Tony Mc Govern

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Halloween, time to choose your team, team vampire.. 

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Halloween, the time when your free to be yourself, or something else...

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Halloween, when the nights are dark and cold, make sure your well wrapped up.... 

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As Halloween approaches the monsters come out, and the aliens visit...

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I am starting to consider branding, here is my current favourite Brand for myself.

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This is my attempt at furthering my skills at illustrator. I created a simple image of a robot and have started to play with gradients and effects. 

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This is one of the posters I created for uni, which I am now free to share. I would love to hear your opinions of it. 

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Notes

When your saying yes I was one of the three people there

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10 Rules for Typography

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Designer Essay

Here is a link to my essay on 

Josef Müller-Brockmann

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Week 12 Future User Interfaces and Beyond

Futuristic

When you look at the future and study it the next step is to look towards the future and what it may hold. “If you want to see what the future holds you need only look to the past”. We had a look at several movies and looked at the futuristic technologies that they promised. One such movie was Minority Report (2002), within this movie there was touch screens, air motion gestures, wearable technologies. These technologies are available now, some more expensive than others. This shows how far we have progressed in slightly more than ten years. Technologies thought to be within the realm of science-fiction are now a reality. What’s next?

Vive Vive is a virtual reality application. Vive has many real life applications, from training exercise for army, practicing surgery, a new innovative way of learning, a way to view the world without leaving your home and of course creating art. This allows the users to enter in a 3D world that is so immersive its hard to keep track of where you are. You can create art in several layers making a real life portrait or a sculpture, you could build a house and then walk around it. With so many applications, the only real problem you may have is the reach of your imagination.

I was able to find a store that allowed me to try this out. The first time I admit was solely for fun, the games and the art was incredible. After going away all I could think was new ways creating art in the demo, trying to explore the 3D option to its fullest. I will admit to not being very artistic but this was an incredible opportunity one I definitely went back to take advantage off. I was soon creating robots and writing my name in outer space in stars and fire. All I could think off was how to do it better and what else I could add to it. Unfortunately, I was unable to get an image of the end result, as it was in a virtual reality I think you would have liked it. I believe that VR is going to go far and open up many new doors with technology, it will undoubtedly change the way we design and create art.

Leap Motion

Leap Motion is an exciting product no bigger than your smart phone, you simply plug it into your laptop/computer (you can also use it with a VR headset) and use it to interact with your computer. It creates a virtual world you can use air gestures to control. As with the VR there are a lot of application for this product from games to learning. What I like most about this product is the fact the way you can use it to alter music, programs and to create art. All you need to use the leap motion is a modern computer, no special specs or anything.  

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Week 11 The Here and Now

Technology As we started as far back in art as we could go with cave paintings, we have caught up to the present or the here and now. As many people are competent with modern technology, they will have not one or two devices but several, ranging from smartphones, computers, tablets and laptops. We have now started to focus on the designing across several devices. So if your reading a interesting article you may start reading it on your computer at work, continue reading on your phone on the way home and finish reading this article on your tablet at home, one article three devices. When using a website on a computer you can design it to look as you like, the same for any internet capable device. However, when your website will be accessed via several different devices it will look different on each one. It is best to stick to proven principles for designing for technology.

Proportions When taking into account the accessibility of the web, it is best to consider proportions, such as The Golden Rule (mentioned in previous posts) and the Rule of Thirds in your design. Sir Christopher Wren a largely sought after English architect with a talent for mathematics, used both of these principles. You can compare architecture to web design and then use the same proportions to do this.

Hierarchy This is best used to show what is important, and in what order its importance is. If you have a look at the posts you are reading each post has a title then a sub-title and finally the content (text and images), the Title comes before the sub-title, and the sub-title before the content in the Hierarchy. This gives a structure to the posts and lets users know what’s to come.

Typography While we like to go online and look at all the nice images we are at some point going to read something, even if by accident. With the internet advances, we no longer have to stick to web safe fonts, we can use our own and make up interesting font-families if our first choice is not supported. It has been said that “Fonts are the clothes that words wear” and we all like to wear nice clothes, why should words not have nice clothes too, making them more interesting and more likely to be read, not some boring, plain text no one is interested in.

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Week 10 The Rise of the Machines

Apple

This week we looked at the starting point for designers mixing with computers a machine that wildly changed the game for designing. This can be seen as to start in 1984 with the launch of Apple Macintosh with its GUI (graphic user interface) this open up computers to the average joe. Instead of being a programmer who knew the computer inside out – anyone could now use it due to the use of images and symbols to represent applications and features. A feature (GUI) so set in stone in computer familiarity we may never move away from it as we still use it to this day.

Emigre This allowed Designers to start using computer programs to start creating art. One of the early magazines that started in the same year (1984) is the Emigre Magazine this magazine focused on the views of designers, architects, artists and photographers. Indeed, sometimes this new technology was not enough to get the art across, and Émigré worked with that. Using technology as best they could, if they were photocopying an image and it came across blurred or something was cut off it could still have been included in the magazine using the quirks of the technology at that time.

Thankfully technology would continue to evolve and grow developing much more sophisticated software allowing artists to use software even further to get across their ideas, and even use software to bypass the ability to draw.  

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Week 9 Postmodernism

Postmodernism starting in the 20th century is a reaction to the Modernism previously talked about, the idea that all progress is a good thing, including technology. Postmodernism went against that philosophy, signalling the end of modernism. Postmodernism is most often viewed in art and architecture. Postmodernism art has taken on form in Conceptual art, Performance art, Video art, Installation art and Minimalism, each one is a separate movement and yet still seen as postmodernism.

Jamie Reid Jamie Reid who is widely known for his sex pistols art, used a very punk/anarchy design with his art. A lot this work is very forward, containing a very in your face attitude, in bold colors and images making you nearly stop and stare at the work.

We also touched on Paula Scher who during an interview said something that stuck with me, Paula mentions in the interview that while most artists have a process for their work, they start on their work then refine it. With paula it is not that way, very often her work when started that will be it. There is very little that comes after the first draft. When she was in a meeting with Citi for a brand logo she drew it there and then. Which while it was great, some people expect a process but you are not always buying art and a process you are also getting years of experience also. I found this interesting due to the fact that when creating images some will transform from their original concept into something completely different by the end and other times it will not change at all. Showing the many different ways that artist create their art, another artist Stefan Sagmeister covered on this course said that he divide his time and spend 7 years working and then 1 year on sabbatical looking at new types of art then spends the next 7 years experimenting with what he learned in that time. These two very separate artists showed me that it is ok to design your work in a process that suits you.

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Week 8 WWII, HFG Ulm and Modernism in the US

With the 2nd world war bringing fresh persecution against artist that did not comply with Adolf Hitler’s idea of what art should be. With the Nazi’s persecuting artists, designers and even architects in Germany, many took the chance and fled to the states.

This migration then shifted a huge influx of creativity to the states. The ULM School of Design, (Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm or HFG Ulm) tried to balance this shift from Europe. The Ulm School of design started to gain a reputation amongst the best design schools in the world, only the Bauhaus was considered a better choice than ULM. With the influx of these new European artists - modernism which had been failed to take off when presented in 1913 in America, gained a second wind. Here is a few characteristics of the modernist movement

• Reject traditional forms and decorative elements • Seek a solution that is simple and direct • Use systematic methods rather than intuitive ones • Think about relationships in form and content • Use geometric shapes: circle, triangle, square • Use primary colors • Use sans serif typefaces • Show contrast in typographical material • Use photographs and photomontage rather than drawings or illustrations • Use silhouetted photographs with white backgrounds • Use maps and diagrams • Use graphic symbols and icons • Use of asymmetric page layout • Use of grid or clearly delineated page-organizing method • Apply a planned visual hierarchy

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Week 7 The International Typographic Style

The international style also known as the Swiss Style, which began in Switzerland and Germany in the 1950s. This movement would be honed between two design schools. One school led by Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder in Basel with Josef Müller-Brockman leading in Zurich. This movement became a huge deal for the next 20 years. As many recognised Swiss designers would work on this style and defining it, one of the main features of this style is the mathematical layout, elements being properly spaced and aligned.

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Week 6 Revolution & The Bauhaus

De Stijl

De Stijl otherwise known as “The Style” was made (1917) due to the nationalist egotism witnessed – by Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian during the first world war. Theo Van Doesburg in an attempt to explain his work drew an image of a cow then split it up into squares and rectangles.

The De Stijl presents a minimal abstract form that cannot be chosen as any individual country or person. This was seen as appropriate post-war era art style. This style uses geometric shapes using only straight lines making simple squares and rectangles with simple colours in them.

The Bauhaus

With the loss of the first wold war, Germany was facing Economic, political and even cultural devastation. With the need to rebuild and move forward into the future the Bauhaus was built with its new director Walter Gropius in charge. The Bauhaus opened in 1919 (till 1924) with “The ultimate goal of all art” teaching and encouraging all forms of craft, “For there is no such thing as art by profession”.