Match and Mismatch: Development 4

The concept I will be developing is my first one which focuses on manipulating the bench in shape and has a more darker and experimental feel. I made a lot of collages, cutting the bench up and stacking the benches on top of each other thinking primarily of the postcard series and how I could make an image and then cut it into 4, making the postcards go together as a whole instead of 4 individual designs. Nothing really worked out though and after a riso workshop (seen below) I realised why. With the bench in that small size, it just looked too dainty and cutes-y and that doesn’t fit my concept at all.

Riso prints, Lisa 2018

Making another collage out of the riso printed collage I thought I need to make it weirder and blacker, the ideas I had so far were too controlled. So keeping that in mind I printed out more images of the bench, in different sizes and threw them on the scanner.

Development, Lisa 2018

This looked better but still too, I don’t know, structured. I wanted it to be more random and flow-y so I folded the images a bit and threw them back on which created this:

Development, Lisa 2018

Way more interesting. I like how it’s kind of starting to make less sense and how the clean lines of the furniture piece is skewed and less clean basically. From this I started playing around with a pattern I’d drawn previously, imitating wood, and overlaying it in different ways and changing the colour. All the different tests below:

Layout ideas, Lisa 2018

Quickly discovered that too strong colours didn’t work, like the yellow and having the background white, it looks too happy. I also got less and less fond of the pattern thing, it just kind of became too busy and like something I’ve seen before maybe. The grey and the green I thought worked best and I did some tests with type as well, at first trying out small text and repeating the word bench with different tracking but small text just didn’t work, again too dainty. Because the image underneath has so many small parts, the type needed to be big, so changed it and it instantly worked way better.

I also experimented a bit with hyphenating the word (so to represent how the bench can be made smaller or longer, and something that is cut) and I quite like the result but I’m not sure I can finalise it just yet. I like how it looks when the brackets bit is highlighted as well, making the benches a different colour hmm.

Turning the image around made it into a poster and although this looks nothing like my initial sketches of what I wanted the poster to look like, I really like it! Thought it looked okay in green but after changing it to black I realised it looks way better like that and the yellow gives it a more old school swiss style feel which I really like and feel like that’s the direction this project should be heading.

Poster development, Lisa 2018

I want to give the design one more go though, thought about cutting it up more and see what happens. I also want to try to recreate the skewed benches I did with the scanner, in the darkroom and see what that looks like, hopefully it could give it more personality (if it works). Also now, the typeface is Helvetica (which works) but will look into other ones as well. Don’t like Avenir anymore but found one called Gibson that I might try.