Match and Mismatch: Development 1

Working more on my ideas for the three concepts I got very into doing something that incorporated nature in some way and started sketching ideas that included the material more- so birches, leaves and oak trees but it wasn’t really working. It kind of felt too light and dainty but in the same way too messy as well. So I looked a bit at the designers that my furniture student found inspiring: Konstantin Grcic and George Nakashima. Nakashima makes pieces that focus heavily on the material used, so a tabletop could actually look like it was just chopped down from the tree.

Summer Show: Development 2

I don’t very much enjoy making posters. I think it’s because I feel like the one I do has to be AMAZING and represent the subject perfectly and in a fun and creative way and still be able to extract information from it. Way too much pressure in just one artwork ha.

Over two sessions I’ve been experimenting with making quick analogue posters by drawing with different tools and then overlaying that with cut out text and photocopying it to make it all come together as a flat piece. The drawing/markmaking I really enjoyed as it was all about creating marks quick and not having the time to worry about what line you were going to draw next. The motif I chose was a painting of Andy Warhol by Basquiat that I saw at the exhibition at the Barbican last week so lots of faces on my outcomes.

Walk the line- Research 2

Diving further down into my three words, I decided to explore other ways to make them visual and began playing around with stamps and letters to see where that led me.

For this, I started to write the single word first somewhere on the paper and then developing it into something else after reading the word over and over and capturing what I felt while reading it. I thought it would be good to see what associations I made after actually constructing the word myself, putting the letters down with my own hands.

Movements: Development 2

Today I have been working with kinetic typography and making a video reflecting my movement. Started out by researching kinetic typography and found the Swiss designer Dominique Schmitz very inspirational. Similar to the Zero movement his work is full of lines and overlapping elements creating vibration and movement and I especially liked these two seen below. Even the colours are right. Initially I wanted to create something like the left example as it feels like a modern spin on what I am looking into but then I started thinking about type as image and got more interested in how I could use type to create pictures and started sketching with the letters I, Z and O.

Work by Dominique Schmitz

Map of Me: Outcome 2

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. 

Dialogue Studio: type

Last workshop was about type, more precisely looking at how letters are constructed and how we can manipulate them. Through drawing, painting, cutting and photocopying I spent a day immersed in creating different variations of t, y, ! and ?. Y quickly became my favorite to work with, whereas the exclamation mark didn’t inspire me at all. An intensely fun day that gave me lots of ideas on how you can work more with letters to create interesting and beautiful results. Below are some of my outcomes.

First- scanned letters (that I moved around whilst scanning) and then continued working on in Photoshop to create these images:

Type experiments by Lisa

Second- folded and cut out letters assembled in different ways, photographed and edited in Photoshop.

Type experiments by Lisa

Hothouse Talk: Kath Tudball

As a student at Central Saint Martins, Kath Tudball found a book so inspiring that it continued to shape her future career. “A Smile in the Mind” written by Beryl McAlhone and published by Phaidon Press in 1996 is about witty thinking in Graphic Design and featured a piece by Michael Johnson she found particularly interesting. Influenced so much by this she managed to get an internship at Johnson Banks where she stayed for over a decade working with branding and visual identities.

Now working at The Partners, Kath has an impressive portfolio of clients, projects and awards and always comes back to the idea of wittiness in design and letting her passion for ideas that deliver social impact influence the way she works. Some of her projects include TUSK, Cystic Fibrosis awareness and the new identity for the Science Museum, each one having that extra layer of playfulness that I think makes them so successful. Ah the power of a good book.

Images taken from johnstonbanks.co.uk and the-partners.com

Map of Me: Development 3

Placing conversations in the places I found them may not be working out for me. These images are two of my outcomes and I liked the result for about three days but now, not so much. I feel like I need to develop this idea more because it is just too one dimensional. The photographs aren’t really working as I would like them to because of the poor quality of my camera and the visuals doesn’t seem inventive enough.

First outcomes for app, by Lisa

So, I have decided not to do the photographs like this. Instead I want to make my app more focused on type and text, perhaps with a few images as well but very abstract and made from cut out paper like what I did in this post because I enjoyed that very much. I want to incorporate poetry more somehow and make the conversations communicate more by themselves. 

Design and typography

Before venturing in to the world of Graphic Design I had no idea you could do so much with type and love type so much that you can make a living designing it or designing with it. I never thought I would be one to get excited when seeing a piece of graphic design work featuring only type but I’ve come to realise that I do. There are so many designers dealing with type in the world in so many different and interesting ways: printed, painted, sculpted etc. Below are some examples of designers and studios that has made type and letters their living and it’s really inspiring. 

Dialogue Studio: the world is my grid

Photos by Lisa

If you know how to look, you can basically place your surroundings in a grid anywhere. Last Friday, using the outside and inside of buildings as a base- I created posters working with the grids I found looking at my photographs. A really fun exercise that got me thinking more about layout with text and how we can alter blocks of text by changing the tracking to get more control and a pleasing result.