Modernism and Postmodernism, plus related movements

Recently I have been given a project for my Foundation Studio module where I have to research Modernism and Postmodernism and talk about the influence of Graphic Design, and also I have decided to look into Typography too. On top of this I am also writing my essay on Modernist Typography. These subjects are very vast which makes them quite difficult to process into something that is relevant to my work. What helps me with this is the lectures on Mondays. The key lectures which have helped me is the ones of course on Modernism and Postmodernism, but also the ones on Dada, Surrealism, Arguments, Semiotics and others. These lectures help to put these huge subjects into perspective with relevance to Design and they also help stimulate my personal thought no the subjects so I can add my parts to the lectures which I can feed back into my work. They also work as a springboard into my own research as they lay out the key points for each subject and from there I can pick the most interesting and relevant and research it further.

Hepworth Print Fair

Yesterday I visited the Hepworth Print Fair in Wakefield. I loved the atmosphere and was surprised at how many people turned up (this was evident in the lack of parking spaces left!) I met someone called Nathan Bolton who worked for Engine Room Design, this was quite funny as I am already in contact with the company from when I went to the Bechance portfolio review, its a small world. I bought a lovely A2 screen print and it was a successful day.

Gary Hustwit Lecture 12.03.15

This lecture did not teach me any technical skills, however it did have an effect on how I think, especially about my ideas. From what I gathered from his stories, Hustwit always followed where his ideas took him, regardless of money or the possibility of failing. That to me is a very brave thing to do as I have always had those fears when I consider my ideas and my future after Education. One thing he said which stuck out to me was: '"if you find yourself looking for something but find it does not exist, make it yourself." I love this mentality and it also reminded me of an idea I had a while back about creating pocket 'typespotting' guides (like transpotting booklets) for individual typefaces. they don't currently exist and I really want them to. and so this lecture has inspired me to pursue this idea and go for it.

What Makes the Perfect Human?

During the Modern Life is Rubbish pt1 Lecture a question was asked: What is the perfect human? And so I thought I would try and answer this question and give my thoughts on it.

So what is the perfect human? There are so many ways I could consider this. I could approach this is many different ways and from a few different viewpoints. I could look at it from an aesthetic point, a primal point, a cultural point and even my personal point of view. Or I could consider all of these.

In the modern world we often obsess over celebrities and idols we aspire and look up to. What makes these celebrities so desirable and interesting to us? It is mainly the superficial values like their good looks or talents we see and like, we rarely see what is behind these traits, their personality and opinions etc. This is why our love for celebrities is so fickle; why we can so easily forget about them and move onto the next at any given moment. Which leads me to believe outside values may not be as important for the perfect human as they are so feeble and unstable.

I can now look at more long lasting admiration, such as close friendships and relationships. Usually the friends and companions we love most are the kind of person we can connect with on an unexplainable level. Superficial good looks or skills do not usually play a key part in the fabric of these bonds, it is the unexplainable qualities of a person which brings two people together in this way. These qualities however, and the desire for different qualities, vary from each person. And so because of this it is difficult to pinpoint universal traits that are admired by most people so I can not build my perfect human on personal qualities.

One viewpoint which I can pick definitive qualities from is the primal qualities that help us to survive, like strength and reproduction etc. We would not be alive without these qualities and so that makes them essential in the perfect human. Making my judgement on these traits is not so difficult as the process of natural selection has slowly picked out and crafted these qualities. And because of this I realised that from a primal and survival point of view hasn't the perfect human already been created, art we all perfect humans because natural selection those us and made us this way?

If this is so then the perfect human will always be in a state of change as the world changes and our needs to survive changes. We are the current perfect humans. What will the perfect human be in 100 years time?

Learning HTML

I have had a long running interest in HTML and CSS and after a workshop on Processing it kickstarted me and so I began trying out the basics of HTML.

So this all started with this workshop on Processing which you can see above. Processing is a varied form of Javascript and here I used it to program a range of images of letters to type out random quotes and so behave in a certain way inside the canvas which I assigned it. This was usually telling it to stay within the canvas and to start another line when it reached the end. This was fun but I could not see how I could use it int he majority of my work, however since I enjoyed it so much I decided it was time to properly start to learn HTML and CSS.

I bought I few books a while back and did some reading into the basics, however that was as far as I had got, so I went onto Lynda.com and begun a tutorial on the essentials of CSS and HTML. From that I then used some of the exercise files to try out what I had learnt.

Once I experimented with some tags and attributes I had learnt I decided to write my own HTML code from scratch and what you see above is the results. I only used the very basic of tags and attributes but I found it fun and exciting.

After getting a taste of HTML I am very eager to learn more so this is a skill I will be looking into further. I hope that I could by September be programming simple webpages that display my projects in a digital format.

Typesetting in Practice

After our tutorial on typesetting I took what I learnt about widows and orphans and went back over my Earth Artefact document and got rid of all the widows and orphans in my copy. I simply increased or decreased the tracking till the end lines were big enough to fit in with the rest of the paragraph. However I never went past 10 either way as it would make it too noticeable. I also increased the leading from 12pt to 15pt as the wide gaps will make the short paragraphs easier to read and it will also make it work well on both screen and print. I did not learn this through a tutorial, I was influenced by fiction books and their wide leading.

HD1 - 5 Hour Branding Task

Thank you to Alex Nicholson for the presentation


Yesterday I took part in a team project given by the Sharp Agency to brand a new entertainment complex that is being built in Huddersfield. We were put into teams and we quickly gelled and worked well together. We went through a process of brainstorming the ethos of the complex right through to designing the logo and opening poster. We then had to present our outcome to the director of Sharp. His comments were that we spent too long on the details of the logo rather than the idea as because of this we missed a strong idea within the logo we could have played on. I leant a lot about industry paced work and would love to do it again.

Art Nouveau Inspired Typography & Type Workshop

A few days ago I took part in a typography workshop where we were asked to simply sketch out some rough letters. I decided that rather than drawing my usual geometric and grotesque typefaces I would try out an idea I had during a lecture on Art Nouveau. This idea was to draw letters with a relaxed hand and so I would draw natural lines which my body dictated rather than usual calculated French curves.

I utilised the skills I learnt in the Process and Production typography tasks as well to come up with these basic sketches which will help me develop this typeface further

I drew this letter F which has subtle curve to both the stem and the crossbar, this reflects the natural curvature of tree trunks which is very slight and subtle as no tree grows perfectly straight. This works with Art Nouveau's style of curves which are influenced by nature. It also contests the structured grotesque letters we usually see just like Art Nouveau contested Victorian angular styles.

Physical Studio - Tasks 1 and 2: Typography

This project is split into three tasks. Task one is to take three references from a variety provided and from them create the letters ANESG in three variants to match the three references. Task two is to then expand these five letters into whole alphabets, but only as rough sketches. Task three is to then pick the best and draw that up neatly using graph and tracing paper.

Here I will show you my results from the first two tasks

Here are the sketches for the first alphabet. I used a variety of shapes I found interesting from this reference, these were the rounded rectangles and the jagged boxes. My favourite letter from this sketch is the letter A because it looks interesting but it is not too abstract that it is hard to recognise the letter, it also uses subtle shapes from the reference that work together nicely. However the rest of the alphabet I found hard to work with, the shapes worked well for one off letters however as a whole font it is too abstract for even a display font and is impractical to use.

This reference I found the most difficult to interpret and take influence from. There was little shapes of interest however I managed to highlight the thunderbolt shape and also the bold rectangles which decorate the border of the poster. Right from the start I found that these shapes were not working as letters, the thunderbolts and bold squares did not fit well together and were better off being two separate typefaces. If I had to take this typeface forward I would like to create two sets of glyphs for each letter, one influenced by the bold squares and the other by the thunderbolts, this way the end user can combine them in whatever way they wish, or even choose to use just one set. However I can not see this typeface working so I will not be taking it forward.

Straight away I knew that I would use circles for this typeface. I thought a simple circular typeface with a thick stroke would be readable and make a bold and simple display face. And so I started on the initial letters ANESG; the ANE and G were quite simple however the S was a huge challenge. Is seemed impossible to fit a letter usually made out of two circles into one large circle, especially since it needs a thick stroke to fit with the others. The thick stroke and condensed space allowed little to no room for the white space needed to construct the letter. I initially came up with an idea to scrap the one circle structure for this one letter and make it traditionally using two, this looked good however as I thought it did not fit with the other letters so it had to be scrapped. I then looked back at the E and how it was structured, and by using a similar cross bar I created two curves, one on the bottom and one on the top of the circle and I connected them with a crossbar same to the letter E. This created a legible and contemporary S, but more importantly it created an S which fit within the circular structure and so fit in with the remaining letters. Once I had the first five letters sketched I then did a very rough sketch of the rest of the alphabet. I only did a very rough sketch to get a sense of how the letters would look, it was quick enough to allow me to do a few variations of some letters when they did not look right, drawing them in too much detail would waste time. Once I had this rough sketch down I then worked one drawing the first 10 or so letters neatly on graph paper. I plan not only to draw the whole alphabet up neat on graph paper, but to also draw them on Illustrator as I am already experienced with designing type, especially with a circular structure.

Illustrator Tutorial - Appearance Panel and Gradient Mesh

Appearance Panel - 

- Reflective Colour space is something that is printed (CMYK) as light reflects off it, Projective Colour space is something which is projected with light (RGB) like colours on a screen.
- Forward slash (/) on the keyboard sets a shape to no fill

The task today was to create this rocket using only four shapes. So to start out I created the main body of the rocket with the eclipse tool which I then manipulated the anchor points to get this pointed carrot shape. To create the multiple strokes without creating extra shapes I will need to use the appearance panel. To add another stroke I needed to go into the appearance panel and simply press the button at the bottom which added another stroke> to make the stroke smaller I went into the effects panel > path > offset path and then offset the path by about -3/2mm. I then went into the stroke panel and turned it into a dashed line by ticking the dashed line box. To then create the checkered pattern I created a series of low opacity lines using the reflect tool and by selecting them all and going into the object>pattern>make menu I made it into a pattern swatch. I then applied it to the full of my shape, however it was too big so I scaled the pattern down using the scale tool, however I made sure to tick the scale pattern box and not scale shape box. I also added a drop shadow to lift it off the page. Using this same method I created the fins and duplicated one with the reflect tool to ensure it reflects in the same position on the opposite side of the rocket. I then grouped these shapes, and added a whole white fill to the outside which gave it this sticker look or something from a cartoon. I then created the porthole using the appearance panel and these same techniques.

Gradient Mesh - 

To start with I imported this image of a pear and then turned the layer into a template layer which locked it and turned down the opacity. I then selected the gradient mesh tool and created a rectangle which covered most of the pear. I used the direct selection tool and the add anchor point tool to mould the mesh to the shape of the pear. To make sure this was as accurate as possible I switched from preview mode to outline mode to see exactly where my strokes were. Once my mesh was moulded I added more mesh points using the mesh tool which will add to the accuracy of the gradient mesh when I begin adding the colours. To add blended colour I used the direct select tool to select each anchor point, and then using the eyedropper tool I selected a colour from the image which the anchor point will use to stitch the gradient together. As there is a lot of anchor points I needed to speed up my workflow so I used the shortcut for the direct selection tool (A) and the shortcut for the eyedropper tool (I) which saves me a lot of clicking backwards and forwards between tools. Once all the anchor points were allocated an area the mesh was complete so I repeated the process for the stalk of the pear. I then tweaked some anchor points that didn't look right and selected darker areas for the parts where there was a shadow. Once the mesh was done I then added a texture. I imported a textured image of concrete into illustrator and image traced it. I then lowered the opacity and changed the blending mode to multiply. I then re drew the outline of the pear and used it to clipping mask the texture. I personally did not think the texture went well as it does not look anything like the texture of a pear however now I know how to add a texture for future reference.

I then exported both images as high quality JPEGS 

After Effects Tutorial - Worm Animation

Worm Animation from Emma Nicholson on Vimeo.

To start this animation I created this simple worm character in Adobe Illustrator, and to ensure I can edit each body part I put each into its own layer. So my character was bold enough to be seen on screen when placed among other objects I needed to make the strokes thicker than I would for print, this is a typical rule of thumb for cartoons and animation for screen. Once my character was complete I imported it into After Effects. From this point I learnt how to change the anchor point of a layer and how to work with keyframes from the options panel below the layer. To make my character move I added keyframes and lowered and raised each segment of the worm, I subtly rotated some parts to make it look realistic. The shortcut for rotating was helpful (the R key) and it sped up my workflow as I moved each body part. Since the movement was very repetitive throughout the animation I coped the keyframes to keep the movement consistent as I was luckily to makes mistakes from doing it over and over again, and it also made the process a lot faster. However I could only copy the keyframes one layer at a time which did hinder me a little. Once the basic movements were in place I tweaked the increments in which the worm moved as some were inconsistent and looked odd, I had to do this keyframe by keyframe. At this point I noticed some features on my character I didn't like so I went back into my illustrator file and deleted them, and since the file is linked into After Effects it transferred the new character seamlessly, and I double checked the play back to make sure. I also added a background and a Sun which I made in Illustrator too however after another look I didn't like the sun so I removed it. I then added textures to my background using the multiply effect and lowering the opacity. I did some final tweaking and then exported my video in HD and then at a lower 720p resolution for the internet so it uploaded quickly.

City Rebuilt - A Modernist Idea

Here is a piece I wrote a while ago about an idea of mine for a series of rebuilt cities. After learning about modernism I noticed how modernist this idea is in the way it wants to streamline the world as series of carbon copied urban havens. It is the starting idea for a unified society and world to live in.

Here and now in our cities we are always trying to adapt to changing technologies, installing WiFi, wider roads and better rail networks. But this task is becoming herder and herder as we have no more room to adapt, we do not have room for wider roads, new railways or solar fields.
So why not build a whole new city from scratch? After the second world war central Berlin was left in ruins and has been rebuilt with eco buildings, effective subway systems and legible graphic design. So it makes sense to build from scratch rather than give a run down city that has been built over for hundreds of years yet another facelift.
The only problem with this of course is that there is no room for the new cities, and the infrastructure around the city is still going to be outdated. So can’t we flatten our urban areas and outdated technology part by part and stat again.
This way we can eliminate problems like oil shortage, landfill and lack of recycling, global warming, transport delays, unreliable internet networks and roadworks. We can introduce solar roadways which solves the energy crisis but also provides easy underground maintenance for gas, electric and telephone infrastructure. We could build homes that face the sun for optimal solar panel efficiency. We can build useful road and rail links t key areas and build electric car charging points with integrated WiFi hotspots and domestic device charging facilities. Problems solved.

Of course there is many problems with this idea such as what will we do with the people within these areas and their opinion on being forcefully moved, and the human rights breached in doing so. So in a way this is not just a modernist idea but one of a world dominating villan in a cartoon. It is too drastic to be practical however it is a starting point for real change to be made int he modern world.

Authenticity Seminar Notes 11.02.15

- Craftsmanship
- What is the rule of a craftsman today
- Making and the Maker

- There is a common feeling that things made in the past are more authentic. Such as manual typesetting or film photography. This is because you are more physically involved in the process
- Digital forms can be deceiving, e.g.. photoshop

- Charlie Brooker - Black Mirror Series

-
Unique
Original
True
Real
Genuine
Common
Copy
False
Imitation
Counterfeit
-

- Authenticity is thought to be connected to the truth
- An authentic sweet shop is seen as humble and honest

- A forged painting is not as valuable as the original no matter how well it is done because it does not carry the idea behind it
- Forgery is always illegal as it is intended to deceive. A fake is fine as it is a confessed copy

- 'Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse the desire to do a job well for its own sake.'
Richard Sennett

- A craftsman is a label given to identify a fully educated worker of their craft
- Stones of Venice

- A 'working creature' can be either a man or a tool. Man has passion for their ideas which bring forward mistakes and inaccuracy; take away these imperfections and you turn man into a working engine. To make precise movements and calculations is to become de-humanised, a machine with no other purpose than to make the same things the same way. With imperfections of man comes the endless possibility this is accidentally discovered through mistakes.
- Reference to design and type

- In painting you can use the word authentic in two ways. One, it is an authentic painting as it is not a fake. And two, authentic in the sense that of how it was made and the connection between the artist and the painting
- This second meaning of authentic can be challenged due to opinion. If someone did the same technique, is it authentic to them or the original artist?

- Martin Heidegger
- Authentic relationships: if you look at the picture of the hammer you get an idea of it. But if you accidentally use it you develop an authentic bond and understanding of it

- Phenomenology: theory of experience

- Knowing the word is different to knowing the physical thing

- The Hand, short film
- Hand clutching lead

Art Nouveau Lecture Notes 09.02.15

- Art Nouveau used lots of organic lines and shapes
- It challenged Victorian tastes with these organic forms and decorative features
- Social Reform
- Arts and crafts movement

- The Industrial Worker
- Mechanical Labour

- For the people, by the people
- Art Nouveau worked to create a better lifestyle for the craftsman and worker
- This contradicted itself as only a few people could make Art Nouveau. It was also expensive so the working man or woman could not afford it

- The world was changing, industry was changing society and man was being replaced my machine. It created a de-humanising effect

- Man was not made to be machine perfect. Doing so would remove what makes them human
- Man is not a machine
- Giving people back craftsmanship

- Art Nouveau took inspirations from nature
- Curved lines were very important. It was a huge shift from usual craft which traditionally used angular shapes
- Natural, organic shapes and curves
- These shapes influence some forms of typography
- Whiplash curves and symmetry
- They used contrasts between foreground and background to create distinctive layouts
- Use of borders to separate these two sections

- Women were often eroticised and used to advertise products

*Create a letter with Nouveau style whiplash curves. Take inspiration from nature

- Organic colours in landscape paintings
- Everything is influenced by nature
- It opposes the heavy gothic style of the Victorians which was very angular

- A response to industrialisation and standardisation of life
- Raising the imperfect quality of the craftsman
- Nature, femininity
- Function should dictate form

- Remove boundaries between art and craft
- Aubrey Beardsley
- Unifying media and mediums
- Japanese influences
- Removal of hierarchy in art

- Grid system and checkerboard patterns

- 'To every age its art, to art its freedom.'
- Each member of the Vienna Secession had a monogram, a symbol for their name
* Create my own

- Using publications to promote ideas and reach the masses beyond the exclusive group

Postmodernism Lecture Notes 09.02.15

- How we think of humanity
- Reality and 'the real'
- How we think of culture
- Perfect world/human
- Normality?
- Placing things in a box, categorising
- Modernism and Postmodernism
- Identity
- Change, difference

- Do we live in a postmodern world? Life 10 years ago will seem shocking to us because today is so different
- There has been a major social change in the last 10-20 years

- Subcultures
- The idea of one uniform society has raised problems. Now culture is seen as little cults joined into one culture rather than a universal whole group
- We used to invade other territories to unify our beliefs and religions as we thought we were doing a justice
- New world order

- Postmodern, difference in people. No single set of rules for one unified society
- Indifferences
- You are different with one group of people to another
- Fluidity and flexibility
- People are expected to move with developing culture
- Logic of fashion

Modernism was driven by the thought of progress to one unified society. Technology and fashion unifies us

- Modernist society aimed to improve culture. To improve what humans were
- However this brought up problems with rights to individuality and diversity
- Function above all
- Universalism, global village
- Modernist progress towards new technology
- Constructed future through technology

- What is the natural way of being? Unified or diverse?

Bauhaus & Black Mountain College

- Experimentation meets human nature

*My ideal world based on modernism and postmodernism

- Developing principles to unified work
- Playing with experimentation
- How colour and shapes effect and play with our mind
- Discovering human nature in order to develop principles to use in artwork
- Creative Laboratory
- What effects us as humans
- Production od manuals, to create formalism. The science of aesthetics
- The Art machine

- Optimal human nature and way of being that we all fit into no matter of individuality
- Primal human nature

- Is there an outcome to this experimentation
- Will a formula of work and production be created
- Social manipulation
- Logical principles, getting everything right

- Black Mountain College - How complex and noisy the world is
- Bauhaus - Streamlining the noise and creating a 'perfect' world

- We are never finished or complete. Which begs the question, what is coming next?
- Are we being or going to be?

- Utility and form vs complexity
- Bauhaus vs BMC

- Experimentation and experience

The perfect Human - Film

*What is my perfect human