (2017) Top Right: From We Found a Hat (2016) Bottom: Concept art for Coraline (2009)
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Lauren tamaki NEW YORK, NY
I’m torn between two directions for my capstone. My love of zoology and marine biology pulls me towards making some sort of children’s book on animals, but working with some of the creative leads on luxury goods at Facebook rejuvenated my interest in fashion and the editorial world. I’m particularly drawn to fashion illustrations. Growing up, my mom and I watched a lot of Project Runway together, and I loved the designers’ concept sketches where gowns defied gravity and quick lines created sharp clothing pleats. Lauren Tamaki’s distinct style alludes to the energy and motion of the runway garments, and her work captures the essence of the clothes. She has a more finished and detailed style for editorial illustrations where she paints specific products. I’m trying to get better at ink and using line sparingly when I paint shapes, so she’s definitely an inspiration for me right now and great source material for my potential capstone.
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Week 01 - oct. 22-OCt. 28
Top Left: Portrait of Yayoi Kusama Bottom Left: Marc Jacobs S/S 16 Top Right: Illustration for Nicole Sadana for Fall NYFW 2017 Bottom Right: a history of awesomely outrageous footwear
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Google Dev ARts HTTPS://DEVART.WITHGOOGLE.COM/
I'm really interested in digital art—digital in that it embraces forms that couldn't exist in the real world. I like things that are heavily manipulated and embrace the strengths and limitations of digital programs—glitches, scan lines, RGB color shifts— that give some insight as to how the piece was made. I recently discovered Google Dev Arts through my search for "art that represented internet culture" for imagery for my podcast book. I started by looking at Jon Raffman's raunchy photographs that expose the dark underbelly of real life "internet trolls." Then through a long struggle to find the proper terminology for
"digital art" I found this piece by iGNANT Magazine that explains the merits of digital art beyond a superficial fad. Through the article I found Google Dev Arts, which is an initiative that started in 2014 for engineers to explore the possibilities at the crossroads of creativity and science. Programmers experiment with making codes and algorithms to generate kinetic art, integrate augmented reality into the real world, turn digital pieces into real life installations, etc. I'm really fascinated by this intersection of art and science in how it creates a unique way of making art that can't always be realized in a physical space.
Top: Color of World by Jae Hyun Yoo Yoo's program derives the color palette of any location on google maps. His goal was to find connections across the globe based on color, and his work expanded to look at color palettes similar to those found in fine art paintings. Bottom: Type & Form Sculpture by Karsten Schmidt Schmidt started with an algorithm that generated kinetic movement from two dimensional type, and then a 3D formula created stalagtite-like depth to it. The piece was then turned into a mesh form to be 3D printed as a sculpture that was then photographed for Print Magazine.
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Week 01 - oct. 29-nov. 4
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Molly Magnell
Top: Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, 2010 Bottom: Life is Not a Rehearsal, 1993 Right: New York Botanical Garden, New York, 2015
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Week 01 - nov. 5-nov. 11
jenny holzer HOOSICK FALLS, NY
In Becca's workshop on Dimensional Posters for AIGA, she introduced artist Jenny Holzer, who works heavily with type and projections in outdoor spaces. Her selection of found text leaves viewers to interpret their open ended meanings. Her projections are large scale and animate over large spaces, wrapping around their curves and corners. Her work, and Becca's workshop have opened the door to thinking in multiple dimensions. My work has traditionally been flat, but over the last year or so I've been thinking more about environmental design to see how users interact with space. I've been paying attention to museum curation and how much or little I'm supposed to notice my surrounding. Window displays are really interesting to me in that they use three dimensional objects to create a typically flat space that gets viewed like an image.
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This book was written and designed by Molly Magnell during the Fall semester of her senior year in 2017 at Washington University in St. Louis. These five books exist as a catalog of the process and design thinking that went into the work she made during her design capstone titled Form and Function taught by Professor Chrissi Cowhey. This book was typeset in: Diversa Soft Serif, 35 pt./ 42.5 pt. leading for the cover; 24 pt./ 28 pt. leading for the chapter headings; 118 pt. for the chapter numbers Quadraat Regular, 9.5 pt./ 12 pt. leading for the body copy; 8 pt./ 9.75 pt. leading for the captions with a 1pt. rule.