Another thing to design is the interview pages for the magazine. I literally had no ideas for this and thought I would focus more on the text, deciding point size and look at leading and stuff. I also tried different column width to see how we could work the layout for this, being that the square size could be tricky to design to.
Due to time being too short before the hand in, I only managed to prepare 2 screens for print and then only actually print one of them. The result came out really nice though and I am very happy with it. However, I did realise that two of my designs might need some tweaking in terms of how big or small the halftone image is (the size of the dots I mean) because I did have some difficulties washing out the emulsion from the screen with the dots being so small. I decided I am going to redo all of them for the final hand in before the summer because I would really like to see them all screenprinted, it just makes the colours so much more vibrant and alive. Something that digital print cannot do- especially if you want that electric blue and red colour I am after which I took from my “child water” gif because I think that colour combination really works and looks great on a poster. I did try some other colours as well, more pastel-y ones because I have used that quite a lot in my gifs but I couldn’t get it to have the same kind of punch that I got with the vibrant red. I also thought of inverting the red and blue elements but that made my thread poster look like blood running down from the top. So I decided to leave the red background with blue objects for all of them as that was most effective and looked best.
First gifs done, I did an experiment with some coloured pencil shavings I stuck in my sketchbook the other week when brainstorming connections to “child” thinking about how children always create stuff and the mess they leave behind. I thought it would be funny to make the shavings move and made one where a bit of it rotates but finishing that I just felt like it didn’t move too much and the image as a whole was too static so I made another one that’s more twitchy and communicates better with the paper one I made just before.
It kind of looks like someone is moving the shavings around on a light box and I think it looks really nice: like someone fiddling with something.
Final one I managed to do today is another thread one. For this I pulled apart the yarn I had to create thinner strands of thread, mixed two colours and spun them around on a coloured piece of paper, scanning it as I went along. This gif is like a combination of all my words with the thread that I have been using for “old, the paper for “may” and the moving around for “child”. Twitchy and changing ripples basically. Wrinkles on a worried forehead, sound waves of a child screaming and the connections and intertwines of something old.
Five gifs done so four left now! I think it’s starting to come together.
Final outcome for Match and Mismatch are my gifs. I initially wanted to make something based on photographs of my hand manipulating the bench so it’s different lengths or using the postcards but I don’t think I could make that look refined enough and also because of time management I had to make priorities hah. So I tried manipulating my bench image in Photoshop instead to see where that got me. Making it digitally this way it would relate to the poster as well, with the solid black background so that’s a plus!
I worked a lot with the poster outcome of this project. After all the tests I did here I thought I might be done but after realising I wanted to use the image of the stretched bench for my publication, I didn’t want it to be visible in the poster as well. I was also starting to change my mind about the placing of the text. It clashed with the white line at the bottom too much and just didn’t sit well. Before all this though, I changed the typeface. I had started using Helvetica when making the tests just to kind of use something, but also started to like it. However, I thought I should look at other typefaces too, to see if there was something else I could use to fit better. I had recently found Gibson and thought that looked nice and kind of similar to Avenir, but when I placed it on the poster I instantly hated the way the “e” looked. It looks too evil, like someone is laughing ominously and the poster is dark enough without having a evil looking “e” in there. So Gibson had to go. But! Then I found League Spartan! And it fit perfectly. I love the roundness of the “b” and the bold strokes of the ascenders. I also tried to make the text a bit wobbly to take away some of the static-ness but didn’t like it in the end so let that go.
Poster publication! I struggled with this one. Foldy things aren’t generally a favourite, and the need for it to be so smart I think puts so much pressure on the design that I found it difficult to make up my mind about how I wanted it to look. One thing that definitely needed to be included was the extension of the bench and playing with the folds to show that in a fun way. I wanted to make something that folded like, a crazy amount of times to exaggerate it but when I thought about how that would work when stacking the publications, it wouldn’t work. I didn’t want it to have too much volume, plus I found the restriction of the A3 size that the poster had to be + a lot of folds = not great as the publication would look smaller than I wanted it to. It needed to have some weight to it, the publication needed to feel robust, like the bench. Making it small and/or like it was apologizing for itself would feel wrong and not representative of the bench.
So, after some thought I decided to not do three different versions of the bench, but two. So it wouldn’t be the dramatic change of size I wanted to demonstrate in the beginning, but not having that, fixed the problem I had with the composition looking stupid, instantly. I also edited the image of the bench more, adding a black line where the ink didn’t print, and overall making the image darker to avoid any loss of information in the photo. This time it printed way better! And because I decided to go for a black/yellow theme for the poster publication thing (instead of green which was my initial design) I printed the postcards on bright yellow card (unfortunately not as thick as I wanted because the Riso wouldn’t do it) but I am happy with the result!
Our final idea for hanging work and systems for display that we settled on became based on the metal grids, white paint and tape. As the grids would replace our current pegboards, we could get rid of those but would still need to keep our wooden tables and bookshelves to display work/books that need to lie flat or stand. As the wood didn’t really fit our theme we decided we could paint the furniture white so that it goes better with the rest of our aesthetics. Because our idea focused around keeping the space as neutral as possible, painting everything white is good because it gets rid of the various existing colours all around the studios.
I decided to work more on our Helvetica type before pitching our idea as I had left it a bit incomplete (when I put all the letters into the template from the website I used, the M and W were cut off) so I re-scaled all the letters, making them smaller so that the two causing problems would fit. Not super fun but when I got into robot mode the work was done pretty fast. The first time I worked on the typeface I got impatient and didn’t really care about how the letters actually worked together, but now after re-doing it I decided to look at the way the type worked when you used it. Turns out, the letter “I” was way too big in relation to the other letters (which wasn’t really noticeable before) and none of the letters were actually sitting on the same line. After fixing that, and looking at the tracking more, I was happy with what I had.
The publication took a long time to figure out what to do with as none of the ideas felt right. Initially, Finn came up with an A5 format and we discussed different binding ideas such as using split pins and tape and printing ideas included screenprint and digital.
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