Year: 2021

Floating Comic (Staircase)

I chose this piece from the box as I thought it would give my work a little more variety from the other works with its comic book styling rather than a more traditional book. With this I decided to use the panels of the comic is a unique way in order for each individual panel to stand out and flow with the rest of the panels in a downward sloping fashion. I did this by allowing the panels at the top of the page to overlap the following panels to give the narrative a downwards sloping feel, sticking with my theme “staircase” (a downward spiral ascending into misery at the bottom). With this theme I also picked the prefect spread in the book as it starts with calm and contentless and slowly terns to despair as the characters a violently killed.

Exploring Patterns in Signs

To begin with I started to take pictures of anything that caught my eye, all the while trying to find a linking factor. When you’re looking for lettering you find out that it is everywhere! Instructions, directions and notices to name a few of the categories. Many of the signs around department and campus were to give instructions regarding social distancing requirements in relation to the pandemic. All of the signs were designed in the same way and so they formed a set and were consistent across the University. 

After collecting the photos I began to sort through them. I noticed that nearly all of them were circles with only a handful being rectangular. Within the circles, I organised the images by colour: white, green, yellow and red. They abided by the universal traffic light system with green meaning go and red meaning stop. Yellow is used to give instructions.

I could extend this way of categorising signs through shape and colour to see the different trends, not only on campus but in road signs too.

 

Obsession

For my theme I chose “Obsession”, for each stage of the story there is a section of the book to represent it. 

Firstly the story begins with a woman reading a book in the library, so I left the pages as they were. 

She is alone.

And starts to hear some noises, represented by the concentric circles.

In the later end of this section the reader gets a glimpse of the mouse, but never sees it again.

She starts to look for this mouse, and starts to look under objects, and gets more and more obsessed about finding the mouse and eventually tears up the floor board and carpet.

She finds nothing.

Staircase

For this mini project I picked the brief of staircases as I wanted to experiment with different levels within a book and how this manipulation would effect the text.

The first thing that I wanted to do was have two different path ways, the best way to do this was to cut the book in half which I did. I did this as I wanted to represent the two sides one being the severely ill and the other more mild illness. I represented the two sides by two different staircases both going downwards. The first staircase has clean lines that go down in an even manner. The string leading down shows that allow although he has a clearer mind it still isn’t perfect and this is shown as adding this has made the pages much harder to read due to the tension. The other set of staircasaes follows a lot more uneven and different variations of steps. I created this by having every step both a different size and different methods, for example one has negative space within the step and another has lots of texture. This staircase represents the people that are most ill so therefore following this path down wouldn’t be a good experience.

Lettering in perspective

For this mini project I decided to focus on the different perspective of letters in the environment. I focused a lot on different angles of the letters and how this made the type even though they where the same look completely different. I took photos from high, low to each of the sides as well as zooming in and out. To really get to understand how the change in perspective happens. Something that I noticed as I focused on the letter B was how the different font, colour, text size and position all allowed for the same letter to look completely different some many times. I was then able to represent my findings on a document displaying how perspective and different varieties that go into the typography change the meaning and visual.

Materials and Context Photography Across Campus

Eric Photography Document 2

For this ‘Photography In the Environment’ task, I focused primarily on the materials the letters were placed on or made from. I became highly interested in the lettering of the mundane, the everyday lettering that goes largely ignored.

The texture, material and condition of the text was also of interest to me – It was an interesting thought process to consider how the lettering had been constructed and how that linked to it’s purpose or task. For example, the concrete lettering found on the base of an outdoor table tennis table is set deep into the supports in a thick, slab serif type. While having connotations of strength and stability, this also links to the lettering’s function, to communicate the brand name of the objects creator. Due to its intended usage being outside, both the material and method were appropriate.

I then began thinking of the condition of the lettering – The ‘Please Close Lid’ sign, found within the Co-op, was immaculately clean and a clear, sans serif type in an assertive dark red shade. While helping to stand out and communicate the desired message, the cleanliness and visible shine over the letters reflects positively towards the shop as a whole. In contrast, the deteriorated, aged letter H found on a nearby block is clearly old and has been left unattended. The texture of the pain crumbling away, revealing the exposed brick underneath, was very different visually from much of the campus, which tended to all be newer lettering.

Looking back at these photos, the context of the lettering could have been explored further, with different distances allowing both the material and context to be shown optimally in separate shots. However, as in the Fire Exit image, I believe that this wasn’t always necessary, as that image captures both the material and context of the letters reasonably well.

Eye Line

This is a mini project looking at the different types of lettering in the environment. For this project I had a theme of ‘eye-line’ where I took various photos at signs around campus and looked at what features they had.

From looking at the various signs I found that all the signs at eye-line were important or warnings. This was emphasised by bright colours against a plain background and that the had bold sans serif fonts to grasp the viewers attention.

Obsession Through Pages

Having looked at the brief lists, ‘Obsession’ immediately stood out to me. I intended to present the gradual progress of obsession, setting in after time and slowly creeping into borderline insanity.

Reflective of the woman happily reading in the library, the first half of the book remains in tact. However, after around half way, I begun to add to the book. I began to scribble over the pages in red pen, firstly just lines and then into words, transitioning from red pencil to red pen and finally a red Sharpie. These became more aggressive as the book continued on, showing the increasing annoyance the woman has in the sounds. As this change is a slow increase throughout the entire book, this is not seen in the images above.

Similarly, I began folding the corners of the pages, becoming more noticeable and regular the further into the book you get. This is to mirror how the woman would keep putting her book down to investigate the source of the noise. Later in the pages, the woman’s written voice appears, first seen in pencil, then pen and finishing with a Sharpie, the same format as the mouse. The coherent sentences quickly turn into almost deranged scrawlings, ending with multiple pages of repeated questioning “Where is it?”, as seen in the first image. In my initial brainstorm, I decided that repetition was a key source of annoyance, which is why every choice is repeated with gradually increasing intensity.

Finally, again mirroring the brief as the woman rips the library apart trying to find the source of the noise, I began tearing the final pages. By  ripping more and more each time, a gradient wave is formed, creating a visually appealing textural difference and adding dimension to the book. The entire back cover is gone, as seen in the final two images, showing this as an endless narrative, the woman never finding the mouse and receiving the closure she desires, pushed to insanity by the noise.

Cambridge Institution

When deciding what brief to choose for Berta’s project I was instantly drawn to ‘staircase’. It was like I had the perfect book to do so, I decided to put my own spin on the project while trying my best to stick to the brief. The front cover is a man looking onto what seems to be nothing, for me this character was at the front of what was the ‘Cambridge Sanatorium’, which is shown from the first two photos.

From there you can see a clean descendance into the 7 floors of the Sanatorium, as you get deeper the darker it gets which is reflective of the on goings. As you get right to the bottom you start to see bars, showing the Sanatoriums darker secrets as it is actually more of a prison then anything else. The book itself is based on slavery so I used this as my reasoning as for why the man is being moved down the ‘hospital’, it is because of his race instead of whether he is ill or not. As a result of this I decided to stick racial slurs right at the bottom of the staircase.

Serifs and Texture

Task

For Eric’s project we were tasked with finding Lettering in the environment with a theme in mind. At first I started taking pictures of all lettering that interested me and I started in the typography building. As I was taking pictures, I realised that most lettering were serifs so I decided to make serifs my theme. However, as I was taking the pictures, I realised there was a variety in the serifs as some letters had clear and traditional serifs and others were less clear but still had decorate ends.

As I continued taking pictures, both inside and out the department, I started to take pictures more focused on textured lettering, specifically, texture that had been a result of wear and age. This lead to taking pictures outside because I had found that text was more worn out there due to weather.

We then had to group our pictures into our themes and placed the smooth textured serifs at the top of my page as it was my first theme/idea and moved to textured serifs to textured lettering down the page to mimic the evolution of themes from just serif to textured lettering.