#rmit student

[joedesigned]

ZINE UPDATE

Finally starting to progress with my zine, and by that I mean I’ve done the introductory page... I’m just absolutely hating everything I make at the moment and am really stuck in a rut, but it’s due THIS WEEK so I’ll have to work past the creative block and suck it up. I’m not really happy with the layout at the moment but I figured if I just get something down i can go back later to fix it up. 

You can see better now how I’m gonna try incorporate my magazine collage / photo collages in with the zine. The talkshow host is made up of photos from unsplash.com (all free to use! no copyright!) and I’ll also include some of my own collage later in the zine.

again, feedback is welcome, I want to change the font of my body text as well, its too bold. Something bauhaus but not bold? Does that even exist?

[joedesigned]

ZINE UPDATE

Still struggling a bit with the design aspect of my zine. The only progress I’ve seemed to have made is making the front cover, and I still can’t even decide on that. Here are a couple of options I’ve designed, I’m trying to incorporate the Bauhaus style and still keep a modern approach.

In this weeks tutorial class we were talking about how Andy and Karen want us to take a more abstract approach on the assignment, and I’m worried mine is still too literal, so I’m gonna have to think of how I can include something that isn’t traditional / something more creative in my presentation.

if u want u can comment your favourite version?? It’ll help me decide (I’m sooo bad at making decisions :) any feedback would be great too!!

[joedesigned]

This is the poster I made for one of our specialist classes for image and identity, but I definitely was inspired by the content we’ve been learning in comm design studies. I have been really into collage as an art form so made my poster from a collage of photos I’ve taken over the last 6 months. I cut the letters of the words out of the photos and then layered them on tp of yellow coloured paper to help they stand out.

[joedesigned]

I saw @kiaraconcept digitalised her shapeshifters activity so thought I’d give it a try with mine! I had fun making this and found it super easy once I had the basic shapes making up the letters made (lots of copy and pasting, reflecting and rotating.) I gave my type two styles, the first resembles the colours of the BauHaus shapes, and the second has a more modern, high contrast theme.

[joedesigned]

SHAPESHIFTERS ACTIVITY

I decided to do one of the workshop activities today during my image and identity tutorial class. I’ve found that doing a semi-mindless jobs while my teachers are talking in online class helps me to stay sane, it can get a bit tedious if I am just sat at my desk doing nothing.

I couldn’t find any coloured paper so I used pages out of an old scrapbook style notebook, but I think it came out pretty good, i even unintentionally stuck to bauhaus inspired colours.

I tried constructing the alphabet from the triangles and slices, I was more successful with some letters and kinda failed with others. I found it hard to try and stick to the bauhaus inspired style, like for example the letter R and F are too pointed and unreadable in my opinion. I think I, K, O and U resemble the Bauhaus aesthetic because 1) they are readable and 2) they have a good balance of pointed and curved edges.

I really liked doing this exercise and am gonna try complete some of the older workshops in the coming weeks. It took me back to the start of the course when we made the alphabet from everyday objects in one of the first tutorial classes.

[joedesigned]

CLASS LAYOUT ACTIVITY

In this weeks class we were given a pretty basic (yet effective) magazine page and told to redesign the layout to emphasise different elements on the page. We were told to create a layout that emphasised the text (far left), create a layout that emphasised the photo (middle), and create a layout for fun (far right.) 

I had a lot of fun doing this activity, it definitely made me rethink some of the design decisions I make, and why I make them. Definitely gonna use some of the techniques I used in this exercise in my zine design.

[joedesigned]

PROJECT 4 UPDATE:

Today I scanned the magazine cut out’s so that i could use them in my digital zine. I made sure to scan each furniture time separately because that gives me the option to photoshop a scene together if I decide I don’t like the scene I’ve put together in the first photo. My plan from here is to add these magazine scarps into my zine and add some graphics on top of them!

[joedesigned]

THE END!

We’ve reached the end of my tumblr blog! 

Reflecting back on this semester I think this blog was one of my highlights. I really enjoyed making posts and learning about different styles and eras of design, and I’m not just saying that either, I looked forward to digging deeper into topics discussed in the lectures and finding work I liked. I think I was partly interested in all that stuff, but partly wanted content for this blog. This blog helped me explore further into what we were learning about because I loved the idea of ‘blogging’ and wanted things to post about on here.

I also really love the community that was built here. Tumblr is pretty dead nowadays, theres not much going on, but it felt so full and exciting during the past couple of months with all us students posting our work and interacting with each others work. Theres definitely some people I know based off their tumblr usernames and not their real life names (I’m so sorry but let’s blame COVID for that) and I’m excited to get to know them better hopefully when next semester starts (if I can figure out who is who lol.) I also think this blog worked so well considering our current situation, it’s such a pandemic proof idea, it was probably one of the only projects we had this semester that wasn’t compromised due to COVID-19.

I also really liked the casual-ness of this space. I haven’t planned any of the journal entries (and I’m sorry in advance for the amount of spelling mistakes you’re gonna find marking my blog.) For me my posts were such a stream of consciousness, I just start typing and don’t stop until the streams over. Half the time when I started to write a post I didn’t even know what I was gonna write about, I would just let myself write and see where I went with it. The casual, self reflection aspect of this blog helped me understand topics more, and made me think about thinks longer than I usually would’ve. I retained the information that we learnt about in the lectures more because I knew i wanted to write about it on my blog later.

Overall this experience was such a source of creativity for me. I felt inspired every time I opened the app, because my feed was just full of RMIT students like myself. I’m really gonna miss posting on here, and interacting with everyone on here, some parts of me wish we could go on doing it forever. 

I might use this blog in the future, I might not, but I’m glad i have this little shrine to my first semester at uni that’ll be here forever.