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he first brief for this year was all about street graphic and how we can use the language of the street to create graphic based work that reflected and represented our understanding of the topic. Not only should our work have promoted research, creative thinking and experimentation but it should also have been a visual narrative of our ideas and how we think as graphic designers. “The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it” (Charles Baudelaire)
The brief came in two parts the first asking us to research into how imagery, artefact’s and ephemera can bombard our senses with visual messages and experiences that we can convert into a visual piece of graphic design. Initially we where expected to demonstrate our ability to choose an appropriate subject matter and then be able to justify our ideas discriminating between the ideas that would work and those that would not. The second part of the brief then asked us to develop our most appropriate idea and turn into a concept that we could then create a cohesive body of work from which explores the concept in detail ready for a presentation of our work at the end of the project. Using the brief as I guide I set about addressing all the points asked for in-part one and
started by collecting a vast quantity of resources and references that I believed represented the street as cohesively as possible . This research I carried out covered many media platforms both first an second hand. The main body of which where photos and sketches of the street that explored its many different aspect. This includes things from its architecture to its people and languages. From here I then compiled the research into a mind map and mood board that I could potentially develop ideas from. Initially I had many ideas some of which I believed could possibly work and others I believed I would struggle to take much further. At the start I felt that I was more likely to go with the architectural or typographical ideas with architecture something I have had a keen interest in for a long time and typography being a recent addition that I would like to explore further. Due to the fact that I was so early on in the project at this point I didn’t want my ideas to be too focused on what the final out come would be as I felt this would limit my number of multiple solutions. I therefore decided that i should carry out more research, but instead of looking solely on the city this time I would look at the artists designers and writers who have observed and utilized the city as a basis of study. Hopefully inspiring more different unique ideas for my project.
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or this project I looked at many artist and designers including big names such as Lawrence Wiener and Glen Ligon, and also some smaller named designers such as Clet Abraham and Mike Farruggia. Although I like the work of Wiener and Ligon I felt that related more to the smaller named artist with there use of signs in there work something that interested me most. At this point I had the ideas to recreate there work in someway possibly creating my own examples of Abraham’s work or like Farruggia tell a story using bits of signs that could be found around the city. Although I liked these ideas I was struggling with the thoughts of how I could my work different and not just an exact copy so I decided to leave these ides for a bit and work on something else. By taking a step back and carrying out more research I allowed myself to generate more ideas and explore things that I would never have thought about otherwise. One example of this is ambient media. I have seen this style of work before and always admired its creativity in making advertising fun however I had never associated this as being a type of graphic design before. I really loved the idea of creating something of a similar style in my work however I struggled to come up with a topic that I could base my work on simply for the basic reason that I had nothing to advertise. Up to this point I realized that I had only looked at typographers and felt that I needed to look at other artists and designers who created different styles of Work to help progress my ideas further and hopefully find a solution to some of the issues I had previously encountered. One of the artist that inspired my final idea most was Ben Heine, A Belgian born Artist Heine’s work is a clever combination of photography and illustration that combines the two mediums in one image to create something of an optical illusion. Given the name “pencil versus camera” The work is created by overlaying hand drawn illustrations and photographs creating a final image that shows a contrast of the two mediums like I have never come across before. Using the idea of contrast as starting point I began to piece together a final idea gathering small pieces from across all of my research and combining them together.
“I just make art for people. I want them to dream and forget their daily troubles. I used to write poems many years ago, I want to convey a poetic and philosophical meaning into my pictures, each new creation should tell a story and generate an intense emotion, like a poem, like a melody”
Starting from the beginning I took my best initial idea and worked on how I could use the combination of photography and illustration to create a final piece that addressed all that the brief was looking for. I had looked a lot into typography and felt like this would be my strongest idea so began working on an idea that used photographs of signs and illustrations of signs to tell a story/Poem about the city. This idea helped link not only the combination of contrasting mediums inspired by Ben Heine but it also linked back to the ideas of using signs that I had been inspired to think about when researching Celt Abraham and Mike Farruggia.
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hat the idea mainly consisted of me taking as many pictures of different words on signs as I could find and then for word that I could not find I would design and illustrate a sign of my own that could replace a photograph and continue the story. Now I had the idea all that was left to think about was how I would present the work addressing the second part of the brief where it asked me to consider how all my research and final ideas would be displayed. Unfortunately I was really struggling for an idea as to how I could show my finished work and felt that although I really liked my idea I was also struggling due to time issues to take enough photos and create enough illustrations to write a full story in time for the deadline. A rethink into what I was doing was needed and the solution was found in the artist research that i had carried out earlier. Jack Pierson is a photographer illustrator and sculptor who uses instead of words individual letters of shop signs to produce his work. Using this idea of individual letters I would be able to simply remove the letters from the photographs of signs and create a typeface made up of all the individual letters that could then be used to write my story. I chose to call this typeface The City Typeface and one by one began individually selecting letters from my pictures that I would use in my typeface. Although there was huge variation in the number of fonts and letters that where available making my typeface varied and unique I felt that I was just compiling random letters from several prexisting typefaces and not really a typeface of my own. What I therefore did next was to look back at my original photos and pick out letters from things such as the architecture and other objects that could be found in the city and turn them into letters instead of just literally finding letters in signs. This process I found was surprisingly allot easier than I had anticipated and soon found a complete set of 26 letters in a huge array of buildings and objects. These included massive structures such as the Eiffel tower which seemed to perfectly fit the profile of a letter A to small tiny things that you would not normally notice such as the letter J formed in an umbrella handle or the letter S found in numerous wrought iron fences.
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fter finding all my letters the final step of this project was to turn what where photos into illustrations. Originally I had thought about including the background in the drawings as photographs by overlaying my letters on top of the images similarly to the way Ben Heine displays his work, however as i carried out this process the final results seemed too messy due to factors such as not all the letters in the photographs where the same scale and some letters needed to be adjusted slightly to make them more obvious. Before coming up with a final design I decided that I would need to was
research into how a font is created and how it is displayed so that the public can see the final product. What I discovered is that often a font poster is created to display how the font looks once it is In real use. This gave me the idea that this was what I was going to create for my final piece so began working on a few of my own designs. The development of the designs took around a week to complete and included me looking at layouts, colour, and the creation of numerous final options to choose from some of which can be seen in the images below.
Out of the eight final designs I created This was the design I felt worked best and I would use for my final presentation. Overall I am really pleased with the way the design worked out and feel that the project as a whole meets what the brief was originally looking for. I would have liked to eventually have created a story
with the typeface like I had originally intended to however, I feel like the project is not of a worse standard because I failed to do so. If I was to change on thing about this project I think I would’ve managed my time better but overall am proud of what I have achieved and feel it is one of my stronger projects.
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his project was all about the curious and intriguing things that can inspire and tease the mind. Using Joseph Cornell and original 17th century curiosity cabinets as a starting point this brief stated that “in the same way certain artists attempt to capture experiences, or ephemeral moments of time in their work, as in the boxes of Joseph Cornell and animations of the Brother Quay, you are required to use your personal experiences to build a cabinet of curiosity or shrine� before then moving onto say that in the first instance we should collect visual and written information based on our own experiences to put into the project. In order to achieve what the brief was asking i stated the project of by gathering as many resources as possible that hopefully at some point in the project may be of use to me. Similarly to Joseph Cornell i didn’t want to just gather a collection of elements of his experience and haphazardly make art out of anything i found but i wanted to be methodical in my approach so by gathering as much information as possible i would be able to eliminate elements that would just produce collection of shallow, scrap pieces of ephemera and instead create something that would represent my own preoccupations and concerns. In order to understand what a curiosity cabinet actually was before developing any ideas I decided the best thing to do was find out as much about them as possible. This began with some basic research on the Internet followed by a look into a few books all of which taught me a few things but what i really wanted to do was get a look at a real curiosity cabinet and find out why it was created in the hope that it would give me a better understanding of the personal experiences that went into the cabinet. After finding access to a cabinet i could use as a point of research i set about gathering and collecting as much information about the piece as possible, this initially involved taking a few pictures but then i decided to go further and find out about some of the stories behind some of the objects. It was by doing this that i discovered what would be the main idea that i would take forward into my project. Similarly to the work of Joseph Cornell the objects i uncovered in the cabinet all had there own individual stories that made them special to the creator. What would seem like a random collection of old holiday trinkets or junk that had just got thrown in the cupboard to anyone from the outside was actually a life time of memories that could be accesses simply by looking at the objects and remembering where they came from.
“Derive ideas from the world around you, from your own background, from your childhood, from relationships with others, from the social and political environment. Don’t be confined to a pond...in which the water is always in danger of becoming stagnant” (ken garlend)
“Beauty should be shared for it enhances our joys. To explore its mystery is to venture towards the sublime.”
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uring this project i became hugely inspired by the idea that a simple object can be an access point to memories that would other wise be forgotten and started to think of ways that i could use this theme in my own project. I had already decided that what i wanted to do was make a physical cabinet rather than a virtual one however I was concerned with the fact that perhaps to someone else the objects to I’d choose place in my cupboard would either be too literal or simply mean absolutely nothing. Based on this I came up with the idea of creating a cabinet specifically designed to provoke the audiences own memories and not just get them thinking and puzzling over my own as to why i put the objects in the cabinet that I did. If carried out successfully I believed this idea would answer the brief fully and would also comply with my own ideas of how objects can inspire
memories otherwise forgotten. Now i had the idea I now needed to think about how it should be carried out and what the eventual end result would be. In order to do this I began my research in Joseph Cornell and discovered what it was that inspired him to create what he does Cornell stated that his work was inspired by the love of his city but also came from the wonder of how objects would look when combined together in new and interesting ways. When researching Cornell’s cabinets i noticed that some of the works created where not static and instead where designed to be played with and took on many different unconventional forms. I now understood that even a physical cabinet didn’t just have to have to have a glass front and have opening doors but could take on any form that i wanted it to have. Taking inspiration from moving cabinets I began thinking about the ways in which i could make
my final piece a non static piece of design work. The first initial ideas i had centered around on making my cabinet a book which contained images of curious objects, articles and various other things of interest. The book i would create needed to look different from a typical book so I came up with the idea of creating an interactive book and instead of regular pages I would use opening and closing doors. Although this might seem like a random idea a lot of thought when into making this decision. A door is something that every one has and is familiar with. What was even more perfect is that even if they look identical can led to completely different rooms beyond full of a huge array of objects (similarly to a curiosity cabinet) When a person comes across a door a natural instinct is to try and look at whats inside it hopefully in a similar way to what they would do if every page in my book was a door that they where allowed open.
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had already established that my Cabinet was to be based around the theme of memories so decided that behind every door i would place a different memory allowing the reader to focus solely on one object at a time and eventually be inspired to think of memories of there own. To help establish what memories would be behind each door i came up with three themes, the first would be family, the second would be home and the final theme would be travel and interest. Although i was happy with the idea of doors i felt that it wasn’t interactive enough as I had originally planed so decided to carry our research into how
other people had made books Interactive. I came across numerous ideas form special inks that appear in ultraviolet light to things that move when coloured filters are placed over the image. Once the research was complete I decided that my best option was to use a combination of multi media such as photos that could be taken out and removed, maps that could be opened an read and small pop outs that would create a 3d affect to some of my doors. The construction of each of the pages was fairly simple and was done by me layering up pieces of coloured cardboard to create a panel effect rather
like a real door, the addition of dolls house letter boxes and door knockers also helped to give the impression of a read door that had been miniatured. Issues came however with the length of time it took to complete each door and it contents leading to me to have to rethink how i was going to complete my idea. Instead of creating a book i decided that perhaps i could use the original theme of the cabinets and place each of my doors inside a box that the viewer could open initially and then open the doors once they where inside. By doing this i would also allow myself to place bulkier items inside the box such as keys and ornaments.
TYPE DESIGN
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ne of the challenges we where faced wth this year was to design a typeface that was inspired by a piece of artwork we had been provided with. In my case i chose a design piece by modernist El Lissizki. The work itself uses a random combination of two dimensional an three dimensional shapes to create a harmonious composition. Based on this therey what i decided to do was break the font back down into these shapes and then see what letters could be created. Initialy I started off with the letters A D H & G and started to create my font. I decided early on that what i would do was to create a lowercase font rather than the typical upper case. I didnt really have an idea behind this other than i felt like the composition of the shapes worked better whith this formatting. Once I had my first four letters I then moved onto creating the rest of the alphabet. The key most important
feature of all my leters is the cirle that remains in the same positon in every single letter and creates a sense of unity. Accompanying the circle is also the addition stright horizontal lines and a serif on appropriate letters. Duriung one stage of the process I considered making some sectons of the letters three deimensional like the origional artwork. After trying this tecnique out however i found that i didnt like the results and went back to the origional designs. I feel this font has a certain eliment of the art deco about it with classic features that you could assocociated with this style. Even though this isnt striclty the style or era that lissizki created his work i feel that the combination of the two works very well together. If i ad more time with this font i think that i would also like to go back and try to create a Capital version aswell to allow me to see how the font would look in a finnished article.
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he earth artifact was a project that asked us as graphic designers to re-imagine what we would do in NASAs position when they sent up the voyager satellites. Designed as a way of possibly communicating with extra terrestrial life each of the satellites carried a golder record containing all the information scientists believed was important about planet earth. Our task was to therefore recreate the disks in someway but also give them a more contemporary feel. For this project i decided the best way forward would be to first gather as much pr existing information on the discs and space mission as possible and then from that and then start generating my own ideas. The obvious
thing to do with this project would have been simply to recreate exactly what the original discs did and use a combination of sound and visual information to tell the story earth however i felt this wasn’t very creative and the brief allowed for a much broader range of possibilities. Some of my initial ideas included creating an image of earth out of photographs I had taken similarly to a photo collage however after spending some time developing this idea I found that I could create the entire project in rather a small amount of time and to fully represent the earth I would need to include photos of people and objects that i would have no way of getting access to. Instead then i started thinking about other ideas
this included a video of earth or alternatively a book of visual information all about earth. After generating a few ideas i then needed to think about what the most important things about earth where that I would need to include in my project. Personally I see the earths people, History and landscape the most important so decided that these things along with the industry and animals of planet earth would be the subject of my final piece. Because the audience of our brief would be potentially aliens and they would not be able to understand our language I decided that out of my too best idea i would create a book of icons that showed planet earth in its most basic form. To test the theory out I generated a series of
12 Icons that represented things from People, Objects and places and tested to see whether other People could understand what i had create. The response i received was mainly positive so I decided to go head with the idea. The logos i had created up until now where very basic and i felt as if they lacked the quality needed for my project so I decided to carry out some research into existing icons and icon designers such as jack Hagley. What I discovered whiles caring out this research is that there where far more variations of simple logos than I had originally believed and would be able to improve my designs significantly from what i had learned.
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nce i had finnished improving the design style of my logos i decided that what i would really like to do was also be able to include some information graphics in my book also so that they would help explane things that logos would not. Based on this fact i set about createing thee pages of A4 that contained information graphics depictind things such as earths position in the solar system, the history of our evoloution and the geography of our planet. I found as i went along that certain things where easy to depict using only images however somethings where far too complicted and requred the use of words. Origionally i had planned not to use words anywhere in my final piece to came up wit the soliution of using binary. Binary is a language that can be understood world wide on our planet as it is a computer generated language so why would it not be able to be transleate
by exterer terrestrial beings aswell. Once i had devised a solution as to how i would solve the language issues i now needed to think about layouts. Using the grid systems of wim crowel and Joseph MulllerBrockman i devided a serise f laouts that i belived would best optimise the apperace of my work. Aside from what would be on the inside of my book i also had to think about its exterior too. For my front cover I decided to create a simpl logo ofplannet earch accompanied by its co-ordinateds in three languages in the hope that even if aliens coldnt understand one the other two might be usefull. Overall i am really pleased with how this project turned out and feel it is the most sucessfull of all of my projects. if given more time the only chanfges i would make would be to include more pages in my book perhaps looking at other topics such as earths history or cultures or perhaps its languages and landscapes.
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he following is my personal manifesto that i have decided to include within this project as what it describes are the rules that i have stuck to whiles completing all of my other Studio briefs. The inspiration for this piece comes from my research into pre existing manifestos although the eventual designs is my own. I dried to keep a overall hand drawn feel to the manifest as i feel it makes the appearance seem more personal and emphasizes the fact that this is my manifesto and what i stand for. For the majority of the design i chose to use the font sugar cubes as it was an easy to read standard serif font. For some sentences however i have tried to relate the style of the font to what it is trying to say for instance one particular sentence mentions about the time that i put into my work instead of therefor accompanying this sentence with an image relating to time i made the fonts letters itself out of clock faces.