PORTFOLIO
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Graphic design writing: On white space - EmigrĂŠ 1994 Music festival publication You are here - composition of your district Expressive typography Book structure and design Get naked - cosmetic packaging Book cover - image and text relationship Seduction - Major project Seduction - Major project - Promotion CV and business card
On white space - EmigrĂŠ 1994
On white space in graphic design
white space
White space is nothing. White space is the absence of content. White space does not hold content in the way that a photograph or text holds meaning and yet it gives meaning, through context, to both image and text. In fact, white space can make or break the effective transmission of image or text. This would be an effective experiment: find a simply presented fashion shot, preferably in black and white, and compare its presentation 1. as a full-page bleed; 2. with a white border and 3. much smaller with asymmetric balance. The third wins every time. The former two fits within the code but the third uses the creative/unpredictable edge built into the code. The asymmetry symbolises daring and innovation while still being safely within the modern semiotic code. In material terms, what is white space in graphic design? White space is extravagance. White space is the surface of the paper on which you are printing showing through and on which you are choosing NOT to print. If economy and conservation were your chief concern, then white space would be at a minimum; obviously you would use it all up. So white space is used for purely semiotic values; for values of presentation that transcend economic values by insisting that the image of what you present is more important than the paper you could be saving. It is likely that this aesthetic is more extravagant with paper than any other graphic design value - especially in Japan. Printing plates, separations, paper and four colour presses still have to be used and paid for with the inclusion of white space. White space is a negative cost right down the production line - except for giving style.
nothing
It is easy to name those sorts of publications where white space is not the first priority. In most paperback books for instance, where presentation of text in the most functional, economical and readable way is the first priority, white space has minor importance. Historically, newspapers have not been big on white space, although this is changing as newspapers are slowly shifting their function and providing colour and entertainment as well as hard core information. In these postmodern times there has been an increasing competition for the eye in all media, so sales are promoted not through content, but through quick visual summaries made using the visual code in which white space plays a dominant part.
not first priority
There is another important category of publication where white space is least dominant. This is the area of working class/mass market publications, where the main distinguishing variable is the category of class. This category of publication is common in most Western cultures. These publications share an international commercial aesthetic of clutter and busyness in every design element. Here we have a commercially motivated use of polar opposite end of the quality/bourgeois aesthetic. Here is white space working as hard as ever to brand for class, but in this case, it is working in the negative. Clutter has come to represent working class (just as white space identifies high class). Clutter clearly identifies a market in those who are immediately suspicious of white space and have no hesitation about what it means - that this publication is not for them/not of their class. So he quality aesthetic has been highjacked by bourgeois ideology, leaving the working class only trashy and inferior symbols to identify with. White space is the key and the tool. Compare the mass market women’s weekly magazines to Vogue (not to mention Arena. The Eye or Emigre). In the quality class of publication, white space is so dominant that even the advertising is simplified, highly visual and heavily coded. Quality publications, in the 1990’s, come as such heavily coded entities that no element can afford to be out of step. Compare these publications now to the anarchy of the early 80’s and you can see that white space has once again gripped the design world in a new conformity.
quality
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Music festival Publication
The scenario for this assignment was an international festival of music focused on minimal music to be held in Wellington. The high point of this event will be a performance of Einstein on the Beach, an opera by the minimalist composer Philip Glass. A poster which folds into a brochure is required to serve as a promotional momento and in its brochure function as concert information notes. We were played the music composed by Philip Glass. I saw minimal music, visually, as a repetitive pattern, something with a constant background with parts emphasised. I choose to use a pattern of crosses to begin with and place elements on that ‘grid’. I decided to pull out some text lines to make it longer than the others; this made the composition very horizontal. To emphasise this horizontal structure, coloured stripes were added. I feel the stripes represent a constant in the music. The crosses were taken out after all the elements were placed, because the elements were doing the job for them. After completing the stucture and composition of the concert notes, the poster was then considered. To do the poster with the same feel as the information side was very hard, so I decided to take a section of the composition on information side and enlarge it. The lines of text were turned into lines of colours, and the information for this side was placed with the same feel as the information side. The poster side is very colourful in contrast with the information side.
SIZE: 500 x 400mm. CMYK. Laser print.
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You are here - composition of your district
The project was to develop a self-portrait within your district, using photographic composition. A specific size was given and we needed to have an element of a neighbouring classmate’s work. How did I see myself in my district? I spend most of the time either on the bus in and out, or sleeping in my district. So, I looked into how I traveled on the bus. I took many images inside the bus. What strongly stood out for me were the yellow poles. I lined the images up at the aisle of the bus. That gave a busy image, which I placed within the larger composition. Then I looked at what is outside of the bus. The lines of the poles drew me to the power lines. The view and the yellow line at the bottom right hand corner are the neighbouring elements. I placed the composition with a lot of space to symbolise that a suburb is only a small part of a bigger picture.
SIZE: 500 x 400mm. RGB. Photographic frontier print.
The aim of this project was to typographically express a piece of writing by an author from the International Institute of Modern Letters (Victoria University). This portion of the story is set on the last night the couple is together, before the lady goes back to India the following morning. The poster represents that they are in two different places in their lives but they are still bound to each other, even if it is only thinly, by marriage, history and memories. This is shown by the line connecting the two sides. The left side represents the woman. She is stubborn and turbulent but she is lying still. She is resisting the new situation, blocking it. She wants to be away from him, back in India. The right side, his side, is timid and calm but hopeful. His side is the side reaching out. The old map represents an element in the story, ‘The Penguin History of New Zealand’, something he gave her on her first day in New Zealand to make her feel more welcome. It was the symbol of her resistance to New Zealand and she refuses to read it. The colours were chosen to represent the sombre mood of the situation. The brighter colour is to focus the attention to her side because the story is about her. The typeface, ‘Civitype’ by Fontgrube, was chosen because it has an element of Indian but does not overpower the composition. The manipulation of the descenders on the woman’s side is to convey turbulence. The manipulation of the ascenders on the ‘d’ is representing her blocking the changes / the new.
Expressive typography
Extract from ‘The Last Hours’ by Adrita Mukhopadhyay They lie on their sides, with their backs to each other – the bed sheet between them pure and untouched, a yard of unnavigable blue. Bottom right:
In this warm-up exercise. A poem was given to us to explore and be more familiar with expressing typography. The great sea has set me in motion, set me adrift, moving me like a weed in a river.
This final represents a buoy in the middle of the waves of the sea. The plainly set text, in contrast, makes the ‘waved’ text look more flowing and expressive of the poem.
SIZE: 1500 x 300mm. CMYK. Laser print.
SIZE: 900 x 267mm. Black. Laser print.
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Book structure and design
The aim of this project was to apply typographic structure and hierarchy to a grid system. We were given the content for the pages and were asked to design the page structure according to the context of the writing, which was typography. Illustrated elements needed to be sourced ourselves. The page size was given at 230 x 210mm, landscape. The pages that needed to be designed were; half title page and verso, title page and verso, dedication page, content page, chapter introduction and one chapter. The typeface used as body copy was Sabon because as a serif it works well in blocks of type. It has quite a unique characteristic to it. Trade gothic was used as headings to compliment Sabon. The overall aesthetic I wanted to achieve when considering margins and columns was that I wanted the pages to be clean and uncluttered. I decided on three-column grid, using one for illustrations. With the prelim pages and chapter opening, because the book is about typography, I used letterforms (Poetica, swash caps) as decorative elements. I wanted the colour to give substance to the pages without dominating. This project taught me about typograhic rules, how to use them to make type design simpler.
SIZE: 230 x 210mm pages; 460 x 210mm spread. CMYK. Laser print.
Get naked - cosmetic packaging
This project had a non-participating live client. She had made an all natural range of cosmetics specifically for New Zealand women. The client didn’t have a specific audience, so we were given the task of coming up with an audience we wanted to target and write our own brief. From the products and what I understood of the client’s value, I decided to target New Zealand born, urban, businesswomen at a higher income range. Someone who would like tranquility / peacefulness, nature. An organised person, she would be around 35 years old. She would prefers natural products to others because she believes it is better for her skin. She would not always have the most expensive product on the market but believes that quality doesn’t come cheap. From that target, my package has to look calming to the eyes and white space would be important, it would also have to be clean and structured like the target. The existing brand was ‘get naked, feel the difference’. I kept with ‘get naked’ but I decided that ‘feel the difference’ didn’t appeal to my target audience. The product is all natural, middle to high price range. It is made in New Zealand for New Zealand women and the climate, which means it has SPF 30. The communication style was to not overload. It needed to look expensive and ‘elite’, so the buyers can justify the money spent. Though it is natural and NZ made I wanted to stay as far away from souvenir-shop aesthetic as possible. I wanted it to look natural–as in honest. The logo communicates a clean, organised and independent ethos and also comes across as natural / honest. I chose three products; hand serum, daily facial hydrate (SPF 30 moisturiser) and night serum (sodium lactate). I decided early on to have tinted coloured cream. This will subtly differentiate them. The labels are black so they don’t compete or blend into the colour of the cream. With the name of each cream at the bottom of the pots, I made the logo on top of each pot slightly different. The box’s shape and pattern is tidy, clean and organised. The way the lid closes completes the packaging. The hole in the front is like a sneak peek of the product and a good way to show the logo without plastering it on the box. The paper is textured and natural, white and pure. I had the product as a set of three because this would be more ‘valuable’ and complete than buying it in bits and pieces.
SIZE: 60 x 60 x 214mm box, 60ml round pots. Black. Laser print.
Book cover - images and text relationship
With this project we had to choose a book title that we have read and develop a new hard cover sleeve, consisting of front, spine, back and inside flap. The cover has to fit within the genre of the book. I chose ‘Smiley’s People’ by John le Carré. The book is about British spies working in England and around different parts of Europe, an image I got from reading this book is the Berlin wall and the importance of getting to the other side. That is why I chose, from early on, to use the image of the wall, it was just the matter of finding the right image. The use of the wall breaks up the page and gave me a structure to work with. I wanted the cover to look gritty and dark but with a lot of space so it is not too busy. I chose Eurostile bold condensed because it is squarer than the other fonts and it suits the image of the wall. After the front cover was sorted the spine was easily done. I found the back cover quite hard to get right but after adding another quote it just came together. I didn’t want too much text on the inside flaps because I wanted it to stand-alone and not relate/touch the wall. I didn’t have too many problems with finalising the details except for maybe the rags of the inside front page. I was in my element with this project. Constructed graphic design, 2D design that is to be seen 3D.
SIZE: 205 x 136 x 22.5mm book; 460 x 205mm spread. CMYK. Laser print.
Seduction - Major project
Overview: This project started when I noticed and was annoyed with how much sex there was on television and in advertisements. I started looking at different ways to represent my work, using either too much sex and making it ridiculous or replacing sex all together. I began to look at adult ads in the back of magazines, with my interest in typography, I saw how tacky the font usage was on these ads. It seems that they have picked these fonts for their oddity, to attract the eye rather than to entice the audience. The line of thinking seems to be that having a naked woman is attention grabbing enough. As I was researching I found a written work by Micheal Worthington. He has been researching sex and typography for almost all his adult life. His work seems to agree with my thoughts that the fonts used in these ads are not well thought through. From this I started designing a typeface which is seductive and erotic, yewt what I created didn’t seem to get away from tacky either. So I decided to look more into seduction itself. I found ‘Seduction’ by Jean Baudrillard, he described seduction in many contexts. I realised that there’s a great complexity in the term ‘Seduction’. I decided to take the elegance of seduction as a theme to design my typeface and try to show that complexity through my design. It seems that being subtle is the key to seduction. Now I am at the point where the style of my typeface will be the deciding key to my context.
Aim: To create a usable typeface that conveys elegance of seduction. The typeface should show aspects of seduction such as power, illusion, beauty, complexity and venerability. It has to entice and seduce the audience’s desires. This font will have to reflect many aspects of seduction and desire at the same time being simple enough to be useable. The posters will need to convey these aspects also. Audiences: 1) Audience in mind while designing the font, the audience that the font would seduce: 20 - 30 yrs old. Single, open to be seduced. Has only general knowledge of typography. 2) Audience in mind while designing the promotion: the audience that would buy/use the font: Designers. Design firms. Outcomes: • One set of lowercase letters • One set of alternative letters (what is neccesary) • Some symbols ! $ & ( ) – - — _ : ; ‘’ “” / ? . , é ‘ “ • Numbers • Promotional Material(s)
S nouN
á the act oF seducinG
á the condition oF being seduced á something that seduces; temptation; attractioN (syn) Enticement
eduction
abc defghijklmnoprs tuvwx yz EFGNST 0123456789. ,&:;ÕÔ!/$()'â ã Ò Ó " Ñ Ð - _ á É a b c de fgh ijk lm n o p rs tu v wx yz E F G N S T 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 . , & : ; Õ Ô ! / $ ( ) ' â ã Ò Ó " Ñ Ð - _ á É
Promotion: Design a book, using and showing off my typeface ‘seduction’. The book needs to represent a meaning or meanings of seduction. I have chosen to represent seduction in terms of romance, passion, heat, lust temptation and flirtation. So I decided for the content of the book to be an extract from a (tacky) romance novel. The cover of the book is 100% silk, the inside pages are 150gsm Vellum paper. Extract from ‘The Virgin and the Vagabond’ Elizabeth Bevarly Just what on earth had happened between the two of them earlier, she wondered? One minute, James had been wiping the smudged lipstick off her mouth, and the next minute, she’d been cashing in a one-way ticket to the magic land of erotica. She’d never known how it could be with a man. She’d never realised how much heat, how much power, how much desire the human body and brain could generate with just a few simple touches. She’d heard the term “sparks fly” often enough in her life. But when she and James had rubbed against each other, they’d created a friction that bypassed sparks completely and went straight to atomic meltdown. And if the hot, shuddering sensations she’d just experienced had come from only a couple of kisses and a few well-placed touches, then what would happen to her if the two of them got around to actually…actually…um…
Seduction - Major project - the promotion
b S k
SeductioN
detail of ÔS Õ 790pt seduction
what had happened?
just what on earth had happened between the two of them earlier,
12pt seduction
she wondered?
23z T yE6 G 24pt seduction
Extract from ÒThe virgin and the vagabondÓby Elizabeth bevarly
SIZE: 170 x 150mm pages; 340 x 150mm spread. Black. Laser print.
55pt seduction
detail of Ôk Õ 950pt seduction
detail of Ô2Õ 850pt seduction
detail of Ô3Õ 880pt seduction
one minute, james had been wiping the smudged lipstick off her mouth, and the next minute, sheÕd been cashing in a one-way ticket to the magic land of erotica.
12pt seduction
26pt seduction
The magic land ofErotica
detail of Ôz Õ 680pt seduction
12pt seduction
detail of ÔTÕ 620pt seduction
sheÕd never known how it could be with a man.
sheÕd never realised how much heat, how much power, how much desire
the human body and brain could generate with just a few simple touches. 12pt seduction
47pt seduction
detail of Ô6Õ 800pt seduction
detail of ÔyÕ 800pt seduction
detail of ÔE Õ 890pt seduction
12pt seduction
sheÕd heard the term Òsparks flyÓ often enough in her life.
but when she and james had rubbed against each other, theyÕd created a friction that bypassed sparks completely and went
straight to atomic meltdown. and if the hot, shuddering sensations sheÕd
just experienced had come from only a couple of kisses and a few well-placed touches, then what would happen to her if the two of them got around to
actuallyÉactuallyÉumÉ 22pt seduction
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
E FGNST0123456789 !$&()-_Ð;:Ô ÕÒÓ'". ,/?âãáÉ
Typeface, sÔ eductionÕ by Tanya SooksombatisatiaN
intrested in Ôs eduction Õ?
ph 00 64 21 118 3056 or tazyas(at)yahoo.com
7pt seduction-bold
detail of ÔG Õ 780pt seduction
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Career objectives
Education
Employment history
CV and business card
My career objective is to be working in a design company that does mainly print work. I would like to focus on Typography, though I would like to know different aspects of overall design. Long term, I am looking at being a senior designer with a few people in my team, I would like to be working in a medium-size company, large enough to have the people and resources to do great work but small enough to be flexible and remain creative. I focused my study mainly on Typography, I did all four available typography papers at University. I was also interested in digital graphics. I learned many things from University, not just about design. I learnt many other skills such as time management, juggling many projects at once, meeting deadlines (and the consequences of them) and presentation skills. Most of all I learnt the importance of being able to take criticism constructively and not be too precious about my work; knowing how to back up my work but not be defensive. 2000–2004
Massey University Bachelor of Design (Graphic Design)
Throughout all the places I have worked, I have learned many things. Patience was one of the big things I have come to understand to be important when communicating with other people whether it is with a customer or a work colleague. Among other things, I have learned to work fast and efficiently, either with the rush of a customer or a time limit with the printers. I have learned great responsibility in my experiences. My dedication and hard-working personality seems to have provided me with responsibilities earlier on in the job, this may also contribute to my ability to be flexible within my job titles. April 2004–Present
Change Training
late 2002–Present
Metro Print
April 2001–March2002
Warehouse Stationery
1999–November 2000
Lotto Department at Thorndon New World