Portfolio Project: Outcome 3

So went and bought really nice 200 gsm matte paper with the intention of printing the portfolio at uni to save money. However, the printers here decided to not be friendly. Tried three different ones and using different techniques for feeding the paper but none of them worked. If I printed it double sided from the start, it would rip the black ink off the paper and create a kind of starry night effect. If I printed it on one side first it would come out fine but after feeding the paper through one more time, it would rip the ink off again. One try also came out with a ghost image printed on top of it. Super weird. 

FMP: Outcome 3

When coming up with this idea, my plan was to not only knit, but put other elements in the design as well like reflective thread and glow in the dark ink. I did some tests with glow in the dark ink on my yarn but as it would only be visible on white wool, and the poster I would like to have it in has veeery little white wool in it, I kind of don’t see the point much. Plus, it was really tricky to put on and well, I don’t think it added a lot. The reflective thread I’ve had a couple of goes with but didn’t really love any of my experiments. I decided to incorporate it by sewing it on by hand in just small bits on the grey one but then I thought I could actually use it for all of the posters. Although trying it out on the pink one I realised I didn’t like it at all.

FMP: Outcome 1

First and second poster done! After spending 2+ weeks on the pink one, I finished the second one in just a week. This was because the knitting went faster with the bamboo needles as they are smoother than the metal ones so it’s easier to push the work on it (you don’t stop all the time). I also did it faster because I felt a bit stressed about the whole project actually as I still am unsure of how to mount it to make it look its best. Knitting faster however was not great on my wrists, fingers and shoulders and towards the end I had to wear knitting armor to be able to finish it (bandage on wrists, tape on fingers, heat patch on neck and pillow under my right elbow). Taking a break from knitting now which should be fine time wise.

Work Placement: Outcome 1

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. 

Portfolio Project: Research 4

Because I am printing my physical portfolio at uni, I did some tests to see if the different printers around the building printed in different quality and tone. They did. And the differences were quite big.

Portfolio Project: Research 2

Making a portfolio website is tricky. I don’t want it to be purely from a template because it would be nice if I could get my personality in there somehow. But then actually trying to make something from altering a template I find very difficult. A try at cargo collective’s portfolio builder gave me these outcomes (after a lot of fiddling with it) and it does not look good at all.

Portfolio website tries, Lisa 2018

Work Placement: Research 4

Organising everyone’s work was going to be a huge task so we had to be smart in the way we did it. Considering images were going to be different formats, done in different techniques and had to all work together with the colours we have we also thought about different printing techniques, like imitating a cmyk print or restricting ourselves to only two colours to make it more coherent. On one hand, it would look great to do 4 colour prints for the whole magazine throughout but realistically that would be too much work considering it might constitute of 50 pages and each page would need four masters in different colours. 

Work Placement: Research 3

As the magazine needs to be Riso printed, we had to do some tests on the Riso. I find things always look more different than you expect after printing it on Riso so we made some tests for the cover.

Riso printed cover tests, Lisa and F.Kidd 2018

Match and Mismatch: Outcome 3

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.

Match and Mismatch: Research 4

When thinking about how to design the postcards I realised pretty quickly that I can’t have anything too small as A6 is so small already. I thought about doing something with collage and texture and kind of abstract but felt after some time that that wasn’t the direction the overall project was going in so I should do something else. I thought about playing with the scale of furniture piece versus the small size of a postcard as well and thought it would be funny to do something that made the bench look like something you could hold in your hand and did some tests with me holding printouts of the bench. But it didn’t feel representative enough and although I embrace weirdness, this wasn’t a good kind of weird.

Postcard idea, Lisa 2018