Style

What is style?

A particular procedure by which something is done; a manner or way

A distinctive appearance, typically determined by the principles according to which something is designed.

We watched a video of Cornel West who elaborates on clothing and style from his point of view. he focuses more specifically on the style of clothing , clothes are not just clothes in their style , they reflect a persons characteristics and personality. the way people dress reflects who they are and how they live as a person.

can there be content without style? How can something be created without it having a certain style. if somebody decided to wear a bin bag it would still be a certain style although it assent what most people would chose to wear.

We then looked at Marcel Breuer who was a Hungarian architect and Furniture designer. We looked at one specific chair names the Cesca chair where Breuer changed the generic style of how people would expect a chair to be built by swapping out parts and re-defining its style.

Styles fade in and out , they work on intensities and the styles will fluctuate , they're constantly moving and changing and evolving with the way we live.

Perception or Illusion

In this lecture we specifically looked at Perception or illusion , we started off the lecture by looking at  an image of a lamp post in the dark , we then discussed what triggers in our memory it could fire and what we could relate it to , for example , a walk home after a night out. Images like this help develop a deep sense of self awareness and allows us to perceive things differently , this of which will come in handy when designing in the future as it involves looking at a theme from a different perspective.

Perception - We looked at how the human eye is a form of perception , this is because we see every reflection of light upside down , however our brain knows to flip it the right way up. Below is a basic diagram of how the eye sees reflections of light and processes them:

We then moved onto looking at colourblind tests as they showed us that everybody minds perceive colours in different ways depending on the cells that are present in their brain. Personally i am rather colourblind especially to Reds and Greens , however other students struggled with these tests even though they do not class themselves as colourblind.

Further into the lecture we started to look at optical illusions and how our eyes can be tricked into thinking things are happening when they are not , the illusion below looks as if it is moving even though it is stationary. This happens because of the contrast in colours and our eyes are attempting to sort the colours out.

We then looked at the dinosaur illusion. This illusion involves a dinosaurs head that looks as if it is looking at you from whatever angle you look at it from. This looks like this as we have learnt as human that facial features sick out and that there is no other option for the face to go. As you can see in the video the illusion is created from inward folds with card.

Drawing 3 - Object

Moving away from structure drawing we focused on smaller objects. For this task we were each assigned a table to sit around , these of which contained different objects played out in various ways. Our aim was to draw with as much precision as possible , keeping the objects to a certain scale if possible. One of the first drawings i produced was a 'measured drawing' this is where you draw the objects in relation to another object for sizing references. In my case i chose to draw the stack of objects in relation to the size of my pencil when held up next to the object from my position. this allowed me to have certain reference points as to where each object should begin and end.

I felt that my drawing ended up being rather messy however it was a correct measured drawing and was drawn in perspective with the pencil using reference points. I think one thing i struggled with is that the top object had quite a complicated shape which made me ore reluctant to getting stuck in drawing it.

The next table i was allocated to had lots of large typography pieces scatted around the table in different variations. with these pieces i wanted to start adding colour variation to show some tone in the objects. I felt that i struggles with the typography table as the shapes seemed to be all rather complex , i felt that the angles were very hard to make exact. for example the G that is positioned onto of the G doesn't look as if it sits as smoothly as it should. this was the table that i spent the most time on proving it to be rather difficult. if i was tottery this again next time i think would pick less complex type , also picking different colours for the tone as they don't suit very well. shadow and tone would be one of the skills i would like to work on further in the future.

Other experiments included drawing with crayon , i attempted to draw the glass sphere in crayon as i felt it would create a glass effect with the shading being darker towards the edges and the light being focused around the centre. i liked this experiment as it was pleasant to use something to draw with that was different from marker and pencil. i feel that crayons bring out a nice range of colours that people neglect.

Into the Darkness

In this mornings lecture we watched Fear[s] of the Dark, the film is a 2 tone animated film that was released in 2008 and premiered at the Roma Film Festival. The structure of the film is that it is cut into 5 short stories that make up the whole film. The part that we specifically looked at involved a character that gets stranded in a blizzard and retreats to an abandon cabin , where we see the struggles of paranoia set in and mentally challenge him. i particularly like the film as each section focuses on different drawing styles or ways of animating , similar to the film 'Waking life'. The section we looked at was made up of harsh black and white shading with various textures.

Abstracts and Infos

At the start of this Seminar we began with a recap of key words from the last session , as a group we came up with :

Objective - (of a person or their judgement) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.

Contingency - a future event or circumstance which is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty.

History - the study of past events, particularly in human affairs.

Subjective - based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.

Fabrication - the action or process of manufacturing or inventing something.

Perspective - the art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other.

Preconceived - (of an idea or opinion) formed before having the evidence for its truth or usefulness.

As a task we were split into 6 groups the were each given 20 seconds of the film Withnail & I to analyse and produce a sentence about , these sentences would then all be collected together and turned into well structured paragraph. The sentence we produced was "a scuffle between two characters which is solved by panicked compromise."

Problem Solving / Design & Communication

In this seminar we looked at how information can be presented via infographics. I was excited to be part of this seminar as i haven't learnt about infographics before and i would like to explore them more as my studio project involves them massively. I was inspired to look into inforgraphics by David McCandles who published the books : Information is beautiful and Knowledge is beautiful. These books display information about the world in a graphic manner that are very athletically pleasing and  also very detailed in i the information that they provide us with.

We then started by looking at student work that mapped different pieces of information. For example One student mapped relationships within her life and and created a coloured grid (similar to the tube map by harry beck) that showed positive and negative points about relationships with different family members. 

Our task was to create our own infographic that mapped information that we were interested in or personal to us. We had multiple subjects that we could chose from. I chose to plot music on a graph depending on the year it was created and how much i enjoyed the album. 

I chose to create my infographic similar to a scattergraph , where the points on the X and Y axis depended on weather i enjoyed the music and what year it was created . When i finished plotting the points i will use a straight line to determine weather the graph has A positive correlation , proving there is a link between the year the music was created and how much i enjoyed it.

Message & Meaning

"The difference between poetry and practical messages is that the latter are successful only when we correctly infer the intention." - Michael Rock 

In this lecture we learnt looked into Message and meaning , how it can be portrayed to and audience and the different ways it can come across to different people around the world and also that all pieces of design aren't made just for the sake of it , that there is always a meaning behind work and there is always a message it has to portray. We looked at specific designers such as Anthony Burrill who uses large type to portray powerful messages and studios such as Kurzgesagt studios that use infographics to communicate themes that people don't normally know about such as : what is light?

Message - a verbal, written, or recorded communication sent to or left for a recipient who cannot be contacted directly.

Meaning- Meaning is what the source or sender expresses , communicates or conveys in their message to the observer or receiver , and what the receiver infers from the current context.

Send (Encode)- This means translating information into a message in the form of symbols that represent ideas or concepts.

 We then looked into the work of Antony Burrill. His work was produced to display large messages that will either spark questions or produce motivation within the audiences mind. Burrill uses bold type and block colours that stand out clearly to anyone who can see the images. Burrill specialises in type and layout design using traditional ways such as printing blocks to add a more hand produced aesthetic to his work.

Kurzgesagt studio's produce informational videos that educate an audience through playful and colourful animations. Kurzgesagt focus on informing an audience on subjects that most wouldn't know much information about , most of these subjects are science related or questions that are not normally looked into without certain interest. The video we specifically looked at was "What is light?" , this video is included below.