ITAP Design Canons - week eight

This week's lecture was about Roland Barthes (12th November 1915 – 25th March 1980). Barthes was a French philosopher and semiotician known for his influences in developing theories. The two theories we looked at were semiotics and analysing photography. What I found interesting was how he de-constructed meaning behind everyday objects such as soap. I was intrigued by the amount of mythology we are confronted with everyday without even realising. manipulations of reality.


'Barthes purpose is to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals and symbols of the language of mass culture' - Quote: Dennis Potter. The Times. 


I was inspired by the amount of myths that were hidden in everyday objects such as the myth of cleanliness, purity and magical properties. I de-constructed the meaning of an image of shampoo in a similar way that Barthes did with soap to see what hidden myths I could find. 

From this image of five products I can be lead to believe that yoghurt, green tea, avocado, lemongrass and guava all supposedly have amazing properties that can improve my hair. Most of these are foods that we eat so what is it that makes us suddenly want to put them in our hair rather than our mouth. De-constructing myth shows how much subconscious trust we put in people who we don't personally know but know are supposed to know where their doing so we just go along with it as if it all has to be legitimate. The myths in this image would be the myths of magical properties and purity.



I then went on to de-construct some photography. I looked at the work of famous documentary photographer Henn Cartier Bressan.  

This photo caught my eye for a few reasons. Upon first glance it looks like a photo of harmless kids playing in the street. Then I noticed that they are playing with toy guns. This seems legit for the older boy but the boy on the far left looks very young to be playing with guns. My attention then turned to the boy in the background in the middle. It looks as if he is smoking and he is definitely way too young to be smoking. There is also a young boy in the back wearing a suit for some reason, and all the boys seem to be reasonably dressed up and the building they are playing in front of looks like it could be a church or place of importance. I think these kids have been let out to 'play' after an important family event but their choice of toys is slightly disturbing.

This photo caught my eye because of the interesting body language. Both the people appear to be holding back as if they were unsure whether to kiss or not. The guy has his hand on his leg instead of touching her and the woman still has her legs crossed as if she hasn't tried to move any further forwards towards him. This makes me think that it may be their first kiss. I think the must be in their twenties age wise and pretty well off judging by how they are dressed and the fact that she possibly owns a dog. I would say that they are on a lunch date. What I think makes this photo is the fact that the dog is looking at them. The dog appears to have an expression on its face which could be interpreted in different ways, therefore giving this picture different meanings. Overall I would say that the dog is happy that this kiss has happened, which gives the photo a positive look.

ITAP Design Cannons - week seven

This week's lecture was about vernacular typography and about what happens when the fine arts meet commercial design. Vernacular means anything that is hand-drawn or original; everyday type such as signatures and graffiti. The hero this lecture was based around was famous art director So-me.
So-me is the art director for head banger records. I've always been interested in designing for a record label so i found his work very inspiring and decided to research more into what he has designed. I found out that he owns his own clothing company called Cool Cats. These are some examples of his clothing designs that caught my eye. 

This was one of his designs for the Ed Rec 7th birthday celebration in London. I thought the image itself was very well designed, how he has intertwined different things to do with London but what i thought was really clever was how he has reflected the design so it includes the illusion of the River Thames. 

This caught my eye because of the old-school look to it.  I noticed how the logo is in the shape of a head boy/girl badge and the jumper itself is in the shape of a school jumper, especially with the tightened cuffs and bottom. I like how he has made a relatively simple white logo more interesting by putting it on vintage coloured fabric.

I then moved on to looking at some of so-me's work he did for the record label. 

 This is a promotional piece he designed for Ed Banger records. The use of typography in this piece in incredible.  Using more than one font or font group is a difficult task to get right in design but so-me has pulled it off here perfectly. You can see that he has used visual hierarchy to make certain words and phrases stand out more than others as your eye reads around the circle.  

So-me did a collection of portrait designs for Busy P.  He did a collection of 30 designs all in 6 hours before Busy P's show. . 

To the left are a couple of examples of these portraits. 

I particularly like the top one because of the use of texture that makes it look as if the logo has been sown onto the background. It  gives the image a 3D feel and keeps it looking interesting which makes up for the limited colour palette . This has inspired me to try using only black, white and one colour in my work to see  if it could improve my  work.

I like this second portrait because of it has a pop art Andy Warhol feel to it. The use of bright colours is very eye catching, especially as some of them clash, such as the red and pink. Again, so-mes use of fonts and hierarchy in the typography is very clever, especially how when you read around the portrait it explains the reason for it. This image shows that you can take a high contrast. nit very detailed image and make it more interesting by adding typography.

To finish, this is an image of an exhibition by so-me showing perfectly how using less colours can be more, especially when you use other media such as texture and lighting to excel in your work. 

ITAP Design Canons - week six

This lecture was about 'Artists with Issues' and how they use strong images and concepts to get messages across in there work. The three artists that were mentioned were Jenny Holzer, Adrian Piper and Jean Michel Basquiat. 


I found the work of Adrian Piper quite inspirational. I especially liked her style of work shown in the smoking images below. These images stood out to me as the image is very hard edge and cold and instantly portrays smoking in a bad manner. The quotes she has used on some of the images in her series of 6 are very serious and get you thinking deeper into the meaning behind the artwork.

I also researched into Jean Michel Basquiat and found his life story very moving. I looked at his work to see how he may have portrayed some of his personal issues through art.

His work is very childlike and messy. There is a lot of random mark making strange objects scatter about the page. Some of his work contains sketches of figures that are drawn in unusual shapes and sizes, they're is nothing realistic about his work. You can tell it has been created from his mind, not from real life observation. As a heroin addict Basquiats mind must have been all over the place. Some people say that when you taking drugs your mind is sent back into a childlike state. This made me think that maybe this is what happened to Basquiat and he portrayed it through his art.

When i saw this image of a skull it instantly made me think of a self portrait. Basquiat had a very messed up childhood and obviously turned to drugs because of this. In his early years he was extremely bright and was noticed from a young age. I think this may have put a lot of pressure on him causing him to act strangely like when he ran away at 15. I think he may have been trying to get away from the attention, especially as he went into street art which is sort of illegal and usually kept on a lowdown showing he must have been a quite secretive person. 

Having seen Jenny Holzer's work, I looked at the people she worked with and was influenced by and came across the work of Barbara Kruger. Barbara is a conceptual artist with a very individual style. Her work usually consists of black and white photographs with red or white typography, and often the use of pronouns such as we, your, etc. I was moved by some of the quotes that she uses in her work, i think more so than then imagery. The two images shown below i found particularly eye catching. 

The bottom image i instantly found i could relate to. It got me thinking about how we live in this 21st century world where everyone is on social networking sites, creating profiles for themselves how they think they are or want to be but are not necessarily so. I think that this could become a problem in the future and artwork like this is a good way of promoting the issue. Though this was not the issue the image was designed for, it goes to show that use of strong image and typography could cover many different issues.

Barbara Kruger