Folds

We were set a day task and ask to come up with an interesting fold.  The work had to unfold to an A3 page.  We were told we had to incorporate a title, 5 words about the title, and a paragraph of text which directly related to our chosen title.  We had to give careful consideration to the order that the reader would come unto the information.  Here are some photographs of what I came up with. I decided to use Ardmore Advertising which is an advertising company that I am currently studying. Post about this at a later stage.

Chalk Animation

I discovered these chalk animations by Karla Burns a while ago and found them really interesting.  I felt that they were appropriate to post given that I will be creating my own animation in the New Year.  I thought that now was the right time to upload them.

This particular one was co-directed by Anni Kronnberg and Lucinda Schreiber.  It was produced for use with a music video, the band’s name was FireKites and their song was ‘Autumn Story’.  This piece has been beautifully produced with the use of many chalk boards. The entire production of this piece must have taken hours.

This is another chalk animation and it was produced for one of the Arctic Monkeys songs.  On this occasion the person used their feet and hands to add the image and only used one chalk board.  It demonstrated that you can produce a chalk animation with any size of chalk board.

Pinhole Magic

Here are some photographs that Karla, Winnie and myself produced using a tin box that we had converted to become a pinhole camera.  They were all taken using this handmade camera that had a hole drilled into the centre and then photographic paper was placed into the box.  Each image had an exposure time of 1 minute.  On each occasion we had to head back into the darkroom and develop these images and watch the magic appear.  These images had then to be inverted using PhotoShop.  The images you are looking at are the final outcome.

Displaying Word and Image Belfast 2010

Here are some examples of the work that I have been producing throughout this semester.  These pieces were for the Displaying Word and Image Belfast 2010 Conference.  I used a photocopier to scale the lettering and this distorted the letters into what you can now see.  The poster (above) is also able to be reversed and will look like the poster displayed below.  I also produced a website and a conference book cover.

The chalk guy is back

This guy continues to amaze people with his sidewalk 3D chalk drawing.

Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer who worked in Berlin.  What was unique about his work was that he captured his images by using a camera that he had designed himself.  This camera permitted him to magnify his chosen subject to up to 30 times its actual size.  No other camera would have allowed him to achieve this.  The majority of his time was spent with his study of nature.  Throughout his career which spanned 30 years he photographed nothing more than sections of plants.  I particularly like his style because on occasions he zoomed in so much the plant no longer looked like a plant and this is a format that I have always been inspired by. When you witness an image that is abstract in view you really have to take time to explore it to see what it is which makes it all worthwhile.  His photographs have successfully captured and demonstrated the amazing detail that is naturally present within nature if we take time to look. 

Indian Balsam

Indian Balsam

Birthwort

Horse Chesnut

Maiden-Hair Fern

Hart’s tongue

Larkspur

Laserwort

Tendrills of a pumkin

I genuinely love these photographs given that they all demonstrate something unique yet they are all based on the same composition.  They all focus on a small section of the plant and I believe that this makes them different because you can’t glance at them and more on you have to take time to work out what the image is truly portraying.

Andreas Gursky

Gursky never digitally manipulated his photographs before 1990.  However after this period he has never hidden the fact that he heavily relies on his computer to edit and in turn enhance his pictures which enables him to create spaces that are in fact larger than the subjects that he has photographs and this generates art.  Peter Schjeldahl who is a journalist who works for the New Yorker calls his work “vast,” “splashy,” entertaining” and “literally unbelievable.” Within the same publication another critic, Calvin Tomkins, described his work as stated below:

“The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky…I had the disorienting sensation that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky’s huge, panoramic colour prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance.”

I particularly love the scale and the detail that is produced in Gursky’s work.  It is difficult to imagine the impact of viewing one of these images considering that they are the size of a wall.  If you stop and try to imagine this you begin to appreciate how grand these pieces really are.  When you start to study these photographs you truly become overwhelmed with the detail captured within them. Gursky obviously gives a lot of consideration to the composition that he employs to capture these images and hence create the effect that he was after.  These photographs are very colourful and in my opinion extremely powerful.

Airside are coming to Belfast

Preparing for the talk on Wednesday 4^th November I thought that I would take a look at some work that had been produced by graphic design agency Airside.  

They are based in London and they cover a range of specialities including graphic design, illustration, digital, interactive and the moving image.  Airside have a very distinctive approach and this in turn has won them an array of prestigious awards from the D&AD, Bafta and Design Week. 

I have included a few examples of their work:

Moblin

 

Greenpeace Presents Airplot

 

Rie fu

 

V&A China Design Now

 

Greenpeace The Convenient Solution

 

D&AD Student Awards

 

2012 Olympics pictograms

I came across these pictograms while I was having a look at the Creative Review blog and thought that they fitted in really well with our signage project and they demonstrate that you can successfully create signage that contains images only and that words are not always necessary to achieve the desired effect. It also shows that you don’t always need words to portray the message clearly. I’d like you to identify the variety of sports shown – please let me know how you got on.

These pictograms are believed to have been created by SomeOne. They really wanted to push the concept for the pictograms and one of the outcomes from this was to create two style versions – a silhouette version which used high visibly and an information based application

and then a dynamic version using both as decoration and where a more exciting version is called for, such as on posters or banners

This is how the Track Cycling ‘dynamic’ pictogram, with the silhouette version inset will work

Craig Wand

Craig Wand is a senior designer and typographer at Grey New York.  He also trained under a pseudonym that words are picture. I believe that he brings typography to life.  I really love these images and the way that he has been able to produce images using typography and I feel that this is something I need to think about in producing my identity.  I feel inspired by this style and format.