What is Graphic Design?

This project had me stumped for a while, it was the first project where I didn't leave the briefing with an idea, which was a bit uncomfortable after having felt on top of what I was doing for the past 6 briefs so early on.

I've been thinking to myself: "graphic design is not art" which is hopefully controversial, because it's a topic I'd like to talk about and it's hard to get people to talk back when nobody's put out by what you say. I don't think it is though. Having read "A picture of Dorian Gray" back in October by Oscar Wilde I've been quite happy with the definition of art that it is something that has no purpose than to be admired. This to me works better than anything I'd thought before. Art doesn't need to be pretty, or thought provoking, or ground breaking, it just needs have no function other than to be admired, it needs to be useless outside of the quality of being admired.

And graphic design is not purely created to be admired, it is done to convey a message, to communicate some point, to serve a purpose or some sort of useful function.


My favourite example for this argument is the fire exit sign. That is a good piece of graphic design. It is understood by all, it is clear and succinct. It communicates its message with clarity universally to the world. It is not art. I admire the fire escape sign because it is such a good piece of design, but to be admired is certainly not its main function, and so it is not art, it is good design.

I'm not saying good graphic design shouldn't look attractive, but it is the clear communication of its idea that makes it good design, not how aesthetically pleasing it is. With this in mind I decided what I wanted was to create a set of icons that could convey a message to anyone without a key.

I started off thinking of things that people have trouble communicating, I love you, I'm sorry, etc. This was either blindingly obvious (a heart) or impossible (a man on his knees begging for forgiveness could just as easily represent a chap proposing marriage, or a samurai bowing down to be executed etc) then I thought about emotions, because they can be sort of hard to express for some people, and hard to read for others. I drew out these faces, with colours, for all the emotions according to Earl, but as when I tested it out on Grace with the 5 from the negative and forceful section she only got angry right. I thought: well if someone struggles this much (like she'd been quite wrong with the other 4, despite  me drawing them exactly how someone looks when feeling irritated or disgusted according to an average of peoples faces from google  images) then clearly this is too difficult to communicate. And besides, they were bloody smileys at the end of the day. All of these :D and :P type things have been around for ages and perfected by other people, there really wasn't anywhere to take :@ to new.

So I started thinking a bit closer to home. I live in East Ham, where there is a very mixed ethnicity population, which is good; Prices are low and there's a good variety of goods. But I thought perhaps this range of ethnicity could be something I appeal to, a universal code for East Ham that could be understood by anyone.

So, the brief I set myself was: "Create a universal language for where you live" because what's better communication than something that can be understood by anyone? And good graphic design is good communication.

I restricted myself to East Ham high street, because it has markers at each end denoting where the ends are, and otherwise I could end up going forever. I mean, there's no line in the road where it says this side is East Ham this side is Plaistow, but for East Ham high street (or high street north) there is. I walked up the high street and recorded what each shop sold in a little diary, then I created symbols that sometimes by themselves are enough to tell you what a shop sells, and other times combining a few symbols together gave you the impression of what it sold.

Here are my symbols:

And here is the map of East Ham high street that I believe should be readable to anyone:








Annoyingly I can't get this map to all line up properly on my blog, but I'm sure you get the idea. I'm quite pleased with how it came out, and I think I'm definitely right about what graphic design is. Graphic design is not a pretty picture and it's certainly not an acrostic poem, it's good communication. If you can understand this map then I've been successful in creating a visual language, I read these symbols as if they were written in english these days, so I can't tell how successful they are, but I think they work.

Mirrors

This project was all about our Home. For me my home is where I live, and for the past 4 years that's changed each year. Some people make this big deal about how somewhere else they arn't living is their home, but I think they're idiots. My mom and dad's house is my mom and dad's house, their home. It used to be mine, but I have my own house now, and that's my home. This information upsets my parents, but the thing is, where do you draw the line? Why say that Birmingham's my home when I was born in Croydon and spent the first few years of my life growing up there? I haven't lived at my parents for 3 years now, I just don't get why that'd be my home.

Anyway, so I based my project around my current house. I started off by trying to make a book that catalogued all of the objects in my house in a Victorian style . This is because I've got quite a good memory when it comes to attaching stories to items and with my 3 flat mates I'd learnt the history of the items they'd brought with them, and knew the history of all the things that had been bought whilst we'd been living here. However, after tea staining all of the pages of this book and doing a few items I decided that this book was development work at best, and it felt like such an insurmountable task that it ceased to be fun, so I stopped doing it about 10 objects in. The reason I was going for a Victorian style is because my house is Victorian. This book has since gone missing unfortunately, one thing that I didn't get across was how filthy my house can be. Here is an example of the living room at the moment:

And that's how things like my catalogue of objects book go missing. I tend to be pretty on top of tidying the place up, but we had a party last week and since then I've been too busy to sort the place out, Jack's always hidden in his room, Grace doesn't believe she has any responsibility to the mess (she doesn't, it is mine and Chloe's) and Chloe's too busy to tidy too, she does fashion design and that's why there's fabric shit everywhere.

So I needed a fun way of documenting my house, and I thought what would be better than a video? But what sort of video is good for explaining things? Childrens' tv! So using the puppet Rabbitpuss (a fantasy creature made out of a real rabbit that me and Grace imagined was our cat once cause we missed not having a cat each, it's also an odd way of allowing us to touch one another because my 17th century morals forbid me from touching people or something in my brain isn't wired up quite right) I filmed the kitchen, with descriptions of all the things that stand out in the kitchen to me as well as an interview with Grace. I started with the kitchen because where the dinner's made is sort of where the heart is, Chloe only cooks for her boyfriend (/ex-boyfriend? she doesn't know either, silly girl's just being mugged off by him if you ask me) and he isn't round that much any more and Jack only eats cereal and take away pizza, so the kitchen always kinda felt like mine and Grace's space anyway, and that's why there's an interview with Grace in there.

It was aimed at about 4-5 year olds, with a few tongue in cheek moments (like Gracey with her knife) because I like to pervert things.

After putting this video together and seeing that it totalled about 6 mins I thought to myself, this is already a long amount of footage to watch considering it's me talking to a puppet about objects in my house. Would I really be adding anything other than just filler content by doing the rest of the rooms? Would anyone want to watch another 25 minutes of this? I didn't think so, so here is "My Home", because Grace making dinner for me is my favourite part this home anyway (she's a good cook amongst other things).


One thing a lot of people forget when it comes to video is that editing things out is the most important part (by this I mean those people from the first year project near the end, the public drawing one. Go back in time on my blog a bit and you'll a more detailed account of my thoughts regarding those idiots). Editing all the video of my house down to just one specific room is good editing in my opinion, I couldn't have had it any shorter than this I feel, and the video is quite a good descriptor of my stance on the people I live with as well I'd say.

There's a lot of extraneous information here to the untrained eye, but really it's all about my home and my outlooks on life, so it makes sense as a Mirror in my mind at least, just quite a text-y reflection!

Disaster waiting to happen!

In this project we had to invent a disaster of some sort, make something to spread hysteria about it, then make an 8 page landscape booklet with solutions to the disaster.

My idea was the biblical rapture but for people who don't believe in god.

I decided to make a terrorist-esque video message but from the antichrist, who had risen up out of Angela Merkel. I did a german accent but in the video the audio's distorted so it sounds more devil like. I also wanted to have a couple horror movie bits, to expunge the idea that this was an evil video message, so I reused my Justin Beiber mask and Madeline McCann mask doing some weird things.

For the words I was going to say in the video I took ideas from this Paradise Lost quote:

"2:880-884

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound

Th’ infernal doors, and on their hinges grate

Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook

Of Erebus. She opened, but to shut

Excelled her power; the gates wide open stood"

and combined it with some ghost buster inspired stuff (from when they're fighting on top of the building at the end of the first one against Zool), and then I added the german accent to get:

"Ze Great Tribulation iz upon you!

For I am ze Anti-Christ, Und I am rizin!

Zer shall be harsh tunder, Und ze ground shall shake

Fire vill vrain upon you, as plague Und vor vrack ze peoplez!

Hear ze trumpet cry, to ziz cocophony I, ze vurld chancellor, shall lead you!

Ze Infernal doors are open, Und ze Beast valks among you!"

I tried to get as many Ws in as possible and swapped commas for ands so I could pronounce things that sounded out the german accent more.

I made the Angela Merkel mask, adding horns in Illustrator, then printing it out, sticking it to cereal box cardboard and punching some holes in either side, each one gets a pipe cleaner through it and then you tie them up at the back of your head. You can also see the Maddie mask that features in the video (this mask was made for last Halloween, I felt like it pushed the boundarys of halloween masks, as did a few other people, one polish woman attacked me and several people shouted at me, I had to take it off at the request of someone I was walking with who was fearing for his life).





I made the flame background out of 3 sheets of A3 paper, stuck landscape to landscape to landscape with thick black tape so they were in a loop. Then I drew out the shape of fire and painted it with acrylic paint, the advantage of using the black tape was that I didn't have to paint half of each join. I put bottles at either end then, whilst I sat with my head in front of it, my house mate Jack (who also plays Justin Beiber) pulled at it so that it moved round. After messing with the video on the computer this made it look like Angela Merkel was moving about in front of a flaming background.





Here's the video:



After that I put together the booklet, I found out what the actual effects of the rapture according to the book of revelations from the bible.
-water turns bitter
-large increase in the number of snakes
-plagues and a general increase in illnesses
-endless thunderstorms
-raining fire
-locusts formed into charioteers
-demons marauding around (including the four horsemen of the apocalypse)

and then learnt what the practical solutions to these problems were.

Here's the 8 pages of the booklet:





























The criticism I received was about the quality of paper it was printed on, and it wasn't double sided. If it was double sided I'd have to rearrange half the pages so I had the text on the left and the picture on the right. Also it was said that the Impact font and Garamond didn't go well together. But I wanted a shouty font for the titles and a more refined font to describe what to do in each situation. Surviving through the rapture is a very survival of the fittest time, and I tried to get across this idea through humour that the chance of survival was minimal. The last point against was that on the hunting snakes page the text comes to close to the bottom of the page.

I showed it to my friend Rosie the next day in illustration and her first thought was that it was a real publication from the uni until I said that I'd made it, which was pretty cool. I think that if I had got it printed double sided and on a better quality paper it would look really authentic.

I've reworked the booklet now so that the pages in it are double sided, it looks more professional as a result, as well as shortening the text in the Snake page so that it doesn't run so close to the edge of the page.

Brand New

I got the brief second hand off someone and jotted down that I had to:

Create something new/appropriate other old ideas into something new. so design something that is ultra new idea or something that proves there isn't any new ideas.
fiction and science fiction were ok.

I realised that this was in fact the perfect opportunity to unveil the Smib upon the world. I'd been saying for quite a while how my leisure time would be massively improved by some sort of device that would stop ash from what I was smoking landing on my clothes.

I had a few naysayers "oh that's not an original idea!" well, what's not original about it? I know bibs exist, but they exist so that babys don't get loads of food down their front. This is designed for adults so they don't get ash down their front, and as such has to have different properties.

My housemate Chloe is skilled in textiles and leant me a book about fabric properties. With her help I created the Smib prototype out of hardwearing cotton, sort of like denim, only with a fish pattern on that is pleasing to look at.



That's enough explaining from me about the Smib though, over to the television campaign:



I'm not sure how, but the "there's no new ideas" crowd managed to get a better mark than me, despite their contribution to the "brand new" project being regurgitating the words of philosophers, hardly an original thing in my opinion, compared to a brand new actual product in the class room.

I'm considering doing a whole line of consumerist products that would help you to sin (from the 7 deadly sins, the Smib helps you with slovenliness) To show that the Smib is a real product I've designed it with a few different patterns and colours for those people who don't want to look down at their chest and see fish. There is the standard fish design, the Rasta flag, a floral print, cannabis leaves, leopard print, a green with gold trim version, my personal favourite: the no smoking sign smib, and lastly the sky print smib. Here is a picture of me modelling the smib: I have received several requests for Smibs, my production team has been too busy for me to commit to selling them to people, but I've had around 10 people ask if they can buy one off me, which at 18 quid a go is pretty good. I'd split the money 50/50 with Chloe cause she's the one sewing it for me, but from the first one onwards I'm making money just off of her working (cause she said she'd get the materials). I know that some people won't agree, but money to be made is a good way of measuring the quality of a product, and is there any chance of say someone making any money out of saying there's no new ideas? No. A brand new product that revolutionises the way you relax? yes. I use my Smib regularly, and there's been times where I've forgotten to put it on and been exasperated after spilling ash on myself. Watch this space!

Circus of Sound

This project was similar to the last one in that it was all about typography, but the brief was really quite confusing. the idea though was:

create cd covers for 11 of the 12 songs listed

-libertango
-hughe ashton's playground
-autumn in warsaw
-incarnation II
-endgame
-strumming
-play piano study no. 11
-even tenor
-forlorn hope fancy
-sonata no. 5
-the alcotts
-ship in the embrace of the endless dark ocean

I decided not to use the alcotts, cause I didn't get any feelings when I listened to it.

Turned out that the list of songs we were given were most of an album (Play) by a woman called Joanna Macgregor, so I bought the album and me and my house mate, Jack, sat and listened to it and imagined it was a film soundtrack and tried to visualise scenes that fitted with the music. I wrote these down and then turned them into watercolour paintings.

-A small ship in a storm
-palm trees on a beach with bits of rubble on it
-an explorer climbing over bones in a cave fleeing from a giant spider
-someone floating at the bottom of a waterfall in a jungle
-a cannibal baby
-a monkey publishers
-a woman tied up in the boot of a car
-men standing around a man they've killed
-a man at the bar drinking his sorrows away
-a meth-lab run by a red-neck fox
-and finally a muslim exorcism

I chose to use the font family: Didot throughout, as it has a classic and elegent feel. I realised a little later that the brief had been written in the same font.

Here's what my collection of CD covers looked like at the end:



I unfortunately missed the crit for this project on account of being ill. I was going to say: "if I'm honest this brief left me cold" but I think that it's blatantly obvious that I disliked this project. Out of all the projects I've done in second year Graphics this would be the one where I'd scrap it and start completely fresh, and I don't mean my work I mean change the brief to something stimulating.

Here is how the brief should have been:
Get a random assortment of songs, REALLY random, so loads tracks from all the genres for the past 50 years say. Cut them out of their printer paper so they are all individual, then have each member of the class take 8 randomly out of a hat. Then say to them, through use of good typography and shit I want you create a set of 8 singles, one for each of the tracks you have and brand them so they part of a set. So I've got a Beatles track and a Slipknot track and an R. Kelly track etc and I need to bring them together into a cohesive form? Now that sounds interesting. Instead all we got were most of the track list off the back of one of Tim's albums, an album that already exists, that I bought and which as far as classical music goes isn't very good at all. Since finishing this project I've not listening to Joanna McGregor's Play album, and bare in mind that I stayed up all last night with Classical FM on, so I'm not just hating the genre, it really is a bad CD.

I realise I've been rather scathing, but I have offered an alternative to the brief which I hope for the sake of next years 2nd years is used instead.

"Quotes" Poster

This was a purely typographical project were each student got given a separate quote. Some people had things Einstein had said, and other people had things philosophers and presidents and the like had said. I got a quote from the Old Testament of the Bible. I didn't realise this at first though, I thought it was some sort of wishy-washy poem from the end of the 1800s or something. Here's the quote:

"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth for your love is better than wine"

-Song of Songs

When I thought it was a poem from late 1800s my initial thought was some over the top frilly fancy calligraphy type font, but then we were told not to do the obvious, and that struck a chord in my head.

With this quote we had to design an A1 poster that had our quote, the alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks on it in the font we'd chosen. We also had to Design a T-shirt, a Billboard poster mockup and then write an essay about why I'd chosen what I had based on the quote and stuff.

I haven't ever looked at typography as just something by itself, so this was a bit of a new thing for me. Jonathan said "Learn the rules, then break them" so I decided being as I'm learning the rules I best do my best not to break them just yet. Other people in class did the opposite and broke the rules and ended up with illegible work that just used big fonts (like famous ones cause their good) and things like that.

Anyway, after taking a hefty bible out of the library I decided the font I needed had to:
-look old, quote is from the old testament of the bible, or at least look old
-Needs to be super embelished
-needs to be romantic and poetic

I bought a magazine that came with a little booklet (it was like a typography special coincidently, which was pretty useful) with the 150 odd best fonts ever in all the different catagorys. So I looked through this for something I felt was sympathetic to my quote, because there's so many fonts out there, let's just go through a shortlist of the best ones to save some time.

I did find a font that fitted those 3 things, Burgues Script. But the problem with it is it was the obvious choice, and it seemed so light and airy, whereas Kari Display Pro had some weight (it's a quote from the bible afterall, a weighty thing itself), but was also described as "seductive, lovely, shapely, Kari's charm has a hint of danger to it" and that just seemed to feel like my quote. Because people have tried to have the chapter in the bible it's from removed. Also, it is an attractive font that isn't ultra common. Once I had the font, I created the A1 poster:



After this I took elements from the quote for the other 2 formats.

For the billboard I used Kari Display Pro Wide and took an excerpt from the quote "love is better than wine" which is a phrase I'd said fairly often to my mom in the past, and I felt like it would be a good thing to have on billboards for people to read and just think about their drink problems.



For the t-shirt I thought it'd be head turning/thought provoking if I wore a t-shirt that said "let him kiss me" on it, I'm straight, so I don't really want men to kiss me, but I thought it would be a bit of a joke. With the t-shirt I got some iron on transfer sheets that you could print onto and then place on to the fabric and just iron. We didn't have an iron so I used one of the girls' straiteners, which worked fine.



Then lastly for the essay I took the shape of the stanzas in the song of solomon and put my text in the same pattern.



I was the only person who had all 4 elements done, whilst I was praised for my choice of font I was accused of not laying the A1 poster out in a way that was sensitive to the quote. Least you could read all of it though.

Internet Youth TV Station

For this project we had to come up with 10 ideas for an internet tv station. Either 10 channels or 10 programs within a channel, and these ideas needed to be aimed at a youth audience, for me a youth audience was about 12ish to my age.

My big idea was based around the blackberry messenger being encrypted so it can't be intercepted, and using this form of communication to send video, that way I could show tv programs that wouldn't be otherwise available. Within Britain this isn't required, but in less liberal countries like China they censor a lot of stuff that I know I would have wanted to watch from about age 12 onwards. Also, we were told to consider our demographic, and the Chinese youth is the largest youth demographic.

So I decided to invent a television network that would be broadcast over BBM in China, with 10 channels, each one specifically showing one sort of thing that would not be allowed to be broadcast in China.

The channels were:
-Forbidden Music (playing music that's been banned/illegal in china)
-Ugly Obscene (playing shows like Jackass)
-Crime Learn (playing documentrys about crime)
-Fulon Gong (guided meditation, exercise workouts and spiritual guidance on the banned faith)
-Discovery News (News that would not be told to the chinese public)
-Tibet News (news that relates to Tibet that is forbidden)
-Taiwan News (news that relates to Taiwan that is forbidden)
-Porn (fairly self explanatory)
-Gay Porn
-Lesbian Porn (these two extra porn channels are there so that nobody sees something they don't want to see. Further specialisation within the Original Porn channel could also be done in the future)

Here's the final artworked version of my idea:








I used the chinese flag as a basis for the logo, and then changed the stars for eyes, as for me these are linked with big brother (I quite liked the name BBTV, because it could also be read as big brother tv, and I have a bit of a thing for big brother) and then I found out what the chinese characters for the different tv channels I had were and put those in the bottom right corner or each ident.

I used the blackberry website for inspiration for how to present my channels. I used a white background instead of black though because Black is associated with death by chinese people, so I used a white background instead but then for the text about each channel I put it in a black box, because it's sort of the death of censorship and control, and it also allowed me to use the same style of typography and font colours as the blackberry website without going overly death-y for chinese people.

I really liked my idea, I was one of very few people who had 10 ideas as well, but I didn't get that good a mark and I'm now referred to as the corrupter of the Chinese people. This isn't true, watching porn doesn't mean your corrupted, and I'd imagine if it's the biggest youth market in the world there's a lot of money to be made out of it.