STEFAN SAGMESITER is a designer to whom i always turn to for inspiration. I find his work hugely personal which must come from the extensive relationships he builds with clients, as well as the intergration of his own projects and experiments which he conducts outside of client work. Sagmeister produces such detailed work, often including hidden aspects and tricks especially within his books. Interaction is a consistant part of his designs as well as movement and change; for example his typography made from rotting bananas, which evolves as they decay, his business cards and invites, the hidden text along the spine of his books, and his book covers themselves.
BARBARA KRUGER has an instantly recognisable and continual style, a style that i am inspired by because of its simplicity. I really like how Kruger uses the images she is questioning within her work, but proceeds to alter their purpose with her typographic additions. It is the layout of text that intrigues me most about Barbara Kruger. She positions text in such a way that it is impossible to read it without fully pondering on it. Sentences are laid out broken up, and often word by word with vast space between them, slowing the viewers reading pace and dragging their eyes around the page.
MOVEMENT became the common theme apparent within both Stefan Sagmeister and Barbara Kruger’s work. Sagmeister uses movement in an interactive way, some of his work relies wholly on movement for it to become visible or effective. For example lots of his business cards, such as Gross & Klein’s, printed on real one dollar bills, or his own Sagmeister Inc. business card which features a slide out centre. Barbara Kruger features movement in a different way. The way in which she lays out text means the viewer is constantly moving around the page to collect the words, before contructing the words themselves in order to make a coherent sentence. This in itself is interaction. From this similarity I formed the basis for my idea; a conglomerate of Kruger and Sagmeister. This resulted in the invention of ‘Stefan Kruger’ and lead to the production of a business card style piece incorporating both the style of each designer, and the asect of interactive movemnt.
IMAGERY was the next step to consider. A step i found relatively easy, as I knew the works i liked, and I also knew exactly which ones formed the basis of my idea. The line ‘we are not what we seem’ from the image on the previous page became excitingly apparent as i attempted to blend my two design idols, as did the two faced image in ‘your body is a battle ground.’ The business card element came from my love of Sagmeister’s business cards, but I also really wanted to include the spine of the Sagmeister Inc. book as I have been waiting to try and recreate it ever since i purchased it. The last aspect to include was Barbara Krugers sporadic text layout. This fitted well with my desire to work with text on a book spine as i simply translated the idea of laying text around the edge of a piece of work, to physically laying it ‘on’ the edge of a piece of work. What was also self deciding was the colour, white black and red is hard to ignore when its staring you in the face.
PRODUCTION relied on a little bit of experimenting, the first ‘draft’ was a stack of cut sketch book paper and drawn text. I went on to study the sagmeister book which featured printing on the top side of the paper which hid the words until the pages were bent by hand. I went on to achieve a similar effect by creating a template in InDesign and simply nudging the text over thirty-two pages 2mm at a time. Through tests i discovered the text was constantly visible as opposed to hidden untill the pages were bent. Athough this could be regarded as a design failure I wasn’t totally opposed to it as the essence of the Sagmeister design remained, and the fact that the text in my design was spread around the entirety of the product meant it relied less heavily on the bending of the pages as the interaction and movement comes from the physical rotation of the business card.
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