EVE WHELAN

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...