Similar to our Reflecting Thinking seminar, in preparation for our Essays, we were given by Amanda Tinker an opportunity to reflect on any previous writing we have produced. The seminar gave me a lot of knowledge on how to prepare for my essay, and gave me knowledge on how to carefully plan out my essay so it wasn't rushed.
Reflection is:
An ongoing process of thinking about your development in relation to your work
A record and review of your work
A way to gain new perspectives on yourself and your practice
My own reflection is something I rely on heavily, it motivates me to create my own work, if something isn't well planned out or if I've not thought about it, then it causes me to not want to create anything of good quality, I rely on my feedback to progress forward and feedback from my peers particularly is something I enjoy getting responses to, Amanda's lecture reminded me of this.
Reflecting writing and thought processes allows me to realise what to improve on next time, it allows me to improve my writing as well as a lot of thought goes into each piece of work I produce. It's allowed to me to make decisions a lot quicker and plan out my work a lot more; research is something I'm now intent on focusing on and the thought process behind this is key.
"Weighing up different courses of action before deciding what to do"
Over all, although a long seminar with a lot of information crammed into an hour, it was really useful for me as it allowed me to make sense of how to plan my essay correctly, research, the process of design, and how I can respond correctly to things that make a lot more sense. I'm quite used to rambling a lot and not making a lot of sense, I don't check my writing properly, so it's something I can defiantly look to improve upon. I found this seminar quite helpful.
For the next section of the guest lecture, we were shown the branding for 'That's The Spirit', the new album from the British rock band Bring Me The Horizon, whom the client was Sony; they needed the material in a matter of weeks, so the company worked extremely fast-paced and hard to produce the best content as possible under a strenuous time frame. The company worked around the umbrella logo seen in the middle of the website, album cover. They needed to create as much promotion as possible to fans/media to get the frenzy of the new album working as quickly as possible, trying to introduce the band to a more main-stream target then they were accustomed to.
Only used interactive and digital media means to promote the album, on the website, the sleek black design still echoes Bring Me The Horizon's darker/more rocker tone and style, whilst with the font choice and simplistic design it brings it towards a more open audience. Only also utilised the umbrella they were given a base, making the handle as a line to separate information and create a timeline to promote the brand wherever they went on the website - this is one of my favourites from the work, as such a simple idea is very effective and keeps the branding throughout the entire website the same, as well as simplistic, which is what they were intending for.
This was the campaign that stuck out the most for me for my lecture, I loved the style used and the way they created such a simple yet beautiful website, mixing digital media to create something that was fresh and modern and still retaining the Bring ME The Horizon iconography to the older fans, and the way it can be read against all platforms (iPhones, iPads, desktop computers, etc) and mixing the social media into one efficient timeline. Particularly, I love how quickly they achieved this, it shows that with perseverance you can achieve beautiful quality results, the lecture was very inspiring visually to look at and really encouraged me in my project to work at a much quicker pace than I already was.
One of the most interesting guest lectures for me was Only Studio, a design company created by Matthew and Daniel, who both came in to present their work. Immediately based off the website and portfolio of work, I was drawn to how simplistic they made their designs, yet they looked fresh and modern, using sans-serif fonts that contrasted against the colour themes they'd used. One project stood out in particular to me - which was the branding for a festival, titled 'Lost Village', both Matthew and Daniel utilised their research and created something that was extremely thoughtful and worked well with the way they were trying to position the brand. The concept behind the branding was for a brand new festival, so the work had to stand out, as to draw the attention of any audience they were looking for. Daniel and Matthew worked well at doing this, using modern and simplistic styles which would also be recognisable, they stated the logo was created for it's easy design, so it would be easy for the audience to re-create themselves and promote.
The logo, made out of an L and a V, can also be made out of a hand, making it versatile in it's use and embraced by the audience, it's simplistic yet can be easily recognizable based on the design and font face used. I really liked how thoughtful this was, it was so simple yet understandable why Only decided to do this - making it a brilliant piece of branding. The brand was also all about making a story come out of the design, they spent a lot of time creating an storyline to follow for the branding as it would entice the audience more. This, again, shows thoughtfulness has been put into their research; by using a storyline and the idea that this festival is a real "woods coming alive" concept, it makes it a lot more interesting for the audience to interact with and presents itself as a indie, niche brand.
My particular love for this section of the lecture came from the design of the website - it's modern, sleek and captures exactly what the festival is about, using the hand made font clashing against the modern smaller typeface used for the lengthier descriptions. Because they've made a story behind the festival, it's really enticing to see and is so interesting for me, as a designer, it looks so simple but works so well.
This seminars focus was on the concept of the Hollywood Formula, created by Marten Jonmark. The idea behind the formula, shown below, is that everything starts and ends the same way, which, when you have learned the idea behind it, can experiment and play with it in your own work.
"The Hollywood Formula"
With every piece of work you produce, a beginning, middle and end is required, which can be used to set up the story, character and setting, and then to build up the action and confrontation of the central theme of work; then a climax, which produces a resolution or conclusion to the story. The audience will be satisfied with this outcome as it is something they're accustomed to, so even changing the ending of the work would be satisfactory as long as all the answers for the audience are provided.
The plot of the film is to lead you to one thing to another, or possibly mis-leading you in some way only to direct you at the end. A lot of films, mostly Disney stories, follow this outline as it's a common way of surprising the audience and still leaving a lot to respond with.
Although this seminar seemed unrelatable to our work at first, I realised that when producing my work or creating an essay, it would be essential to follow the Hollywood Formula in my own work, as this is a good way of knowing that the audience would be able to follow your piece - particularly, it's a good method of being able to compare your work to it, so you know that you're on the right track about things.
"Utilization of narrative design is the key concern
when developing visual communication"
Our lecture with Stephen was a focus on narrative and how to incorporate this into design. Essentially, as designers, we are told that when we create something, it has a meaning/story behind it, that we need to consider this when we are creating a piece of work.
"A whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end" - Aristotle
Looking at Arthur Quiller-Couch, his ideas theorize there are only seven kinds of conflict between man; a character, and another opposing force, which creates seven different plot strings. From protagonists to using conflict against society, using Quiller-Couch's methods to apply to any plot means you can generally assume one conflict is brought up in every film. This method although very broad had another conflict, machine added, to associate with our growing world.
Exposition:
"Setting context, beginning" the description of an idea or event. The exposition is the establishment in any narrative plot, for example, in Star Wars, the rolling narrative at the beginning of the films allows the audience to understand what is going on and to set up the rising action to the film. Usually in Star Wars, the first hour or so is establishing what is about to happen in the finale as seen with the main character Luke, who spends half the films trying to work out who he actually is.
Narrative:
A narrative is the spoken/written account of connected events. The narrative is the main focus of any film, primarily telling the story for the audience. From a point of view of a designer we need to demonstrate/illustrate the solution to a problem of the narrative. I need to visually narrate the solution when creating my own graphics, which is the focus of my proposal, to come up visually with a solution for a problem (space)
Story based messaging goes along with the idea that when you feel emotionally invested into a story, or, from a designer, product - you're more likely to invest yourself in it. If it's based upon a story or narrative then it's far more emotionally pulling at. For designers this is something we should consider when creating our work, as this would be more of a selling point than something that isn't carefully looked into. The principal of this is that the audience does not have to pay any attention to what we say, rather we need to tune our message in and give them the attention as to get our product going forward. In Pixar's Paper Man, the story is emotionally pulling and more interesting because it inflicts our emotions and is relatable.
Paper Man
Hierarchy of Info:
The minimalist the better. With hierarchy, it's more about narrowing down your narrative to create something that's more striking and have a more lasting impact than writing more. Ernest Hemmingsways 6 worded story is an example of this "For sale: baby shoes never worn" it's far more emotionally impacting and leaves open the enigma of what the story is actually about.
Pixar's Colour Palette - The Art of Pixar
Denovement:
For someone developing a visual story, ask:
What is the story you really want to tell?
What is the issue?
What will be the events?
Who are the characters?
We, as designers, should be asking the questions to the narrative and establishing one throughout our design and products to get more of a response from the audience; particularly with our proposal this is something we should consider.
Continuing on from our previous In Design session, we looked at some of the different features that the programme can offer in terms of creating something that could be more interactive. Initially, I found this a struggle to get my head around, as this required a lot of trial and error originally, but once I got the hang of it it seemed simple enough to do.
Our first section of the session allowed us to go back and re-do what we've previously learned. This meant that we had to adjust preferences for our document, learn about paragraph styles, which enables us to keep the same text preferences and paragraph preferences for each font, making it far easier to switch between two styles in comparison to other Adobe Software.
We had to re-create one of the album covers selected from a PDF, I chose "Pervasive Percussion" as it seemed the easiest to do and the buttons were easy to design. For the workshop, I learned how to use colour swatches to save current pieces of colour I'd previously selected making it much easier to keep to a colour scheme, and how to select a colour from the image and not just from the hex code sheet.
Using the align palette, which is used to align objects spaced around each other properly, I was able to match the circles up precisely to the album cover behind it, making sure the space was an even a mount of pixels between each other. This tool would be particularly helpful for a lot of objects that needed grouping together or anything that required precise measurements.
Using the rectangle tool, we inserted "Swing of Change" - an animation - into the document. Although seemingly simple enough, this was a bit difficult as the individual video and frame move separately, so it was difficult to align without breaking this on the PDF. We were also able to modify the video so that it was interactive inside the PDF, the user could pause the video or adjust the volume.
The final thing in the session was to save this as a PDF and import it to check for any errors. I had to do this several times because I wanted to perfect the alignment of the text. Using the buttons to navigate around the page spread was quite a simple process, the "text" acted as a way of navigating around, by making the button a link to the text - not the page.
Although this entire session was quite a struggle for me to keep up with, the satisfaction of finishing this and actually producing something that was successful was ideal at showing me that I can learn In Design, despite at the beginning really struggling with it. Although it's not perfect I'm quite proud of how the PDF turned out.
Style: A particular prodecure by which something is done; a manner of way.
In this lecture with James our focus was on style.
Cornel West is an american philosopher and activist - during the lecture we looked at a video where he elaborates on his own interpretation of style. In the video, West states that clothes aren't merly for fashion/an unexplained reason, but that they reflect the personality of the person wearing them. West went on to say that the way people dress may be a reflection of how they live and who are they are (for example, I wear a lot of black, which some may say is a way of showing my shy personality) and especially based on the branding of clothing is how are seen in society: if clothes are more expensive does this give off our wealth/well being?
Arguably, he says that if some person chose to dress in a bin bag, it would still be considered a different style to him - though most people would assert from wearing it themselves and, to some people, this isn't a 'form of style' as it's not purposely made for that reason.
"Style is not just putting on clothes, its how you present yourself to the world as your own interpretation of yourself"
Marcel Breuer is another we looked at in the lecture. A Hungarian architect and furniture designer. His take on a chair was a different way of approaching style; the Cesca chair he developed was changed from its generic style of just looking like a chair and being modified. By having the style altered and changing the way people percieve a chair, he created something that 'removed' his audiences expectations of his furniture.
"Design is the manifestation and consideration of significances, not problem solving"
This guest lecture was around Territory Studios, around London, New York and San Fran, who 'bring expertise of narrative design for film, games and brands' the design company have had clients for movies such as The Martian, Guardians of the Galaxy and the Avengers to name a few, creating the motion VFX, trailers and original content for the movies. Mostly, they create the graphics that appear on the films, such as the Avengers graphics inside the Iron Man suit, or in the Martian the graphics used on the NASA intercom faces. Particularly their graphics have a futuristic feel to it, looking sleek professional and bright, having extreme detail to them, a lot of the detail is completely lost in the seconds they're shown, however Territory still provide it to make the film look as realistic as possible.
My favourite was particularly from the film Guardians of the Galaxy, the stunning detail when zoomed into the shots is quite apparent, and the research they did to create the type-faces for each race and alien depending on their intentions in the film/appearance meant everything tied together well, I love the detailing panel for each main character when they examine them in prison - it looks extremely futuristic and alien like, whilst keeping a simple colour palette. I spent a long time going through and looking at each graphics slide on their website as I found them so interesting, wondering how long it must have taken them to achieve each little detail for a single second of film, as well as creating motion that flowed together. I was really blown away with how much they put into each of the frames and how beautiful each slide looks, this is defiantly something I'd felt so inspired by at the end of the lecture.
To convey the right age to the title character - Peter Quill - 1980's origin and likeness, they were inspired by older planes for his ships graphics cards, and worn leather seats that would reflect the era. As well as this, Territory took upon themselves to make the ship very personal to the character; opting for red, yellow and earthy tones which were a colour palette used in the 1980's, typically for video games. It was really interesting to see how they'd researched each individual character for the film, even for the races of aliens that were not in the film for longer than 10 minutes, putting thought and attention into each section of the movie.
This was by far one of the best Guest Lecture's that I'd been to, it was exactly the type of graphic style I was interested in and the amount of detail they'd put into so many shots made me feel a lot more appreciation for the movies and designers themselves, I was so inspired by how deeply they'd researched into each movie they'd done work for, and how they'd clearly taken on board the styles and eras of the time the characters were made into - overall, I was extremely happy to attend the lecture.
Continuing on from our afternoon lecture, we looked more at the way companies approach their ways of meeting the customers. For example, 'by changing the frame, you dramatically change the way of solutions' meaning that the idea behind this is that by changing the way you look at things or appoach it from a diferent view, then the way of solving the problem or looking at it becomes drastically different - it's not black and white anymore.
'Being able to question and shift your frame of reference is an important key to enhancing your imagination because it reveals completely different insights' We, as graphic designers, especially need to take this on board because of our clients wanting to constantly have innotvative ways of approaching their company/ideas.
Our task reflected upon this, based on amigram tattoo's which show two different words looking at the perspective it's shown from, similarly this is what we as graphic designers should consider - how our audience/consumer COULD interpret our product. I chose to use black and white, two opposite colours and to merge them both together. My idea was to keep this as simple as possible because I didn't want to over-complicated things, the idea was to have the black/white as contrasting each other and slowly changing the 'BLACK' text into white text.
I first drew this out using a sharpie marker and pencil, originally the block was going to gradually get darker as you looked down the page, however I changed this so that white would then go back to black as well as this reads better on the page. The idea behind the seminar to me was quite helpful, it let me realise that I can apply this to my own work - that I need to look at things from a different perspective; I keep using different people to value my work so I know what it looks like from a 'consumer' point of view.
