New term ahoy!
Flu has been vanquished and I am back at university. I’ve got a review type thing tomorrow, but am not stressed. I’ve got work to show, plus I feel refreshed and am full of ideas, plots and wild schemes for the new year. I imagine tomorrow will be a more productive post, when I have feedback to think about. For now, I just want to mention the most recent book I’ve been diving into. The Art of Looking Sideways, by Alan Fletcher.
“I am intrigued by apparently useless information, such as 8% of the population is left-handed; giraffes only sleep five minutes every 24 hours; Italians kiss twice, the Swiss three times; is a zebra a white animal with black stripes or vice versa; and, are you left or right eyed? This book is everything I was never taught at school. It has no thesis, is neither a whodunit nor a how-to-do-it, and has no beginning, middle or end. It is a book for visually curious people, full of things to make you think twice.”- quote from the author.
I went to see Alan Fletcher’s retrospective at the Design Museum a while back, and I really enjoyed that show. His work is clever and looks good, and quite rightly deserved an exhibition. Some pieces in particular I really liked (they will get posted shortly, maybe), and as this book has been recommended to me many times, I was looking forwards to getting it immensely.For starters,yes it is pretty impressive. It’s incredibly thick and each page has been designed differently. I think I read at the exhibition that it is based on a grid system, but one that’s so complex and open to variation that you can’t tell. (You really can’t.) It’s an awesome achievement. But…a few pages at a time is probably the best way to tackle it. Too much at once is like eating all the chocolates in the box all at once – yes, they are all yummy, but after too many you can’t tell them apart and then you start feeling a little bit sick. For someone like me, who loves to read, the idea of only taking a few pages at a time is very alien. There is some design work, which is what I really wanted from it, but a lot of it is random thoughts, pieces of information, and countless other tiny pieces of interesting stuff. At first that was alright, but as the holidays went on I still couldn’t really get into it. There is so much information in there, it makes it difficult to remember anything in particular. I think because in every day life I get bombarded with so much “stuff” (quotes, pictures, videos, music, articles etc) that I can only take in so much, and so when I read, I like to have something that is the opposite of this overload. I don’t feel right not liking this book, because there is so much in there that is interesting and useful, but I think maybe once I’ve got through it, that it may be a wonderful present for someone else. (Or popping up on eBay soon.) I feel that although it is a wonderful idea for a book, it is full of the sort of things you have to find out for yourself in your own way for them to be relevant to you, although I think that the ones in this book maybe could act as a starting point for your own creative adventures. Over and out x G
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Tags: alan fletcher, book review, graphic design, the art of looking sideways
Merry Christmas etc
I am returning home for a week or so in order to recover from the evil flu and stuff myself with as much free food as possible. Unfortunately, this means I will be separated from my darling, the internet, but I trust it will survive without my loving input. And just in case Santa is looking , please please please can I have…
a) not the flu
b) lots of chocolate
c) well, I don’t really know. Surprise me.
I’m probably getting a bit too old for lots of presents, but I think what is worrying is that I don’t even have anything that I really want. OK, maybe a scanner and printer would be nice, but it’s not particularly Christmassy. Also, I’d have to get them back to uni on the train and that doesn’t sound so fun. Anyways, I need to get packing, and I will try and have lots of cool things to post up on my return. Who knows, maybe the neighbours will have installed free wireless. That really would be a good present!
I am also off to Edinburgh for New Year Eve instead of my trusty local pubs which have seen me for maybe the last five or six year. So that should be exciting and stimulating. It would be interesting to have some kind of design challenge while I’m up there, maybe a photo on the hour every hour, something along those lines could be pretty cool, well, I’ll see what happens. Until my return, good bye internet ( and my few readers) and have fun times over the holidays.
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Tags: Christmas, Edinburgh, flu, holidays, home, internet, NYE
Yep, am down with the bug this week. I was working quite a lot in my part-time job trying to save for the upcoming term, but that’s all gone a bit wrong due to me feeling like crap. It’s not so good. I have been watching Series 1 of Dirt- it’s trashy, it’s tacky, but I can’t deal with anything more demanding. And sleeping a lot. I just checked my college internet-blackboard-thing and I have a review the week I get back. So when I get better, I’m just going to have to crack on with sorting out my portfolio etc all which is simmering away at the back of my mind since the dissertation. I have a friend who has finished uni and is now in a well-paid ( dull-sounding) job who was complaining that she only gets a week and a half at Christmas off in employment.That is paid, and she doesn’t have to do anything at all. A whole week and a half. I bet most of the students on my course would love that amount of time off, but it doesn’t happen. This is probably why I am a little bit cynical about Christmas these days- to me it represents work, spending too much money on people I don’t want to, and more work. But enough of the sob story.
In my fluey leisure, between sleeping, bathing and making tea, I have been relaxing and it’s good. I like it a lot. I’ve found a lot of cool things on the internet to occupy my time and have been catching up on ‘fun’ reading ie non-dissertation related. my book today is Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which I am really enjoying because
a) cholera sounds a hell of a lot worse than flu
and b) it’s really really good!
It’s a book where you really get into the characters lives, time seems to skip about a lot, but it’s done so well. I’m looking forward to continuing it later.Anyways, unfortunately I have very little design news today so I’ll leave off by mentioning www.typeradio.org which is brilliant. Typography and talking, and all done by some really top designers. Get this in your ears now.
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Tags: typography, design, flu, Dirt, university, holidays, Christmas, Love in the time of cholera, Marquez, radio
Good evening there, well today was just peachy. Handed in my dissertation this morning, and that’s it. No more writing. Although there probably will be more writing, but maybe less extended, at least for a while anyway. Did I get back to my studio work straight away, and get one last full day of good design in the studio done before the Christmas break? Of course not; I went vintage shopping with my friend in town to celebrate and bought some amazing blue and silver peep-toe high heels. Ah, sweet sweet shopping.
Although I am hoping to, and probably should do some design catch-up over Christmas, the sad and lonely truth is that I am working nearly everyday in (a well-known high street) shop, and that doesn’t leave much time for anything other than sleeping at this time of year. Oh – it’s sad and lonely because I am remaining in student halls by myself to do this. It’s not too bad though, the other students have all left random food so I might be able to rustle up some unusual meals for fun.
I should probably mention the last bit of design work I did, related to the ‘provoke change’ project, I helped out a charity shop in town by designing some promotional posters and fliers for a CD&Vinyl fair they were having. I couldn’t walk away from this project once I saw the original flyer: plain text in rainbow comic sans. It was a minor crime against design, and part of me did feel a bit like the design police – “I’ll take it from here, just put down that font and no-one gets hurt.”Anyway, check out my lovely lovely poster down below. As I havn’t done very much illustration for a long time, I was happy to find I could still kind of draw, although I was a little annoyed to learn that a friend had overheard this on her visit to the shop – “Oh that poster? The manager downloaded it off the internet.” Sigh. The illustration is based on an old photo from a photo-shoot, I can’t help but feel a little uneasy about using this image in relation to Save The Children, but I think it does attract attention, and maybe that makes it alright. I think it’s quite a cheeky image more than a blatantly sexual one, but I am not sure how if this is how it is interpreted by others. Well, anyway, apparently the event went well for it being the first one, and I had a lot of people asking me about it so I guess that means it worked. 
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Tags: dissertation, charity shops, design, shopping, comic sans
How finished is finished?
I have closed Word for the first time in weeks…and instead of worrying about completing my disertation I am going to sleep worrying that my precious dissertation (all 7896 words of it) might somehow disappear from my hard drive and all back-ups, but it’s done! Which is where I ask the question, how finished is finished? I still have to print and bind (slightly nerve-wracking as I think it is going to cost a fair bit and I don’t think I’ve got very much left on my bank card – talk about pressure). And knowing me, maybe scan in a couple more images. And write a tiny bit more. But enough is enough, I have to let it go. It is not going to get any better, the unread books are unread, the untook photographs are still untaken, and I am not going to think of any major insights during the next 12 hours or so. Goodnight Dissertation, I’ll miss ya!
Now what happened to that studio work?
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Tags: , bristol, dissertation, legible
d-i-s-s-e-r-t-a-t-i-o-n
Argh! I am so close to finishing, but the more I get done, the more I remember I have to add in - pictures, examples, where the hell was that quote from etc. And then printing and binding. I love writing, I really do but I am not appreciating the stress. Also, the halls where I live (and where the library is situated) has been going fire alarm crazy the last two days. It’s very unnerving to be working on something in a quiet room to suddenly have hells bells going off. It totally throws your composure, and it’s tough to remember what you were doing. It’s even more irritating when it happens late at night, as on Sunday when I was preparing for a good relaxing night of sleep, and then couldn’t. And possibly even worse when it was this morning at 5:45, waking me up from the really nervy half sleep I’d been having. Good for writing strange druggy books ( ie The Naked Lunch, William Burroughs ), not so good for academically rigorous dissertations. ( ie Legible Cities, me). well, back to it, so close to the finish line!I am going to get so very very drunk after I hand it in. So what if it’s at 10 in the morning, I think I will deserve it. Signing off, G
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Tags: dissertation, stress, fire alarms
Crit
Ahaha I should be posting a bit more regularly. Crit last week went well, but have landed myself with a lot of work. Am almost done on the typography project (good), have loads of research to do to prepare a pitch for ffres (not so good) and am meant to be starting research on a dissertation related project( er…) Oh, and in distributing my charity shop flyers have picked up another project to design a poster for a vinyl&CD fair in one of the charity shops. And my dissertation too.
I had a “Professional contexts” class today where we talked about what design is worth and why you should charge lots ( because you don’t end up with all of it!) how to set up your own company and lots about tax. It sounds complicated, but I enjoy working with figures, so I think I understood it all.
On with the dissertation tonight “What is a legible city and why is it important; A case study of the Bristol Legible City project”. I’ve got about 5000 words and need maybe another 2000. Hey ho let’s go!
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Tags: crit, dissertation, prof con
Middle of the week
Today was just spent inputting content into my typography brief “A complete waste of time” – that is its real title, and I’m wondering if actually that was a warning, not just a title. Part of me is trying to figure out if it is really worth it, but then I won’t know until I’ve actually done it and got it in my hand to show in the crit group tomorrow. So I’d better get on with trying to remember a Friday night out in 5 minute intervals. I hope that it starts working out, I know it could be a really great piece, but I just have to put the time in to make it that.I need to start researching my next project pretty soon too; I am hoping to enter the Ffres awards, which is a design competition for young welsh designers. On another, non-work related note,today I learnt how horribly addictive ebay can be when you have stuff of your own on there.
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Tags: dullness, ffres, typography
Charity Shopping
Urgh, the cold has got to me this week, am battling on through headaches though.
Today I revisited an older project “Provoke Change”. This project was a collaboration with one of my friends who is an illustrator and together we produced a map of all the charity shops in the town together with a brief guide. We also have a myspace at www.myspace.com/charitybath so you can check out our designs and photography there, although ideally I should get them up on here, as that would make all this a bit more interesting to look at, and talking about design without any visuals is a bit tricky. Anyway, I love love LOVE charity shops. So many high street shops are just dull, tired big wastes of money and you just look the same as everyone else. This project was meant to encourage people to visit charity shops and try something a bit new and different to what they usually would. Anyway, today I spent just getting the map and list of shops absolutely perfect, so that I would be happy to hand it out to the public. I think that our plan is to head into town on Friday and distribute a good amount of these maps (maybe 200) throughout town, and hopefully we’ll get some feedback in the next few weeks from the website and also from the charity shops themselves. It’s pretty exciting! I’m much happier with the designs now, and also it’s taken ages for me and my illustrator to be free at the same time for the distribution,so it’ll be good to get this one out there. I was getting worried that we would never get around to it, but I think we’ve timed it well as the Christmas shopping season is upon us now, and town is a lot busier and full of shoppers.
I imagine that my not-so-secret location has been revealed now!
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Tags: charity shops, design, provoke change
Welcome to the world of a third year graphics student...
Today was a busy one. To begin with I had a group crit, where we talked about each others work. It was interesting to see what others are working on and even in our small group of five, there were many different approaches. I have just started a typography brief where I am listing everything I do for a period of time, and presenting it somehow. A few weekends ago I went to the first Swnfest in Cardiff, saw lots of great bands and generally had a wild weekend break from university. I’m trying to make a piece that commemorates this as Cardiff’s first festival and also reminds me that there is life outside of dissertations and projects. So far, it’s a bit like a railway timetable and incredibly dull to look at even by railway standards, so this week I’m going to be adding much more information to it to make it a lot more dense.
What font is this wonderful piece of information graphic art using? Helvetica. I’m still not sure what my opinion is on this one. I saw the documentary on the Beeb the other week, and I still just don’t know. I think I like it because sometimes it can look great and has so many uses, some of which are documented in Lars Müller’s book on the subject. Equally, helvetica can look dull, tired and very boring because it is used for so many things. A lot depends on the treatment of it and the context though; bad design is still going to be bad no matter what typeface you use. I think that I’ll be sticking with it for this project because I have not used it for a while in my design work, I think just because it is so commonly used and maybe it’s a phase that designers go through “oh no, not helvetica. Mere mortals use that font every day, that’s not for us.” Well, I’ll see how it goes and hopefully this project will work out.
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Tags: crit, dissertation, helvetica, Neighbours, Rashomon, swn fest, typography
