communication design

• Questions and failure with rejection…

For my five creative people I wanted to have a board range of people with different talents and interests that I admired. The people at the top pf my list were a Swedish and Danish duo David and Luise who together run the food blog Green Kitchen Stories, while also having released a couple of cookbooks. David is an art director at a magazine and together they style and photograph all their own shoots. I reached out to them via email and while I got a reply they said that they be happy to get back but in a couple of weeks as they were very very busy right now. I replied saying that I understood completely but the project was due quite soon. So I then moved on to the next people on my list, a artist called Ruby from London and a duo called Peaches and Keen from Melbourne. I emailed them both asking and they both said yes! I Interviewed Ruby ect first with the questions below and then as a back up decided to interview Peaches and Keen as well, questions also below:

What’s your earliest memory of creativity?

What process did you go through to get where you are now creatively/artistically?

What’s your ultimate place to work in?

Are all your drawings personal? if not, What inspires you?

How do you procrastinate?

P+K qu’s:

How did you guys arrive at your current style?

First step you take when starting a project?

Pro’s (or cons) of working collaboratively on your projects?

Do you look to other designers/current trends for inspiration?

Favourite medium?

I felt like they warranted different sets of questions as they are completely different in creative style and practice.

• Decisions on which one to use…

I the end I chose Peaches and Keen over Ruby ect for two reasons. Firstly while Ruby’s answers were very relatible and cute I thought that they contained less depth and insight into the processes and matter of design. Also in terms of presentation I was unsure of how I could present her work in a creative context, I had asked her politely whether she could respond to the interview with handwritten answers or scribbles in her cartoon style. Very understandably she said that she was quite under pressure in terms of time at the moment and replied just in email form. While Peaches and Keen have lots of colourful artworks and also photographs that inspire them up on their Instagram and blog which I gained permissions to use.

• Further research into their work and how to present it, zines, short clip, poster…

When I was researching ways to present my interview my immediate thought had been to make a poster but as the answers were quite long it made more sense to present them in a zine so to avoid crowding the answers together. Their work is very airy and light and a poster I think was a less effective way of portraying this in comparison to a zine.

I also considered making an animation of their works using the circle type patterns which would then loop and have the questions over the top or to the side.

To start making my zine I could only visualise and understand how to make it by literally folding a couple of A4 sheets and roughly planning out what would go where with questions and images then translating it into a InDesign document.  

Then came the revelation/information that you’re not meant to use your own illustrations or imitate the artists work which makes complete sense as it would blur the line between your own work and the artists.

Peaches and Keen talked a lot about their love for nature and how much it inspired their work in their interview, I wanted to translate this in the presentation well as showcasing some of their works. This led to the ideaand decision to cut out a leaf, in particular a monster leaf on the front cover of the zine. I had several try’s with a Stanley knife and after working out that I would definitely need a sharper, newer knife and that I wasn’t going to to be able to keep the holes in the leaf I ended up with a product that I was relatively happy with. I then decided, in part inspired by the calendar with the cut-outs that Andy showed us some weeks ago that I could make a little cut-out of the floral pattern that I put in the middle of the zine bringing to on to another page. I thought that this technique of presenting their work was acceptable because it wasn’t an adaptation or reproduction of their work and therefore confusing to the viewer but just adding interest and highlighting their work in the zine.

After looking at what sort of typography peaches and keen used for things like posters and logos I decided that it needed to reflect their style in being light and airy; a sans serif font that wasn’t too fussy and made use of geometric vertical thin lines. I used Sans Fira in size 15 or 16 for the questions and then for the main body of the text I used Bangla Sangam MN.

Printing my zine lead to a couple of issues I had not foreseen while it was digital on screen. The colours between my images and my backgrounds, which I had previously thought I’d matching so they blending in completely were suddenly visible and very different in tone. I’m not sure if this was because of my computer screen (recently water damaged) or because I had my screen tilted at an angle or what. After printing it again with the transparency increased it lessened the distinction between the colours but also made the colours duller overall. After considering the two I decided to work with the one which had the contrasting colours because I felt like it represented the artists work and provided context to the interview. The duller colours in the second printing did not in any sense convey Lily and Lucy the fluoro duo and their artistic style.  

To construct my zine I wanted to sew a line of stitching down the spine instead of stapling it. This was because peaches and keen had put up some work on their Instagram with bright pink and red hues of embroidery on it.

ruby ect. replied and now I have an interview to play with !!

As a tool I have mostly enjoyed using Tumblr for reflection and research. The ability to go over and edit or save drafts is great. I seemed to end up with endless drafts, as I’d write half and then get distracted by another avenue of research or thought. Not always the most productive method of working. I think the most useful aspect of Tumblr as a platform was seeing everyone else's opinions and thoughts on roughly the same topics. How insightful some people are was quite intimidating and at first putting my own take on things out in the open made me a little uncomfortable. I also found that by reading other peoples posts first it influenced my own thinking, I think it would been interesting to see how different my thoughts and approaches would’ve been if this hadn’t been the case. 

http://bobbygenalo.com/interactivetype/

Modernism was a movement that arose in the late 19th and early 20th century. When I was researching it I found that it was tricky to define because it encompassed so many different movements and ideas. As far as I can tell the base of Modernism was the rejection of 19th century traditions and practices as far as art, literature and design were concerned.  Modernists tried break away from the previous customs of the Victorian era and their work was characterised by the presence of new avant-garde and experimental styles. a key figure whose work can be examined as a example of modernism is Jan Tschicold, a German raised typographer whose influence on 20th century typography was substantial. His work with sans serif type lead him to flee a Nazi Germany as it was considered a threat to German cultural heritage which traditionally used Blackletter type. As part of his career he spent time with Penguin Books to create a standardised cover and format that still exists largely uncharged today. 

His most influential work The New Typography laid out rules and guidelines for modern graphic design, giving fonts and layouts. The ideas that he presented in this book were very much influenced by elementary and functional design of the Bauhaus, at his most provocative he only condoned the use of sans serif type. A view which he relaxed in years  come. As far as i can see one of the most important ideas that Tschicold championed was the use of hierarchy in a work, especially in relation to fonts. Before this fonts had been chosen almost  random. Nowadays using hierarchy in relation to your text and font is one of the most important techniques in making your work ‘work’. 

Modernism. 2016. [ONLINE] Available at:https://faculty.unlv.edu/kirschen/handouts/modernism.html.

LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY •

‘Typography is a tool of communication. It must be communication in its most intense form.’

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus as a master in 1923,  as head of the metal workshop and director of preliminary course ( could in part be due to why Marianne Brandt was accepted into the male dominant metal working course and excelled in it, selling more of her work and raising more revenue than anyone one else. He was a strong supporter of accepting women into the Bauhaus) he left after five years and established his own typography and photography studio in Berlin, but not before he had helped put together the series of 14 Bauhaus books. His influence can be seen in relation to the uninhibited use of all linear directions, not just horizontal. His priority: unequivocal clarity in all typographical composition. 

One of his key ideas was that in order to move forward  humanity needed to embrace new technologies, he experimented extensively with pictograms, believing that the most important aspect of typography was the use of zincographic techniques, meaning the mechanical production of photo prints. Moholy-Nagy was a very strong believer in the fact that the camera would mordernize how artists worked. ‘The emphasis must be on absolute clarity since this distinguishes the character of our own writing from that of ancient pictographic forms.’ Drawing from this the work we have done into cuneiforms in earlier weeks it can be seen how this evolution of type and communication has lead to where typographers stand today. Partly i’m sure due to Moholy-Nagy’s desire to reproduce old formulas and experiment with new technologies. 

References: 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. 1923. The New Typography (pdf). [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.t-y-p-o-g-r-a-p-h-y.org/MEDIA/PDF/TheNewTypography.pdf.

László Moholy-Nagy, Names. Bauhaus Online. 2016. [ONLINE] Available at: http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/personen/laszlo-moholy-nagy