Visual Journal

RMIT GRAP2199

[anila-d]

Summary

GRAP2199

My real expectation at the start of the semester was to be able to attend all the classes in this semester - even the early morning lectures :) -while having a full-time job. It is fulfilling to have made it to the end of the first semester and sharing so many ideas with my peers. The activities of the communication design studies were the best well spent time with my peers; I enjoyed the focus on collaboration and sharing. Learning with your hands the history of design was both interesting and inspirational.

The design movement that I appreciated the most was Postmodernism. In particular, the slides from art director David Carson influenced me for another project which was about designing an unconventional poster. Also, Andy’s and Karen’s design work was a great influence and changed my perspective of design. Experimenting with a variety of materials before jumping on the computer was something I was missing from my design process. It proved to be essential while I was designing the packaging of a product for another assignment.

The overall vibe of the communication design course made me think differently about design and see design and typography everywhere. What I would like to improve further is the skill of sharing and documenting my work as I clearly understand now how important it is.

Thank you all! 

[anila-d]

Week 4

Creating a pangram using a continuous line. 

Our chosen phrase was “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”

[anila-d]

“Ask me anything” Finally!!!

My creative responded a couple of days before the deadline...

My long long list with all the creatives came to an end with Marta Cerdà accepting my interview... but that wasn’t the end... It took her 3 weeks to answer my questions... I can say I loathed this project and every workshop related to the creative was stressful as I didn’t have a creative!!

Marta Cerdà is a graphic designer from Barcelona. Her main body of work focuses on the boundaries between typography and illustration. Before founding her own studio in 2008, Marta worked in advertising agencies and design studios across Europe. On her own, she has contributed to global projects calling for design, illustration and custom typography for art, culture, editorial and advertising clients. Her work has been recognized by professional organizations including the Type Director’s Club and the Art Director’s Club, where she was named as an ADC Young Gun. MARTA CERDA'S CLIENTS INCLUDE Nike, Coca-Cola, Google, Ray-Ban, Volkswagen, Random House, Penguin Books, Wired, ESPN, Esquire, Fortune, The Guardian and Vanity Fair.

http://www.martacerda.com/

Final Postcards

Here is the interview with Marta

Hi Anila,

I had to go super fast, sorry I would have liked to answer you with longer explanations, but this week is over busy.. Good luck and thanks for the questions, they were really thought!

• Your work stands out worldwide, during your creative process, do you think of what is going to be a successful fit or do you trust your creativity to lead your work?

It's a very interesting and original question. I try to do both things at the same time. Its is very important for me that I feel I am part of the design but it must be something that I think it will like, in general or for the target it's going to be for. But it happens sometimes that things you think they'll work they don't. 

• You are blending illustration with typography in a unique way, did that start as a way of self-expression or as a need to differentiate yourself?

I think both too. I think that today we value more things that are crafted than in the 90's, for example, 'cause we are already used to technology. 

• Do you have time for skill development or do you learn through each new project? 

Now I learn through each project. I quite often get briefs that are open enough to try new things. But, in any case, I try to find time every month to learn new things, like a software and do workshops and attend to conferences, go to exhibitions, read books, etc. 

• Which part of the creative process do you believe is usually the most important and what would you advice a design student to master?

The first part it is the most difficult, when you still haven't found the idea. You need a lot of trust in yourself and patience and perseverance in that part. The other part is more technical, you learn with time and by doing. The other part I think it interacts more with your character, so you need to be very critic to yourself, and have this balance with a good self esteem and patience. 

• My background is greek and my will is to work in Europe in the future — what challenges did you meet working in different countries?

Making a new network it is the most challenging part. You need to make a network in order to survive. The other challenging part is the paperwork, it is always a nightmare. 

• When do you put an end to a design piece? Is it the deadline?

Yes, the deadline always is the end. If it's not enough, I sleep less and work until I find the solution.

• What are you currently fascinated by and how is it feeding into your work?

3D and its relation with typography. I am trying now to learn Cinema 4D and experiment more in this direction.

• What’s your personal motto? Or how do you describe yourself in three words?

Soory, my english sucks, here I describe it with a few more words: I work a lot, I like to live a lot too, I am very insecure, and I enjoy a lot working, it is my save place on earth. 

Examples of her work

[anila-d]

“Ask me anything” first attempt...

Hoping for answers and wondering if you will receive an email before the deadline was really tough and stressful.

My first creatives in my list were Priscilla Balmer and Yyo Hählen. Their work is regularly rewarded in Switzerland and abroad.

Their posters have been selected and exhibited several times in international competitions.

Some of there work that I admire

Balmer Hählen: Rendezvous de Créateurs 2017

Balmer Hählen: FCMA

My questions to them were:

1. Your work stands out worldwide, during your creative process, do you think of what is going to be a successful fit for the world or do you trust your creativity to lead your work?

2. You pay a close attention to the quality and variety of your prints. I imagine how hard it is after creating a piece of work, spending the same (or more) energy and time to learn or invent printing techniques, how this idea started in a digital world? Were your clients hesitant about the printing cost?

3. My background is greek and my will is to work in Europe in the future — do you believe that design is an international field that can be transferred anywhere, or do you feel that each community - each country has a mindset which might be an obstacle in your expression of design?

4. During the creative process of a poster for a competition, you might have a range of design solutions; how do you decide which one is the best? You definitely advise each other, but how hard is it to trust someone else's instincts? Do you ask for feedback from other designers?

5. Your work is been rewarded in Switzerland and abroad, does that make you feel anxious about the approach of your future projects?

6. How do you meet tough deadlines? Tell me about a time you completed great work under pressure.

7. Why have you chosen to work more on projects like posters? Is that because it’s less stressful and it gives you more freedom? Would you (or have you) turn down a project proposal from a company that doesn’t suit your style, or the timeframe is tight?

Never got the answers on time :(

[graphicfearlesswomen]

[womenofgraphicdesign]

Masha Kornienko (Konstanz, Germany)

Food Truck Festival magazine, 2017

via @graphicfearlesswomen

[designeverywhere]

Riot

[slapdashing]

Mirko Typographic posters by Robin Weissenborn Typography Daily

[jordanrendevski-design-deactiva]

REPRESENT

Throwback to one of our first lectures, when we decided it would be a good idea to have a gang sign.

Use this gif to show your allegiance. 

[anila-d]

Week 10 Prototypes

Making some prototypes today for our project “ask me anything”

Really quick prototypes of our ideas which helps us to talk about them and give and take feedback. It was really interesting to see others prototypes and giving feedback as it’s not a finished work so you can still give some suggestions.

[anila-d]

Week 6

THE WIRED GUIDE TO EMOJI

More than just cute pictures, these digital icons are a lingua franca for the digital age.

AUTHOR: ARIELLE PARDESBY ARIELLE PARDES

EMOJI ARE MORE than a millennial messaging fad. Think of them more like a primitive language. The tiny, emotive characters—from 😜 to 🎉 to 💩—represent the first language born of the digital world, designed to add emotional nuance to otherwise flat text. Emoji have been popular since they first appeared on Japanese mobile phones in the late ’90s, and in the past few years they have become a hallmark of the way people communicate. They show up in press releases and corporate emails. The White House once issued an economic report illustrated with emoji. In 2015, 😂 became Oxford Dictionaries’ “Word” of the Year. Emoji aren’t just for people who say things like “lmao smh tbh fam.” Emoji are for everyone.

That puts a lot of pressure on the designs and standards for emoji. If emoji are a language for everyone in the digital world, then the emoji lexicon needs to constantly evolve across cultures 👳 , across screens📱 , across time 🕑 . Today there are thousands of emoji depicting people in all their diversity, and thousands more to represent the things we interact with in our world: money 💰, prayer beads 📿, Apple Watches⌚. In the future, as the world becomes increasingly digital and increasingly globalized, emoji will become important tools for translation and communication—a lingua franca for the digital age.

The First Emoji

In the beginning, there were emoticons. Depending on how wonky you want to go, the earliest emoticon can be traced all the way back to 17th-century poetry—but, for the most part, emoticons came of age as the :-) and :-( and 8-D of chatroom conversations in the 1990s. These primitive gestures represented an important part of early netspeak: You could convey sarcasm by tacking on ;-) at the end of your message, or share your ambivalence with the ¯_(ツ)_/¯ face.

The first emoji were created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. Kurita worked on the development team for “i-mode,” an early mobile internet platform from Japan’s main mobile carrier, DOCOMO. Kurita wanted to design an attractive interface to convey information in a simple, succinct way: for example, an icon to show the weather forecast rather than spelling out “cloudy.” So Kurita sketched a set of 12- by 12-pixel images that could be selected from a keyboard-like grid within the i-mode interface, then sent on mobiles and pages as their own individual characters. Kurita’s original 176 emoji—now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—privileged symbols over faces, because DOCOMO’s goal was to find new ways to express information. There were characters to show the weather (sun, clouds, umbrella, snowman), traffic (car, tram, airplane, ship), technology (landline, cell phone, TV, GameBoy), and all the phases of the moon. But those characters weren’t purely informational: For the first time, emoji offered a way to add emotional subtext to a message. “I understand” might sound cold or passive on its own, but add ❤️ and the message offered a sense of warmth and sympathy. It was the beginning of a new visual language.

SHIGETAKA KURITA/NTT DOCOMO/MOMA

Emoji quickly became popular in Japan, as rival mobile companies copied DOCOMO’s idea. And as mobile computing continued to explode throughout the mid-2000s, companies outside Japan, like Apple, saw an opportunity to incorporate emoji on other platforms. In 2007, a software internationalization team at Google decided to lead the charge, petitioning to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit group that works sort of like the United Nations to maintain text standards across computers.

Since computers fundamentally work with numbers, every letter or character you type on a computer is “encoded” or represented with a numerical code. Before Unicode, there were hundreds of different encoding systems, which meant different computers and servers didn’t always represent text the same way. Unicode focused on standardizing these codes for language, so that the letters you typed in English, Chinese, Arabic, or Hebrew showed up accurately across platforms and across devices. The Google team—Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer—noticed emoji’s ascent

https://www.wired.com/story/guide-emoji/

[anila-d]

Week 6 You encounter emojis on a regular basis in your 21st-century, tech-savvy lifestyle, but what is the history of emojis? They’re all over the place, and you really can’t interact with any device or platform these days without someone sending you an emoji or you sending one out yourself. This speaks to the ubiquity of this form of communication.

[anila-d]

#Week 6 5 teams and 25 unique typefaces Challenge yourself and keep changing it, you never know where you’re going to end up...

[pond-scum666]

Making shapes from shapes to make shapes

“we did no invent grids - grids emerged from letterforms” - ANDY

This lesson we were given a selection of elementary shapes to create a typeface with. The restriction of only using one initial shape to create a typeface encouraged us to find unique and experimental solutions, which in the process created more individual and original designs. This way of working in a group for such a task also lead to a lot of discussion and finding the most effective way of depicting each letter together as a group.

We had this desire to make the letterforms mathematical. our font we constructed naturally adopted characteristics of modernism, more specifically Memphis and Bauhaus.

[ifyourereadingthisnowitstoo-blog]

Don’t fall in love with the first idea - introduce one idea one at a time. 

[stav-ros-deactivated20190312]

Communication design studies exhibition. Last Friday’s exhibition was interesting to see all students visual thinking and creativity. Well done to all grap2199!

[designeverywhere]

Sydney Design Festival

[anila-d]

Sydney Design Festival

[designeverywhere]

Books from Weißensee in Leipzig

[anila-d]

Melbourne Art Book Fair

- the NGV Triennial

- NGV Collection International Art