Process and Production, motion graphics

hitchhiker fixed exported from Jack Coster on Vimeo.

Here is the product I made during the After Effects and Process and Production workshop, showcasing all hand rendered elements made in illustrator and photoshop.

The ten second video was created based around elements from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and shows cuts, fades and transformations in After Effects, all synced to music.

"Design isn't designing": A talk with Ian anderson.

The talk with Ian Anderson was a 'real talk'. It was long, had many tangents and digressions and, occasionally it felt like nothing was really said at all; but every word he said was from knowledge and passion, even if a solid ten minutes was talking about Letrasets and bands that I'm not even convinced the tutors recognised.

But, now I'm digressing...

The talk was all a slough of industry experience and various anecdotes relating to the various graphic design projects and how they were constructed and, perhaps infinitely more importantly, why.
The reason I call Ian Anderson's lecture a 'Real' Talk, is because there were some rather hard hitting truths punctuating his discussions on work.

Truths like;
      "Design isn't designing, design is problem solving and (we) need to be able to
             communicate the solution. (We) are not artists"

It hits home how problem and solution orientated graphic design is, and the nature of what it is we really do. "No one will pay us for drawing something pretty, or setting nice type", we need to be able to effectively interact with audiences, communicate with them, tell them our ideas.
Make them give a damn.

And even if I already knew, and hate being reminded; being told that "You don't need to like the design at the end for it to work". It's true, in College and the (admittedly few) freelance posters I did, the end result has most always had a begrudging element of compromise that I wouldn't have ever added if I had all the control... but how Ian followed it up was much more powerful and empowering, as well as making the compromise dilemma feel not as soul crushing.

      "-Enjoy the solution, how you solve the problem is yours; how you choose
             to represent that solution is not"

I was also fortunate to share a brief few words with him, much to his chagrin I assume, after talking for as long as he did, discussing Typography. Iain held it in such high esteem, it is simply what he kept coming back to, more than anything else, saying"No matter how much you know about typography, you need to know more"
So I asked, what is the most common typographic 'law'?

Typography isn't written, it's spoken. It needs to be heard by the audience. Are you shouting? Are you whispering? What's your inflection? It's important to consider how somehow might read your work, how someone might interpret it. Typography isn't just words on a page, it's a message. An idea you are presenting to someone. You need to make sure you present it well.

The 'real talk' was so vast and informative, I really could write for page after page about what I took away, even if the notes I took were somewhat limited.
The fact is; While Ian's talk may have lasted for hours, and covered a whole alphabet's worth of topics, everything he said wasn't as simple as a statement. It was only after he started finishing, elaborating and explaining that you began to see what was what and why...
Really, he summed it up best.

"Being a graphic designer isn't about the mark that you make; it's about why you make it"

Researching research.

Research needs to be focused. You're working away something, as well as towards something, and that your research needs to change and adapt as you're going along. These facts needed to be kept in mind at all times whilst you work, or you'll end up with some pointless facts that aren't helpful, or nothing at all.

This is essentially what happens when you're told to guess a completely random object with only a set number of questions you created before you where even told to think of the object.

(The object was a pumpkin, if you were wondering. I was trying to get into the spirit of Halloween, not that it helped anyone else who had to to guess, though)

Research is a fluid process, it constantly changes and needs to be changed to keep your ideas from going stagnant, as well as to ensure you're not stuck on a linear path. Research is best conducted in subjects you find most appealing or natural, as you're able to more comfortably and enjoyably explore them; and the process of research should always strive to be intriguing, even more so than solving problems.

No interesting or exciting idea came from research that wasn't passionate.

The creative process; slightly less illustrated, now more illustrated

In the afternoon session, immediately following the lecture on how ideas are conceptualised and then applied, we were tasked with illustrating our own creative process; how we come up with ideas and tackle briefs and projects.

While turning our processes into pictures was fun, and looking at one another's was insightful; the final product I created was, crude... both in presentation and execution... and perhaps this post will be amended in the future with a version that is more appropriate for showing, or a whole new post created all together where the improvements can be seen, but for now it's best left without the visual accompaniment.

However, this doesn't mean nothing was gained from the exercise. The recognition of dread in starting a new project, and how this can be used as motivating force rather than an inhibiting one, as well as recognising where perhaps other people's techniques could be used to enhance my own (such as more closely integrating the primary and secondary research, rather than conducting them on their own, independently of one another), were enlightening and overall, lead to a little more insight into what we all do, and how we all do it.

 Well it appears I need to have my creative process actually on here now. So lets do this hooper-scotch! 

Here it is! In all of its.... glorious glory....

The idea of Ideas.

During our first theory as practice lecture, on the 4th of October, the idea of ideas was conveyed to us; how they are formed and, more importantly, how to begin to develop ideas from concepts into fully realised projects.

As Graphic Designers, it can be argued that ideas are simply the most important factor when it comes to producing a successful project. They're almost as if they were invaluable commodity, one that, when spent and used correctly, can be used to solve a wide variety problems. Exactly what graphic designers are for.

(hah, look at how corny this is.... I don't think

I fully deserve to be a graphic designer with

images like this on my blog)

However, these ideas are only ever as good as how they are developed and, not matter how visually interesting or engaging a piece of work is; These ideas must always be presented so that they may be communicated to an audience, and must be appropriately constructed to serve this.

Everyone is capable of ideas, it's "the rule, rather than the exception" in human cognition; but how we develop and apply these ideas is how we, as designers, take ideas from concepts and use them as a platform to communicate with people and, at a high enough level, society.

 

    "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy to be called an idea at all" - Oscar Wilde.

Convergence and Conflict.

On Friday the 23rd of October, I had the opportunity to visit the Yorkshire Sculpture park, allowing for the opportunity to focus on the convergence and opposition present within the natural nature park, and the man-made elements within it.

These illustrations were created with a combination of fine-liners and coloured pencils, bringing in an element of colour that hasn't been present within my work thus far.

Convergence:

 

This piece (as well as all of the other pieces created during this trip) used a lot of colour, exclusively colour, in this case. This illustration tried to capture the way the light hit one of the sculptures, using a pair of complimentary colours to emulate the warmth and coolness of the sculpture, and the way the light hit it.
I thought that, while a good exploration into the opposites of colours, the piece didn't have a great deal in terms of depth of interesting representation.

 

This is a leaf. It fell on me whilst  was doing a much better illustration and I figured 'why not?'

So this is a literal impression piece of a leaf that I made. It does capture the nature of the leaf and the colour is very representative of the leaf itself as, it's just a leaf.

I don't think this leaf is very interesting, but that's just me.

This is one of my more favourite pieces. It was created by observing objects present in the environment and sketching them loosely with a fine liner, then colouring them in ever more loosely with a coloured pencil.
These illustrations have a great deal of dynamism to them, and are very enriched by their colour (with the less is more mentality that a striking amount of little colour is perhaps better than just block colour)

Opposites:

 

While it may seem that, besides the two separate materials  used to create this illustration, these two elements are in no way opposite to one another. And while the exclusive use of fine-liner on one element to sketch it, and pure coloured pencil on the other, gives an astounding amount of contrast and 'opposition' to the two pieces; the elements themselves are actually opposites too, with the hand being a living person's hand, and the poppy being made out of plastic and metal.

This piece is probably one of my favourites overall, if not simply because the hand is rather well drawn and captures something of a story in its presentation. I like how the two elements work with one another, as well as their execution in their materials.

This final piece is also amongst my favourites, as it too (I think) capture something of a narrative.

This illustration captures what I would do more than anything when coming to the Sculpture park; the clash between man and nature. Though I didn't think it'd be as blunt as this.

The security camera and light were drawn in fine liner, which I hoped would capture a sense of coldness and lifelessness, whilst the trees and nature behind it were all composed of more colourful and natural pencils, drawing a huge contrast and opposition between the two elements.

Second life drawing session: Interior.

In the fourth week of Processes and Production, we were tasked with more illustrations, this time from the perspective of the interior of our creative arts building.

This visualising task contained a couple of the same elements as last time, and also allowed for the same scope of materials, but also placed an emphasis on views from windows and line-drawings with fine liners.

People and Places

This piece was going amazingly well. Emphasis on the was. I felt like I had a really good sense of proportion and perspective, and the lines where detailed but not overly god awful or too messy. Then I needed to draw the face. The first line I made for the jawline was wonky, a bad start to what would rapidly become a downward spiral of uncorrectable mistakes...

It wasn't that bad, and I certainly still think highly of the rest of the piece. And maybe the fact being all janky and wrong just, adds character that doing it well just wouldn't have added.

With my second person illustration I had learned from my previous mistake and decided to change tactics. Instead of drawing a constantly moving subject, I took a photo and worked from that, and made sure that the face was at least partially obscured by something so I wouldn't need to draw it; in this case, her hand.
This illustration was made with sightly more consideration to my studio brief, starting the sketch with the shoes and then working my way up to the rest of the subject. In this way the illustration was less focused on the person, but more the individual constructs that made them up; such as the shoes, legs, body and head.
Overall, I believe this to be an improvement over the other illustrative investigation

These illustrations were made rapidly, using a selection of different thickness fine-liners and parallel lines to construct these illustrations.
These illustrations, as mentioned previously, were very quick and, as such, I feel like they could have been dramatically improved, using perspective lines more accurately, as not to get this ever-so-slightly distorted look, that takes away from the realism and authenticities of the drawings, and ultimately makes them fail.

Line drawing studies, featuring perspective :

This is probably, in my opinion, my favourite illustration, in terms of how well it's composed and it's accuracy of what I was trying to capture.
It's relatively simple; just a simple perspective drawing of the hallway between the CA2/002 and CA2/004 (which, to 99% of the people reading this.... probably already know that because, it's not exactly abstract), trying to capture the change in scale as the hallway progressed.
The alignment is a little off, and the lines are undefined in places, but overall I like this piece the most, due to it's authentic shading, scale and perspective.

This perspective piece is a little abstract, and I'm not sure how I feel about it...
Simply, it's the view of the deli counter (the art-isan, for those less informed, or who want to hear a pun) from the balcony two floors up. There isn't much to say about it. I'm sure if you squint... tilt your head a little, you'll see it (and look stupid whilst doing it but, I'm not one to judge). It was, at least, an interesting exercise at illustrating a subject from an angle and perspective i'm not familiar with.
(it also, yet again, highlights how much I'd benefit from perspective lines.

views from windows:

 

This illustration was an attempt to do something different. I understood that, when given the task to 'draw the view from a window', it was heavily implied I draw the outside from the inside.

But, it was never actually stated I had to do that.

So here's a small, almost thumbnail sized illustration of a window into a room that had hot chocolate and tea stacked by the window, and a magazine on the table.

I don't know what room that is, but I think I want to be in it.

This final illustration, I begrudgingly did what I wasn't explicitly told but actually I was really so be quiet. (it wasn't begrudging I just figured that'd be more entertaining.)

This is an illustration of the south facing window, which is essentially the entire bottom side of the creative arts building. This window is broken up into a 3x3 grid of windows, and decided that, rather than draw them all as a single frame (like a normal person), I'd split them up into their own section and focus exclusively on what I saw in each 'frame', regardless of the overall, joined together picture.
The result was a rather visually interesting, distorted and almost 'broken' image of the outside world, that I personally am very proud of.

Indesign: Grid Posters

In the third week of process and production, we were given the task to use indesign for the purpose of replicating layout designs from popular and successful grid designers, like Josef Muller-Brockman and Rosemarie Tissi, using the layout and grid settings to create perfectly aligned and positioned designs.

For the purpose of display, the originals are on the left, whilst my recreations are on the left.
:

Technically speaking (and I'm nothing if not technical when on this blog); this piece was a real pain in the arse to recreate faithfully. Almost impossible when trying to stay true to the grid system I had implemented (something I didn't do once or twice, to meet the ends I was after).

This Rosemarie Tissi poster is the most intricate of the three, with a far more varieties in rendered constructs, like lines, dots and triangles; as well as the typical text and rectangles present in the other two posters.
The sheer amount of elements made composing them hard in and of itself, and though it may be utterly impregnably complex when trying to render; the design itself is very pleasing and interesting. The contrast in the colours of the various objects, as well as their relative scales, adds a lot of depth to the piece, and a lot of information is conveyed, even if it is inefficiently displayed in less than a quarter of the space.

Here you can see I've (tried to) recreate the a Joseph-Muller Brockman poster, albeit slightly smaller than the poster on the bottom.
This piece was interesting, as the grid used to align the various elements of text and rectangle was turned 45 degrees clockwise to give the whole piece a very different impression.
Because Indesign does not feature grids tilted 45 degrees on their axis (or I didn't invest very much time looking to see if they did) I instead made the entire piece aligned to a normal grid, then flattened and rotated it all as one big element, rescaling to try and get it as close to the original.
Muller Brockman would have probable created this print using a physical grid system, rather than a digital one, and could have simply moved the paper slightly to get the same effect.
This is one time where technology was more convoluted than the old, hand rendered methods.

 

 This final piece was the easiest (and probably rightly so, seeing as through it was the first one I made). The size of the text was incorrect, but this was mostly due to the text itself being different (and, admittedly, more crude), as well as the grid I was working being less precise and, therefore, harder to recreate. 

And while it's not perfect, or even mostly accurate, the rectangles on the bottom are almost 1-1 in both posters, and aligned nearly exactly to the grid they were made on.

So that's good.

First Life Drawing Session: Exterior

In the first week of process and production, all of group A was tasked with going out into Huddersfield town and drawing and documenting the city, with a set of locations and targets to aim for, using any and all materials we saw fit.

People and Places:

This illustration was created with a much greater emphasis on colour, rather than the structure of the line work, with the lines themselves often being sloppy and distorted by the bleeding colour, almost rending those lines useless in defining the boundaries of the subjects.
There is almost an element of perspective, with the field of view forced upwards in a plaza, with the paper cranes existing in their own, undefined dimension.

These pieces were created by quickly illustrating people as they walked by on a busy high-street, trying to capture their mannerisms and their expressions as quickly as possible before they moved, on translucent paper, before laying them all over a backdrop of where they'd been seen.
The contrasting colours help create a sense of energy between the static background and the people moving in front of it, as well as the technique itself resembling something of a hand-rendered long exposure.
Overall, I think this style of illustration is most reflected in the futurist work that was occurring at the turn of the 19th century, like Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" (pictured below)

Skylines:

Linedrawing, featuring perspective:

This piece was created on a simple, blue piece of tissue paper that was lying around in the studio, mostly because of its length, and because it was a clear day and I figured the light blue would make drawing the sky much easier.
The illustration itself is a perspective piece taken from directly central of a main road, intending to both capture the style of the buildings, as well as the sheer scale that this road had to offer.
The piece ended up working; after drawing the buildings I added a distant landscape in the extreme background, as well as shading with markers (for better or for worse).
This was later cropped and shaded further with the dodge and burn functions, creating the final piece.

Type in context

This last piece was made with two separate fine-liners, much like the motion piece above, in order to capture an element of contrast between two subjects; namely the metal and material structure of the phone booth, and all the added elements around it, typographical and otherwise.
It started as a simple line-drawing, with the two colour distinction of the BT logo, to help it stand out, before I noticed and decided to add all the other added elements and imperfections present on the booth, leading to something slightly more abstract.

Modernism and Post-Modernism

Last week, there was talk on the way that modernism and post-modernism has evolved since it's inception in the the early 20th century, and the ways that design concepts and principles have changed, up until it's rapid and dramatic interruption after the September 11 attacks.

The lecture focused mainly on the contemporary elements of design; the rigidness and form of post modern themes, simple and clean designs from America and Germany, following the Bauhaus and Swiss philosophies of design.
However, the emergence of the more rebellious and less rigid forms of graphic design that began to emerge in the latter part of the 1900s were omitted or otherwise not touched upon, focusing on the cleaner and more refined designs that would clash (and do clash) with this 'unconditional' philosophy of design.

Perhaps, what we know today as 'Post-Modernism', the Swiss and Bauhaus schools of thought, are really just a slightly more contemporary continuation of Modernism; and this less rigid form of design, that practitioners like David Carson and Andy Worhol subscribe to, often created with little to no formal training, can be seen as an extension or continuation of the Dada-ism trends that tried to break away from the mainstream and provide a more emotional and person form of expression communication in art, as well as a much more raw one, coinciding greatly with the punk movement that was sweeping across the western world at the time these early designs began to make it to the public eye.

 Perhaps now Post-Modernism is the culmination of the radical experimentation mixed with the more rigid and 'tried and tested' methods of the last century, the current standpoint in the long, winding evolution of Graphic Design as a discipline and its own art-form.

Test post
I am in need of some test things that will show how the blog works