ITAP - Week two

The two principles I have chosen to look at this week are developing ideational fluency and managing a creative environment. These two principles stood out to me because again I found them easy to relate to. As I am writing this blog, I am sitting in my own creative environment that I have set up, which I will write more about later. Firstly I am going to look at the work of Saul bass.

As you may or may not know Saul Bass is a famous graphic designer. His work is recognized all over the world. This is because of the ideational fluency portrayed in his work. The two images I have shown here both contain similar characteristics. Bass often uses the idea of a silhouette in his work, not necessarily in black like shown in the images here, but just some form of silhouette style drawing. His drawings are always very basic shapes with blunt, sharp edges and hardly any use of curved lines. The typography is usually very basic, as if it was drawn by hand, almost childlike. Same with his use of colour; Bass very rarely uses a lot of different colours in his work. He usually sticks to one or two and plays with the gradient instead. All these assets he portrays in his work are from where he has developed ideational fluency over his years of being a designer. Developing this fluency can have many benefits for the designer, the main one being that your work is easily recognized. Another would be that the designer can easily tackle any design problem put in front of them as there brain is trained is to tackle anything from there own personal angle.  To conclude on that principle, ideational fluency is very important in visual communication.

To write about the second principle, I have taken a photograph of my wall, which is my personal creative environment. This consists of a collection of tickets, flyers and drawings I have collected over the past year or so. As you can see I have created a collage of them on my wall. I often add to this with new objects that I collect that mean something to me, influence me or make me feel happy. That is how I manage my creative environment. Your creative environment says a lot about the sort of person you are. From looking at an area an artist and designer works in you can learn so much about them without having seen there work before. Obvious things such as the colours and layout can tell you about how the person acts and behaves. Looking at my creative environment you can pick out lots of bright colours and large amounts of collage. You can also see how the board is more cluttered on one side than the other. This shows that there are two sides to my personality, the wild, arty side and the more serious, organised side. As this is my creative environment I know that for a fact is true but if I was to enter another person's environment I would be able to assess it in the same way to pick out similar qualities to those I just listed about myself. To conclude managing your creative environment says a lot about you as a person and therefore has a large influence on your work.