Danny Riches

Reflecting on this year, I feel I have gained a deeper understanding of my discipline and have gotten closer to realising who I am as a Graphic Design - which overall, was my main reason for coming to Chelsea, I felt I would develop and grow as a creative. 

In terms of my projects, I’m happy with how I have conceptualised and researched each one, with each one having it’s own narrative but being a piece of my practice as a whole. In regards to execution, there are times I have felt some outcomes weren’t as polished or as finished as they could be, but my main priority has always been to find out who I am creatively and focus on the core concept of what I want to create, hoping that through my tutors and peers I could deepen that sense of experimentation and gain a deeper understanding of how executions of designs can unfold. Throughout the year, I have pushed to try new things and really pushed the concepts I have created, trying to achieve what I could and visualise them to my satisfaction, this not always being the case as with my spmp , but importantly through my mistakes I have gained more depth in understanding how I function as a designer and how I can grow further and improve. 

Quantified Self Re-Shoot [4] : Final Outcome

The above is my final outcome for my quantified self reshoot. I am very happy with how it has been produced, reshot from the original photo I liked in the last photo set, to incorporate more of the elements I liked from it.

Quantified Self Re-Shoot [3] : Shooting elements

Once I started shooting the elements together I realised the rose I was going to incorporate wasn’t fitting with the other elements, due to this I took it out of the composition, and played more with the framing of the plants in the water and how their different structures of branches and features could intertwine and work in harmony in the white water.

Quantified Self Re-Shoot [2] : Experimenting with Environment

As for a background for my botanical elements, I disliked the paper background from my original and wanted to use the environment to communicate another part of myself but have it also be related to the subject matter.

I have always loved being in water, and since childhood have visited family by the sea and spent my days there. I wanted to incorporate this into the shoot as an environmental feature however i felt like it could also resemble my love for minimal and clean design.

Quantified Self Re-shoot [1]

In the Easter Break I wanted to re-shoot my Quantified Self, predominantly due to my disappointment with the level of image quality and a feeling I could expand on the point of the brief, communicating my qualities or an aspect of myself.

Authos - Final Outcomes & Reflection 

For the visual style of my outcomes, I went for a scheme that communicated a sense of a blueprint, with a blue and white contrasting in a more ‘manual’ type of setting. I chose to use a typeface with more structure, resembling the use of older manual styles and with a weighted sense of legibility - complimenting the nature of my project and it’s sense of stripping back the layers of language and the nuances of it. 

SPMP Reflection : Overall, I feel conflicted about my final major project. I am happy that I have realised a concept I really wanted to tackle, developing and creating a functional system, but disappointed with my quantity of finished outcomes I made with it. My system took a lot more research and development, with my correspondence with a linguist ongoing and time being needed to figure out the vast nuances in the english language - Due to this my time for the development of outcomes became shorter and tighter, with my priority being to get my system to work, with the alternate outcome being having a large quantity of prints but with bugs in the functionality of my project. 

Authos Outcomes 

Arranging my outcomes I wanted a simple and clean design, resembling a manual or blueprint style - reflecting Authos’ ethos of being directional and instructional.

System Test

With my system functioning in theory, I moved onto testing them with words Christian recommended as having a low transparency of orthography. [From top left to bottom right] Unity, Snake, Neck, and Pharmacy. 

Developed set in Visual style 

Visualising Articulation

With my grid and glyph sets finalised and functional, I move onto aesthetic treatment. Taking from the guidance of my research into the development of Arrival’s alien language, I wanted to communicate the ethos of the project and visualise the articulation of the English language.

Re-hauling semiotics 

Correspondence with a Professional in the Linguistic field - Christian Ilbury, Phd researcher, Queen Mary university

After conferring with Matt, we agreed I needed someone who specialised in linguistics and specifically phonology to get my project as functional as possible. I e-mailed lecturers and Phd researchers from UCL, the university of Westminster and Queen Mary’s university - all held in high regard for their linguistics programs.

Rough Guidelines of System & Grid 

From practicing assembling my semiotics, I came up with the idea of the foundation of building the components coming from the visualisation of the mouth - with the higher parts being the upper roof of the mouth and lower the opposite.

Experimenting with Semiotics [2]

To begin visualising my system, I wanted to experiment with how I would visual song with basic shapes of circles and accents - through realising I would need more glyphs than these I felt it would be an appropriate initial method for me to be critical of what symbols and semiotics could be used to represent what sounds. How lines or dashes through circles could interact and show changes and difference in sound.

Experimenting with Semiotics [1]

As an initial exercise I wondered how the use of a singular sign, once changes could indicate a difference in sound, beginning with an arrow as a means of using an existing symbol that holds several meanings when reflected (upward facing for up and downward facing for down, used in environmental design already). 

After taking my initial mockup to my tutor group meeting I got the following notes:

- To get a linguist on board to give my project more validity and overall structure.

Initial experiments