Visual Thinking Project
By Tyrone Westlake
Aims and learning outcomes Aims:
To extend your confidence and ability to conduct relevant research To develop your critical abilities and improve your theoretical awareness To enable you to use and combine a range of materials, media and techniques
Learning Outcomes:
On completion of this unit you will be able to: Demonstrate your ability to conduct visual and contextual research and communicate your findings effectively. Demonstrate your developing critical evaluation of your practice, appropriate theoretical knowledge and related audiences. Demonstrate an appropriate range and level of technical competence in the production of coherent visual solutions.
“Design is thinking made visual� - Saul Bass
Project Brief
Brief Breakdown The preceding pages are the brief for this project which is named Visual Thinking, This is a project that focuses on typographic experimentation and observation. For the first project we have to form a group of 2 and using the letter assigned to us we have to come up with a word we can relate to graphic design and visually style our assigned letter to express that word. My partner for this first project is Sam Tillen and our assigned letter is “A” so I will have to brainstorm some words for it. Once we have completed our letter form we have to create a postcard with the letter form on it and a phrase to explain how the letter relates to graphic design. After those 2 weeks have passed I will join a group of 4 where we will go around the town of poole and take pictures of found lettering and urban Typography which we will edit and assemble into an alphabet which will be used in Adobe InDesign to create a 300 x 300 mm french fold book on urban typography. The week following we will individually produce an A2 poster to promote the book which must include 300 words. The next task after that is to create an “innovative typography workbook” using a copy provided, it will include pictures of outcomes and ideas I would have produced over the 6 weeks. Alongside this project I will also have to produce a 2500 word essay on the work of a designer or topic and how they express that passion in their design.
Letter A Mind Map
Here I have created a mind map using words that begin with the letter “A” and that I can relate to graphic design in some way. Whilst creating this mind map of words I realised that Some are easier to connect with graphic design like “alignment” and “Ascender” but they lack a way to visually represent them effectively so I have other more visually stylistic words like “astronomy” or “ash” which I can still relate to graphic design just not as strongly but they do allow me to come up with several ways to visually represent them which I believe is a better use of this project for me personally. If I get told my more visually expressive words are not relevant enough to graphic design I can always fall back on those more technical words but hopefully this will not be the case. The word I would most like to explore is “Ash” as that could be interesting to design as its a visually invoking word and I can find ways to manipulate this material to effectively express itself.
Ash Experiment
This is the product of some experimentation with some ash just made into non styled letters just so I can see what the ash looks like for reference for when I start to style it as I can see how this material interacts. The consistency of the ash plays a big role in this as with too large pieces like I have here it doesn’t look as ash-like as it could as people generally think of ash as a fine powder. From this experiment I also took note of how the ash smudges into the paper so if I do some more designs on paper I got to be careful of ash smudging into the paper where I need it clear for possible contrast. This has lead me to thinking that making a stencil could prevent this problem and also help me mold the ash into typefaces.
Digital Ash Typography
Below are screen-shots of key parts of the creation of this piece:
In Adobe Photoshop I typed out the word ash and using multiple layers of that type along with various different layer effects I created the image to the right. On feedback of this design, I was told that the typeface is too thin and serif to fully utilise the ash effect I had applied to it. I am going to have to look at some thicker fonts that I could possibly use for my next experiments.
Digital Ash Typography
A
REvolution
A
A A
Game of thrones
Impact
Poplar Std
A AA Stencil Std
Arial
From my last feedback I received I was told that I needed to explore some bolder sans-serif fonts so this page is me trying out some other fonts with a capital A. From these my favourites are the Revolution “A”, the Arial “A” and the 8Bit Wonder “A” as they are all bold sans serif fonts with strong structures and they all have large areas so the ash can make more of an impact. I will create stencils out of one of the fonts that I have selected which I will use to allow the ash to take the fonts shape more accurately than trying to form it by hand.
Digital Ash Typography
For this idea we cut out a stencil of an Arial “A” and kept both the stencil and the cut out letter and with the stencil we filled it in with a thick layer of ash then took the stencil away, when we took the stencil away it crumbled down slightly so the edges are not clean but this helps to visually represent the properties of the ash. The cut out of the stencil we used as a negative of the stencil and we placed it onto the paper and covered it in ash, then we carefully lifted up the negative with the rest of the ash on and what remained was a ash outline of the Arial font. This is one step closer to what I wanted to achieve for this part of the project but I still want to take this a step further as even using real ash to create the letter form it still isn’t easily guessable and I still need to try a 3D idea.
3D Ash Letter This idea was an experiment with creating a 3D ash model using plasticine as a base for the ash to stick to. As the plasticine didn’t stick the ash to it very well I had to dampen it with hair spray which worked to a degree if it was touched bits of ash would still fall off it. After I stuck as much ash to it as possible I took my pictures but even straight after making it bits fell off which is visible by the colour of the plasticine coming through at certain points. I will look for another idea for this project as this piece is too brittle.
Visually the ash has given the plasticine the appearance of concrete despite the fact I used ash. I think this happened due to semiotics because ash is usually seen as brittle so a strong structure like the plasticine has took away its fragile appearance and made it look rough and gritty like a block of concrete.
Motion Disperse Letter form This is my next ash type experiment where I experimented with the use of motion graphics to create a dispersal effect through the use of a plug-in called Trapcode Form that was created by the company Redgiant. This plug-in allows you to create particles out of a layer and then manipulate those particles in a number of ways. I learned how to use this plug-in through a tutorial (http://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/ red_giant_sand_transition/video-tutorial
This is the tutorial I followed to help me learn how to use the plug-in to achieve the effect.
This is the Indesign interface for the Trapcode Form plug-in.
Below are the key frames of a motion graphic of an A in the 8BIT WONDER font which I have used the plug-in to turn the letter into particles which I have dispersed in a horizontal gradient motion.
This is a good start to achieving a letter form which represents ash effectively as the particles and their dispersal looks like wind is blowing away the ash which was my intention with this idea. This is by far finished though as I want to use a different typeface because I plan on making the next version of this have a vertical gradient motion so it looks like it is crumbling down and this current typeface has too short of an ascender height to fully utilise the effect.
Motion Disperse Letter form V2
These are the screenshots for my second attempt at using the Trapcode Form plug-in in Indesign, by changing the font to Arial it made the initial letter form look cleaner and it gave me more height to achieve a slower and more detailed vertical dissolve effect. In this version I also discovered how to make it disperse less uniform, this is through a setting in the plug-in called “Flow Evolution� this makes it look as if different wind directions are warping the form of the dispersing particles. The animation run time is 7 seconds.
V3,V4 These are variations where I explored the plug-in options further to see if I could possibly develop my letter form more.
V5 Final
In this final version I managed to make the particles smoother in motion and unlike the others the particles are smaller and it looks less like random specs of black like I was getting before in some of my versions. In this version it has twice the particles for each pixel so there are more particles in play which makes it look dusty like ash dispersing would. I am happy with this outcome and it matches the criteria of the brief due to the particle effects which use 3 dimensions to work. I will have to create a print of the key frames of this motion graphic as my final display piece.
This is the key frames of this piece on an A3 page so I can display it for the brief.
Task 2: Postcard To begin I have set the postcard size to A6 and I added a 3mm bleed
The text I used to explain my letter form is “Without the foundations of type, text becomes as brittle and inflexible as ash�. This is a quote I made that links ash to my understanding of typography.
Without the foundations of type, text becomes as brittle and inflexible as ash.
This is the completed postcard at A6 size. This marks the end of this task. Through this task I have had my first attempt at using Adobe InDesign, through the making of the postcard I have learned how to set up the document with bleed settings added . Through my experience with other Adobe products, InDesign wasn’t too difficult to approach.
Task - 3: Letters in the landscape - A lexicon of urban typography This task will acquire me to form a group of 4 which will go to Poole to take pictures of urban typography around the town and harbour. My group for this task is: Me, Harry Murr, Ethan Huang and Henry Kirby. The typography can be taken from anything we see which falls under either vernacular typography or found typography.
The following pages are the pictures we selected out of hundreds, to use for our book. This is the collection of all 4 of our photos to which we all contributed.
This is our joint alphabet from A - Z
Task - 3: Letters in the landscape - A lexicon of urban typography After editing the images and converting them into .tif format we created a 300mm x 300mm double page spread document with a 3mm bleed and a 10mm gutter. With the document set up we started placing our pictures. Below is a screenshot of one of the pages.
This was a resource we were provided with to help us set up and design the pages for perfect binding. It also shows how to set the crop and registration marks when exporting the finished document as a PDF for printing.
Perfect Book Binding From the printed pages we were handed back we next had to bind the book. Using a Lumbeck press we placed the pages and glued them together and also to a piece of cheese cloth. When it had dried we got a piece of black card then cut out the measurements for it to fit our book and we glued the cover to the spine completing the book
Lecture - The Power of Persuasion This was one of the lectures I went to and it was about propaganda and media persuasion. Some of the topics were: what propaganda is, how it is used, how the media influences us, how the government influences us. I took 4 and a half pages of notes in this lecture as I thought this would be useful for my essay. The notes are below and opposite.
Lecture - Oo0h, Aah mmmm Notions of taste, aesthetic judgement and consumer culture This was the second lecture I went to and it was a presentation of different objects and how everyone has their own individual notions of taste. coolhunting.com - daily trending topics Consumerism begins - 19th century Adverts begin to seduce and persuade - Neomania rises
There was a seminar following this lecture where we were put in groups and were given random categories of objects to judge aesthetically, then as a group we had to decide which objects were the best. This allowed us to discuss with each other why we liked or hated certain styles.
Lecture - Cinematic Bodies This was a lecture where we discussed how cinema is a form of media that distributes idealisms and social programming. We discuss Lacans psychoanalytic theories like his notion of the wheel and his model of the psychosexual development. My notes on the lecture are below.
Risograph Workshop
This was the brief I received for the Risograph workshop. I was assigned the word Tortoise and the colours Yellow (U) and Blue (3005U). Using only these 2 colours I had to create an image of a tortoise. The fact that I only had 2 colours meant that I had to be creative with the colours I had. This is what I ended up creating, I created the initial image in Illustrator then I separated the 2 colours into individual layers and converted them into greyscale, then I saved each colour into a PDF where each was printed separately onto the same piece of paper. This is essentially a digital version of screen printing but easier and cheaper.
With this printing method you get this effect when you use opacity as it spaces out the dots further as it gets more opaque.
Screen Printing Workshop
This was the second lecture I went to and it was a presentati objects and how everyone has their own individual notion coolhunting.com - daily trending topics Consumerism begins - 19th century
Adverts begin to seduce and persuade - Neomania
In this workshop we were shown how to screen print. We were shown the processes behind applying your image to a screen and then we shown how to use the screen print once an image is applied.
ion of different ns of taste.
a rises
Key Texts With this brief we were given a list of key books to look at. One of them was The Visual Dictionary of Graphic Design which I took some research from.
Another book I took research from was The Visual Dictionary of Typography.
Anatomy of Type Whilst researching the anatomy of type online I found this comprehensive information graphic that highlights 37 different terms of typography.
For the Love of Graphics For the love of graphics was an exhibition our class ran where we each had to bring in an example of graphics we love and set up an exhibition for it along with a summary of what you contributed to the exhibition.
My Contribution was the limited edition Campbell Warhol can designs and this is what I wrote about them: For the 50th anniversary of the Andy Warhol Campbell paintings, Campbell have teamed up with the Andy Warhol foundation to create these limited edition cans based off his pop art variations of the classic cans.
It was a great opportunity to show what we ourselves love about graphic design and to see what others perceive as great graphic design. It allowed us all to see design we have not encountered before