New Math

equations by craig damrauer

Random selection

of things I have recently seen and liked..

This is from the front cover of a booklet I picked up in the design museum. I just really like this typeface.

I had to go to the Business Design Centre in Islington to do some printing, and the Surface Design Show was on, I love this front cover of the showguide. It reminds me of the Bridget Riley drawings we were taught how to do in year 7 art.

and I saw this photoshoot in an old copy of Stella magazine. I don't know how they've managed to make clashing florals look so easy. I can't wait for summer!

Tree Typography

Today I went to the Design Museum to see the exhibition for the Brit Insurance design awards. There was some amazing stuff, but this was my favourite by faaar, its a 'forest of typography', made by Why Not Associates in collaboration with Crawley Library.

Workshops were set up with library users to find out their favourite pieces of writing, and then the text was sandblasted into oak tree trunks making floor to ceiling pillars.

Each of the 14 trees has a different theme, one even has the opening lines of a Harry Potter book. The work was described as "An elegant reminder of the importance of words, ideas and literacy."

Poster project leaves the studio

I wanted to put my poster in context so I went to my local dairy crest branch and the nice milkman got out a milk float and let me take these photos!

DECODE

Best exhibition i've been to in a LONG time. It was all about new digital technologies providing new tools for artists and designers. Lots of interactive things that I have no idea how they work but they were amazing. As you walk into the exhibition there are plants that light up with you moving along past them..

The image below left is of a screen with an animation made through code that changes in shape, colour and size in response to your voice.. It was a bit weird talking to a screen but it really worked.. And the dandelion was another screen with an interactive animation. You blow the screen with a hair dryer and it scatters the seeds.

This mirror was amazing, when you walked past it nothing happened, but when you stood completely still infront of it, you slowly fade into the screen.

The image above is of my favourite thing in the exhibition, its an interactive board that without touching it, but just standing infront of it, you can draw splashes of colour. Its got a genius title as well, 'Body Paint.'

Below is a piece of work that is a moving diagram of all the flights across North America in 24 hours. All the coloured lines are moving, and they all represent individual flights. It turns what could be a pretty dull mass of information into something really beautiful. I now wish I was a massive computer/technology geek because it would be so good to know how these things all work!

'Voice' poster project

We had to design a poster based around supporting a local cause. My idea was a pretty random one about encouraging people to support their milkman..

I think probably the three words at the bottom need to be bigger, but at the moment i'm going to wait and see what it looks like when my tutor gets it printed A1 in b&w. And i'm thinking about maybe when i've got that large copy taking a photo of it stuck on a milkfloat or outside the Dairy Crest depot down the road.

Typography week comes to an end

The last typography workshop of the week was based around transforming the classic font, Helvetica, in the style of a word that we had to choose from a list. My chosen word was 'Construct.' I was thinking about simply separating the letters out into pieces, but then I had a lightbulb moment and thought jigsaw! We were given the alphabet printed on A4 pages in Helvetica so I cut up all the 26 letters into 144 jigsaw pieces. The A above was my obvious starting point and this is my full alphabet all put together in a big font construction:

This week really has turned me into a typography geek, we even watched the film

and I found it really interesting! On the journey home I was spotting Helevetica everywhere, a very geeky way to pass time on the train but it worked.

And this is my font that I'm working on from the first typography workshop day, it's all made up of the same rectangular and semicircle shapes. Some of them still need sizing up and I need the f's,g's etc to fill the space properly but yeah, this is what it looks like at the moment:

Letterpress

I went to a letterpress workshop today and learnt how to do this traditional printing. It required a lot of patience because it takes f o r e v e r to do but was worth it in the end. This is the block that I made out of the stamps from my chosen font, Perpetua:

And this was my end result:

Now I've had the induction in how to get started with letterpress I want to do more and it should be a lot quicker. I really like the handmade effect that it produces, you can't really see on the photos at all but the finish is just so much nicer than text printed off the computer.