sinead h

Communication Design student @ RMIT

[sineadhdesign]

reflection

My objective for this course was to learn something new and to expand my communication design skills. I have definitely been able to achieve these goals this semester due to the high focus on group work. The group dynamic has enhances the learning process as we got to work out problems together and share our creativity. I delved deeper into the world of Bauhaus, learning about their structure and the history of the women of the design school. I thoroughly enjoyed the zine-making activities and learning about art books and how unconventional you can make them. It was refreshing to discover that design can be so artistic and eclectic. I now know how to layout zines on illustrator, which is a great skill to have in continuing this course. This course has made me even more excited to learn more about typography and how much more it will develop and change in the upcoming years. I was inspired by Stefan Sagmiester and his abundance of creativity in his typographic images throughout the course as well as the Bauhaus movement which pushed for art to be common in everyday households. The activity that made me think differently about design was the type shapeshifters activity - it was great to work in the group dynamic and it taught me to not be satisfied with the first outcome but to keep pushing the design because you may never know what greatness you can unlock by experimenting! But overall i really enjoyed learning about art books and i’m excited to start collecting them! They are raw forms of creative expression and i love that they’re physical artefacts that you can interact with. peace.

[milovisuell]

Memphis Group

GRAP2199 | Week #9 | Lecture/Relevant research

The Memphis-filled apartment of Raquel Cayre. Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine

1986

Pee-wee’s Playhouse debuts. The spirit of the Memphis style (though not necessarily the philosophy) enters the mainstream. The movie Ruthless People, drenched in Memphis-inspired décor, comes out that year, too.

October 1991

Karl Lagerfeld, who filled his Monaco home with Memphis furniture, sells his entire collection at Sotheby’s.

February 2016

Supreme releases an apparel-and-skate-deck collection designed by Alessandro Mendini, who exhibited in the first Memphis show.

Schwartzberg L. (2017). The Memphis Design Movement Is Having a Moment. Retrieved from https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/the-memphis-design-movement-is-having-a-moment.html

[jamietung]

Memphis is just wonderful

[wotf-isthis-blog]

Memphis is just so fun! 💛

[highlybodacious-blog]

Those Supreme decks are so cool

[sineadhdesign]

the colours and shapes are e v e r y t h i n g

[sineadhdesign]

The homemade zine - My cousin Neassa who is a graphic designer and art teacher was the subject of my interview. She inspires me to craft and create art and design so i thought that there wouldn’t be a more appropriate aesthetic for my zine than a homemade crafty feel. It’s like a snapshot of my relationship with her, fun, homey, and based on arts and craft!

[greatconcerns]

GINI SIKES: Keanu, you’ve said you accepted a part in Idaho first, hoping River would do the film too. KEANU REEVES: No. We were always together. RIVER PHOENIX: He was lying. We were doing I Love You to Death, and we both got the Idaho script. We were driving in a car on Santa Monica Boulevard, probably on the way to a club, and were talking really fast about the whole idea. We were excited. It could have been like a bad dream—a dream that never follows through because no one commits, but we just forced ourselves into it. We said “OK, I’ll do it if you do it. I won’t do it if you don’t.” We shook hands. That was it.

keanu reeves & river phoenix photographed by bruce weber for the cover of interview nov’ 1991. 

[sineadhdesign]

I really like the idea of the interview magazine and its a shame that is has just been discontinued. For a magazine to produced stripped back and unedited interviews with famous celebrities, i think thats really unique and inspiring. I love the idea of a homemade zine feel, and that was something that i wanted to achieve in the making of my zine

[posterinthecity]

[sineadhdesign]

black letter is so eyecatching in posters so i can see why hitler wanted to use it in his propaganda... 

[objetpetita]

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

[sineadhdesign]

Love the idea that text can be unconventionally arranged so that it can create designs in the spacing as well as create images in the lay out.

[pittrarebooks]

Eric Gill’s second edition of his book, An Essay on Typography, was published in 1936 and is part of our Leuba Collection. His specific theme is “typography as it is affected by the conditions of the year 1931.” What he means by that is in 1931 the clash between industrialism and handcrafting methods was coming to a head in the world of presses and printing. Gill’s book offers principles on “the making of letters and the making of books” in order to emphasize the fluidity of the alphabet as we know it.

Many of the seemingly inexplicable standards we have for alphabet letters today come from the history of the physical methods of writing, especially the change to writing on paper. For example, “upper case” letters and “lower case” letters were once one and the same. Gill demonstrates how the Roman letter “A” evolved into “a.” The reason for this is that the two strokes of “a” were easier and faster to write on paper than the three-stroke “A.”

Another case he brings to our attention is that of serifs and sans-serifs. Serifs were a hold-over from the times when words were chiseled into stone or wax (because they provided clean lines to the letters), but it was bothersome to add serifs on every letter when writing by hand. However, a new twist occurred in typography history. With the invention not only of movable type, but also word processing software, serifs are now as easy to use as sans-serif fonts. Now the decision to use one or the other is merely a matter of taste, design, and readability.

“Gothic” lettering is today seen as a fancy font that one rarely uses. However, Gill points out that what we think of as gothic lettering just used to be the normal way to write letters. When writing was chiseled onto stone, the craftsmen found the easiest way to write was in the “gothic” style. After writing transitioned to paper though, people continued to use the gothic letters because they were the only type of letters they had been exposed to, and their shapes were natural in their eyes. They were simply copying the only letters they had ever seen.

Over the centuries the shape of letters has changed dramatically, not only because of the ease of holding a pen rather than a chisel, but also because writing practices began to favor standardization, and letter “type” stopped imitating handwriting styles. This is why we type in fonts that would be inefficient to write by hand. Gill acknowledges that we have developed “normal” styles of lettering, but encourages typography enthusiasts to be creative with their lettering (without being absurd).

-Lauren Galloway, student employee

Resources:

Gill, Eric. An Essay on Typography. Second ed., Sheed & Ward, 1936.

[commcooper-blog]

THIS POST APPLIES TO BOTH WEEK 5 & 6,

Double whammy woop woop

[sineadhdesign]

Letter zine On Friday we cut out shapes from magazines that resembled letterforms - I really enjoy the eclectic and miss-matched aesthetic that this produced as every letter was unique and not uniform, unlike a traditional typeface

[sineadhdesign]

The Real Bauhaus Wives of Weimar, Germany

Because Friday’s lecture was a sausage fest (by no fault of Karen and Andy - it’s just the way history was written), I did some research into the wonderful women of the Bauhaus. 

Despite Bauhaus accepting more women than men into their school of design, its hard to find any evidence at all that the gorgeous gals pictured above even walked the halls of the famous german school. 

I’ve included an image of a tapestry woven by Bauhaus’s very own Gunta Stolzl. Just one of the talented ladies to finish the 3 year course. 

Here’s a great article that gives a brief overview of the women at Bauhaus: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/nov/07/the-women-of-bauhaus

And you can find more about Gunta here: https://www.bauhaus100.de/en/past/people/masters/gunta-stoelzl/

[sineadhdesign]

PKV - Architecture Letter forms from 20.4.18 

My favourite one pictured here is the letter K. It goes to show its all about perspective. 

[sineadhdesign]

rejection email from Del Kathryn Barton’s management for an interview :)))

[samtullydesign]

The workshop this week reminded me of a beautiful typeface design by Philippe Cossette.

The slightly opaque nature of the colours is from overlapping pieces of cellophane. I love how each of the letters look very short and chunky due to how crowded the semicircles are. I also think his solutions for difficult letters such as ‘M’ and ‘N’ is very creative. 

Source.

[acharlottedesign-blog]

As humans it is our instinct to find faces within objects, so I find it funny that we have manipulated objects (in this case type) to look like faces. This is probably my favourite type-based emoji.

[sineadhdesign]

Typeface made with 3 shapes. We started with orange quarter squares, when we were happy with what we produced, we moved onto adding red squares, and later green triangles. This challenged us to not be satisfied with the first outcome that we produced and try different solutions. Our group proved to have a great dynamic, we delegated the letters between us and moved around the table each time we got a new shape!

[sineadhdesign]

Modern example of Blackletter used in mainstream media. Lady Bird film poster, Dir. Greta Gerwig

[sineadhdesign]

Makeshift Exhibition in the emergency stairs 6.4.18

[samtullydesign]

3 very different exhibition spaces.