Peter Frasca

This class has honestly been one of my favourites of the semester. I enjoyed the work we did, and liked my classmates and having such a positive teacher. Having to transition to online classes was a bit of a struggle for me though, and although my class attendance and completion of work was relatively unaffected, one thing I did start slacking off on was watching lectures, which led to me missing quite a few. I also kept forgetting to keep up with my Tumblr, which piled up the work for me at the end. What I learned through this class was mainly to think outside the box, and aim to do something different rather than just follow the same sort of style that is popular. Overall I enjoyed my experience in Communication Design Studies.

In this final week before class, I really focused on trying to make the interview more about how Dali’s artwork influenced modern art, which I actually found extremely difficult, as there really wasn’t much clear information I could find on this subject. Due to my struggle in trying to re-write my interview, and also having to finish work for other classes, I didn’t make any progress on the design of my zine.

In Class Because I didn’t have any more design work to show Shayna, I obviously didn’t get much feedback. One thing was to change some of my typography, maybe making the questions bold, or include another typeface which would allow it to be easier to read. Even so, I am confident in designing the rest of the zine with the feedback I had received from prior classes.

This week I had made a lot more progress on the writing side of things, and actually finished my answering all my questions. I also made adjustments from the feedback I had received in the last class, drawing up new versions of the moustache. Also page using just an image of Dali’s face was included. I chose the image as it his expression looked really crazy, and conveys his ‘madness’ well. I inverted the colours on the image in order to make it look even more chaotic.

This week I had made more progress with the actual writing, having completed my five questions, and starting to write answers for them. I had also trialled what the rest of my pages would look like, using a brown paper texture in order to further convey the ‘vintageness’. I incorporated a cut-out of Dali’s work, which in this case was the ‘Persistence of memory’, and inverted the colours, which created better contrast against the background. I then placed some placeholder text on the page just to see how it would fit on the page.

For this week we showed off our five subjects for our interviews. This was my list:

1.      Salvador Dali Someone I have always been intrigued by, as both an artist and a person. I love his surrealist artworks, and his overall chaotic personality. Someone who I thought would just be fun to write about.

2.      Alexander McQueen Someone I had relatively know knowledge about, other than the fact that he was a fashion designer. After doing a bit of reading I realised his outlook on the world was very compassionate. I also found out he died by suicide, which is extremely sad for someone who seemed so caring, and I would like to have asked him what was happening in his life for that outcome to happen.

3.      Dada Dada has interested me since I saw the artwork portraying Mona Lisa with a moustache. I liked it because it seemed like the movement didn’t take itself too seriously, which would have been interesting to write about, and try to convey what kind of personality the movement would have.

4.      Abstract Impressionism I always looked at abstract impressionism as a bunch of impressionist artists that were a bit weird and thought differently, which made them move into the abstract bracket. Maybe interviewing them about what they thought about impressionism would have been interesting.

5.      Wassily Kandinsky Kandinsky was considered one of the pioneers of modern abstract art and was also an art theorist. I felt like interviewing someone that thought in such a different manner such as him, and also was extremely knowledgeable (being an art theorist) would be great to write about.

After presenting these to Shayna, I came to the conclusion that I definitely wanted to do something about Salvador Dali. Rather than just interview him, Shayna suggested that I interview his moustache, as it was something that you normally couldn’t interview, and maybe could give a different outlook on Dali’s life.

This week’s lecture was on Bauhaus and was interesting insight into one of the most iconic and influential schools in modern design. Something that I actually had no idea about before this lecture was that Bauhaus was a school, rather than just a movement. Looking through the slides, especially the chairs, I also realised that Bauhaus had such a huge impact on modern design, looking minimal, but not necessarily being simple. The image of the chair shown above is a design I still see very often, especially at school.

This week we did a class activity on using grids, and basic shapes in order to create a typeface. We began by watching a video with Andy demonstrating the process of making letters by cutting coloured paper into triangles and quarter circles, and arranging them in a certain way. Because I didn’t have any coloured paper with me, and I also wasn’t comfortable in my ability to cut super straight lines with just scissors, I used the same techniques that Andy demonstrated, but digitally, on Adobe Illustrator. I was assigned to make the letter ‘I’, and used a combination of triangles and quarter circles to make both Upper and Lowercase letters.

This week we did the opposite of what we did in week 4, presenting a design that we disliked. I showed the class a ‘Head and Shoulders’ shampoo bottle, which was actually handed out as a free sample at Melbourne Central train station. Although the use of colour, and type weren’t necessarily tacky or looked bad aesthetically, the heavy use of text, and trying to put so much information on such a small bottle made the design looked cramped, and overall hard to look at.

Discussing the ‘Ask me anything…’ assignment

We also had a small discussion about our next assignment, which required us to interview a historically significant subject, whether it be an artist, designer, architect, art-movement, design-object or even a typeface. We were encouraged to think outside the box, and rather than just think of a person to interview, maybe interview things that cannot normally be interviewed, with Shayna’s example being a brutalist playground. In other words, because this project that is entirely made up, don’t limit your subjects down to just people.