EVE WHELAN

Following on from the lecture and seminar, where we learnt of the importance of layout and ideas of how to set out research documents. In the seminar I created a number of layout suggestions; since then I have used some of the layout ideas in Brief 4 Expound of the Foundation Studio Practice module. Examples of the uses are shown below with my initial layout and the spreads I have used it on in my Research and Development document.

Laura Oldfield Ford was born in Halifax and is very interested in the Punk subculture and counter culture. Ford is an activist with a voice to be heard. She went to the site of the London 2012 Olympics to document the buildings that had to be vacated for the 2012 Olympic Park. She created beautifully detailed pen drawings of the buildings; some of the drawings then had pink or yellow ink painted over sections of the illustration. The choice of colours was carefully made as pink and yellow are the two main colours in the London 2012 Olympic logo. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3050-always-yearning-for-the-time-that-just-eluded-us https://redandblackrainbows.wordpress.com/tag/laura-oldfield-ford/ https://kottke.org/12/07/the-naughty-2012-olympics-logo While Napoleon was in power he enlisted Haussmann to redesign Paris for him. Napoleon wanted a big open city with large boulevards (main streets) to make crowd control easier and the chance of rebellion dec...

Following on from the Stop Motion Animation seminar I wanted to create more of my own work using the suggested app. The theme I decided on was space, inspired by the final After Effects workshop for Process and Production. I created a little rocket and a starry background and started taking photos. The first animation below is more of a trial run, making sure that things looked how I wanted and I was moving the individual elements at the correct speed. I then created the second animation below, adding in extra elements like the planet, making the animation more complete.   Rocket_1 from Eve Whelan on Vimeo . Rocket_Journey_ from Eve Whelan on Vimeo .

Chris Ware is a graphic novelist who works in a somewhat unique way. Ware doesn’t tell stories like a typical graphic novel, where you read from one panel to the next, left to right and then continue down the page. Instead, Ware treats the page as a whole and creates one full scene with lots going on and dialog that doesn’t have to be read in a certain order; but once all read it will have built up a full scene. He also uses the language of architecture, almost personifying the buildings in his work, delving into the way the characters live and interact with the space to help you understand it further. He likes to start off working by hand then scans his work into the computer to add colour but doesn’t use the computer to add non-realistic colours, from the millions he has available at the click of a mouse, he sticks to colours that are more real and believable.                 A piece of work Ware created...

In the seminar we were told about a stop motion animation mobile app for creating quick and easy animations. After looking at William Kentridge in a lecture (and the previous post) in a small group we created a little animation of a boat using newspaper, plain paper and charcoal. The process was simple create a background base of a sea, on a newspaper spread which we added to with each shot. Then created a few separate elements to move individually, such as the boat and clouds. The first animation we created was a quick trial of just moving the boat across the calm water to work out the pace and angles. The second animation we created was around the idea of the boat sailing across the sea as it becomes progressively stormier. For my first two attempts at stop motion animation, and in a short space of time, I am pleased with the result, the way it looks handmade with no worries about each shot being perfect. Stop Motion Animation - Boat 1 from Eve Whelan on Vimeo . Sto...

Using the Shorter English Dictionary, 1936 edition, volume 1, Kentridge created an animation drawing on the pages and using the existing text as an effective background. Kentridge is a South African artist who uses his countries history of apartheid as a topic for his work. The book he uses, the use of text as ‘ground’ and image and the meaning behind the text all play important roles into making the result as meaningful as it is. The use of the book Kentridge picked could have been chosen for a couple of reasons, firstly for the quality of the paper and the ink and the way they interact together, the way they can be worked upon. Secondly, the book could have been chosen for its particular subject, in this case a dictionary which tries to bring meaning to everything and bring it all together to be one, quite the opposite to the apartheid of South Africa, keeping people separate. The use of the large blocks of dictionary text as ‘ground’ means the text itself becomes a kind of...

In both the lecture and seminar, we discussed the correct and incorrect ways to work through and present a research and development document. Making sure you display your work throughout the document in a linear and coherent way. Starting with research, of course, looking into your given topic and really getting a feel for what you are dealing with. Then looking at particular artist pieces that are relevant to the topic and the initial ideas you get; responding to their work in your own style. Then moving forth into potential routes for your project to go down; having multiple ideas is key to working out early on which ideas will and won’t be successful. Development of the ideas continues and then you pick one idea to push forward and refine further. Resulting in multiple final pieces, which can be printed and mocked up, or displayed in their own final piece document. The layout of your research and development document is extremely important, making sure all of your work is displaye...

Salvador Dali once said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing”. This statement holds a lot of truth as we grow up as ‘copiers’; that is how we learn everything, to get a fundamental knowledge of anything you have to begin by copying before you can progress onto something more original. Yet nothing is truly original, everything has been inspired by something and most things can be deemed a prequel or sequel of something else.                Kirby Ferguson created a series of videos called Everything is a Remix, explaining his thoughts on how nothing is original more and the ways in which we can legally remix. He talks of Led Zeppelin and how this famous Rock band copy a lot of riffs from blues songs and even copy lyrics and names from other songs without giving the original artist attribute or marketing it as a cover. Ferguson explains how this remixing spreads over to the film industry also...

A lecturer and PhD student, Jonathan Lindley spoke of his journey into the adoption of sound. He started out like myself as a Graphic Design student, struggling to sync video with audio. This process of adopting sound seemed to be a way of rejecting being a specialist and trying to become more of a ‘Jack of all trades’. He spoke of the difficulties he faced while trying to be freelance when you aren’t an established designer, having difficulties getting work and getting work that pays well for your time. After working for a few artists doing graphic videos for their songs he decided to start his own recording studio to make his own music instead of just designing graphics for other people’s music he could do it for his own too. Not only that he could also begin to design the experience; using sound responsive graphics to engage the audience. He became interested in the idea of Neo-tribalism (a new revived form of being in a tribe) and how this affected your life and experiences. Th...

In a seminar we were asked to pick a song and draw a response to it. My chosen song was Guns N’ Roses Welcome to the Jungle, I wanted to create an image of jungle chaos; the type of place the wacky lead singer Axl Rose would thrive in. Looking at the lyrics, the following lines stood out for the jungle design: “Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games”; “Welcome to the jungle, we take it day by day”; “You can taste the bright lights, but you won’t get here for free” and “Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here every day”. I wanted to create a chaotic, rock and role jungle scene with lightening, fire, broken glass and just a sense of unruliness. The stereotypical rock and roll lifestyle of rule breaking, I wanted to harness this with a loose and messy pen drawing, the kind of art where if you make a mistake you have no way of removing, only working around it to make it fit again. I am quite pleased with the way the drawing ended up and the process of making it was enjoyable, I ...

We live our lives through filtering; we are unable to process everything around us, so we naturally ignore somethings. We are consumers of everything around us however most of this happens subconsciously so as a designer you must design so the consumer is consciously aware of it and doesn’t naturally filter it out. The way we process images is the light is diffracted through the lens in our eye and hits the retina at the back. When it hits the retina, the image is inverted, messages are then sent to the brain via the optical nerve where the brain then decodes and flips the image. Our vision does have blind spots to it; this is when the diffracted light hits an optical nerve rather than the retina. Colour blindness is most commonly with the colours red and green but can also be for the colours yellow and blue. There is a nature vs nurture question about our depth perception, is it something we are born with or something we learn in our earlier years? A test was done with young...

               A brand is the idea or concept of something in the eyes of the user; how the “product” is received by its target market. Branding has become the driving force of communication in the modern world. With vastly increasing rates of consumerism and a global capitalist markets we’re giving brands the chance, nay power, to influence us more. A great example of this is the bottled water industry, an industry that marks up ten-fold an item we can get for free from our kitchen taps. People can develop, unknowingly, psychological and emotional connections to a brand; making a brand appeal to a user because of past associations or experiences. An example of a brand that changed a big part of its identity to boost the user appeal is BBC 2 when they recreated their logo. Making what is a small change gave such a large impact. BBC 2 was losing ratings and people thought the channel to be somewhat boring; they cre...

Advertising has changed and developed so much over the past few decades. Through the years vast amounts of experimental, new, iconic and simply brilliant design work has made its way into the public eye. Going back to the 1960s in this radical period where youth cultures were born, young people had an income and things were looking up after the recovery of the post war economy. Graphic Design was a fairly new career and advertising was naïve, there were only three television channels; with only one of them, ITV, being able to advertise. One of the very iconic 1960s advertisements was that of the Volkswagen Beetle, selling it to Americans (as lovers of unnecessarily large Cadillac’s and Corvette’s), the ingenious idea to play on its small size and make it appear as a toy car on the posters. This wave of “Beetlemania” rushed across the states. https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/147492956519827761/?lp=true In strode the 1970s; a decade where Graphic Design really came int...

Helvetica (or Neue Haas Grotesk) is a sans-serif font created in 1957 by Swiss designer Max Miedinger, with help from Eduard Hoffmann. The font was renamed in 1960 from Neue Haas Grotesk to Helvetica; the font was named after Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland. The pair wanted to create a clean looking, neutral font which was completely different to many of the 19 th Century fonts. Helvetica was what the world of typefaces needed at the time a fresh face that could convey a message in a clear and neutral manner. With an uncommonly high x-height, very densely packed letters and neo-grotesque style Helvetica became a hallmark of International Typographic Style that came from Switzerland.  However, since then the font of Helvetica has been so widely used to the point where it has become overused and generic. It has been used by many big companies as their logo font, companies such as Lufthansa, American Apparel, American Airlines and Nestlé. Even the New York Subway system a...

               The Bauhaus movement created a variety of simplistic and modern fonts, with a lack of extravagance. Josef Albers believed it could be stripped back even more and that a typeface could be created from only 10 stencil components. This was a purely lower-case font as a lot of the Bauhaus fonts were.   I was given the 10 components and tried to create a typeface from them. This was then compared to Albers’ actual font, there are some similarities with letters with the I, N, O and X being the same and the E, H, K, P, Q and Y being a pretty close match. However, a lot of letters are drastically different such as the A and G. My typeface created from Josef Albers 10 stencil components. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2724?artist_id=97&locale=en&sov_referrer=artist

               The font is a collection of letters, numbers and symbols. Whereas the typeface is the actual design of it. Typography in design can be just as important as the image itself. It can convey a wide range of themes and feelings to provide the overall piece with more impact.                A lot of fonts were inspired by the Bauhaus movement; they progressed from the extravagant, hard to read calligraphy styles to the simplistic, minimal fonts. A great example of an iconic Bauhaus font is the Universal font created by Herbert Bayer in 1925. The whole font is based around the circle and the font is quite often used tilted slightly to the left to give it a sense of movement and to almost bring it to life a little. A slightly more modern version of a Bauhaus font is Helvetica, created by Eduard Hoffman in 1953. Helvetica keeps with the s...

               Surrealism is a philosophical movement that began in 1920s Paris. It was seen as an escape from reality and the harshness of war; an opportunity to explore the subconscious of the human mind. It revolutionised human experience by removing all reason and control.                The word surrealism was first used by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe his opera “Les Mamelles de Tiresias”, written in 1903, performed in 1917. Surrealism is the idea of combining together two elements that don’t usually go together to create a strong and startling result for the viewer.                Salvador Dali is a surrealist artist, with one of his most famous paintings being “The Persistence of Memory” 1931. This painting, as pictured below, is an excellent example of surreal...

               Postmodernism began after Modernism didn’t quite live up to everyone’s expectations. Postmodernists wanted to challenge the audience and make them ask questions. Postmodernist style is about collage, mixing styles, mixing high and low art and critiquing basic assumptions about life. Postmodernist art is often political or satirical, playing on recent events of the time.                Self-referencing seems to be a big part of Postmodernism. A few examples of self-referential pieces include M. C. Escher’s ‘Drawing Hands’, 1948, where his drawing is of two hands both drawing the other as they are being drawn. ‘The Treachery of Images’ by Ren é Magritte, 1929, is also an excellent example of self-referencing, as it refers to itself in the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, explaining to the audience it is not a pipe, simply a dra...

               Wassily Kandinsky believed that each primary shape: triangle, circle and square. Had a corresponding primary colour: red, yellow or blue. In 1923 he created a questionnaire to ask people of the Bauhaus, where you had to colour in a triangle circle and a square with a primary colour and explain why you chose to pair the shape and colour. Kandinsky’s ideal for this was a blue circle, red square and a yellow triangle. This result was the majority during the 1923 Bauhaus test. I gave the test to a number of friends and family, there results are as follows. 1.       Red for the triangle as a triangle has sharp edges like blade that can draw blood and blood is red, also red has three letters and a triangle has three sides. Yellow for the circle as it reminds me of the sun when paired together. Blue for the square as blue has four letters and a square has four sides. 2. ...

               The Bauhaus was an experimental art and design school in Germany that lived only a short life, however its legacy lives on. Its short fourteen year life began in Weimar in 1919, where it remained for only six years before relocating to Dessau in 1925. Its final location was in Berlin where it closed in 1933, as things were changing in Germany in the lead up to World War II.                The Bauhaus wanted to combine art, design and crafts to produce practical, functional and clean looking pieces. They wanted to take a step away from traditional forms of expression and the late 19 th Century to early 20 th Century styles. Bauhaus were pioneers in Modernism and the roots of many things we see today began in the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus used simple shapes and colours, they believed the shapes triangle, circle, square to be primary...