communication design

• Questions and failure with rejection…

For my five creative people I wanted to have a board range of people with different talents and interests that I admired. The people at the top pf my list were a Swedish and Danish duo David and Luise who together run the food blog Green Kitchen Stories, while also having released a couple of cookbooks. David is an art director at a magazine and together they style and photograph all their own shoots. I reached out to them via email and while I got a reply they said that they be happy to get back but in a couple of weeks as they were very very busy right now. I replied saying that I understood completely but the project was due quite soon. So I then moved on to the next people on my list, a artist called Ruby from London and a duo called Peaches and Keen from Melbourne. I emailed them both asking and they both said yes! I Interviewed Ruby ect first with the questions below and then as a back up decided to interview Peaches and Keen as well, questions also below:

What’s your earliest memory of creativity?

What process did you go through to get where you are now creatively/artistically?

What’s your ultimate place to work in?

Are all your drawings personal? if not, What inspires you?

How do you procrastinate?

P+K qu’s:

How did you guys arrive at your current style?

First step you take when starting a project?

Pro’s (or cons) of working collaboratively on your projects?

Do you look to other designers/current trends for inspiration?

Favourite medium?

I felt like they warranted different sets of questions as they are completely different in creative style and practice.

• Decisions on which one to use…

I the end I chose Peaches and Keen over Ruby ect for two reasons. Firstly while Ruby’s answers were very relatible and cute I thought that they contained less depth and insight into the processes and matter of design. Also in terms of presentation I was unsure of how I could present her work in a creative context, I had asked her politely whether she could respond to the interview with handwritten answers or scribbles in her cartoon style. Very understandably she said that she was quite under pressure in terms of time at the moment and replied just in email form. While Peaches and Keen have lots of colourful artworks and also photographs that inspire them up on their Instagram and blog which I gained permissions to use.

• Further research into their work and how to present it, zines, short clip, poster…

When I was researching ways to present my interview my immediate thought had been to make a poster but as the answers were quite long it made more sense to present them in a zine so to avoid crowding the answers together. Their work is very airy and light and a poster I think was a less effective way of portraying this in comparison to a zine.

I also considered making an animation of their works using the circle type patterns which would then loop and have the questions over the top or to the side.

To start making my zine I could only visualise and understand how to make it by literally folding a couple of A4 sheets and roughly planning out what would go where with questions and images then translating it into a InDesign document.  

Then came the revelation/information that you’re not meant to use your own illustrations or imitate the artists work which makes complete sense as it would blur the line between your own work and the artists.

Peaches and Keen talked a lot about their love for nature and how much it inspired their work in their interview, I wanted to translate this in the presentation well as showcasing some of their works. This led to the ideaand decision to cut out a leaf, in particular a monster leaf on the front cover of the zine. I had several try’s with a Stanley knife and after working out that I would definitely need a sharper, newer knife and that I wasn’t going to to be able to keep the holes in the leaf I ended up with a product that I was relatively happy with. I then decided, in part inspired by the calendar with the cut-outs that Andy showed us some weeks ago that I could make a little cut-out of the floral pattern that I put in the middle of the zine bringing to on to another page. I thought that this technique of presenting their work was acceptable because it wasn’t an adaptation or reproduction of their work and therefore confusing to the viewer but just adding interest and highlighting their work in the zine.

After looking at what sort of typography peaches and keen used for things like posters and logos I decided that it needed to reflect their style in being light and airy; a sans serif font that wasn’t too fussy and made use of geometric vertical thin lines. I used Sans Fira in size 15 or 16 for the questions and then for the main body of the text I used Bangla Sangam MN.

Printing my zine lead to a couple of issues I had not foreseen while it was digital on screen. The colours between my images and my backgrounds, which I had previously thought I’d matching so they blending in completely were suddenly visible and very different in tone. I’m not sure if this was because of my computer screen (recently water damaged) or because I had my screen tilted at an angle or what. After printing it again with the transparency increased it lessened the distinction between the colours but also made the colours duller overall. After considering the two I decided to work with the one which had the contrasting colours because I felt like it represented the artists work and provided context to the interview. The duller colours in the second printing did not in any sense convey Lily and Lucy the fluoro duo and their artistic style.  

To construct my zine I wanted to sew a line of stitching down the spine instead of stapling it. This was because peaches and keen had put up some work on their Instagram with bright pink and red hues of embroidery on it.

After the completion of this project I think the main insight that I gained from it was the importance of creative people like artists and designers sharing their ideas and processes. I was struck by how willing my chosen interviewees were to share their thoughts and inspirations and how quickly they got back to me. Even within the Communication Design course discussion with peers really helped shape how I approached the brief. This as well as being inspired by how sweet Lucy and Lily were and how easy and natural their approach towards collaborative design really made this brief for me. 

ruby ect. replied and now I have an interview to play with !!

(Tumblr right now amiright)

As a tool I have mostly enjoyed using Tumblr for reflection and research. The ability to go over and edit or save drafts is great. I seemed to end up with endless drafts, as I’d write half and then get distracted by another avenue of research or thought. Not always the most productive method of working. I think the most useful aspect of Tumblr as a platform was seeing everyone else’s opinions and thoughts on roughly the same topics. How insightful some people are was quite intimidating and at first putting my own take on things out in the open made me a little uncomfortable. I also found that by reading other peoples posts first it influenced my own thinking, I think it would been interesting to see how different my thoughts and approaches would’ve been if this hadn’t been the case. 

The nice part about tumblr is that when you start it’s very hard often to stop, however then you run into the problem of whether or not it’s relevant, is it more just that you like the look of it/chuck it up there for good measure. While I had used tumblr before it was only for a personal archive of inspirations/mood board type thing. I found it quite hard to structure mine, tumblr orders the posts by chronological order, ideally I would’ve liked to somehow put the posts into folders to be able to see were I was.

http://bobbygenalo.com/interactivetype/

I couldn’t find Bobby Genalo (a US artist and general problem solver) on tumblr but if you click on the link above it shows a great example of his highly interactive and creative work.  Above are some screen grabs of project he made to display the percentage of the US population living in poverty over the years. I thought it was particularly clever how engaging the use of typography is here, the O expanding and shrinking in relation to the statistic for that year but also being used in the word poverty for the heading. Almost an infographic it shows how type can communicate in more than one way depending on its context. 

carolchu62:

While I was researched M/M paris, I found some fascinating collage works by Raoul Hausmann. He was an Austrian artist and writer. Hausmann’s artwork is full of criticise, dissatisfy and satirise; to tell a long story by cutting anonymous figures. Raoul Hausmann was a founder member of the Berlin Dada group, developed photomontage as a tool of satire and political protest (he abandoned painting in 1923 and centred his work on photography).

The collage above is designed by Raoul Hausmann, which called “Tatlin lebt zu hause” and the one on the right is created by his wife– Hannah Hoch, named “Grotedque”.

Reference:

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hausmann-the-art-critic-t01918

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Raoul-Hausmann

http://www.evoketw.com/%E6%8B%BC%E8%B2%BC%E8%97%9D%E6%83%B3-%E8%B2%AB%E7%A9%BF%E7%99%BE%E5%B9%B4%E6%99%82%E5%B0%9A%E8%84%88%E7%B5%A1.html

These collages are really thought provoking, my first response when it popped up on my screen was that they made deeply uncomfortable for some reason. 

When I examined my own response to them I came to to the conclusion that it was because the images are so disjointed and misaligned that I did want to associate them with the human form. I would love to know the story that he intended to tell with them as Carol has said; the specific issues of political protest he was trying to get across. I think these images do have a much deeper story than the collages we made in this weeks tutorial, the layers of strong imagery are more compelling. However I’m not sure that they are as effective as some of the work I saw at the tutorial at preserving the flow of the images.