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O O COLLECTION
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Me Pattern
O O COLLECTION by FRANCESCA DOMPE
about Me CIAO !
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I am Francesca, I am Italian and I am a student of Graphic Design at The Cass in London. This book is a showcase of the work I did during my second year of study. I love working with color, but I also love black and white. I love extremes like messy things but also very tidy and clean, I think that the contrast between clean and messy can be very interesting. I hope you enjoy! ;-)
THOUGHTS about PRACTITIONERS
Massimo Vignelli
Alan Fletcher
Gerhad Steidl
Massimo Vignelli has been practising design in New York for nearly 50 years, during which time he has made a big impact on all forms of design, from graphic design, to furniture, to clothing. All the while he has steadfastly maintained his Modernist approach to all design problems. ‘We brought discipline to design,’ he claims. ‘We are systematic, logical and objective – not trendy. Trends kill the soul of design. Modernism took out all the junk, and postmodernism put it all back in.’ In 1957, he married Lella Valle, which was also his professional partner. Together shared intellectual experiences and growing process from the very beginning of their professional lives.
Synthesising the graphic traditions of Europe and North America to develop a spirited, witty and very personal visual style, Alan Fletcher is one of the most influential figures in post-war British graphic design. The fusion of the cerebral European tradition with North America’s emerging pop culture in the formulation of his distinct approach made him a pioneer of independent graphic design in Britain during the late 1950s and 1960s. As a founding partner of Pentagram in the 1970s, Fletcher helped to establish a model of combining commercial partnership with creative independence. He also developed some of the most memorable graphic schemes of the era, notably the identities of Reuters and the Victoria & Albert Museum and made his mark on book design as creative director of Phaidon.
Gerhard Steidl is a German-language publisher, an international publisher of photobooks, and a printing company, based in Gottingen, Germany. Gerhard Steidl still heads the company and is in charge of the production of every book. He endeavors to follow the preferences of the particular photographer for layout, paper, and binding, and insists on working with paper, because of the importance of the feel of the book and the difference between backlighting and reflected light. Printing, binding and all other work is done within a four-storey house on Düstere Strasse in Gottingen.
-Typography-
-The Art Of Looking Sideways-
-His Way Of working-
“His vision of typography is very delicate and his passionate way of working brings typography to life. A good typographer is the one that has a connection with typography, he transform typography into poems”
“The book is unconventional and full of topics totally unrelated. It is like a showroom of typography and layout. Some bits are very noisy and other very calm. You never know what surprise will bring the next page”
“He is very passionate. He proudly produces everything in the house. His productions are meant to last forever for that reason he makes a lot of tests and chooses very carefully materials and structures in order to achieve the best outcome”
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STUDIO WORKSHOPS
Pamphlet Workshop
Visual Research Method Workshop
Book Binding Workshop
We have been asked to bring in the class photocopied material from our research, drawings, experimentations… etch.
The aim of the workshop was to learn to do research in different ways and generate ideas in a very short amount of time.
With this work we went through bookbinding homemade because for a designer it is very important to know how a book is physically made.
With this material we created a physical pamphlet A2 size, foldable in 16 pages at A5 size, using glue, scalpel, text already printed and pictures without any use of computer.
We had to choose a place and collect information about it . We choose Liverpool street station. We have been at the Bishop’s Gate to search through its archives and we found many informations, pictures of station in the past, newspaper articles, leaflets… After we walked around gathering other material. We looked at people, listened sounds, we also interviewed few people. Once happy with our collection, we went back to uni to edit. It was about chosing material and we set up a crime scene.
First we prepared all material, cover and papers cut a the size of how the book is intended to be. After with glue, scalpel, ruler, cutting mat we follow Michelle for the procedure.
This workshop was very useful to understand how a layout works and also made us to reflect about the choice of type-font we will be using for our final outcome.
I like make things with my hands and this workshop helped me to understand better the structure of a book.
Montage & Sound Workshop Second part of the workshop about montage. This time we looked into sound montage. We have been presented to various theories about it, and through examples we have been introduced on how the sound can influence consciously or unconsciously our perception of an image, movie or film. The sound is very important, it is the editing that gives the total control of the meaning you want to convey to a simple images or video etc. We learn about the difference about the sound of the world where the movie is shooted and the external sounds.
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Experimenttion & Development
FUTURE PAST STUDIO
ACTIVISM
The Brief
The Theme
Activism is the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change.
The Activism project for me turned towards BREXIT.... ....no Brexit, Brexshit, sad Brexit…. “a little unfair Brexit” for me=us EUs!
This brief asked us to engage with Activism as a theme and produce outcomes based on material relating to specific events both historic and contemporary. We were provided with some initial lines of research via historic archive references and interviews with locally active Radical activists based around the East End location of Roman Road and Bow. But we also had the option to choose our own theme.
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Experimenttion & Development
Taking on the role of activists, we had to create new work which will inform and make people think about specific acts of Activism. “Take on the cause – go to the heart of what has provoked the specific passion”
This is something that is still on going and has affected the life of many EUs but also Britons, Remainers and Leavers. This is a fact that will mark History, UK History, European History and probably World History. It was a vast topic to look at and investigate. I born and grew up with the feeling of being an European daughter that could go wherever she likes in Europe. I really felt living in London was like living at home and now it’s like my parents are telling me that my presence in their house is not welcome anymore. This is a devastating feeling. I do believe that family is the best place to be in the world, UK was like my family and this shocking reality doesn’t let me live serenely. I am obsessed with the news of Brexit What Theresa said?/What Jeremy said?/ Why Boris J. is so nasty?… but the strongest feeling I have is Will I, and my family, deported outside UK?
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We had to produce outcomes based on material relating to specific events that we feel strongly about. An act or a cause that evokes strong emotion in us. We had to immerse ourself in further research relating to our chosen event and theme. We had to create memorials as a means of commemorating these acts. Through distillation of historic archives and contemporary accounts, we had to create a set of commemorative material that explains and evokes our chosen theme and personal approach to activism.
The Outcome
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Experimenttion & Development
The documentary made by the ceramist Grayson Perry about Brexit, The matching Pair, made me feel very emotional. Grayson Perry wanted to interview Europeans
Along my research I came across with people that were ... not very nice with Europeans. They used language very disrespectful and words so bad that was very painful hearing or reading them. Then for the banner I imagined myself protesting in Trafalgar Square against this discrimination.
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After research, conversation and documentaries I decided to inform about the feelings of us, Europeans have after the Brexit vote. The outcome of the pamphlet is quite dark, sombre and a bit sinister. Maybe is too drammatic but I think that it reflects the emotional state of many of us, Europeans.
working in farms in Boston, but they were afraid of the consequences. But one agreed to the interview knowing that it would be TV broadcasted in all UK. His name Piotre, is Polish and showed a lot of courage and for that reason I decide to make the plaque to commemorate his courage, and the courage of others.
Pamphlet
For the project we had to create a Pamphlet to inform, a Plaque to commemorate and a Banner to evoke.
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Pamphlet Poster
Development
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Plaque
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Banner
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Banner
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The Brief
The Theme
Using the Roman Road as an area representative of current contemporary East London culture we will engage in discussions about place; past, present and future. Mulberry UTC will create a series of ‘kits’ to include – a 1000 word creative writing piece imaging the future of Roman Road, research, photography, objects, materials, illustrations, and any visual material linked to their future imagined place. Cass Students will respond to these ‘kits’ and stories to create projections of future place. These should draw upon gathered reference material, both self-initiated and from the Mulberry students, to create imagined locations set in interpreted futures 100 years from now 2118. Be bold and adventurous in your narrative solutions. You should consider factors that may happen to shape our future worlds, these might be political, environmental, social, infrastructure, population, health, etc.etc. Project framework is sequential narrative which should be expressed as a montage sequence which can be motion or print based. The use of audio is required this can be through the use of direct recording and or transcription. This is about field recordings and not use of stock sound effects or music tracks. We will also create a Riso promotional poster for your sequence.
The theme I choose to explore is about the historic action of the Suffragette and how it will be seen in 2118. Their protests and their fight changed the course of British History and not only. Their actions started a process towards deep changes in society, mentality, morality and other that is still ongoing, This year 2018, Britain celebrated the 100 years of women vote. The 1918 women vote was an important turning point in the society because back then the possibility to vote for women was still considered unreal, utopia or ficton. Women like Sylvia Pankhurst or her sisters and mother, soffered starvation, humiliation, went to prison because their beliefs. Thanks to them, today we live in a society that has more respect for people whatever is their background. Of course there is still a lot to do in order to make the world better, but this is why I imagined that in 2118 we will rejoin almost the perfection, and to cite Sylvia Pankhurst, in 2118 we will finally live in “THE GOLDEN AGE”
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ARCHIVES and FUTURE PLACES
The Outcome
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continues with making choices and the pasting and constructing is really the last phase. This process is really time consuming, but at the same time it allowed me to think more in depth and how I wanted to turn my project. I wanted something happy, also inspired from the 1000 words of creative writing that Mulberry UTC students shared with us. Along my work there are a lot of references of things done by Sylvia Pankhurst. I feel the overall project has a sense of utopic dream but I strongly believe that dream make people alive, and if the Sufragette didn’t have these utopic dream nothing would have changed. I made a riso poster recalling to the colour purple, yellow and green as the posters used by the suffragette. the sound I chose is based on pianoforte because I believe that that sound gives a more romantic and dreming feeling to my story
Riso Poster
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Development
For this project I imagined a world and East End, were everybody is happy, where the word hostility is forgotten, where no one suffer for starvation, where everybody can be proud of himself.... I made a lot of research in different fields but after I focused on the Suffragette particularly in Sylvia Pankhurst. I red some talks she had in front of thousand women ... and men. Her public spechees were so powerful that men joined women “shoulder to shoulder� on fight against injustice. I decided to make a collage of a perfect Roman Road, and from the collage I took out the single images that tell my story. It was the first time I launched myself in a collage. It was a very long process and I can say that a collage starts way before the action of pasting or better constructing. Collage starts with the action of collecting material, it
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Final 12 Images
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Digital Printing On Fabric
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The Brief
The Idea
We had to develop a visual proposal for the possible implementation of our work in a real world context. Our proposal can be film based or print based but must visualise and clearly illustrate how our work could be experienced. Think about the logistics: Where will our work be? How will it be seen, what will be needed to set it up? What equipment will be neded? What permission/ contacts might be made to enable it to happen? This is a hypothetical imagining to practice developing a clear proposal for the implementation of your work in a real world context. DIGITAL Website - Roman Road Trust (You will be expected to supply formats for film, still images, audio and text describing your project in no more than 250 words) Be imaginative and think about how your work could be experienced. This proposal should be ambitious and consider how people can experience your work. The experience could be in the local environment – in a shop, or building that relates to your outcome. It could be projected in a space, installed on a journey – it could involve a walk, an audio walk visiting various sites with printed material displayed on site, it could be virtual, it could be in a gallery, in a pub in a café, projected or flyposted. It could be a experienced through a workshop, a talk, an installation. Visualise this. Propose this. What would you need to make it happen?
As a visual Proposal I ended up to think that the best place where to show my work is Roman Road Market. I think at that place as the heart of the area, and the outcome of my project is all about Roman Road’s people, their heritage and their Pride. I decided about this place because at the beginning of the project, when I conducted my primary research, I interviewed people from Roman Road and it came out that a lot of local inhabitants are moving out of the area because housing prices are too high. The local market is a very lively, a place where people meet, chat, buy stuffs, and I think the display of my work here would be welcomed by the residents (and visitors) because my work is about Roman Road, its Pride and happiness.
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Project Mapping Experiment
Roman Road Project Realisation: VISUAL PRPOSAL
The Outcome be situated at the level of the red circle, It is about in the middle of the market. It is Gladstone Place, there is a coffee in the corner and it is a quite airy place. The building on coffee side offers a big space where the final image can be displayed. The final image can be quite big and that means that people will be able to see it without too much effort. For the Promotional Riso Poster I thought to stick it on walls around the area as shown in the next page.
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I have been visiting the place few more times and my work will be displayed as banners along the section of Roman Road where the market happens every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Logistically, the work would be displayed like on the map below, The numbers on the map correspond to the place where the banners will be put. The final image, that is grouping all images together will
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CREATIVE INDUSTRY PRACTICE STUDIO
What This Module Is About
This module is intended to enable designers to gain experience and understanding of working practices within the creative industries. Through working on projects that reflect real-world situations, we will consolidate both disciplinary and creative skills, develop professional confidence and navigate individual and collaborative approaches for working. This module seeks to enable us to: • Develop social and professional skills and confidence for collaboration, negotiation and decision making in individual and team working contexts • Acquire knowledge of professional ways of working and standards required in your field, including recognition of relevant ethical concerns • Embed in your practice professional methods of project management, recording, communication and presentation
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Experiment & Development
• Employ creativity and enterprise in problem solving through effective industry techniques for analysis and evaluation, setting goals and targets in relation to the opportunities and constraints of the brief
The Brief
Idea
Develop a proposal for a product that sells your course to prospective students. You will work in groups to: • develop a collective design agency and brand • design and create a target audience appropriate product or service • develop a promotional plan and propose a display for the market which you’ll pitch to the Student Enterprise team at Accelerator. Teams/products that are selected will go on to sell at the market.
My group and I worked on the idea of making a gadget that will allow students to avoid to forget their USB key attached to computers.
Project brief aims This project aims to give you work related learning insights through working on projects that reflect real-world situations, you will consolidate both disciplinary and creative skills, develop professional confidence and navigate individual and collaborative approaches to working within the fields of Illustration and Graphic Design
We developed a brand and its identity, we thought about the promotion of our product and company, and we produced our product physically.
We did a lot of research in many field related to the realisation of our product. We looked into how much students would like a such product and how much they would need a product like this. We conducted market research, necessary in order to understand the flow of the market.
It was an intense project that projected us to real situation and problems that we could experience in real work.
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Manifesto-Mantra-Logo
MARKET READY
PART ONE
As a group we started as in fourth gear, our designers made an excellent work for the logo and the identity. We wanted to have a funny side of the product, because the product itself was quite fun.
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We struggeled a lot with the production of the prototype. We tested different possible solution, but it was quite hard to build something that wouldn’t look as hand made.
PART TWO
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We conducted survays in order to understand the potential of our product. We developed the final prototype at a very good standard ready to be sold. We kept to develop and improve the commercial aspect of our design agency.
SURFACE
The Brief
Idea
As a brand Microsoft believes in people and what they can make possible. Its mission is to empower every individual and organisation to do more and achieve more. Microsoft and Microsoft Surface mean infinite possibility, new ways to create and collaborate, and the power to achieve.
The final idea for this project is to use a metaphore to explain that everybody can be creative and that creativity is individual and universal, it needs to be shared and freed. The metaphore I am going to use is about “everybody is able to cook and it involves creativity, so everybody can be creative. Creativity need to breath, it is like wind, you can’t see it but it is there. Creativity needs to be shared because it is individual but also universal.” The story wil be about a girl that didn’t know how to cook because she never did it before. After someody helped her to start and when understood the basics she started to cook in her way, she put her creativity in her cooking.
Your audience is those - student or professional - who put creativity at the heart of wht they do. Stay true to the brand, don’t try to make the brand more like its competitors, this is all about how Microsoft is different.
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Each film must include the Microsoft logo and the mission statement, “we believe in what people make possible”. It must also reference Microsoft Surface, this could be something you symply resolve at the end/ beginning.
It is a simple idea, but I believe that if the film is well done it can play on the feelings of the viewer. I believe this, because I believe that branded content plays hard on the feelings of the viewers.
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Develop and create a short film (or films) to bring this message of infinite creative possibility to life. this is about to embodying the spirit of the brand through film. You can leave literally behind.
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The scene will start with the sound of blowing wind. The actress will then walk in and take a sit. Now the actress is looking at the camera and the shoot is framed to her face, because the expression of her face will evoke feelings to the viewer. Now the conversation starts and from the first question she looks unconfortable. I will leave the actress to answer by herself to some questions, to make it more real. F_ Hi S., how are you? S_ I am ok, thanks F_ So, I wanted to know what do you think about creativity and if you feel to be a creative person. S_ She is free to give her answer. F_ May I ask you something else? S_ Yes, of course F_ In the morning you choose the clothes you will be wearing? S_ Yes F_ Can you cook?
S_ Yes,of course F_ Did you born knowing how to cook? S_ No, I learned F_ How? S_ My mum taught me, long time ago F_ Now, do you cook exactly as she taught you? S_ No, well maybe at the beginning then I started to cook in my way, adding ingredients, taking out... F_ I believe that means that you became creative in your cooking, do you? She remains a bit puzzled and then she answers S_ Yes, I believe that I started to invent my dishes... F_ See, you create your meals, you choose your clothes in the morning... this is to be creative, everyone does it, it isn’t? S_ Yes... F_ Creativity, belongs to everyone... it just need to breath, it is like the wind, you can’t see it, but you know it is there.... Then words and other stuff will run on the screen... maybe coloured balloons in the air.. and at the end Microsoft Surface with its statement.
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Plot & Dialogue
Message Intended To Give With My Project
Development
CRITICAL CONTEXTUAL STUDY
How the Guerrilla Girls triggered changes in Western Culture.
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Picture 1 “What Do These Artists Have In Common?”, original poster created by the Guerrilla Girls 1985 Picture 2 “What Do These Artists Have In Common?”, first poster created by the Guerrilla Girls 1985 Picture 3 “We Came In Peace For All Mankind”, Moon Plaque 1969 Picture 4 “Be as tough as she is”, Nike 1984 Picture 5 “We Sell White Bread”, Guerrilla Girls 1986
had to be a new kind of activist art that would change people’s mind about these issues” . The Guerrilla Girls are anonymous art activists who, until today, keep their real identities hidden behind gorilla masks, introduce themselves with names of deceased woman artists such as Frida Kahlo, Kathe Kollowitz, Eva Hesse, and proclaimed themselves as the Conscience of the Art World. The Guerrilla Girls started their campaign by creating posters, skilfully laid out with statistics, humour and caricatures which were turned into weapons against the art world. Their posters were constructed with sharp and witty visual language which enabled the Guerrilla Girls to expose the dirtiness of the art institutions and to denounce the discrimination of women artists, racial exclusion, gender identity and sexual orientation. The Guerrilla Girls used billboards and any surface to display posters and stickers, and public spaces to put on performances which highlighted their plight. How were their messages so influential that sought to rewrite the history of art of Western countries? The following analysis of their works intends to understand what made their protests so powerful and what after over thirty years of activity continues to bring to our society.
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The picture above looks quite innocuous however, had a watershed effect on the history of Western Art. Only two copies of this poster appeared for the first time on New York’ street in April 1985 and immediately had a wild response from New York’ society. This poster marks the beginning of the protest conducted by the Guerrilla Girls against the art world since 1985. The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous women artists that came together in reaction to the ‘International Survey of Painting and Sculpture’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984. The exhibition claimed to gather the most important artists of the time and the Guerrilla Girls were furious to discover that of 165 showcased artists only ten percent were female and even fewer were artists of colour. For the Guerrilla Girls the underrepresentation of women artist and artists of colour at the exhibition was not giving a complete picture of the artistic culture of the time. In their opinion the exhibition highlighted the fact the art world and art institutions were “white-male-dominated” and governed by discrimination, inequality and hypocrisy. During the course of the exhibition, female artists were outside protesting, however they were ignored by the attending public. The Guerrilla Girls “realized that there
Although American women played an important role in American art in the 70s, during the 80s they were still and not valued by the art world. American society was still very conformist, feminism was deprecated, and “conservative politicians attacked public arts funding for work which gave voice to the ‘transgressive’ expression of communities marginalised through gender, racial and sexual exclusion. Graphic activists responded, addressing the political dimensions of rape, abortion, AIDS and the continuing marginalisation of women in the art world institutions.” The Guerrilla Girls were, and still are, diverse in age, race, sexual orientation, class, gender… In other words, the Guerrilla Girls, were representing all those ‘things’ that American conservative society was demonising and through their protests activated a deep change within art institutions and public opinion, first in New York and after world-wide. That said, it is understandable why ‘behind the scene’ a turmoil of dissent was rapidly growing. American conservative society and art institutions were unwilling to let women artist to express themselves freely and were also trying to suffocate their efforts to be recognised as a valuable part of the art culture of this period.
Visual Awareness and first poster The Guerrilla Girls turned the use of posters into weapons against the art institutions. They started their fight with just two copies of a poster that they created in order to transmit their message through the use of Visual Awareness. Frederick Palmer, on his book Visual Awareness wants to make understand the reader that the way of seeing things is not related just to their functionality. He explains that visual communication can imply different emotions to the viewer depending from the memories or familiarity the viewer links to the object seen. More specifically he says that “in communicating ideas visually, the painter and the photographer are conscious of the emotional content of their work. They know that certain subjects affect people in particular ways, that we are attracted to some subjects and repelled by others. We shall be affected by the artist’s emotional involvement and influenced by our memories of previous experiences and thoughts which the subject provokes.”
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First and foremost, the Guerrilla Girls were artists and the posters they created were so effective because being part of the minority enabled them to be aware of the possible emotional response to their posters from the other marginalised women. With their first poster (Pict 1, 2) the Guerrilla Girls played well their card of Visual Awareness. With the content of this poster they were aware that they would bring out all
the suppressed emotions of women artist and women in general.
pose of this poster seemed to give information, it was created to denounce and attack the art institutions. The typeface chosen was not an accident it was the named Futura and the Guerrilla Girls made use of the general visual awareness to convey their message through the use of Futura. Created in 1927 by the German Paul Renner, this typeface became extremely popular and in the 80s it was the designers’ favourite typeface. Futura was used in almost every form of visual communication from words on military uniform to the ubiquitous and constantly growing advertising world (Pict 3 and 4). Because of its largely diffused use, the familiarity of Futura was the element of the poster that unconsciously was attracting readers.
The Guerrilla Girls appropriated the Futura’s familiarity and used it as a weapon to expose the corruption of the art institutions. The message couldn’t be clearer and was also reinforced by the use of different weights of Futura. For example, the use of FUTURA CONDENSED extra bold for the head-line and the list underneath and the use of a LIGHTER weight for the explanation through the use of statistics were balancing the content making the poster more eye-catching and more interesting. In other words, the combination of statistics and Futura made the poster so punchy and so provocative that their message couldn’t pass unnoticed, and it was spreading immediately at the same speed of the mass-marketing advertising of the time.
Stimulation of moral sentiments through visual metaphor
With this simple poster the Guerrilla Girls denounced and exposed the unseen corruption within the art world. They stated discrimination as a real problem with their statistic, they proclaimed themselves as ‘conscience of the art world’ and they created their own identity, in order to show the inequalities between male and female artists. Probably the Guerrilla Girls didn’t expect the ‘wild’ positive response of New York and probably they didn’t expect to be active for over thirty years. However, with their use of visual communication forms they pointed out and made public the problems of discrimination, inequality and hypocrisy, in such a manner that large part of the society was emotionally united as a response to the poster.
The Guerrilla Girls produced more and more posters, the visual language used a mixture of humourism, sarcasm and statistics and had a wild success and seemed unstoppable. The Guerrilla Girls produced an elevated number of typographic posters but because of their growing political and social engagements they also explored other forms of visual communication in order to stimulate moral sentiments. “The classic means of stimulating and simplifying moral sentiments is through a visual metaphor” and the We Sell White Bread (Pict 5) is an example of the ability of a visual metaphor to recall moral sentiments. This message was produced under a form of stickers pasted on gallery windows and doors that later turned into posters. For that message the use of the combination of text and image creates a metaphor, but its meaning is amplified by the use of sarcasm that imply a strong message against race discrimination in the art world.
Connection between audience and Futura With the first Guerrilla Girls’ poster “all hell broke loose” , consequently they started to produce more posters and designing others. A year before women artists were protesting outside the MOMA and were being ignored. Why were only two copies of this poster able to break the silence that triggered a revolution in the art world? Why did women and the general public stop to read it? First of all, posters are supposed to be eye-catching in order to distinguish themselves from others. ‘What Do These Artists Have In Common?’ typographically constructed with a recognisable list was different from the mass-marketing posters present in New York. At first could give the impression of a public notice because “a public notice usually consists entirely of words. Its values are those of ‘information’: intelligibility, explicitness, completeness” , but it was not. Although the main pur-
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New York Social Context
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VISITS
‘He ate up every image, every word, every bit of data that appeared in front of him and he processed it all into a bebop cubist pop art cartoon gospel that synthesized the whole overload we lived under into something that made an astonishing new sense.’ I think this was the best visit I have ever seen, it is undeniable that from the elevate amount of work produced by Basquiat a strking energy and authenticity bursts out. Jean Michel Basquiat was a pioneering prodigy of the cultural scene present in Manhattan in the 80s. Bsquiat was a self-taught artist, gifted of explosive creativity. He was “a radiant child“, Rene Richard. He was interested in disparate subject and often opposite to one another. He was a chameleon, because his ability to excel in so disparate fields, from painting to rap, from street graffiti to poetry. He had the chance to encounter other personalities who contributed to the explosion of new ways to make art. as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Grace Jones, Blondie…. and many others. Today at the Barbican I felt like I finally know were everything came from. Basquiat and his friends twisted the art scene so deeply almost 40 years ago, but it feels it happened yesterday...
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. Born in Brooklyn in 1960, to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, he grew up amid the post-punk scene in lower Manhattan. After leaving school at 17, he invented the character ‘SAMO©’, writing poetic graffiti that captured the attention of the city. He exhibited his first body of work in the influential group exhibition New York/New Wave at P.S.1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Inc., in 1981. When starting out, Basquiat worked collaboratively and fluidly across media, making poetry, performance, music and Xerox art as well aspaintings, drawings and objects. The exhibition celebrates this diversity, tracing his meteoric rise, from the postcard he plucked up the courage to sell to his hero Andy Warhol in SoHo in 1978 to one of the first collaborative paintings that they made together in 1984. By then, he was internationally acclaimed – an extraordinary feat for a young artist with no formal training, working against the racial prejudice of the time. In the studio, Basquiat surrounded himself with source material. He would sample from books spread open on the floor and the sounds of the television or boom box – anything worthy of his trademark catchphrase ‘boom for real’. The writer Glenn O’Brien wrote following Basquiat’s death in 1988:
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Drawing Made At The Exhibition
JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT
CAN GRAPHIC DESIGN SAVE YOUR LIFE?
This exhibition illuminates how graphic design influenced and influence our every day life. With a tour from hard-hitting posters to illuminated pharmacy signs, or packaging that instruct us to take the correct pills, or awareness campaigns that stop the spread of infectious disease, Graphic Design persuade, inform and empower us.
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Drawing Made At The Exhibition
The tour start from smoking campaign. In fact Graphic Design has had a long and conflicted relationship with smoking. As I was going along with the visit I was made aware that graphic design has played a major role on increasing its sales. Thing that I couldn’t be 100% informed because when this was happening I wasn’t born yet, or I was very little
or simply I wasn’t interested. As far as I can remember there always been campaigns against smoking. But from my tour I discovered that only in 2003, The World Health Organisation introduced the world’s first framework convention on tobacco control, which governs the advertising, promotion, packaging and labelling of tobacco, which led to packaging legislation as we know today. Then Graphic Designers have risen to the challenge of effectively communicating the health risks of smoking. This has included formats as small as postage stamps and explicit picture warning on cigarette packets. Graphic Design once a key player in the promotion of tobacco, now has a pivotal role in the anti-smoking campaign. This was the start of my tour, but probably the section more highlighted of the exhibition. After I could see how Graphic Design played a decisive role in other fields like education, hospitalisation, medication and provocation.
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It was a very interesting exhibition and I learn a lot about things that I see every day but which I don’t generally relate to graphic design. Graphic design surrounds us, using words, signs, simbols, colour scale, format, and shapes mediates our experience of the world. It is ubiquitos yet often overlooked.
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Me Pattern
TALKS
PATRICK SAVILE
First HotHouse Talk of the year. Patrick Savile was the guest at the Cass.
Savile is more abstract, in fact he explained us his love for the abstract and the combination with type.
This artist lead us on his career journey after he left university.
With his talk I understood that because he is a freelancer, for his choice of freedom, he spent many years in “bohemian style of living“. Yet there where difficult moments but also amazing moments. He always had a good web of connections that brought jobs to him even overseas.
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Picture from Savile Talk
His last works remind me a little bit of Dali’, yet Patrick
His talk, in one side, relieves me because I still don’t know what I wanna do, but in the other side made me wonder what I gonna do after university, because, for many reasons I am not in the position of having a bohemian style of life…
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Obviously was not easy, but as he said he was lucky as well. His style of work has evolved during the 15 years followed his graduation. During and after the uni he was into comics and his style evolved so much and changed, due to his continuously zig-zag within graphic design, illustration and “art”. He said that in the last few years has finally found his own style, his voice, his way.
SUPERMUNDANE ROB LOWE
and the award-winning food quarterly Fire & Knives. He lives and works on Havelock Walk, an artist’s community in South East London. He founded the online print and design company http:// www.moo.com. Rob Lowe was asked what the name, ‘Supermundane’ stood for. He said it means, ‘above the world’. He found the word many years ago whilst he was working as a graphic designer in a kettle factory in the Midlands. He said the name has been a useful way for him to stand out. To end his talk he made a song based on the most common typefaces, which I recorded and it was sooo funny. At the end of the talk we had the chance to talk to him and drink with him as he was our friend, how cool was that?
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Best talk ever!!! On November 2017 Christa and I went to Walthamstow to attend a talk made by Rob Lowe. We paied £10 but was money well spent! We have also been offered drinks and snacks, very good the red wine!! On the back there was also a mini exhibition of Lowe’s work. Lowe told us about his career but he told us in a very funny way, all the public was laughing I almost had tears in my eyes. He is a graphic designer with over 20 years of experience in the creative business. His work has been exhibited all over the world. He uses line, typeface, colour as well as optical effects in his designs. He designed the children’s magazine, Anorak
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Thank You
Book designed by Francesca Dompe Front & Back Cover by Francesca Dompe Illustration by Francesca Dompe