#practical notes

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Throwback to some of my first year notes that I was looking through to help with a skull ID. worked out it's most likely a ring tail possum

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Exquisite Corpse

A fun collaging exercise from our studio 1 practical class encouraging us to work collaboratively and practically with abstract and unconventional thinking which tied in well to this week’s lecture.

One of my favourite aspects about this course is that we get to play around with stuff like this because it forces us to look at things from a different perspective through a method that I wouldn’t trial in my spare time. I like that it helps in opening my eyes to the potential in any and every material for my projects.

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paper prototyping

today we were encouraged to explore ‘franken-models’, where we sketched out our ideas in 3D for our third assessment of this semester. it’s a quick, cost-effective and efficient way to test designs, encounter issues and fix them in the early development stages.

it was interestingly pointed out how as communication designers, physically developing things with our hands can be one of the last stages of our process while for an industrial designer it is the very first.

this task gave a unique perspective on thinking, but with our hands.

2.5.17

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type safari

this week’s practical class enhanced my sensitivity to shapes in the architecture around us, as we were tasked with venturing around the campus to find typefaces within the structures of the university.

this exercise was super fun as it was a chance to explore the campus and to discover that interesting and recognisable shapes can be created out of almost anything - an interesting but significant concept for many designs we see today.

28.4.17

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material shapes the letterforms

in this week’s practical we explored pangrams, a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once - often used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and keyboarding.

our first task was to write a pangram with water, which we soon realised was deceptively simple as we discovered how quickly water evaporates on hot concrete.

we were put to the test against the sun to get all the letters down before they disappeared, resulting in our use of cursive script to save time. along with this, we tried using our shadows and different surfaces to convey the pangram as efficiently as possible.

in our second challenge, we were given a kind of garden wire (used to train stems and branches) to build our pangram. again, this was deceptively simple as we found that the wire was springy and while flexible, refused to stay in shape.

we used tape to fasten the pangram down, working in what resembled a production line with some forming the letters, and others sticking them down.

28.3.17

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quantity not quality

a quote usually heard the other way around, Andy highlighted the importance of focusing over the amount of ideas generated, rather than aiming to refine an idea to a finished standard.

here we investigated typography with one of the first surfaces used to communicate by shaping our initials and creating a typeface using play dough as a substitute for clay.

for our typeface, we strayed away from a popular choice of impressing the letters into the clay and instead separated the play dough in the centre of circular canvases to use positive and negative space in communicating our letterforms.

7.3.17

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personalised gang signs

this week’s class invovled exploring typography through hand symbols by creating individual signs to communicate our initials. it was quite a thought-provoking exercise, seeing how difficult/easy different letter combinations could be formed.

7.3.17

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hello my name is

an extension of the ‘typeface in my pocket’ exercise, we crafted our names from the items we had on us and in our bags.

my first impulse was to reach for my pencil case and use the slimness and similarity of my stationery to form a relatively cohesive and recognisable interpretation of my name.

28.2.17