emma kelly

Reflecting on comm design studies as a course, I feel like I’ve learnt a heap but haven’t really been as disciplined as I would like to have been throughout it’s duration. One of my objectives for the course was go above and beyond the expectations and have my work done with time to spare before each deadline. That definitely didn’t happen, but it’s something I’m learning from even now as I write this. 

I was as attentive as possible in lectures, although I still get confused about the timeline of the historical events we touched on. I loved learning about the early writing forms such as mesopotamian cunieform, and how we applied that in workshops.

The aspect of the workshops I loved the most were when we were tasked with “finding” letterforms, whether that be finding them in our bags, in our surroundings, in magazine images.

Out of all the historical art and design movements discussed as part of this course, the most memorable to me was postmodernism. In particular, Memphis Group. I don’t know why I liked it so much, I just thought it looked cool, and I’d love to furnish my house in that style if I get one in the future.

I had been wanting to experiment with layering, and thought that an ink roller effect would do nicely behind an acetate sheet with vector line drawings of my artist’s CUTE WORK

I missed the week 10 lecture and workshop because I locked myself out of the house and spent the rest of the day trekking between stations and finding my way to the property management in order to get back inside *facepalm*

I made it to the week 11 lecture though, and I thought it was the best lecture of the lot. I felt really inspired as Karen and Andy discussed the future of design. The stand out example for me was the device that allowed a paralysed street artist to continue making art by tracking his eye movement. The technology was great, but I was even more moved by the fact that the engineer who designed it had made the plans available to anyone who wanted to learn to make it themselves.

I skipped the week 11 workshop to attend the Extinction Rebellion strike for climate (regrettable because I got behind in my work after missing two sessions but also not regrettable because the earth and all that). After the lecture I was really revved up about the difference I can make to the future and got a bit passionate lel

Week 9.

“Ask Me Anything” project

I was lucky enough to get a response from one of my favourite creatives, Frances Cannon. She’s a multi-disciplinary artist based in Melbourne, whose work centres mainly around the body and the psyche. She uses media such as ink, gouache, watercolour, and also photography. She said she is happy to participate in my project- I hope that she’s able to give me plenty of words to work with in response to my questions. 

I managed to find every letter except B and P around the RMIT campus on Friday.

Polly and I also spotted a few punctuation marks such as / and ?.

This exercise wasn’t about making letterforms - it was about making letterforms become seen.

In the second part of the workshop, we were given a set of triangles to add to our existing yellow squared alphabet. There were only a few letters that really needed it, but for the sake of cohesiveness, we made sure every letter had a touch of both blue and yellow.

And thirdly, orange quarter segments! We named the font “Ramsay” after Gordon Ramsey. Not for any particular reason relating to the font itself, but yeh.

Do good designers need a style?

With this assignment, my available materials kind of dictated what my question had to be. I don’t have a lot of stuff!

Week 3 

We explored the pros and cons of different materials and methods when making pangrams in our workshop in week 3.

Our group received a roll of plastic cord and some thumb tacks. We had to try a few different methods to be able to manipulate it effectively into something legible. Our material was very difficult to work with quickly. The method we thought would be most appropriate at first was to bend and twist the cord like wire. We learnt that it didn’t hold it’s shape well and ended up relying mostly on thumb tacks to hold it together.