Going back to my original sketches of the connections I’d made when thinking about what light is, I’d written down words such as: direction, negative space, something sharp, overlapping, framing. And I’d also drawn shapes and lines about light: how light travels, bounces, moves in different directions. And this was what I should focus on I thought. More abstract things that I could play around with more.
Child! Children are crayons. Because crayons are something you use (or at least I did) throughout your childhood but then you don’t anymore. Children are also movement, never sitting still, puzzles, colour, shapes and not thinking too hard about the world they inhabit. Wrote down ideas and connections to “child” and then went full on crayon mode as seen below.
Ben Branagan, Inca Starzinsky and Sophie Smallhorn- 3 practitioners I discovered today and not being able to decide who to write about I decided to do all three.
Ben Branagan is a south London based artist and designer making really interesting collages using found photography or pictures he’s taken himself, cutting out and overlapping images to create a sort of surreal vibe where you are looking into several dimensions at once.
Now that I finally feel like I like my app idea to the point where I’m actually inspired, working on my screens went really quick. After one intense and productive day I now have an app concept and a prototype to show. Thinking about how to make my application interactive, I decided that I want the user to be able to do what I have done as well- create poems about their experience of London and make them into posters that you then can print. Making your poems into visuals. It works by you choosing the letter that you want for your poster, then you pick the colour and lastly you write your poem on it, add to gallery and print!
In terms of the design, I used the same 4 colours I had in my first prototype (blue, yellow, red, pink) for navigation as I think these also work for this idea. The font for the text is Avenir Next Medium and the letters I have manipulated are set in Big Caslon. I found out that I like the outcome of the manipulated type better when it’s set in serifs but as I am overall a very sans serif person and I needed a type that wasn’t so ornate for the rest of the text in the app to fit with the kind of strict and geometric design, I went with Avenir Next as it a bit rounded so it matches the curvyness I have going on with the posters.
“Just as one can compose colours or forms, so one can compose motions.”
The above quote is what I have been basing my pastiche on. It’s by Calder and captures his way of creating so well and summarises his work weather it be static or moving- he composes motions.
Deciding I want to create my pastiche digitally I went back to a screenshot I saved months ago when starting this project. It’s taken from the website of A2/SW/HK and is the visual identity they did for an architecture firm. It’s not visible in this picture but the black negative space of some of the letters that by themselves create abstract forms, move up and down, sort of floating in space.
This movement and the shapes to me really breathes Calder but in a more “modern” way if you want to call it that. The shapes have a weightlessness about them that embodies the whole way Calder looks at form and how sculpture does not have to be static. Nothing is pulled down by gravity but rather living its own life- moving in a random way and every shape has its own personality. This is what I am basing my video on.
Diving further into the art of the cover I made this moodboard with some designs I found inspirational. I chose these covers simply because I like them but it’s funny how much they say about me as well. This moodboard actually sums up my own aesthetics pretty well because of some of the things I like that keep re-accruing unintentionally like geometric shapes and colour or minimal designs with lots of white space. Some of the covers are almost architectural, some are only type and some are more rough (but not messy). Basically me, hah. I’ve also finally decided what size I want my book to be: 20x25cm portrait which means I can start designing it now 🙂
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