Probably the most I took away from this trip that I can relate to my own practice at the moment was the way the last set of images of the the black gallery space was laid out. It dealt with a lot of ephemera in such an exciting way that I completely didn’t realise what the content was about (or perhaps this was a definite subconscious effort to avoid it as it wasn’t the happiest of content). Also the last few images above are of small collections of things which I must pick out from all other pieces as aesthetically pleasing for myself - interesting! I could also question after the trip, whether any of my work would benefit from being shown in a space outside. Whenever I imagine how a show or exhibiting a piece will go, it always seems to be within a gallery space or a similar creative environment. What would happen if it were to be arranged outside of this, would it change the message delivered by the content?
Wednesday, 30 October 2013
YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK TRIP
Tuesday, 29 October 2013
CLINTON CAHILL - IMAGE AND TEXT - 29.10.13
Image & Text, back to basics with visual literacy. Going back to routes of practice drawing letterforms and photography
- Re visit key elements of VL from a graphic design perspective.
- In order to recognise and explore the complexity and mystery of an image and text in graphic communication.
- So that we can exploit a better understanding of graphic composition.
Formal Considerations
All of the bits that make a piece need to be considered, the empty space and the page, balance, symmetry, dynamic equilibrium, contrast, visual weight + recognition (psychology), reading image and text, point and line, Harmony and contradiction, positioning the viewer.
Why?
Fundamentally important to a range of design practices. Page layout, illustration, book design, advertising, film & motion graphics, new media, packaging etc.
Empty Space
Meaning and inherent dynamics.
Image above represents the page or window. Represents potential, the immanent, the void, ‘notional’ or imaginary space, ground (figure/ground), the field, ‘window’ onto other/extended space. Writers blank page represents space of artists imagination. Virtual space to invite audience. How big is it?
Ground = Paper surface
Figure = Goes onto the ground
Field = Paper for the mind map (Paper represents field of knowledge)
‘Window” = Canvas is window into bigger space. Looking through it into artists imagination.
Choosing kind of space to best express idea. ‘A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel’ Page 124 “Terrifying whiteness of the page”
- Use empty space to work with to perhaps to intimidate.
- The golden section, fibonacci sequence - paper sizes
- A-sizes created according to what Westerners believe to be aesthetically beautiful, mathematical and standardised.
- To create unconventional sizes you must change the conventional size of “the book” for instance.
- Paper stock is important, shape and size.
The audience don’t like things close to the edge, it makes us feel uncomfy, our eyes are constantly moving all over the image, from left to right. Bottom right diagram above takes the viewer off the page, whatever is missing we can imagine the rest. Entertain the viewer. These are vital for page layout. Rhythm of the grid, the structure underneath the content is made by understanding page layout.
Once paper is chosen the space is changed/defined by the mark, activated, defined, deformed, disrupted, punctured, polluted, enhanced etc.
BALANCE
Symmetry can be stable but this is potentially boring.
Dynamic equilibrium - the eyes enjoy suspense. Symmetry in faces, we enjoy this initially but after a while it becomes a bit weird. Scales in diagram above right are predictable and give a sense of balance. Scales in bottom right give us a sense of moving as if it were to tip over which makes the composition more interesting to look at.
Compositions above become more interesting as you go down due to composition and colours.
V&A poster - Vince Frost. Symmetrical but there are other twists to make it interesting.
Images we recognise all of the time don’t need to be big on the page unless this is important as we easily recognise even when quite small that the image is of a face for instance.
Barnbrook’s type spec sheets rely on you recognising the symbols from elsewhere (example above wasn’t the one shown in lecture - can’t seem to find that one, it was cyan and magenta and had the symbol of a cross on it!)
Why is the red dot in the above design? makes you feel like you’re putting your tongue to an iron. Hiding or revealing, which is most effective?
Balance - Bauhaus posters stripped down of their layout, i.e. cut all of the elements of a poster up and re-arrange them by hand in front of you as apposed to on screen, it’s more immediate this way and happens at the speed of your thought. How a small piece of text on a page layout can hold the whole composition together, if it’s taken away, the whole composition feels like it might fall down.
The human eye recognises and relishes contrast
We stop seeing familiar things that don’t or haven’t changed. But we can also enjoy the boring as it is denying you change. In portfolios, most people use black text to annotate, why? Why not use 80% black so the work can stand out more. Rembrandt’s painting are mostly blurry, he only used absolute black next to white on the eyes as it anchors us in psychologically to the piece and pulls you in to dwell on a creation part of the piece.
Smaller can be stronger if done well with contrast. Artists exhibition catalogues/books need the work to stand out over the design that the designer is using to put the piece together with.
If the below are identical - > These can change
Shape + Colour - > Size is effected
Shape + Size - > Colour
Colour + Colour - > Shape
How does your graphic information relate to the edge of the page? (See diagram above) The left composition feels stable, 2nd feels like it is nervous, moving, irritated, and 3rd is on it’s way down, it has movement.
Designer Paul Smith’s catalogue breaks the rules as it’s audience are savvy enough to understand that it’s not correct but it is witty with the heads being cropped out of the image frame. The photography doesn’t look like a product shot, it’s almost not real information. Marion Deuchars book covers, again examples of images cropped in “the wrong places”. Upsetting the rules by deliberate odd cropping/clumsiness. Guilty faces, icons (Statue of liberty, coca cola) easily recognised and so are powerful and so they can be decided upon carefully where to be placed.
. Point = static fixed, terminated
----- line = time, duration, direction, movement
However, where is the word? You can imply word through image, when you are directly given the word, you have nothing to do or think about. If someone says refrigerator, you all start to think of a refrigerator, where is the image? In your head, is it the same image you all have in your head?
Sagmeister’s Lou Reed album - The grid is the face. Making the audience engage physically through showing breathing etc, you’ve hooked the audience as it makes the feel it physically.
NOTES FROM ONE TO ONE MEETING - 1 - 29.10.2013
- Mind map ideas chosen to understand how they link together better
- Write myself a brief for each of the stages of my work (include mood boards)
- Set myself a timeline, i.e. art direct my work
- Object + photo. Photo of an object, the physical object is more important. Painting of an object, the painting is more important
- Why do i collect objects and then photograph them?
- Collections and reason - physical objects Vs photos of the objects
- Is this to preserve memory, wanting to keep it alive and holding onto these things?
- Blogging. Try a different style to deal with the amount of content. Mac journal, limit amount of labels/tags
- Try more reverse mind mapping once I have narrowed down the subject areas.
- Narrow my list down, perhaps just write and research into one subject for now.
- Set myself tasks in my briefs.
- "Bits section" Illustration, improve as a tool to better my mark making in sketchbooks, mushrooms from tokyo, relate back to 1st ideas.
- Write about each of the projects individually, come back to these notes and make sense of all!
Monday, 28 October 2013
GET INVOLVED!
Part time second years have organised a weekly gathering where they can test out their projects and exhibit their work in part of the Holden Gallery. I went along with Carolina today to make a imaginary island!
OWT DISCOURSE 2
Owt Creative are a design collective based in Manchester, they operate as a studio, sine publisher and event producers. The collective is made up of Ste Beed, Jon Hannan, Ben Kither and Sarah Stapleton, all graduates from the Manchester School of Art. This week saw the second in a series of talks organised by OWT featuring talks from emerging and established practitioners. The event aimed to bring knowledge into the North West whilst also sharing existing, emerging talent which already exists here. The speakers were asked to discuss notions of process, audience and inspirations but OWT described it more as a pub chat! They said that the materials generated on the evening along with submissions inspired by the talks will provide the framework, determine the format and influence the art direction of the new OWT publication.
The evening was compered by Gemma Germains of Well Made Studio based in Liverpool. It began with Alex Zamore of Intern Magazine.
Alec Dudson
Alec spoke about how he travelled from city to city following the biennials and began to research how people who had lived in these places viewed their cities. Alec aimed to make a travel guide from his research but not for your average tourist. Whilst travelling around Alec had various internships but never got offered a job through any of them. He became very interested in creating a magazine/publication but had no idea where to start in such a saturated market. Alec kept thinking about all of the internships he had taken and decided that not enough people were talking about internships or to them about what they were doing. And so his magazine “Intern - Meet the talent - Join the debate” developed from these thoughts. Alec used Kickstarter to fundraise for the magazine, he remarked that it’s very hard to get people involved in a project without having something to show them.
Alec looked at what makes a valuable internship. His views are very different about interning compared to those in the magazine, he believes he needs to be impartial and unbiased. Alec’s views are very subjective as he experienced many internships where he would look forward to starting and end up doing lots of admin work, with no real practice involved in the projects to help develop his skills and pass on any that he had. Real work = Best experience.
Alex Zamora
Alex Zamora describes himself as a Community lead / social strategist @PokeLondon, also a freelancer, a guest lecturer in various places, and runs Fanzines for fun! Alex left Liverpool over 11 years ago as he felt there were no jobs there for him, and so made his way down to London. Alex championed North West designers as he felt that they were massively underrepresented. One of his aims is to get North West Creatives coverage as he believes there is a high level of talent here that’s not talked about, particularly those who have graduated from LJMU and MMU and he believes when you are in such as a position as himself it is your duty to help others too. One of the projects Alex set up was a Facebook group running up to the elections in 2010 asking people to join who weren’t going to vote for David Cameron.
Alex has a passion for zines, he says there is no proper way to make a zine, you have to go about it in your own way and experiment. Alex started up his own zine, Feverzine with the first one being published in 2007.He regularly visit zine fares, although there has been no real zine scene in the Uk for the past 3 years. He referenced Zolt Zine as a Alex has over 2000 zines in his collection. During his talk ALex also discussed students portfolios, he said that awards don’t stand out in student portfolios anymore as so many students have them. People are more interested in personal led project and being initiative in your own work as this usually stands out from all other portfolios and shows that you have interests in your own things.
Lé Gun
Lé Gun are a London based collective of illustrators and designers who have put together the Lé Gun Magazine and are also well known for their enigmatic installations and art shows. Gun Illustrator, Neal Fox came to talk about the collective, he said earlier on whilst studying he worked in fine art but was influenced by comic art, of which he gave various examples! The collective would organise collaborative parties in bars where they would all draw together with the aim of raising money to fund the first issue of the magazine. Neal quoted André Breton with - “The man who can’t imagine a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot”. The collective have made several collaborative drawings together where the 5 of them will work on a piece at one time. Some of the most inspiring pieces for me were the walk in drawings where they translated a 2D drawing of a room into a 3D drawn replica of the 2D drawn room (See below). They were also lucky enough to be given an old shoe shop in London for free use for a short period of time to do with as they pleased. In the space they created an animation for Babyshambles’ song - French Dog Blues .
The talks from the evening can be watched on the OWT Discourse site here.
Sunday, 27 October 2013
READING LIST - DR STEVEN GARTSIDE
- Image of Will Self's work space, it is a mass of post-it notes all laid out in an order that I assume makes sense to him
- There is that thing about people's work-space (when it is being photographed) as to whether it is like that all the time, or if it gets primped according to the event
- On the list for the 'strategies' last week the Perec might be really good for the kind of thing you are thinking of.
- The Baudrillard has some relevance as well, as he talks about peoples underlying collections motivations.
Giuliana Bruno, ‘Collection and Recollection: on film itineries and museum walks’, from Public Intimacy: architecture and the visual arts, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 3 - 41
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1996
S. Johnstone, (ed.) The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2008
Charles Merewether (ed.) The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2006
Susan Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992
Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: art from bureaucracy, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008
RANDOM THOUGHTS
Whilst at a friends house party I noticed that all of the toothbrushes were laid out very neatly on the shelves in the bathroom (top shelf and below). Each toothbrush pointed in towards one another, away from the edge of the shelf. It made me think back to when I used to do a lot of design work for sports fashion magazines and one of the “rules” was that models would generally face inwards to the magazine and not out of the page. Sometimes this rule is broken but it is generally so that it subconsciously makes the reader think that the model is involved completely in the magazine and not looking out of the page. A model looking out of the magazine can also direct the reader away from the page of the magazine. I wondered whether the rules for the magazine had perhaps influenced the person arranging this shelf to do the same thing, to make every one feel “included” in someway, or have designers taken ideas from the way we lay out objects to make up their rules in these magazine?!
Saturday, 26 October 2013
WORD OF THE DAY - TRAJECTORY
SHOW & TELL CORNERHOUSE
Today I went along to the Show & Tell at the Cornerhouse in Manchester. Each person chosen to show and tell had been selected by previous show and tellers! Unless they put themselves forward which hasn’t apparently happened for a while now! The next event should be in February in 2014 which is a shame as it was a really great event and they should occur more often.
Darren Nixon - http://www.axisweb.org/p/darrennixon
How we create images and meaning. He uses found images from newspapers and makes his own narratives, Darren is interested in how we find and extract meaning from the imagery we encounter every day. He fills his paintings with thinking and has began to look at photography. Darren tries to fill each piece with a narrative without actually telling a story. On occasions some of the paintings are grouped together for exhibitions, once the exhibition is over they become individual paintings again. During the exhibition they are given a new name when grouped together but regain their original name once the show is over. I would like to get in touch with Darren as this is quite an interesting idea, how does he chose how to group them? how are they arranged? why does he group them for shows?
Simon Austerberry - http://www.simonausterberry.co.uk/
Simon has designed a full working typeface called laser. He saw an exhibition about cycling and was taken in by one particular bike the Cinelli Laser. He liked the unique curve that the bike featured in it’s frame and used this as his starting point when creating his font, also taking the characteristics of it being very light and super fast! Simon took us through some of the letters in his alphabet, he focussed on the letter S, reason being he said that it is the hardest letter to design. When designing the letter S all was going well until he placed it next to other letters in the alphabet and then he realised it was far too wide and so had to keep tweaking until it looked right individually and along side other characters. Simon documented the process of making the typeface through twitter @typeinprogress
Hannah Gibson
Hannah is an Illustrator and also teaches on the Ba course in Salford. She loves to take polaroid and llama photographs which later inspire her work. One birthday she received the book Atlas of remote Islands (which i have since bought as a gift for someone else!). the book only contains birds eye view maps of the islands, there are no images. This inspired Hannah to create her own illustrations in a new style based on the stories about some of the islands (The above image is not from this project, I can’t seem to find any)
David Rublin
Architect, Planner, Urban Designer and Director of URBED. David showed us the large scale maps that he has drawn of various cities. they rally are quite spectacular. They look stunning on their own but when shown next to one another take on a comparative role by showing you the different structures of the cities. The maps can become quite large measuring 3 x 3 metres. He also draws the same cities but from different dates to compare. SO frustrating that I cannot find any images online of his maps as they really are beautiful.
Mark O’Brien - http://www.mark-obrien.co.uk/
Cardboard craftsman. Mark uses cardboard to figure out how things work, he began doing this at a very early age. he now crafts things out of cardboard which are used in advertising. Some of the objects Mark creates are huge, one piece was a suit of armour, another some guitars and amps. he had hoped people would pick them up and mess around with them but people tend to be rather precious about them and don’t want to handle his cardboard master pieces. Mark also works in with children in schools creating artists workshops, he says he finds kids really interesting and they really inspire him in his work.
Friday, 25 October 2013
TEACHING AT LJMU
Today I was asked in to cover for a member of staff at Liverpool John Moore’s University. The morning session involved me teaching adobe illustrator to first year Ba Graphic Arts students. This was the first time some of the students had used the software and so it was quite an intense morning for them. Half way through they weren’t taking any more information in and so we had a half hour break whilst I typed up some shortcut sheets for them to use whilst completing the next task. The whole day was scheduled for me but I could add to it as I felt I needed to. The schedule had the students performing simple tasks in illustrator, drawing paths, shapes and learning how to manipulate them with the pathfinder tool. Later this then translated into outlining a font and manipulating this with the skills they had learnt in the morning. Afre they had completed their tasks I gave them some examples of typographers who I thought might help them in their work.
In the afternoon Ant Ovenden came to join me in a crit with the second group. This group had to present one word that they had chosen and created combing two different fonts. This was done in the computer room with the work projected onto the wall. Each student was encouraged to talk a bit about their piece and then the group would have a bit of a discussion about what they thought about that piece, how it could be improved, where they imagined the typeface being used. Some of the students were still a bit stumped on how to use certain tools in illustrator and so at the end of the crate I went over anything the group were unclear on and again showed them some inspirational typography designers.
PINT WITH ANT ELLIS
Last night after a days teaching I met with Ant Ellis for a pint in Liverpool. Ant is a writer, designer and artist and works full time teaching on the Graphic Arts course at Liverpool John Moore’s University. Ant has also graduated from an Ma course at The Royal College of Art in London and so it was helpful to have a chat and find out what he found worthwhile about his time on his Ma course. We spoke a lot about the theory side of an Ma course and how this is integral to the development of your learning, pushing it further than on a Ba course. We also spoke about plotting the trajectories of your work throughout the course of the Ma but how it is also important for there to be areas that naturally branch out from your planned route for you to get the best out of what it is you are researching/practicing. Ant kindly forwarded his research statement onto me to read through and also suggested a book that he found helpful whilst studying. (Poststructuralism: A very short Introduction - Catherine Belsey - See image below) Ant’s research project came about during his Ma and looks at the relationship between typographic representation and language, and how this representation can affect the meaning of a word. Some examples of Ant’s work can be seen below and you can visit his website here to read more about each one.