MICHAEL W. LAM

But to keep it short and sweet, the entire first semester has been a very enjoyable experience. It’s crazy to think that only 3 months ago I’ve made the move from Perth to start this course. 

It’s very interesting to reflect back on the first week of class picking things out from our pockets to make letter forms, absolutely tearing my brain apart to now seeing letter forms literally everywhere I go lol. My objective coming into this course was to gain new skills and find new mind sets to approach design - I’ve checked this box 100%.

To be completely honest, every topic taught in this course by Andy and Karen has been new discoveries for me. Stand outs were the Bauhaus and Memphis group movement - these were design movements that I’ve always appreciated but never knew about until now.

I’ll definitely look back at this unit later down and appreciate everything that i’ve taken out from it, obviously a big part was learning how to code HTML webs but also the process of prototyping really resonated - I think it’s a great practice to incorporate irregardless of whether you work on digital format or not.

ITS DONE!

Assessment 3 has been submitted & I’ve officially coded my very first website!! 

What a journey.. from ten million tabs on youtube and coding tutorial sites to nearly giving up trying to figure out HTML codes and opting for a zine option.. I’m happy to say that I’m stoked with the final result of a cool abstract website that I’ve put together in the best way I could to reflect my creative and his work.

So my original intentions for this project was to interview a melbourne local creative who I was interested to learn about and make a documentary video as my interview format. Being a photographer for a long while, I was always interested in the art of film-making and story-telling but never got the opportunity to surround a project for it. This seemed like the perfect timing but I unfortunately didn’t get responses from any creatives that could make this happen.

Then the web-building concept started to brew up and thankfully a creative from my hometown Perth, Ta-ku, responded via my Instagram DM and said he was willing to take up the interview so there began my journey to decipher the world of HTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT as well as Dreamweaver for the construction of this HTML web.

In retrospect, it actually isn’t as overwhelming as I had initially thought. There were definitely nights where I did not need to be as stressed as I was.. Shout outs to KAREN’s guidance and lots of late nights, the finish-line was found. (you’re the real mvp Karen)

I felt strongly about creating this website to provide a full presentation of who and what Taku does. From a beat-maker to a successful photographer to now owning a design studio, the man really has done it all. It would be a shame to not incorporate the visual element in a moving format. 

Personally, I was super grateful to have made this connection with him through this project as I see him as someone I strive to become, succeeding in merging entrepreneurship within the creative field.

To reflect on this project, 

- The biggest takeaway is that I’ve learnt a new skill in coding HTML webs and I’m planning to work on a personal website over the holiday period. 

- The biggest challenge came from creating my visions through adequate understanding of HTML. In addition to that, my answers weren’t available up until the weekend before submission so this made it very difficult to arrange the relevant contents for the website.

- I would like to have taken this project further by making it live onto a server and creating responsiveness elements for the web to be displayed in different devices.

MOCK UP! (Prototype..ish)

10th May, 2018

A quick mock up of the web layout for my interview project with the man ta-ku. Intending to display his work in a gallery format through a compilation of all of his projects throughout his journey as a hyper-creative. I plan to approach the web design in line with his minimal and abstract style of work to hopefully create a similar mood to how I feel when perusing through his work.In addition to the layout of his work, I also hope to insert animated graphics to incorporate that with his still elements.

ASK ME ANYTHING - Assessment 3 (WIP)

Last few weeks have been many nights of intensive HTML/CSS crash courses. For my interview project, I was determined to portray my creative in a digital format. 

WEEK 11 WORKSHOP - Zine building.

It was a great opportunity to get a workshop dedicated on zine building. I had been considering a few variations of zines over the past week in case my Website experience fell short.

Website WIP progress/challenges:

Website Research.

Identifying HTML, CSS and JS scripts from webpages for inspiration. It’s a huge world in web development that I hope to start with this assessment by creating a basic HTML site as my final submission. 

Below are a few others:

https://madebyfew.com/

http://2016.makemepulse.com/

Week 7 Lecture:

After the lecture last week on the brief history of the Bauhaus influence to modern design, I couldn’t help but refer to this poster I came across while studying the Gestalt Principles in Color and Information Design.

Based on the simple geometries that’s representative of the Bauhaus style, this typeface designed by Paul Renner released in 1927 and took off in the US with great popularity.

Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet continues its influence close to a century forward in this installation of “foamboy monsters” by artist Niek Pulles.

This creation of work was for the brand Comme Des Garçon’s seasonal tachiagari, Japanese for “beginning.

all images courtesy of Niek Pulles

Identifying Creatives: TAKU

A creative powerhouse from my hometown Perth. Known by TAKU initially as a beat-maker to then building a social following that’s allowed him to tackle multiple creative outlets.