Having decided that the best course of action would be to start experimenting visually to get my ideas rolling (reinforced by a pair tutorial we had with Kyung Hwa), I started working with some of the concepts I had already thought of during the tube trip and previous research stages of the project.
The theme I first began exploring, which ended up also being the one I went with for my final products, was the one regarding how advertising relates to the city and to people that I had began studying during the Circle Line Trip. This was one of the first experiments I made:
For the one on the left I wanted to experiment with typography, drawing from my psychogeographic experiments in the Museum of London, I thought typography was an interesting visual representation of the conglomeration of information in big cities and in modern society in general, and wanted to relate the excessive type and abundance of visual information to advertising.
With that in mind, I went to design quick logos for different words that relate to consumerist culture. I wanted to emulate adverts, store facades and signs, and explored different typefaces to imprint specific tones and contexts to the words I was using.
While I do like how some of these turned out, I think a composition with all of them would be a bit too edgy and in-your-face, which can make the whole thing seem very superficial. I did some further experiments with them which I’m gonna show shortly, but I didn’t use most of these for my final products. I may still try to do something with the ones I like the most.
This was another one of my early experiments:
This one was a very free illustrator drawing. I picked the pen tool and just started drawing lines with my experiences walking and looking at the city in mind. I started by drawing solid angular shapes and straight lines while holding the shift key in illustrator, which allows me to only draw angles of 90 and 45 degrees within the lines, as they evoked to me the calculated concrete structures of the city’s architecture.
From there on I started adding other elements that relate to how I had been thinking about the city: windows, bricks, rails, doors, ladders, stairs, lamps, doors, the sun, the moon, geometric shapes and adverts.
I used varied forms of star shapes (similar to the one I used for the “BUY” lettering in the previous composition) to represent advertising, and ended up exploring these shapes further throughout the project. They are references to the shapes that can often be seen in particularly loud graphic adverts, which are commonly alerting sales, deals and discounts:
Caio's Graduate Diploma 