#graphicsandimage

After playing with the letters physically and with materiality, messing around with them digitally helped me to understand how they interact with one another. These shapes can represent letters, however they can also represent many other things, and when put together they can come together to represent an entirely different thing. This may be an example of how design gives already existing objects a different purpose - Design can be used to manipulate or change environments and objects.

Again, this sheds a new light on the way that I view posters and designed graphics. The placement of each element of the poster has meaning, I constantly find myself wondering about how the composition, size and colour will affect what people will see first, and how I can use that in my own designs to draw people into what I want them to see.

Further deconstructing the shape and figures of letterforms. Previously when i had worked with letterforms, I had worked with them in a purely digital way, in which I tried drawing them, then recreating it using digital software. Using different materials such as tinfoil taught me about how to create letterforms, but it also increased my understanding of the materiality of objects and how that affects the shape of the letterform. Even with the overall shape of the ‘B’, the tinfoil version that I had created has the values of a ‘D’ just because I couldn’t snip that extra bit in the middle off.

This was the one of the most interesting parts of the graphics and image week. For the blue photo, my group tried to recreate the lighting of a daytime image inside the studio using filters, and it allowed us to fully utilise the potential of digital/material replication. Doing these exercises very much informed me that there was a lot going on behind the scenes behind every photo. I’ve learnt to look at every image with careful consideration. How is the lighting being made? What effects are they using to illuminate the lighting? Even the idea of creating the cone shape requires adding smoke to the room, something that at first I thought would have been done in a post-photoshoot stage, but was actually done within the photo itself.  

Playing around with different types of lighting in a photo studio really helped me to shift my perspective on the art of photo-taking. The manipulation of light helps to frame different scenes, adding a whole new element to the shot and creating meaning within the light. Using a hard light illuminated in different angles could make my face seem more angry, creepy or give different kinds of emotions. I wonder if the same can be applied for some of my studio project designs - Whether an object that I intend to be an angry, aggressive piece of design can be shot in a certain way and with certain lighting to convey or make the audience feel a certain emotion.

I had already known the basics of how to use a camera, including changing shutter speed and aperture, but I always had trouble trying to find the right one for the right time, place and motive. Going out and taking these photos with people that understood what I was trying to do as a photographer made experimenting with my shots and trying out different camera functions a lot easier. I learnt that one of the unseen skills a photographer needs to have is communication and intention.

Changing the image of some of the letterforms that have been found. I already knew how to use photoshop before the technical studies session, so I had found this aspect of the course easy, but I would not have thought to use hue and saturation or a form of distortion to highlight the letterforms that I had found. It changed my view on photoshop, I used it before mostly as a drawing tool but now I see it also as an image enhancing tool/a way to create a new perspective