InsertDesignHere

At the start of the semester, I think my objective for this subject is to get better at design. It's very broad and not very specific. Though, I don't think this subject was to achieve a better design sense.

Without a doubt, I realised I am at the beginning of learning how to explore and experiment with design.

Learning about early print, swiss style, blackletter put in perspective of where design comes from.

This leads into how we can take the key ideas of something like Bauhaus and apply to design now. Experimentation, prototyping, trial and error. Over and over again so that mistakes are made early.

Though I consider Bauhaus quite funky. People have walked out of the school laying groundwork for typography, design theory, architecture and much more.

This subject lays some important foundation I never learnt to make sure I build good design habits. This goes with typography, making zines, experimenting with materials and much more.

Breaking down design to building blocks: experimenting with literal square paper, playing around materials found at home, and spotting structures found around university that look like letterforms is a way to get into a design mindset.

I do look forward to keeping the habits I learnt from this class and apply them to all my future projects.

Week 12 

A recap lecture about everything we did.

It was fun to see my zine on the projector. This was my first zine created in week 8, linked here.

The title of this zine was ”にゃにこれ？！” in japanese, which translates to "Meow, what's this?!"

It was a fun zine filled with many small animals, confused and or peeping through the holes in the page.

In this week, we were taught a few shortcuts with inDesign and how to take advantage of the template.

The two points that I made use of was:

Technology with design, it reminds us of how technology improves and changes our design environment.

This brings me to a YouTube video about how our landscape is changed by technology. In a sense, how robots and technology can reply people.

People mostly fear that robots will replace technical jobs and physical labour. Though robots can also be taking creative jobs.

The video explains how technology can be used to simulate to human brain or behaviour to make something needing imagination.

Below is a link to the section of the video discussing creative bots:

https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU?t=11m24s

As a bonus, this bot looked through informercials and created their own. It's a funny start, but it will only get better from here.

https://twitter.com/KeatonPatti/status/1001906391987245067

Week 10 Lecture

I decided to read a bit more into one of the case studies from this lecture.

Adbusters

This organisation is anti-capitalism and anti-advertising.

Their website states "Join us; come together and commit to the sole goal of fucking up every system that keeps you from living your dreams"

They have created spoof advertisements which comment on the negative impact of  capitalism and our consumerist culture.

Above are some of their spoof advertisements from their website.

Art of Lion Dance

Here is my final zine. It comes with a lion patterned pocket and a red packet with an extra goodies. (It’s not real money)

I used a laminator and gold heat transfer foil to make the red packet.

There were a lot of tests to make sure the lion looked nice on the final packet.

Bonus Page

As a bonus to my zine, I decided to add a red packet, often given to lions during a performance. I used notes and an old red packet to design my own.

The template was made in Illustrator and I decided to design a lion face to print in gold foil on the red packet to relate it to the artist and keep it traditional.

To do this, I researched methods to print gold on paper. One method was add gold foil by applying heat with a laminator shown in the video below:

What a mess

We were given an 8 page zine template to create a zine from. With the layout I had decided on, I needed 20 pages.

I remade the pages at A4 and labelled each page and direction the translated it to the zine. It took quite a while but it’s not worth risking mistakes in the final copy if one page is upside down.

I probably made 5 different A6 zines to get this formatting right.

Definitely learnt to make mistakes early from the constant experimentation and fast prototyping studio.

Here I was experimenting the page layouts I wanted to have for my zine. After I decided to go with a landscape zine, I drew how I wanted a page to look and recreated it in a mini zine.

Week 10

We did fast prototyping for zine. It reminds me of the design ideology of Bauhaus with their focus on experimentation.

The main points of prototyping are:

- It is physical - A test - For other designers to interact with - Allows for feedback - Allows experimenting - Easy to manipulate - It's inexpensive

We created different zines are had an open discussion about our design choices.

My booklets were a bit plain but allowed me to quickly create an assortment of different page layouts physically.

Week 9

In this studio, we continued experimenting with zines and letterforms. Creating zines where the content were collages.

Letterforms were surprisingly hard to find from the folds and details in photos from magazines. Although, for my font cover I created an "A".

From this I decided the theme was "Abnormal"  with the letter A and created Frankenstein monsters and animals.

Instead of English, I added the Japanese characters バケモノ to 4 of the middle pages. This word means "monster" and in a way, was a cheat method to create letterforms with zine cutouts.

This word should actually be written as 化け物/ばけもの but they all actually say the same word. バケモノ uses a phonetic script called katakana which is mainly used for foreign words but its main aesthetic difference is its use of straight lines and slight curves compared to the other scripts.