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It has been a while since I've posted here and theres been quite a lot which I've seen and done since my last one.

Tim and I were discussing how graphic design as installation art pieces are becoming more common. I've never really thought of graphic design in this way, I've always thought it to be by nature more flat, paper based and contained by its environment rather than changing the environment its in. I've definatly changed my mind after coming across this:

Its hard to pinpoint whether this is 'graphic design' or 'fine art' - personally I dont' think its either specifically, I think they both cross each others boundaries. Its a really beautiful piece that both graphically communicates a message yet has all the aesthetical values that are only achievable through an art installation. Amazing stuff!!

Another thing I've really interested in is the change from traditional music artwork to digital media. Ever since I bought my first real album (that Michael Jackson album I bought when I was nine doesn't count) I've loved opening up the booklet and seeing the artwork, smelling the ink and reading the lyrics... it really gave me a feel for the album. With the dawning of mp3 players and software such as iTunes it is possible that traditional music packaging could become extinct. We have already seen a change (not in my lifetime) from vinyl with their amazing large scale images (my dads copy of Pink Floyds 'Dark Side of the Moon' comes to mind) to the smaller scale of tapes cd's. Will the move to digital media be the next big change?

This article has some very interesting thoughts on the subject. As it states, iTunes has a very intuitive method of dealing with this by integrating coverflow and its one of the main reasons I've moved from Winamp to iTunes as my default player. But even then, all it displays is the cover, what about the rest of the booklet - hopefully soon there will be some type of technology that solves this.

We have been looking at colour a lot recently and had a really fun workshop which involved us bringing in 10 objects of a certain colour and arranging them in diffirent orders according to the colour spectrum. I took many photoes however due to a problem with my camera (probably the battery dying as it was saving an image) I lost all of the photos from the day. I do still however have some on my phone for reference and I'll upload them if I can get an adapter for my card reader.


I found our last brief really fun and challenging and I learnt a lot from it. We had to judge each others work and arrange it from worst to best without being told what the concept behind the piece was. Those that worked well were ones that were obvious and/or had text to support them whereas the ones that had deeper meanings or were more subtle were eliminated first.
It was said that those that worked better were the ones that needed no explanation and spoke for themselves. I'm not entirely sure wether I agree with this yet as I think some of the concepts were amazing and could be figured out with a bit more thinking. Some images are meant to be loud and instant whereas others whisper clues to get you thinking.
I did noticed that those that worked particularly well, especially for yellow and green were those that combined text and image.

link to it: click me.

This should be a fairly long post as there is a lot to catch up on that I would have posted on the original blog had it been working correctly. Last week I worked I worked on the 'Visual Thinking 1 - Alphabet Soup' brief. I enjoyed it very much but after the crit on friday I think I would have done things a lot diffirently and have a lot of improvements to make.

The main problem I had was that I focused less on the manipulation of the actual type-face and more on the concept and although the imagery worked well it strayed a bit from the point of the task. Nevertheless I did my research and here is the image that inspired me to use the watercolour theme that ran through the series.
As you can see the mountain was a direct inspiration for the frame where upper case E's are depicted worshiping a lower case E. I was originally going to have the lower case e sitting on a throne but decided the mountain would be more visually interesting.

When it was announced that we had to use these letteforms for print-making stencils I had a big problem. First of all my images were landscape and secondly most of them were made up of more negative than positive space. I decided to re-do them specifically for the print-making workshop. I wanted them to be a lot simpler and would also work well for print purposes. My inspiration came during our critical studies session on Tuesday morning. Richard spoke about how when Nazi Germany arose they rejected modernism in favour of more decorative, gothic type design. He showed us some examples of war propaganda posters of the time such as those on the right of this text.
I really liked the look of the type design and thought it would work really well with the word I was given which was 'exaggerate' - I thought over-exaggerating the decoration of the stylised serifs and under-exagerrating everything else i.e. making it thin and boring I could have a very interesting type face, the results are as follows