A Daydreamer's Space

Ask Me Anything - Final process and Reflection

I think I’ll just summarize the experience from the very beginning so that look more organized. 

When I first heard of this project I just felt like myself became a big question mark that I totally had no idea what it is about and how I am gonna do it. This really made one feel panic once, especially when you are asked to attempt to contact top designers who you just feel you would never get feedback from. My immediate thought was just to give up and simply interview one of my friend as the alternative of been brave to talk to those famous. Fortunately I just got social contacts with the illustrator, Lisk Feng, who I’ve admired for a long time, and because she newly followed me on (Chinese) twitter just few days before the project start I believed I have a pretty great chance to get her yes for the interview so I just send her a request and soon she indeed replied me with the answer I expected.

However, I was bit of hurry that after I got the confirmation from her in the morning of Monday.  In Tuesday’s workshop Andy and Bronwyn asked us to create a list of five creatives and suggested us to try from the top one, and everyone was preparing for their email draft. I then felt rather ashamed for giving up so early that I even haven’t try to challenge myself to push the boundaries. I decided to redo my list and at least I would like to have a try with my top one creative - Tim Walker - a famous British fashion photographer.

Unfortunately I could’t find any contact details straight to Tim Walker except an email address of his agent, which usually took a long time to get replies. No Facebook, no twitter, no Instagram and no Tumblr shortcuts to approach him. That then made me resolved to focus on researching and preparing questions for lisk only.

Since I know Lisk from many years ago it was easy to do researches about her. I don’t really have common questions on how she processes her work or where she gets her inspiration from because I’ve seen the answers within her books or in her previous interviews. I am more interested in her person, her experiences on the career, how she grow to be stronger and the way she views herself. I want to know more about herself rather than simply asking about her creative process. Based on this curiosity I came out with my final 7 questions. And I already decided to present them in the form of a A5 zine because I have grown a strong interests on it recently. 

After got her answers I started to experimenting with my first attempt in layout designs. Here is some photos of my initial samples of the zine:

Except some common mistakes related to inadequate print setting, such as problems with the upside down double prints, order and size mistakes, there are also some problems with the designs itself that I realized after the consultation with Bronwyn and Andy.

As Bronwyn said the cover is just not of the artist’s style, which feels more like for a fashion designer and it’s hard for audience to link it to Lisk’s illustrations, the back cover is not good either as the font is not suitable. She also pointed out that there may not appears too many frames as Lisk doesn’t use much of that style and suggest me to try with more free styles of framing. The pink squares and fragments should be consider to delete as they are meaningless at all and I should focus on more on the font choices rather than adding unrelated elements to the pages. Andy also suggest me to delete unnecessary decoration and be aware of the space so it won’t appear visually too “crowded”.

To summarize that, the purpose of the design is to clearly establish and promote the artist’s style but avoid adding distractions or meaningless elements, so it should be fully planned and I need to learn to keep a balance between objective description and subjective creativity in manipulating the artist’s work. Everything sound clear now, but how am I going to deal with it?

|  P R O C E S S E S  | Here is the list of my chosen artists:

0 1 / / Giuseppe Pepe

He is an Italian graphic designer and the creator of his own digital art project #LoosingMyMind since 2014. I noticed his works from iGNANT magazine and I’m instantly in love with his headless project. “Since the head is the primary part of our beauty, I decided to create a project that reflected the secondary [body] part instead.” he explained. He collaborates with many different instagrammers and removes the heads of their provided photographs for this project. I really love his concept!

0 2 / / Jeffrey Madlambayan

He is an amazing artist who makes cool collages with his phone device. I discovered his works through instagram when I was in high school. His works are very inspring and I really like his aesthetics, his use of colour and geometries and compositioning. Simple, minimal and clean yet rich to look at.

0 3  / / Jennet Liaw

She is a LA based designer that works in a range of graphics, typogrpahy, packaging etc. I found her works through instagram couple years ago and totally attracted by her typography works. Her hand-written typography works are full of characters and very inspiring and pleased to look at.

0 4 / / Elaine Li

She is an art director, designer and content creator based in Hong Kong. As an active and popular user of the Instagram, she is a well-known Instagrammer within the community and she is also one of the organizers ofInstameetHK that organize regular meet-ups for photo enthusiasts. Her amazing photography is what I always admire, very bold and full of content. She has such a broad collection in her photography, ranging from travel, portrait, architecture to urban exploration. She is also one of the early rooftoppers before it came mainstreamed. (I know her in person as she is my sister’s friend)

0 5  / / Lidia Gulyas

She is a popular Instagrammer based in Melbourne and I of course discovered her works through Instagram once again! I love her amazing photography and Instagram posts as she tells great and inspirational stories through her texts (caption) and images. She often incorporates beautiful hand-written typography in her photos as well.

I have started to approach my first three choices and sent them email about this interview project. Surprisingly, Pepe (my first choice) has replied my after a day and YES! he agreed!! I reach him through email and instagram message.

(bahahahahahahhaaa wohoooooo!) Then I began to draft my five questions, sent him and waited for his reply again (this time it took him almost a week to reply, but it’s okay). He sent me his responses through a word document. Initially, I thought he is a native English speaker (even tho he is Italian) because his written posts on Instagram and Facebook page sounds like one. However, it actually took me a while to digest his responses and I have tried my best to correct some of the grammatical errors (english is not my first language…). But I’m pretty happy with his responses, it made me understand further and know more about his life, his perspective, his art.

Here are the questions that I have sent: #1 How did you find yourself in love with graphic design/ photography? (I wonder how he gets into this whole graphic design/art thing and what intrigues him to enter to the creative industry/caree)

#2 What would you do when you’re lack of inspirations and ideas during your creative process? (I want to know his way in seeking inspiration and something that I may learn from him cause every one is different when it comes to “creativity” “art” “design”)

#3 How would you describe your headless project #LoosingMyMind to the society today? (I hope to know his insights and concept about this project in more details and also the message he wants to convey to today’s society. I really love his collection of #LoosingMyMind, they turn out very dreamy, surreal, unique [ surrealism fan here] )

#4 What is body language to you? (This is what the focus in this collect of works, how does he think about it)

#5 The new Instagram logo that every one talks about, love or hate? And why? (This is what every one was talking about whether they like it or not. I wonder what Pepe thinks about it as a popular Instagrammer and something that he uses a lot. I want this to be the last question in order to be a more fun and interesting end of this short interview)

At first I was thinking and planning to do a zine but I ended up doing a video as my final presentation. Pepe constantly shares his artworks through his social media (Instagram & Facebook) and I also discovered his work digitally through Instagram.  This digital sharing method is something that I wanted to portray my presentation of the interview as well, so I decided to make a video instead.  I created a “headless” figure in my video (out of pillows) to draw connection and resemblance to his #LoosingMyMind project. I create different coloured balloons and write my questions on them as they symbolise the “lost heads”.

I filmed them in the sofa area at my place and I took away the dyed fabrics that were orginally there for a more cleaned and simple look for the video. This is how I filmed haha. Kinda creepy huh haha.

I wrote the questions with white and black marker pens while they were blown up and this was how they looked like when they reduced. 

After recording everything I need, I started to edit them using Final Cut Pro.

It took me quite a while to complete, more time than I have expected. Firstly, I have chosen the music background and I arrange the orders of the footages and some of the clips needed to reverse in order to create the effect of “growing heads” from a headless body. After that, I had to rearrange the questions for a better flow. I decided to begin with Pepe’s responses of the project then continue with more personal questions towards art/design. Then I added all the texts and the popping speech bubbles (resembling iMessage we use [the sound effects] and the digital world we are into now). Lastly, I did a final touch with the overall tone and colour of the footage (clean, minimal, light) to give a more cohesive theme and connection to Pepe’s works.

And this is the final outcome of the work.

|  R E F L E C T I O N  |

I stumbled upon this project by Tien-Min Lao and it brought me back to one of our first lectures where we were asked to come up with our own gang sign. I love how the GIFs show the transition from uppercase to lowercase lettering.

Something kinda clever I found the other day when I was walking to RMIT ^_^

BeCi

12/05/2016

Back on the topic of idiots…haha, no I’m kidding! But I’m not going to lie when I say I am very a little disappointed with Instagram over their new icon design. I don’t know about everyone else but despite the fact that Instagram has said they put “a lot of effort” and thinking into the new design it really doesn’t feel it. 

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me but I really hate their new design. It’s frustrating to think that Instagram would throw away such a unique, detailed, beautifully crafted and complex design with it’s memorable look and retro feel. I loved their polaroid camera inspired design, the newer, simpler design seems way to generic and overused. It’s no longer Instagram anymore. 

Simpler isn’t always better and in the case on Instagram simpler to me feels like a massive fail. Why do designers follow trend like this? Simple design? Gradient icons? Why can’t designers be unique and original? 

I fell in love with Instagram’s icon, the detail in it, the retro look they had, the realistic look they applied to that camera lens. It was just so lovely to see something that no one else had done. 

Now they have taken something I loved and admired and turned it into something I hate…they turned it mainstream.

Bar Stool - Alphabet 

Inspired by an exercise from class where we had to create an alphabet from our University to home, I created one from a bar stool I owned. Playing around in Photoshop for the layout, I found it hard to merely “crop” from the horizontal and vertical grid that the stool presented, I also used negative and positive  space using the “Polygonal” tool in Photoshop to help convey the letters more, not essential for all as some letters such as “A” “B” and “O” followed this geometric grid, it did however teach me how so many letters in our alphabet are made from more organic forms, something I never considered until having the restraints of not being able to use them.