katrinablogyblogblog

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A happy rainbow for the end of semester!

I started this course feeling really excited about a new routine of going back to uni, but COVID-19 definitely shook things up. Nonetheless, starting this degree has been a long-time coming and it feels great to have finally arrived! In saying this, being self-taught and at a very novice stage in my design practice, made this semester a really steep learning curve. 

This course particularly has helped me to understand how we know design today is very much grounded in the past movements and socio-political shifts in history. In moving forward I really want to sink my teeth more into aspects of historical design movements for further inspiration, I now see this as really important. I want to particularly do further research into the Swiss school and The Bauhaus as they were parts of the course I found particularly interesting and inspiring. 

Another aspect of this semester which stood out was Karen and Andy’s continual reminders to decolonize design. I really liked how they regularly critiqued the lens we viewed design through and definitely reminded me to remain engaged with critical thinking around the perspectives and assumptions I carry when analysing design and even creating my own pieces. 

This course further challenged me to be far more experimental and open to be open (and okay) with making mistakes. From this learning I want to continue to actively experiment with diverse mediums, objects, themes etc. as a part of my creative development. I learned that some of the best ideas begin with making mistakes!

I am definitely finishing this course inspired with a useful toolkit to take with me. Thank you Karen, Andy and Ben for your amazing teaching and passion. 

For now, I am definitely looking forward to time to digest all we’ve learned over the break!

Above image credit: Illustration by Crystal Zapata, 2020. Image found on: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/rainbows-alec-doherty-crystal-zapata-kris-andrew-small-nicole-chui-philotheus-nisch-shuhua-xiong-yonk-illustration-080420

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Finally finished my zine!

I found the hardest part of finishing, is knowing when to finish - I think with my perfectionist tendencies I could have endlessly tweaked. 

But anyway, I am quite happy with outcome and think that it maintains consistency in style and is legible. I am now wondering whether I should have been more experimental with my approach, but got to a point where I knew I just had to stick with my original plan of a ‘fine art book’ style of layout. 

This was possibly one of my favourite projects this semester as we were able to both explore an area of interest and compile it in a publication style document, which is always satisfying. I was really looking forward to learning more about the printing process by printing my final piece, but COVID had other plans, so that’ll have to wait anyway!

I am also really glad Ben told our class about making an Issuu, I think it was an important final touch to at least give it that ‘publication feel’!

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Whatta journey and a labour of love. Definitely worth the loss of pen life (? My condolences). But very impressive work!

Zine Progress

I’m showing off a few pages for now, but I will post the entire thing on Tumblr near due date.

Okay so this wasn’t actually what the zine originally looked like. I had all the illustrations setup and applied to digital elements… And it wasn’t good. I was in a slump and pretty frustrated why I couldn’t figure out what I need to do to make this at least somewhat interesting.

I sent it over to Ben and his feedback allowed me to realise why it wasn’t working. He said hand draw some more elements but I knew doing some more just to make it barely functional wasn’t going to cut it. So I hand drew every single element for my zine.

I knew the body text was going to take a million years to hand draw and I only had less than a week. To solve this I traced over body text prints in Neuzeit Grotesk. I couldn’t really get my hands on CBS Bodoni (the font used in all my questions and titles) so I drew that by eye with the Character glyphs for reference.

I like how it turned out into an organic piece, I was tempted to use colour but my constraint was to use only Black and White to reflect the grayscale visuals of television in the 50s and the era the CBS logo was created in.

Some of the drawings were based on Shaker drawings, the shaker drawings featured above were some of the references I used for inspiration.

I’m quite satisfied with the results for my CBS Logo zine. Pretty sad I killed a pen to get it done but I’ll never forget our journey :*)

Rest In Peace, Mitsubishi UB-157 pen no. 4 of 8. May your soul live on in pen no. 5 of 8. God Bless.

Images came from here and here.

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I really like this blend of research and visual exploration. Even though it is part of the research process I think it is still well arranged and a sense of the personality of each subject is captured. Nice!

The other 4 options that I considered for my interview subjects were Monalisa, Le Smoking, The Creation of Adam and Sam Shaw.

Preparing other topics made me feel safer since I’ll have backups incase my main plan doesn’t go as expected. However, I do feel like having a lot of choices increases stress from all the overthinking. Going into this assignment I knew that I wanted to interview the Water Dress since it’s so unique and special. At times, I can be quite indecisive so I’m glad that I wasn’t really putting a lot of effort when researching about the other topics or else I wouldn’t have decided so quickly and firmly.

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I really like how the experimental piece turned out! I think it’s really great how everyone can take the same image and flip it so many ways. 

Week 12 Tutorial Activity 

In today’s tutorial we were given 5 minutes to change the layout of a photoshop file 3 times: text focused version, image focused version, and free for all version. I’m struggling a lot right now with my zine in terms of experimenting with the layout and making it visually interesting. Ben mentioned concerns Andy and Karen voiced about ‘straightforward’ designs and mine, right now, is a v good example of a straightforward design. Thankfully, Ben can give me some helpful feedback. 

Anyways, this task was relevant given my current dilemma. I did enjoy experimenting with the last version. Wish I could do something out there for my zine but it really doesn’t suit my subject or the current style. 

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If you scroll to the bottom you can see the beginning of my digital iterations for one of the pages of my zine. 

These graphics were designed to reflect the question I explore with Marianne Brandt around her self-portraits that were taken in reflections of metal spheres and resulted in some really interesting warped portraits. In this conversation the interview explores the role of these distorted portraits in reflecting her identity that is not fixed, but multifaceted. I think maybe I harp on about it in my Tumblr, but this again is a part of her challenging gendered norms.

So anyway... in line with this question I wanted to present an abstracted version of this. I started thinking I wanted to have shapes with fill, but when I started putting mock-ups in my zine I found that it wasn’t sitting cohesively, with the line work I had already put in, so I stripped it right back. I think it plays interestingly on the warping nature of the metal spheres and reflecting different aspects identity. 

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Some screen shots of our activity in our week 12 tutorial where we were experimenting in Photoshop. 

In the first image we were asked to make the image the focus. The second image is when we were let loose to edit as much as we wanted. I consider myself a novice on Photoshop and am trying to be okay with not liking everything I do as I learn...well trying to be okay!

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For one of my questions in my zine I am exploring gender in Marianne Brandt’s photomontages. In my zine I have decided that I want to keep the visuals as stripped back as possible - to the bare bones of the message I am exploring (in keeping with Bauhaus aesthetic and approach to design). From here I might explore variations in the composition, but I think it does visually explore the changing roles and views of women in post war Germany, but also the continued pressure to return to confines of tradition.

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In exploring collage our tutorial this week, Ben shared some work by Mary Lum, which I thought was really amazing and impactful.

I really like her playful use of colour and the intricately assembled collages that have dynamism and an almost seamless meshing of acrylic paint, photographs and collage paper. 

In the above artwork, her collage is comprised of photographs from New York City, Paris, London, and Berlin. I really like how in capturing the urban landscape, it wasn’t about notable landmarks, but rather you get a sense of the ‘grunge’ and almost tactile elements of being immersed in these cities.

I think overall the colour palette and overall construction of this piece provides really great inspiration for future work. I will definitely be keeping an eye on Mary Lum’s work in the future.  

Above image credit: Mary Lum, Index 3, 2011, Acrylic, Photograph and Collage on Paper.

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In week 10′s tutorial we created collages from magazine materials. I didn’t really know what I was making, but it was fun to explore and an activity I don’t think I’ve done since school. I certainly have a new appreciation for the work of artists who collage, it takes far more consideration than what we see at face value.

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For week 11, Karen and Andy discussed the future of design (or speculations for where it is heading). It’s always a little daunting to think of the increasing role of technology in seemingly every aspect of our lives. But seeming as we have been learning about the interaction between evolving mediums/tools with design movements, the increasing collaboration of humans and machines in design seems only...natural (for loss of a better word).

After the lecture I checked out the ‘predictive art bot’ that was mentioned and some of the content was pretty hilarious and didn’t make sense at all. I think this is a really interesting commentary on the line we tow with technology, particularly in addressing how despite its seemingly infinite development, technology has limitations and requires critical engagement. 

Looking into this website, I was further reminded of Andy and Karen’s really interesting point around the role of auto-effects and predictive design in influencing our design outcomes. It got me thinking about the extent to which design technology shapes my work and idea development, rather than me applying the tools available to fit my ideas. I know technology doesn’t have autonomy, but are we loosing ours too? Anyway...

Above photo credit: Screen shot from predictiveartbot.com

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These are some ideas I am thinking about for the zine cover. I wanted to capture her pot and metal works in its simplest form. I am not sure about the colour of composition so will play around further. 

For the title of this zine, I just thought ‘Woman of the Haus’ is an amusing way to both acknowledge her significant influence at the Bauhaus, but to nod to the fact that very little people are aware of this. 

I am also still figuring out the typefaces I want to use for my zine and have found this exploration useful for figuring out what will work best.

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I just been musing with more ideas for how I want to go about the layout for my zine. Recently I have been thinking I would like to further experiment with the abstraction of The Bauhaus. In my next post I have created some mock zine covers. My intention is to embody Marianne Brandt’s signature tea pot and her experience as an under recognised designer in history at The Bauhaus.

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In the week 10 lecture Karen and Andy discussed the role of art and design in activism. I really like how this week addressed the role of design in disrupting and challenging ways of thinking. After being mentioned in the lecture, I looked further in Colors magazine, I really like how this cover makes no attempt at subtly, actually it seeks to shock. I think this cover is not only visually impactful through the use of scale, but I like its overt challenge to ‘mainstream’ magazines. I like how it almost makes fun of the polished notion of beauty we see in the media, I think it is a good reminder that as a designer, breaking conventions is important in revealing and disrupting seemingly invisible social norms.

Above image credit: Colors Magazine Cover, Issue 25, 1998. Image from: http://www.colorsmagazine.com/en/archive

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This piece is from having a play with collaging on Photoshop for our final assignment, which I am planning on creating a zine. I am interviewing Marianne Brandt and even though she is best known for her metal works, I have really enjoyed looking into her photomontages, that were her private works. Her pieces explored her view and experience of gender, industrialisation, interwar Germany and of course, her time time at The Bauhaus. I like how looking into her works, we can see the evolving nature of photomontages from the Dadaists and their radical, slightly chaotic use of photographs to distort and shock, to the more refined and structured pieces by Marianne Brandt and László Moholy-Nagy.

Brandt also took some really interesting warped self-portraits in metal spheres. So from here, I think I might explore further ways to present my zine with this distorted way of viewing, or maybe I might take a more minimal approach in keeping with the Bauhaus aesthetic... not sure yet.

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In the week 9 lecture Karen and Andy discussed the punk movement that arose during the downfall of modernism and its pursuit of utopianism and universal truths. It was interesting to hear how the punk movement grew as rejection and agitation against existing structures and norms. As mentioned in the lecture, the punk movement arose during a time when unemployment was rising (in the United Kingdom) and the rights of workers was a growing topic of significance in the public. I think arguably, that the punk movement made art more accessible, relatable, and challenged elitism in the art world.

Coming with week 8′s exploration of Futurism in mind, the contrast between more modernist rules and structure was really stark and highlighted more so, this sense of anarchism, verging on chaos, that was seen in the punk movement. 

After being mentioned in the lecture, I looked into Ray Gun magazine, led by the work of David Carson. Although the first image does still adhere to a grid-like structure, I found looking into pieces from this magazine frankly, quite refreshing after spending a bit of time exploring modernism. I like how the layout of this magazine and their covers were unashamedly experimental, illegible and a little frenzied.

Above image credit: Covers from Ray Gun Magazine, led by art director David Carson. Images sourced from: http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/t/tag/raygun/

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After the lecture for week 8 on Futurism, I played around on Illustrator with my interpretation of the aesthetic and dynamic style of this movement.