Game Design Workshop

 

I attended a workshop called game design because it interested me into learning new software and to learn scripting as I had never done it before. I found it really quite hard and confusing to use but I think as you do more and more it gets easier to work with as you get more familiar with the software. the software we used to create the game was Unity and we had to open up a unity document and also a script document. the script document is where you enter all the commands for the game for it to work, this includes when the winning message come up, or how the ball moves and what the little diamonds are and for them to be picked up by the ball and that they disappear. also the script allows you to demand the game to restart itself or to add more levels. as we didn't have a lot of time we produced a simple game of a ball in a maze, the aim is to pick up all the little gems shapes in the maze to move onto the next level. as we had little time we only created one level. the image below shows what the game looked like. I then downloaded the game on my phone. 

Neubau Guest Lecture

We had a lecture from the authors of the The 'Neubau Forst Catalogue'. They talked to us about their catalogue and how they came up with the idea, and how they completed it.

The catalogue is a collection of detailed silhouettes of urban trees and separate tree sculptures. In years of manual work, using a method developed especially for this project, these details have been digitally removed from their original urban surroundings in Berlin. The materials are distinguished by their extent, outstanding quality of detail, and excellent resolution of the usual auto-traced digital tree library.

The Berlin trees were selected according to a special matrix. The letters of the name of the design studio, NEUBAU, were laid over a map of Berlin. The trees that were located at the structural anchor points of the letters were marked to appear in the Neubau Forst Catalogue. Over a period of time, from 2009 to 2013, these trees were systematically photographed, documented, and catalogued in the summer and winter seasons.

History of Graphic Design

History of Graphic Design Avant Garde from Minji Aye Hong on Vimeo.

This video is efficient and a beautiful visual language showing the history of graphic design including Bauhaus, Constructivism, De Stijl and artists work. it is shown using motion graphics and using shapes and letters in different compositions sizes colours for flow of movement.

Rocket

I have created a rocket with a shadow, a pattern, and different kinds of lines such as the dashed line, the thick and thin yellow lines. I used the pen tool to draw out the outline shape of the rocket I then created a pattern separately and added it to my swatch panel, I then used this pattern as a pattern fill for the rocket. I then used the line/stroke panel to create the different lines by changing the thickness and positions.

Pear

I created this in Illustrator using a tool that creates shades and gets the exact colour of the original image in each area but it makes it more smooth. This is useful to make objects seem more real to look at if you want that effect. I think this is a really useful tool to know and I enjoyed this session.

Gif

I made a gif in photoshop lesson by using the timeline and using the different frames.

 

First I set up the size of a new document, then I had to get the timeline to create a gif up so you go to window timeline and it should come up as a bar at the bottom.



 
I then created 7 layers with one shape on each layer and I changed the time of the key frames to make sure each layer is on for long enough but not too long. This was done by highlighting all the frames and clicking on the drop down arrow and choosing the right time.

 

 



I changed the colour of each shape and then saved it as a gif. I loved creating this as it was totally different and easy to make ad there is so many different ones you could make.

Artist Research

Mikey Burton uses infographics to create interesting information filled images.

 

 

Artist Research

I have looked at roy lichtenstein and andy warhol to see how the expression is portrayed by the illustrated face.

Artist Research

Grant Wiggins: minimalism artwork

Used paint on canvases, this minimal simple look would be perfect for my book of materials and textures.

 

 

Artist Research

 

Suprematism, 18th Construction

1915 | Oil on canvas | 530 x 530 mm

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Malevich, Kazimir | 1878-1935

What is the Golden Record?

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Sagan and his associates assembled 116 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, thunder and animals (including the songs of birds and whales). To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages, and printed messages from US president Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

The collection of images includes many photographs and diagrams both in black and white and color. The first images are of scientific interest, showing mathematical and physical quantities, the Solar System and its planets, DNA, and human anatomy and reproduction. Care was taken to include not only pictures of humanity, but also some of animals, insects, plants and landscapes. Images of humanity depict a broad range of cultures. These images show food, architecture, and humans in portraits as well as going about their day-to-day lives. Many pictures are annotated with one or more indications of scales of time, size, or mass. Some images contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are defined in the first few images using physical references that are likely to be consistent anywhere in the universe.

The musical selection is also varied, featuring artists such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Guan Pinghu, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, Kesarbai Kerkar and Valya Balkanska.

After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included. However, the record does contain "Diagram of vertebrate evolution", by Jon Lomberg, with drawings of an anatomically correct naked male and naked female, showing external organs.
The pulsar map and hydrogen molecule diagram are shared in common with the Pioneer plaque.

The 116 images are encoded in analogue form and composed of 512 vertical lines. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute.

Guest Lecture Helvetica

Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker and photographer based in New York and London. He has produced eight feature documentaries, including the award-winning I Am Trying To Break Your Heart about the band Wilco; Moog, the documentary about electronic music pioneer Robert Moog; and an experimental feature film with the band Animal Collective. Gary worked with punk label SST Records in the late-1980s, ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press during the 1990s, was Vice President of the media website Salon.com in 2000, and started the indie DVD label Plexifilm in 2001.
In 2007 he made his directorial debut with Helvetica, a documentary about graphic design and typography. The film marked the beginning of a design film trilogy, with Objectified, about industrial design and product design following in 2009, and Urbanized, about the design of cities, in 2011.


Helvetica - trailer from gary hustwit on Vimeo.

ManvsMachine Guest lecture

I attended a guest lecture from ManvsMachine and they told us what projects they have done and they showed us the work they have done for Nike company. They told us what the clients give you and what its like in the real world, also mentioned how to stand out from the crowd is important and to do this you have to produce work on your own and in teams for clients or for leisure. They have used motion graphics to create this video and more for the Nike company and for other companies.


Nike KD7 from Adam Rowe on Vimeo.
Nike / KD7 from ManvsMachine on Vimeo.

Form follows Function Task

Form and Function

Form follows function is a principle associated with modernist architecture and industrial design in the 20th century. The principle is that the shape of a building or object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose.

- Find an object in the room/ that you have on your person which has a function. It might be a phone, laptop, or something as simple as a pencil, the chair you’re sitting on or notepad you’re using.

 

I have chosen a simple object a pen.

 

-Think about the relationship between its form and its function. Which do you think has been given precedence by its designer?

 

I think the designer put its function before the form because it is very simple its straight pointed at the end where the ink comes out its small and compact so its easily portable and light, it has an outer layer that covers the ink so you don't get ink everywhere.

 

-Do you think they ‘work’ together? [How] could the form be improved to the benefit of the function?

 

I think there isn't much form to work together on this particular pen, but because it is so simple it works well and its function is achieved fully. the only thing I can think of to change is maybe making the pen a bit wider so its easy for people wit big hands to write with, also it could have a wiggly soft material where you hold the pen to make it look more appealing or interesting and to make the pen more comfy to write with reducing rubbing or red soreness after writing a lot for a long time.

 

-Consider the idea that, ‘The way something looks should be determined by its purpose’.

-Do you agree?

 

Yes I agree with this statement as the basic design should allow the function of the object to be the most important thing to make sure it works and it works really well. however some design in its form can help promote its function and therefore there should be an equal balance between the two to get the most optimistic outcome.

Iconology and Semiotics

Iconology

Is the historical analysis and interpretive study of symbols or images and their contextual significance.
each painting or symbols or any piece of design/art can have a hidden meaning or many meanings that can be interpreted by differently by different people who view the piece of work.

Semiotics

The study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behaviour.
Semiotics calls attention to the formal structures of signification. It reveals the arbitrary or constructed nature of the meanings we use and understand in our lives everyday. Semiotics can also be used as a form of social criticism, to examine and explore the motivations behind these constructions of meaning.

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality." Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself and/or an idea/concept.

Dadaism

Dadaism

Was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century. Dada in Zurich, Switzerland, began in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter, but the height of New York Dada was the year before, in 1915. The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first readymades. Dada, in addition to being anti-war, had political affinities with the radical left and was also anti-bourgeois.

 

The roots of Dada lay in pre-war avant-garde. Cubism and the development of collage, combined with Wassily Kandinsky’s theoretical writings and abstraction, detached the movement from the constraints of reality and convention.

Propaganda posters

Propaganda

Is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of a population toward some cause or position.
Propaganda is information that is not impartial and used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis, or using loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information presented.
While the term propaganda has acquired a strongly negative connotation by association with its most manipulative and jingoistic examples, propaganda in its original sense was neutral and could refer to uses that were generally positive, such as public health recommendations, signs encouraging citizens to participate in a census or election, or messages encouraging persons to report crimes to law enforcement.

Playing on emotions and fatherly sentiments, this 1916 British propaganda effort attempts to guilt men to join the armed forces by showing them a future in which their lack of service disappoints their children. Prior to the draft in 1917, emotional blackmail was one of the many tactics employed to recruit young men into the military. The shining faces of two young children look up at their father expectantly and ask “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” forced prospective servicemen to ponder what the consequences would be if the answer to that question was nothing. This poster frames military service as the most honorable accomplishment that a father can tell his children about, demonstrating the effectiveness of that simple question.











This image is the best known image from a campaign that originated in 1940 with the catchphrase “Be like Dad, Keep Mum”, this image came from the campaign in 1942 and the poster “Keep Mum, She’s Not so Dumb” by the artist Gerald Lacoste is remembered more famously. It depicts a glamorous blonde woman reclining, and the officers from each branch of the Armed forces are surrounding her talking to one another as if she was not in the room. It is implied that the officers are talking military secrets, on the assumption, as wrongful as it is, that the woman is only a “dumb blonde” and will not pass these secrets onto the enemy.

This image is interesting because it makes these implications against women, but underlying implies that they are incorrect and it is in fact the men that are being careless, this is a technique known as unstated assumption. This technique is used when the message that the propagandist intends to transmit would seem less credible if explicitly stated. The concept is instead repeatedly assumed or implied. In other words, it is more believable that the woman is assumed to be stupid but in fact is listening and willing to share war secrets, rather then the men just being careless, that has to be an image that is assumed after looking, reading, and analyzing the propaganda.

Another technique used in this image is the usage of slogans, a slogan is known as a brief, striking phrase that may include labeling and stereotyping. Although slogans may be enlisted to support reasoned ideas, in practice they tend to act only as emotional pleas. The two slogans used in this poster are “Keep Mum, She’s Not so Dumb”, meaning a woman can be helpful in finding out important information because she is assumed to be not listening or not intelligent. Also the main slogan of this entire campaign was “Careless Talk Costs Lives”, this was used during the time that women spies were used to gain information, and government officials were caught speaking about official business when on leave. The slogan is meant to evoke an emotional feeling of guilt to military and government officials who speak freely about war secrets; because of this the deaths of soldiers and civilians was the result.

Art Nouveau Movement

The Art Nouveau style appeared in the early 1880s for a relatively short period of time – up until WW1. The style of the, it’s impact was evident across urban centres throughout Europe and North America. Permeating art, craft, design and architecture, it could be recognised in buildings and advertisements, inside homes and outside street cafés.

Despite only lasting a short period of time in the late 19th/early 20th century, it experienced a popular revival in the 1960s and today its motifs are returned to again and again in visual communications.

It is regarded as an important predecessor of Modernism. this movement was in response to the technological advances and the industrial revolution. These developments lead to contemporary life appearing to become ‘standardised’, an a resulting sense of alienation; a loss of people's sense of ‘self’ lead to artists seeking new forms of expression. For some, this led to an emphasis on subjectivity or ‘interiority’, and a search for spirituality.

 

Post Modernism

What is Post Modernism

 

Design movement that evolved in the mid 60’s as a critical response to the dominance and percieved sterility of Modernism. embracing art, architecture and design. It re established interest in ornament, symbolism and visual wit. unconstrained by dogma, Post-Modern designers rejected monernisms obssession with progress and challenged the fundamental tenets of order and discipline espoused by the Bauhaus.

This movement use’s collage and a and lots of different techniques to create a visually busy and eye catching piece if work. post modernism throws outall the rules of design that modernism created, so post modernism was completely freedom of design.

Ray Gun

While the contents of its pages were not related to graphic design, Ray Gun magazine proved to be an exploration of typography, layout and visual storytelling that would shift the approach of many graphic designers. The magazine was founded in 1992 and led by the work of David Carson, who served as its art director for the first three years of its career, which lasted 7 years and over 70 issues.

Carson’s style of typographic experimentation influenced the development of the deconstruction style of design and a whole new generation of designers. The experiments by Carson and other Ray Gun designers were chaotic, abstract and distinctive, but sometimes illegible. The magazine’s radical subject matter often related to music and pop culture icons and the magazine became a reliable source for the prediction of up-and-coming stars.

Modernism

Bauhaus

Bauhaus was a revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by the pioneer modern architect Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919, includes artists Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

Swiss Modernism

Design

Often referred to as the International Typographic Style or the International Style, the style of design that originated in Switzerland in the 1940s and 50s was the basis of much of the development of graphic design during the mid 20th century. Led by designers Josef Müller-Brockmann at the Zurich School of Arts and Krafts and Armin Hofmann at the Basel School of Design, the style favored simplicity, legibility and objectivity.

Of the many contributions to develop from the two schools were the use of, sans-serif typography, grids and asymmetrical layouts. Also stressed was the combination of typography and photography as a means of visual communication. The primary influential works were developed as posters, which were seen to be the most effective means of communication.

Constructivism

The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appears as a positive term in Naum Gabo’s Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Aleksei Gan used the word as the title of his book Constructivism, printed in 1922. Constructivism was a post-World War I development of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the ‘counter reliefs’ of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. The term itself would be invented by the sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, who developed an industrial, angular style of work, while its geometric abstraction owed something to the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich

Futurism

Futurism (Italian: Futurismo) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized speed, technology, youth and violence and objects such as the car, the aeroplane and the industrial city. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere. The Futurists practised in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Its key figures were the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Antonio Sant’Elia, Bruno Munari, Benedetta Cappa and Luigi Russolo, the Russians Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Igor Severyanin, David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the Portuguese Almada Negreiros. It glorified modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurism’s artistic style. Important Futurist works included Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and Balla’s painting, Abstract Speed + Sound (pictured). To some extent Futurism influenced the art movements Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism.

De Stijl

 

Originally a publication, De Stijl was founded in 1917 by two pioneers of abstract art, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. De Stijl means style in Dutch. The magazine De Stijl became a vehicle for Mondrian’s ideas on art, and in a series of articles in the first year’s issues he defined his aims and used, perhaps for the first time, the term neo-plasticism. This became the name for the type of abstract art he and the De Stijl circle practised.

Other members of the group included Bart van der Leck, Vantongerloo and Vordemberge-Gildewart, as well as the architects Gerrit Rietveld and JJP Oud. Mondrian withdrew from De Stijl in 1923 following Van Doesburg’s adoption of diagonal elements in his work. Van Doesburg continued the publication until 1931.

 

De Stijl had a profound influence on the development both of abstract art and modern architecture and design