Happy Easter!

I thought I would be nice and come back to say Happy Easter to all you guys!

Don't worry, I still have updates to post here, including my prototype for final three-dimensional letter-form  and some updates on my sketchbook! But for now, I'm just taking it easy for today!

Simplicity is Key

Over the Bank Holiday weekend, I work on my sketchbook, which contains are own personal ideas, and is a great way to work on our artistic skills and creative thinking. I also worked on some more thumbnails, and while I was working on these thumbnails, I constantly thought of being less illustrative and let the good 'aul letter B show the Bank. So, as we all know, the world of banks is crumbling and shattered beyond repair thanks to the fat cat bankers, so I thought it would be better to take that side of the bank world and use it with my letter B. The result is much less illustrative, and I believe that the shattered B letter forms can be a great idea to work more upon and I'll be able to explore the shattered, cracked, crumbled and smashed letter forms greatly with many different materials.

Ji Lee - Word as Image

During our VisCom CCS tutorial, Susan Halvey discussed "What was a Written Word" and how there can be certain barriers to communication, whether it was written or verbal. At the end of the CCS tutorial, Susan showed us an amazing video called "Word As Image" by Ji Lee. The challenge was to translate an image into a word, and portray that word typographically without adding any other elements. It's definitely worth the time to watch, since it definitely helps myself think how I can use the letter B to show the word Banker, without being overly illustrative and decorative.

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas...

Once we had all of our research done on typefaces, type categories and so on, it was time to start thinking how we can use our ideas with our given letter. So we broke out the good old layout paper, and start tracing typefaces and altering them to portray our word, which in my case is "Bankers" So far I have got a couple of ideas from my thumbnails that I want to work further on, one being money going down the drain and money bunched together creating the letter B.

The main problem a lot of us are trying to avoid is decorating or illustrating our letters. We need the letter form to do the work, not the illustrative parts that make it up. And, of course, the key thing is to keep it nice and simple. And it's important to make the right choice with a typeface, since it has to relate with the words we are trying to get across.

Right now, we have gone back to do some thumbnails to illustrate our word. Then we can then use these thumbnails to help us generate new ideas with our letter form later on.

Sans Serif Typefaces

Slab Serif Typefaces

Font Catagories

Typeface Thumbnails

Pushing Yourself With New Materials

Today, Patricia gave use a short presentation on working with a more three-dimensional form and exploring new materials. When we are researching new ideas, we should find out what kind of materials are appropriate to express that particular idea. Nails, wire, egg shells, playing cards, and even fur could be used.

Working with the idea of Banks and Bankers, I thought that it would be appropriate to try and include credit cards to illustrate that idea. Thankfully, I still had my old bank card in my wallet, so I decided "Why not cut out the letter B from this card?". With a blade and a pair of scissors, I cut out the capital B shape using he typeface Bondoni as a template. The negative space created in the card also creates a great shadow. Here are the results of this little experiment:

Selected Discipline - Vis Com

The choices have been made, and now that the people are back from their Berlin trip, the provisional places have been selected and have just begun. I'm am so happy to be in Visual Communications. I feel like it was the perfect decision I could have made, after talking with my tutors from the electives, so now it's time to get started again!

Yesterday, we were given our brief, and our theme was "The State of Our Nation", and with that theme, we have to illustrate our interpretation of "The State of Our Nation". We were given just one letter from the alphabet to illustrate, and the letter I am working from is "B". So with that letter and theme in mind, we created mindmaps to brainstorm some ideas we can work from. So far, I think the words "Bank/Banker" and "Boom to Bust" could be quite interesting to work from.

We then had to choose a typeface we liked and label them in certain catagories:

e.g Typeface - Old English
      Catagory - Gothic

All of this research with mindmaps and typefaces now leads up to thinking of ideas and drawing them.