Art Wonder Everywhere?

 

 Inspiration comes from odd places of course it does, thats why when it strikes you it is a pleasant surprise. So imagine listening to Radio 4 and a piece about an art gallery opening in Africa come on. and you think that will be a brilliant to do branding for an art gallery. One of my favourite design companies "Experimental Jetset" did a spot of branding for the Whitney museum and it looked amazing. I think I will follow this up with individual posters for exhibitions because I like.

When you see a great piece of art, you sit in awe of it hence the name. The AWE gallery was born and the first idea I sketched done was similar to the above finished logo. I needed a subtitle to the gallery, something snappy that could attract people to this fictional venture, & deemed an acronym would make sense. Art...wonder...everywhere?...everyday! For A 7 day a week museum of art made it made so much sense to choose everyday over everyday.

 

Below is my adverting campaign at a bus stop, as you will know big type is my thing so to see "Art Wonder Everyday" massive on the street will surely draw your attention, it certainly would me. So a bit of bias on design and with the artists on the ad. I am an art fan, I find wandering round the tate fabulous, but most of it, I don't get, so to promote this I only chose artists I like, "expect Lichtenstein, Duchamp, Warhol, Rosenquist, Picasso, Dali, Pollock, Mondrian, Banksy, Blake & Magritte."  So now you know what art I like.

The Photocopier is my Screen

 The Photocopier is my screen. Andy is my hero so I combined the too. Having been crowned king of the photocopier by illustration station cos I am always photocopying things. I decided to experiment more with the potential of the copier. Using the one colour filter I made the above. it simply screens a colour cast over the image. The image of Andy was from the i Paper as it was a review of his exhibition in Liverpool, which I must must must go to.

Now Andy's probably most famous piece is Marilyn and these are Andy as the Marilyn's , at least my interpretation. Using a photopied image and a marker pen set. One is the colour version, when he was in the star light and the other, the black and white as his starlight starts to dwindle as well as his mortality, having died twice.

Beauty comes in my shapes and sizes

That's my feet

That's my feet again

The 1960's were a time of innovation. in art, in fashion and in music. and to stumble upon an artifact of this time was a happy accident. Motif was an art magazine for the 1960's to preview art from that period. I chose Motif 10 over the others because Sir Peter Blake designed it. This man designed Sgt Pepper so this man is a legend. Below are a few spreads from the book that I found most appealing.
 It cost me £5 and it was worth every penny in my opinion. 

The Big Reveal

Its all been very quiet on my blog recently but don't worry, its not because I don't love you people its because I have had a very stressful week taking photographs for my uni project. I thought I that I would use this opportunity to reveal, since it is nearly halloween, my costume. Prepare to start singing hits like "Jean Genie", "Drive in Saturday" and "Panic in Detroit". I am dressing up as a personal hero; David...Boowie? David Bowie. I mean....or do I?

Digital Punk

 Digital DIY. Punks would of hand drawn these and hand coloured them using felt tip pens and then photocopied the life out of them. In modern times. Punks if they want this aesthetic can just use a computer tablet and a pen. No Photocopier. No Cost. You loose a little of the style but is an easy way of getting hand drawn text and images onto the computer. 

I did these flyers to promote records in general as i do consider them to be a marvelous invention. It has since become a status symbol for hipsters who want to look fashionable. Punks would of made flyers like this themselves to promote the new single or EP as it was the cheapest most cost effective way of doing so.

Half Music, Half Design

Inspiration is the fuel of design and without it ones would be impossible. Nothing is ever created from scratch. I watched an interesting online documentary called "Everything is a Remix" which helps explains this theory better than I ever could.

So on this basis I will show you where I get my inspiration. I run a tumblr blog which works as inspiration source; featuring various images hosted by other people on said website which I effectively display on my site. http://jareay.tumblr.com/

Pinterest as been a website of interest (see what I did there). it is a site where I can pin images from a other peoples virtual pin boards and post them on my own person virtual pin board where these images remain for permanent reference. This is a good source as it helps with colour schemes and layouts. http://uk.pinterest.com/jareay/

On another note here is a confusing bit of typography for y'all

Juxtapositioned

 Yellow and black are two f my favourite colours to use. They are the colours used on one of my favourite pieces of design done by the one and only design legend, Peter Saville. Opposites are also fun things, but its how you visualize them is the challenge. A simple font choice, some light tracking adjustments and Italics.

Visual Verbs

 

Some words are action words they are something that a person can do, physically, in the "real" world. So how do you visualize an action with out actually showing a person.  You use the power of the letters themselves to show the action. SO when the word is "Cut", it must be severed in some way. "Half" is the way that something is chopped into two equal separate bits. "Split" is to separate into two parts.

A Club Like No Other

An explosion of fun would be had at this club. That's why I wrote and recorded a song about it, then designed the sleeve for it as if it was a single. I've chose the pop art feel because the lyrics of the song references a few points in pop culture. Inspired by the Hacienda club in Manchester, its all about having a good time and that is what I have tried to achieve visually.

A Very British Type

 Mike Skinner once wrote "Go to Heaven For the Weather, Go To hell For the Company" by which logic he wasn't referring to the UK as heaven because traditionally in the main our weather is grim. What makes it worse is we are always complaining about it. Even if its sunny we say that its too hot. Maybe we are just picky. Anyway, to celebrate all things that's wrong with the weather I made these. I think they are pretty. I hope you do. I have always wanted to try out using negative space so I think that these encapsulate my experimental ideals. 

visualkultur.cat

 Went to America bought a lot of cool records and I forgot about this little gem of a book. It is a compilation of artist books from Europe throughout the past 100 years. Some seem to be way ahead of the time and some just beautifully creative. I have selected some of the pages below to show you. These are some of the ones I found most appealing. The front cover is most interesting as well. It is layered and cut in such a way you get a sneak preview of some of the books prior to actually opening the whole book up. Click the image to increase the size of the image.

Smiles

It is possible to say that one of the best British bands of the past 25 years are Spiritualized. The music from this band varies from the spiritual and almost religious to the very loud noise rock feedback sessions. So for those who have not listened to any of their music, do it, Buy "Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space" and listen to it in full.

Anyway, a compilation of their greatness was put together by my father and he wanted a front sleeve as well as inserts and back cover doing for this album. So being a big fan of the discography, I hopped to it. The lead singer during gigs prefers to sit and play his guitar so this was a beautiful image to start, I thought a silhouette of this image would look pretty sweet. I decided I had to keep the design in the sty;e of their designer Mark Farrow (a design legend who has worked with the like of the Manic Street Preachers and Pets Shop Boys). Below is the front in which this silhouette features; the name of the album is from a tribute video to the band.

 

The back cover proved to be more difficult to do as their was no obvious inspirational ideas or images until I came across a nice live shot in which displayed the large screen normally set behind the band. This particular pattern was very simple and worked really well in this context so I used that. editing it to be the same colour as the front.It links to the front as well as they are both inspired by live shots.

Sketchbooking

I am not an illustrator, do not get that impression from these drawings. These little fragments are from my sketchbook. I do quite like to doodle, especially on train journeys to and from home. I'd like to use these at some point for something or other but I don't know how and I don't know when. I have "corrected" them by some basic editing and sharpen them up so that they look presentable. when I draw I am not looking for a style because that will one day come to me.

 

 

Psychedelia has Gotten to Me

Whether people have noticed or not, I have recently become a big fan of Psychedelic poster design as well as the music to accompany it. The debut album by 13th floor elevators is an amazing piece of art as well as the mind opening music. The Piper at the Gates of the Dawn is also an important album to me. The best Pink Floyd album in my opinion. 

But back to posters; very regularly they would feature strange images or nudity just to draw people to the poster. This also made it link to the hippy mood at the time who's mind expanding drugs made them see some strange things. I haven't taken any to make these posters but I do like the styles that they created. The colours were wild, so I have chosen some of them for mine. They were originally screen printed back in the day, unfortunately this process is not easy to come by at home. So these posters were done on a computer. I hope that you like them. Don't be scared of them. Please.

Not a Type-ical day

I have a bit of practical design experimentation during the course of the last week. It was based on the use of ink and typex. I had previously discovered that if you first write in typex then place ink on the top of it. it does not seep through onto the other side so you end up with a reverse letter form on the other side. So using this I tried this again but chose to do the whole alphabet to see how it looked. It was going to be a "grunge" typeface; not one that you would commercially use for a heading but for a one off piece. Once the process work had been done it looked like what you see below. So after that I drafted it into photoshop and made the negative space letter forms into positive space ones. which is what is next to the process work.

Once they were done, I did some one off works in this style to see what they would look like so these. I chose words that would be relevant to the style of the the font so "wet" and "Dirt" were chosen. These appear to be more successful due to them being bolder in weight and easier to read. I do like these and think the process was worth it to find out this out. 

Shape of Design

 

Over the weekend, I spent a lot of my time on Photoshop experimenting with patterns and different typefaces to see what interesting combinations I could come up with.   I have become a very big fan of Bebas, the typeface used in the first piece "The Candy Shop", only problem is it only has one weight. I have always wanted to use Gill Shadow but never had the chance so I have used this in the second piece "Good Mood". Shape tools have interested me too. I have utilized the line tool differently making it so the line is staggered and not just straight. This has been used throughout the pieces too.

Good Days, Bad Design

It is said that bad design costs as much as good design. But when you see bad design it's stands out like a sore thumb on and other wise normal hand. Yesterday was a particularly good day for bad designs. Two examples were spotted on vans; this is the prime place it can be spotted even when you are not looking for it. The examples below were spotted while out with family.

"Air Supply" seems to bare little resemblance to air just pieces of metal. It appears to be a default emboss with a strange font and border for no reason at all. A text warp has also been applied. I don't even understnad the mustard yellow colour of the background. It doesn't contrast the logo enough to work a long side it like it normally would.

 

 This one appears to have no structure or layout and just looks lazy. Comic Sans in varying colours, key lines and shadows. Clip art as far as the eye can see. Then some out of date information to advertise the city and not the actual company.