Category Archives: Research

Gregory Crewdson: Cathedral of Pines

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A wooden box

Five dead birds

Nakedness

Nature as redemptive

Light as transformational

Solitary

Suspended animation

Dirt and debris

Water

Container and contained

Search for meaning

Ordinariness and intensity

Tumbling responses

Framed and framing

Intimate gaze

There are a myriad of possible responses to the Cathedral of Pines and I know at this point in time I am far from having them organised in my head. Crewdson talks of the work in this series as being more personal, and as optimistic. It has emerged out of a period of change for him that brought him away from his usual cityscapes and into nature. He talks eloquently of light and nature being redemptive. My response seems to be an embodied and emotional one. I am at once moved, frightened, enthralled, appalled… This leaves me torn in terms of writing for my blog, it takes me from an aesthetic and emotional response to having to move to a more cognitive domain. 

The images have an extraordinary quality that I feel draws you in. As someone with an deepening interest in still life I enjoy their carefully constructed nature, I see them as Vanitas on a grand scale. I like the relatively low-key palettes, the multiple frames within each frame and that the images are ambiguous enough for me to bring my own meaning to them. I found I was constantly moving between the image as a whole and the details. Tiny fragments of life become repeated motifs – nail varnish, emery boards, tablets and pill pots. I find I become a little uncomfortable with the intimacy in some cases.

 Several images stand out for me:

  • Mother and daughter, 2014
  • The Barn
  • The Disturbance

 I can read these in many ways either negatively toned or positively toned. My initial response to Mother & Daughter is one of concern and anguish. The door is open, the snow has drifted in, interior and exterior are intermingling.

 The images take me into theory in two ways – the first is the psychoanalytic concept of ‘container/contained’ from Wilfred Bion and the second is the notion of ‘frame’ and how we assign meaning through our frames of reference.

Cathedral of the Pines design

 The exhibition and promotional designs are spare and minimal, in some ways in contrast to the works themselves. A delicate pine sitting above wide spaced sanserif text. I think it conveys a sense of openness that can be seen in some of the images. The accompanying catalogue is substantial and exquisite. It sits in harmony with the exhibition and while it cannot replace the experience of seeing the actual prints it definitely does them justice.

 I am left with a slight question about what the images are saying about women but that is for another day.

Research Point: Magazine typefaces

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Research Point: Magazine typefaces (Graphic Design 1 pg. 97)

Go through the print material you have collected and divide it into ones that look easy to read immediately and those that don’t. Is this due to the typefaces used, the way the type is laid out – the number of words per line and the column width, or its alignment?

Work out from your examples what the designers have done to make things more legible and readable.

I can see that this activity could easily become a bit of an obsession! It was fascinating to note how fast I made the decision about what I felt was easily readable and worked well for me. It wasn’t until I started measuring and analysing the characteristics of the pages that I realised how much sits behind that almost instantaneous decision. I looked at a wide variety of print materials from the “Lakeland” catalogue and “Your Cat,” to “Time Magazine” and the “British Journal of Photography” (BJP) on the basis that this would give me some very different house styles to consider.

As I started deconstructing the layout I was very aware that my needs in terms of legibility and readability may not be the same as everyone else’s. I wear varifocal glasses and have a slight astigmatism in my left eye; for the most part I take my glasses off when I’m reading but that is dependent on type size.

In the end I analysed eight pages from six magazines, ranging from those I thought were quite legible and readable to examples I found very difficult to read. Rather than try and do everything on the computer I photocopied the pages that I wanted to look at and marked them up by hand. I was then able to scan them and add them to my learning log.

In order of preference in terms of my ability to read them, from best to worst, the articles are:

  1. A Tale of Two Hermiones: Time Magazine
  2. A Changing Nature: Your Cat
  3. In Print Lotus: BJP
  4. Labour of Love: Good Housekeeping
  5. The Mood: Elle Magazine
  6. Video: People Management
  7. You don’t want to alarm anyone…: People Management
  8. Experience: Elle Magazine

The first two were very close and I was surprised at choosing a justified text as this is usually harder to read. I think the centred headings and use of white space is probably what worked for me. It is a very simple layout, which is something I have taken note of.

I was also slightly surprised with ‘Your Cat’ because it is the only one I looked at that has four columns. I was attracted by the quite informal header typeface, and the San-serif body text with no more than six or seven words per line I found very easy to read. I think this was helped by the ragged, rather than justified edge. Overall, the tone set by the typeface seemed causal and friendly.

The BJP has used three equal width columns with a serif text and a bold sub header. My critique of this design would be that the typeface is a little small for me, but that may be expected as the emphasis seems to be more on the photographs than the text.

The Good Housekeeping page I just find really messy and I’m not sure where my eyes want to go. It uses six colours, mixed cases, regular, italic and bold typeface. It feels like the whole toolkit has been thrown at it. The serif typeface with ragged edge is reasonably clear to read but the overall design put me off reading.

Elle Magazine’s ‘The Mood’ uses a more limited typeface range and has more coherence than the Good Housekeeping page but it is too small for me to read comfortably, which I find off putting particularly because all the paragraphs run together without any space between them. The tone of the typography feels quite formal and probably aimed at a readership that I am not part of.

Both the People Management pages look overloaded to me. There is so much going on I am inclined to just flick past them. I think it has not long been redesigned to a smaller format, which I suspect was intended to make it look more contemporary. The heavy solid lines on “You don’t,” and the mix of colours and symbols and text on “Video” make the typefaces leap about on the page for me. The typeface on “Video” is also too small.

Again it was a close decision but Elle Magazine’s “Experience” is the least successful from my perspective. Small dense serif text, uneven column widths, justified text, narrow side margins all make this page very unappealing and something I am unlikely to read. The designer has used indents and the large capital “M” in an attempt to break things up but I don’t find it effective.

This was a really useful activity in terms of thinking about my own work. It has highlighted for me that I have a preference for a simple clear typographic layout but that I shouldn’t rule things out too quickly – like using justified text – as there seem to be ways to make it work in terms of readability and legibility. I was surprised to see the extent of the variation within each of the magazines in terms of design. Most seem to stick to two to three typefaces but these can have different formats, type sizes and colours.

 

 

Research Point: Vernacular typography

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Collage of vrnaclar street signs, handwritten and printed

Research Point: Vernacular typography (Graphic Design 1: page 90)

Vernacular typography can be very well crafted but it can also be crudely created signs done in a hurry. Either way it is using typography and lettering to create visual communications Take a look around you and identify some vernacular typography that you find interesting. Document the results.

Collage of vrnaclar street signs, handwritten and printed

Vernacular typography

I happened to be in Kentish Town for a meeting and it provided a perfect opportunity for looking at vernacular typography. In an age where digital reproduction is so easily available I confess I hadn’t expected to see many handwritten signs, but once I’d spotted one they seemed to be everywhere. I particularly liked the Laurent Perrier one because its message is so clear.

I also like Strollers mainly because it made me laugh. This is a coffee shop for all!  But the coloured type looks a little faded, the positioning of ‘retired people’ is slightly odd, and the lack of opening times seems to be a bit of an omission.

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Research Point: Magazine typefaces

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Paragraph of text from Elle magazine with analysis marks
Paragraph of text from Elle magazine with analysis marks

Typeface analysis

(Research point: Graphic Design 1, page 87)

Choose a magazine and look at the main typefaces they use for the body text and headlines.

I had bought a number of magazines to use for the various exercises and research points and decided to use ‘Elle’ magazine for this activity. This is not a magazine I’m particularly familiar with and it seems to have a very distinctive style so I thought it would be a good starting point. I used various online tools (Identifont, WhatTheFont and Font Matcherator) with mixed success. The various searches gave five matches for the main heading:

  • Nimbus Roman Modern Compress D
  • Euphonia Latin
  • Redeye serif bold
  • Ambroise Std Francois Demi – this was the closest match as far as I could see

On further research a couple of blogs suggest it is Didot, which having seen it, I think is correct. I am obviously getting a bit typeface nerdy because this blog piece on Didot’s history was fascinating!

The brief was just the kind of challenge that Hoefler & Co. loves: we were asked to create a typeface that works like no other, a Modern which — unlike the commercial cuts of Bodoni — would have hairline serifs, and maintain them over a range of sizes. From the Didot collection we chose the grosse sans pareille no. 206 of Molé le jeune as a historical model, and extended the scant material in Didot’s 1819 Spécimen des Caracteres with quite a bit of invention: italics designed to work at large sizes, a range of different weights, and the many characters that Didot’s workshop never made. In the service of the design’s thin hairlines, we drew each of the family’s six styles in seven different “optical sizes,” each designed to be used at a different range of sizes, for a total of forty-two fonts.

The ‘July’ subhead got 9 matches:

  • Vedo Book
  • Irma Light, Regular & Medium
  • Cyntho Pro Regular
  • Relay Wide
  • Family Bird
  • Relay Wide Light

It looks to me like Relay Wide Light is the closest match. At the beginning of the activity I noticed I was broadly scanning the words and the typefaces but I was then looking in more detail (see the image above). The sorts of things I started picking out were:

  • Bowl shapes
  • Whether there were serifs
  • The position of serifs – were they either side of the line or just above/below, right or left
  • Where serifs sharp or rounded
  • Angles – this was noticeable particularly on the ‘S’ character, did the top and bottom line up or where they slightly offset

This was another good activity for really looking at typeface construction and understanding the characteristics that enabled me to decide which typeface is the closest match. It was also interesting to see that although a magazine like ‘Elle’ has its own house style much of its content includes advertising with additional typefaces. I was struck in looking through the magazine at just how many typefaces are included; this must make presenting a consistent style challenging.

Once I had finished my typeface searches I came across this blog piece, mystery solved!

Domaine and Galaxie Copernicus in use for Elle UK by Suzanne Sykes & Mark Leeds in the UK.

Suzanne & Mark have really mixed it up with three totally different typeface families, including a forthcoming sanserif from Mário Feliciano. On paper and in theory, these typefaces shouldn’t “mix”, but in Elle they totally work. It’s a testament to the typographic skills of the designers that they’ve created a sympathetic environment for the fonts to thrive! The magazine is thoroughly contemporary, as it needs to be, and the pacing various throughout. Some spreads verge on controlled mania, others are calm and tastefully restrained.

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Research Point: Typography 2

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Images of protest placards

Protest Typography

Our civilization is based on the alphabet and numerals. These elementary marks have no semantic meaning, but have been assigned roles as visual substitutes for speech sounds and arithmetic quantities. (Meggs, 1992)

…typography with its ability to corporealize language can be a capable tool of intervention against issues that concern us as citizen-designers. In order to understand typography’s capacity as a means for design activism there is the need to perceive typography as part of a greater system, –a network that includes written communication, language, technology, politics and society. (Özkal, 2016)

Typography, it seems to me, has a crucial role to play in capturing our thoughts and putting them out in the world. Often this is probably done without much thought – we just happen to use whatever is set as the default on our computer or device. I remember for a long time in the organisations I worked for everything was Times New Roman for day-to-day communication.

Having worked with a designer when setting up my consultancy business I am aware that the relationship between the typeface used and the message you want to convey is very nuanced. We worked through a series of questions around the tone I wanted to set, as well as practicalities like legibility and readability. The typeface was saying something important about me and the character of my business.

I would argue that typography has an innate power. I have been collecting examples of protest typography on Pinterest and it is interesting to see that in most images of marches in particular, the placards are ubiquitous. The protest typography I have looked at so far seems to have a number of common characteristics:

  • It is designed to ‘shout’, to be big and bold
  • It is generally black, although reversed out typeface, and sometimes red are also used
  • Whether handwritten or printed it is predominantly all caps
  • It is also generally san serif, with quite a slab typeface
  • The message is usually conveyed as succinctly as possible – of the 117 images I have pinned so far the word count is generally between three and seven
  • Some are ‘designed’ and mass produced, others are handwritten on found materials

Its role seems to be to reinforce an uncompromising point. A statement that makes it clear what the bearer thinks about the issue in hand and that this view often sits in opposition to what might be regarded as a dominant ideology. I think this is what Oskal (2016) is referring to when he talks about being watchful of the invisible actors in typographic communication. This leaves me with a question about whether typography in itself is benign, is it purely the application that positions it?

Letters in their attempt to confront letters, create a crack that makes us become more watchful; hence recognize the invisible actors in typographic communication. Typography can work with or resist these actors, but in whichever way, to use its capacity it is necessary to perceive typography in its relation with other systems, such as language, technology, ideology and politics. (Özkal, 2016: 8)

References

Meggs, P. B. (1992). Type and image: The language of graphic design: John Wiley & Sons.

Özkal, Ö. (2016). Letters against letters: Typography as a means for Design Activism. Paper presented at the 5T Design & Resistence Conference Proceedings.

 

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Research Point: Typography

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The history of typography, printing, and reading are all linked; what else can you find out about this history that you find interesting?

A quick online search of the ‘history of typography’ reveals a wealth of information primarily documenting the timeline from its earliest developments through to the present day. This short animation is fun.

This TedX is also a playful look at how we see typography

I was struck by the statement that ‘typography, printing and reading are linked’; for me this has political connotations. It is closely linked to education and goes back to the debates about providing the masses with the ability; a political act that was seen as controversial. Much of my secondary research has therefore focused on typography in relation to politics and protest.

When I first started GD1 I watched lots of graphic design documentaries, it was a new field for me and I knew that this immersive approach works for me. One of the videos I watched was Wim Crouwel Talking About Swiss Style.

While it was not specifically about typography in relation to protest what I was struck by was the fact that typefaces I may take for granted were not universally available, he describes how difficult it was to get the Grotesque typefaces in the Netherlands when he started working. This is an extraordinary concept in an era when I can pretty much download any typeface I want (as long as I can pay for them). I think this is important in terms of the cultural history of typography. I was intrigued and previously unaware that typefaces were so closely associated with particular countries of origin.

 

 

 

Research Point: Critiquing my work

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Design Council Double Diamon model two red diamonds showing product design process

Research Point (Page 44, OCA Graphic Design): Critiquing my work

How do you approach being self-critical? What issues does it raise? Do you have friends, family, colleagues or a group who will critique your work for you?

Thinking about critiquing my own work is not as simple as it might appear. There is obviously a process of decision-making and editing that occurs without which I would never be able to select a final design, but surfacing what at first appears to be an intuitive and not necessarily conscious process is not easy. Inevitably it raises aesthetic concerns about beauty, ugliness, and so on, my first response to the question of how I critique my work is ‘I know it when I see it’ and ‘it’s the version I like’. A response that I accept may be less than helpful and doesn’t necessarily give me, let alone anyone else, an insight into my design process.

Design Council Double Diamon model two red diamonds showing product design process

Design Council ‘Double Diamond’ model

In researching ways to describe the process I came across the Design Council’s “Double Diamond” four step model:

  • Discover
  • Define
  • Develop
  • Deliver

Although this seems to apply more to physical product design I thought the iterative process of diverging and converging seemed familiar, indeed it is very like a model I developed for my own research process in terms of my organisational studies. I find this awareness a useful part of my own reflective practice because it helps give me a sense of when I might be opening out (idea generating) and when I need to focus down (problem definition and solving). In getting to understand this process I can start to recognise times when I have moved through the process and narrowed things down too quickly or when I am spending too long idea generating. Sometimes this is when it is useful to bring in external feedback, as I may not always spot for myself how something might be developed further or focused down more.

After a bit of research there seems to be some common areas of advice around how to review your design work:

  1. Make sure you are answering and working to the brief: as a freelance consultant I am very familiar with working to a brief and also recognising that the contracting process can be iterative as a project develops
  2. Consider current trends: this to me needs to balance of what is ‘on trend’ and what is gimmicky or trying too hard. You don’t want a design that looks very dated or out of touch or lacking in ideas. Equally, it seems to me to reflect back to the brief – is the client looking for something timeless, fresh, traditional, contemporary and so on
  3. Try different perspectives: upside down, monochrome, stripped back to outline and so on
  4. Slow down and step back: this is something familiar to me from my work writing, I need to have time to review and edit (although this is not always within my control)
  5. Remember design theory: colour, composition, typography, balance and so on
  6. Make a storyboard: tell the story of the design. I have a preference to lay different ideas out on the floor or put them on the wall so I can physically see and live with them for a while
  7. Emotional attachment: there is another element that doesn’t seem to get mentioned very much, which for me is important and that is about emotional engagement with your ideas. I know there are ideas I become wedded to and all the rational analysis in the world makes it hard to shift from that idea

I think there are some basic questions that I follow that echo the process in the course workbook, they are not necessarily always in awareness and that is something to be developed further:

  • Have I answered the brief?
  • Is the design usable (I might add beautiful, funny, happy etc., if it’s appropriate to the brief)?
  • Do I like the concept at a glance?
  • Is the design trendy?
  • What is the message or idea? Does it communicate what I am intending?
  • Am I emotionally engaged (if so to what degree)?

I like the point made by Design Shack –

“Good design answers questions. It often answers them before users have a chance to even ask them.”

Interestingly, it is often the approach I take in my consultancy work too – my self-reflection stems from asking ‘what question am I trying to answer?’

In terms of wider feedback I have family and friends who are often willing to share their opinions. I also make use of two of the OCA Facebook fora (Photography Level 1 and Visual Communications). I haven’t shared anything through OCA Discuss yet, partly a usability issue because of accessing the site on occasion, and I think partly because of a need to build my confidence in a new field first.

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Finding the essence: examples of minimalist design

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A square with a circle inside and intersecting lines to each corner
A square with a circle inside and intersecting lines to each corner

The Krasnopolski Grid

Is there any better symbol for MacGyver than a bent paperclip? …the entire collection is worth a look…

Jonathon Hoefler, Hoefler &Co

 

I find Albert Exergian’s film posters an inspiring collection, I love their bold simplicity and the way they seem to distil the film to its essence. Reflecting on my response to them I am conscious that they work on the basis of shared cultural references. You need to know the film or show (or at least have heard about it) for the symbols to work effectively. I must admit there are a couple I don’t get because I don’t know the work they refer to. Adding lots of information would probably make little difference as I still wouldn’t know the references.

That said I like the fact that I have to work at these as viewer. It also makes me think about what I might do as a similar exercise. I think it is significant that this was a self-initiated project but that it generally seems to be referred to as an ‘iconic’ set of designs. In researching Exergian I came across two other designers whose work is also minimalist in approach. – Outmane Amahau and Michal Krasnopolski.

Krasnopolski developed his film posters based on using the constraint of a grid system; I am really taken by the creativity that imposing these restrictions has engendered. The target audience is the movie enthusiast so again they work based on the view that the viewer is likely to know the cultural references.

Amahau’s posters take different art movements as their subject matter.

The series was born from my observation… When I imagine an art movement, in my mind I see a minimalist form taken from a famous work. For example, when I think of Surrealism, the first image that comes to my mind is a melting clock. Huffington Post, 2012

Of the three I think Amahau includes more detail, which is perhaps due to the complexity of the subject matter and trying to sum up an entire artistic movement in a single image.  I think I might have pulled back some of his images further – perhaps just the eyes and mouth for ‘The Scream’ for example.

What is engaging my interest in all of this work is how you take the essence of something – an object or a movement – and communicate it. Not dissimilar to the earlier ‘more or less information’ exercise for GD1. I am interested in how imposing constraints and forcing yourself to pare something right back to the essentials requires problem solving skills and inspires creativity.

 

 

 

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Research Point One

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A series of different typefaces - based on 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' phrase

Research Point (pg.38 OCA Graphic Design)

What sort of items have you collected so far?

What was it that made you want to keep these items?

My research to date has been broad in terms of getting to know the field a little better, and narrow in terms of the specific exercises and assignments. A core part of my strategy involves using different Pinterest boards extensively to collect visual examples:

I am also following a number of OCA Pinterest boards as that gives me access to more examples and includes things I might not have collected myself. I have a growing pile of books that span practical guides through to theoretical and conceptual approaches. These are particularly useful for weaving into other aspects of my life as I travel!

I am making use of my sketchbook to collect examples of the work of a range of Graphic Designers. This has been very helpful in terms of the HG Wells book cover design exercise. I have also been collecting magazines and online pages to get a feel for different design and layout approaches.

A series of different typefaces - based on 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' phrase

Collecting

The current collecting focus for me is typefaces. I have learnt how to add new typefaces to my apps on the desktop and am making use of lots of free resources. It has been interesting exploring a number of websites that talk about trending typefaces. The Google fonts site is also helpful in that it suggests typeface combinations (this is helping me gain confidence in thinking about what I would use). Typography is the area I probably feel least comfortable with and although it comes later in the course I feel it is something I need to be thinking about as soon as possible.

The reasons for collecting these different materials vary. With some it was purely because I had some form of immediate response to them, approaches I really liked and disliked. Some surprised me or showed an idea I would never have thought of. Some of the illustration based examples made me full of awe – a case of illustration envy! In many cases it is an aesthetic response, something beautiful, ugly, funny or sad. In this process I have also found myself particularly drawn to work with a socio-political message. I am more interested in this field than the commercial ‘selling’ aspects of graphic design although I accept that there can be complex messages in those too and the dividing lines can be fuzzy.

I love research and as such this all feels quite natural to me. I think the thing I need watch is the never-ending data collection syndrome. The collecting bit is easy, it is knowing when to stop and make decisions that is the challenge!

 

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The art of postcards

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Collage of lots of different postcards

The humble postcard is something I have probably paid little attention to in recent years, although I do often seem to spend time hunting for one to add a ‘thank you’ to my occasional second-hand book sales.

As with the paper exercise I had a look through my stationery stocks to see if I had any postcards and was surprised to find I actually had quite a few – some plain, some from past work projects, some from my travels in Canada and some art cards. I also found the beautiful CIA Graeae project postcards made from all the artworks in the exhibition. I then had a quick trawl online for inspiration and bought a few more including a historical set.

During my search I came across a real gem in the Marimekko set of 100 cards (50 designs) that are beautiful, fun and a riot of colour. They are a tribute to the textile design of Marimekko and have certainly given me some inspiration.

The postcard seems so well suited to its purpose it has hardly changed in 120 years. Reading some of the different accounts of the history of postcards in the UK it looks like it took about thirty years to get from the original version to its more familiar form with an image on one side and a divided back to allow for a message and address. Rather than repeat the detailed chronology that others cover well, I really wanted to note how it has been connected to social, cultural, technological and political contexts.  In summary the history of postcards follows several phases:

  • 1840 the penny postage stamp introduced
  • 1869 Austria introduces the first postcard
  • 1870 first postcards issued in the UK
  • 1894 first picture postcards produced
  • 1899 standard sizes introduced – 5.5” x 3.5”
  • 1902 the divided back postcard was introduced
  • 1902- 1914 the Golden Age – the texts of their day!
  • 1916-1930 White border era and a shift in popularity from greetings to view cards
  • 1930-1945 Linen card era. Vivid colour on linen paper. Main genres are view, comic and political humour
  • 1939 onwards Modern Chrome era. Technology allows the production of high quality photochromes

Postcards seem to come in a variety of genres which have evolved over their history, including:

  • Greetings
  • View
  • Art
  • Commemorative or historical
  • Promotional
  • Humour

In developing my postcard set I obviously have a specific brief in terms of introducing myself but researching the history of postcards has helped me explore the kinds of messages I might want to communicate.

History sources:

http://www.oldpostcards4sale.co.uk/history-of-uk-postcards

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/photography/History-of-Postcards.html