For this week, I looked into the Research Task in particular, and stumbled upon WeAreBeard. They are a graphic design studio based in Worcestershire, and do extensive work throughout the whole of UK, and I love how interactive and engaging their website is. Their project for a cocktail bar, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, combines both illustration and typography to create a unique branding for the bar. I also really like how they designed their menu to look like pocket travel journals, which is a really neat touch!

They are situated near The Hive and I hope to actually arrange a meeting with them sometime and get feedback for my portfolio, once things have settled down for me.

Guest Lecture: Maziar Raein
For this week, I tuned in on the guest lecture, Maziar Raein, and his take on the importance of Graphic Design and its cultural background and history. He talks about the 80s and how half of the creatives would look at the past while the other half looked towards the future and for new design fundamentals to be created. It was at this point people started to look at things differently, and I suppose it has never clicked with me as someone who was born when things were already opening up to people, but I found this segment interesting as I look to Art Nouveau, a historical art movement, for inspiration for my work. Art Nouveau has influenced the designs of my work and sometimes how I see things with creative briefs, that I can sort of relate to what he meant when people still looked back to the past. I think knowing your foundations and some historical culture helps you develop as a designer overall.

Raein also mentions Margaret Calvert – I admire her work and how she makes it accessible to read her road signs to keep the roads safe. She’s famous for the man digging up the road image, and its such an iconic illustration, she’s pretty much set the standard for road signs in my eyes! I also liked that she collaborated with a very traditional designer (Jock Kinnear), as he may have been the complete opposite of her but they still managed to make great things. I’ve always liked collaboration and encouraged it, so seeing this happening and being the cause for the production of something that makes peoples lives a bit better and safer is really special to me.

Raein also talks about micro-utopias, though I’m not sure I fully comprehended what he meant, I did go on to research it within visual design and I came across Tatsushi Morimoto. I really like post apocalyptic/futuristic art due to the creators having widely different yet similar visual concepts, and its really interesting to see it. I also like to think creators include something that means a lot to them, for example, I think Morimoto included a lot of dome-like buildings to encourage sunlight and growth of plants indoors and to symbolise renewable energy. I’m not sure if this is the intention, but thats the connotation I get from his imagery, which is quite nice and thought-provoking.

Because of this, I was inspired to make a little world of my own for my quadriptych and still playing on my childhood memories or archways in churches.

I’ve proceeded to brainstorm a bit on my work and how I’d like it to be. I did entertain the idea of having it as woodblocks on top of each other or an engraving of sorts, but due to the short-term/duration of this project, I’ve decided to shelve it for now. Though I am considering getting this printed specifically for the flat I’ve moved into!

I also went on to research wood carving, which is a popular and culturally rich art craft that is practiced traditionally in South-East Asia and parts of Russia. As someone from the Philippines, I grew up with a lot of wooden carved and handcrafted wooden furniture and objects around me. I want to incorporate this to my quadriptych somehow, so I looked into various images of wood carving examples.

I want to incorporate the wooden texture design somehow, and one of my peer group’s suggestion was to overlay my work with a wooden texture. I’ve gone ahead and took photos of wooden surfaces around my flat with my phone camera, though most if not all, I wasn’t quite happy to work with for my work.