Final Ideas

This afternoon we pitched our ideas to a room full of important people including David Crow, Phoebe Bois Rachel the Marketing officer and some heads of departments amongst others. It was only a 5 minute presentation but seemed to successfully and was good practice. They were positive about our idea, David Crow said it was very self explanatory which we took as a compliment. The concepts of each group were very similar, although we all came up with different visual solutions, so now all we have to do is wait for a verdict!

Our idea is based on a different symbol and colour for each of the 22 courses exhibiting. We took these symbols from brail and the actually spell out the initials of each course, but this was purely a visual experimentation and not really part of the concept. We've taken this beginning and made it more abstract to fit to our purposes. The final image of the poster is made up of these symbols, but is seemingly random.

Another reason we used this idea was that it translates nicely into decorating the university as well. Using vynal stickers to mark out each show and also lead people through the corridors. As many of our corridors are dark and scruffy, we felt this would really brighten up the place and create a much more accessible and enjoyable experience for the visitor.
The design could also be adapted across the website and any other digital portals that the university set up. We came up with the idea of stickers that could be given out at the degree show because visually it fits with the poster, and also gives the opportunity for an interactive element. As you peeled away the stickers, the sheet will resemble more and more the poster image, creating a new piece of art work. The stickers could be used for a number of things such as rating the shows, marking where you've been or simply adding to a bigger piece of art work.

Hopefully there will be an opportunity to come out of this for working towards the final design of the show, but if not we've enjoyed the week and have another successful project for our portfolios. This project has been a nice sideline from the other 3 i'm working on at the moment and I feel we have produced a lot of work for a week, and if nothing else, I have a finished and ready project for the reviews next week!

Degree show Brief

Early last week Alison and myself decided to take a quick shot on the degree show brief: To come up with a concept/visual idea that represented the breadth of creativity and diversity within the art school. As I haven't really kept a sketchbook in the last week, I thought I would post some of our research and inspiration on here.

We looked at a lot of visual identity's and signage, including David Crow's book and a few others.

Lots of crazy brainstorms later we came up with a few directions, stickers/badges/prisms/brail/colour/symbols. It was important for us to come up with an integrated design that could adapt across different media, especially into the mapping and navigation of the exhibition, which we felt has often been a let down in the past. We were also keen to get some interactive element to the show, similar to the Spiro-graph installation of a few years ago which stuck in our heads as very successful.

2nd year 3D Design

I went to take a look at the exhibition that followed ours in the Holdon gallery, a lighting display by 2nd year 3D students. The lights displayed were inspired by 'under the sea' plants and life. I immediately thought of my workshop project that I did with Jonny Hardstaff, Object React, because my object was called a Venus Flower basket that grows under the sea. I wonder if I could pass on my research and ideas to a 3D student and see if they could bring the beautiful object to life! hmm!

Degree show idea...

''What works wonders in the Now, is not the bomb or the bullet,

but the two humble objects: the hyphen and the word 'and'.

Northern Irish and British, Asian-English.''

My idea for the degree show came from the quote above I found during research for my current project. It is not a design or visual style, just an idea for the concept and name we could base the degree show on. It struck me that Design is such a multi-faceted disipline and each person on the course has their own unique style and ambitions, but in todays world people take on many roles and it is accepted that you don’t have to fit into one simple catorgory. We are not just designers, but communicators and artists/photographers and art directors and ideas-people, and also many of us feed lots of other parts of our lives into our design too. This name would be a celebration of all the sides of design and the variety of skills/job titles we will be graduating with as well as giving us a nice typographical name to play with and lots of scope to develop the concept/theme across the whole identity of the show.

Well I will present this on Tuesday along with everyone else and see what people think!

Holdon Gallery -

The second D&AD exhibit in the Holdon gallery for 3rd years opened up last week and this time I decided to exhibit part 2 of my silence project, a film called '9 minutes ago'. This was a great opportunity for me as I wasn't happy with the final version of the film I handed in for assessment, a few last minute technical hitches meant it was really bad quality. After spending so long working on the film I decided for my own piece of mind that I was going to try and fix it in the couple of weeks we had off before we got our results. I thought this would be an easy task, but no, this film I swear had a vengeance on my sanity and refused to make anything easy. (I will probably explain more of this when I can finally figure out how to upload the film onto here, which it won't do at the moment). Anyway, this exhibition meant I could finally draw a line underneath my silence project and put it to rest.

I think this gallery space is a really great opportunity to come up this year and I'm glad Allessandra is making the most of it for us, we don't often get a chance to see people outside our tutor groups work, or even to print things off nicely before assessment so this is a great chance to do this as well as let the rest of the university know what we're up to.

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth, American born artist:

Very similar to Stephan Bruggemann. But I guess everything is similar to something - nothing is really original any more. I think it's almost impossible.

Fred Eerdekens

Another artist rather than a designer, but one that works with type and the environment, and I think could easily cross over into the design world. I wonder whether the words really do appear from the shadows or if it's a trick of the light? Again this is one i'll probably come back to for the geography project!

Stefan Bruggemann

I do have a soft spot for art like this, statements in simple type but that really make you think. I realised I've picked out quite a few of them this year! Still, they always capture my attention and that's what I like about art. I like the simplicity as well, there is something about a written statement that appeals to me - it is so bold to just say it out loud rather than cloud the message in metaphors and images, putting the question directly in people's head, especially when the work itself questions 'art', I love that! A lot of my ideas in the silence project came out of research and exploration into the use of words and the difference of using words and images, and I enjoyed this subject a lot. I think I'll be referring back to this artist when I start one of my bigger projects later on which is going to be the Geography one from IDST about taking reading into the environment.

''Using all media, Brüggemann’s works often consist of small gestures, additions, or alterations to a given space, medium, or genre.''