Caio's Graduate Diploma

While I’m not really thinking too much about it and trying to just make, I’m also trying to do my visual experimentation through a fairly personal aesthetic starting point, having in mind some concepts that I feel are important in my own practice.

I’ve taken a lot of interest for some time in bootleg/knock-off merchandise. I think it mixes two different elements that I find very interesting and that I can definitely see some of in my work and interests: the presence of consumerist mass media elements and “bad design”. I don’t necessarily consider my design work bad, I just really like the idea of outsider art, amateur design and ventures into “ugliness” and kitsch in art.

I feel I owe an explanation, and might go on a bit of a rant, so please bear with me and don’t hold me too accountable for any possible contradictions: for some reason I really enjoy some instances of amateur, even “poorly done” design. When I’m walking in the streets and I see a logo for a store, for instance, that just looks completely outlandish and out of place it kind of gives me some joy, which is admittedly a little weird, if not a bit hypocritical, for a graphic designer. I get a feeling that there is still some innocence and unrefined, almost transgressive honesty in the world.

I abhor the inflexible, overly regulamentational approach to design that seems to be so common today with the eradication of every logo that doesn’t conform to modern, minimalist standards that could fit into a mobile app icon. And I can also appreciate, in some instances, the bravery behind the notion of being non-thought, of doing something without really knowing your tools.

When I first went into the field of graphic design I had this funny little ambition of one day being able to redesign every poorly made banner on the snack stands of my old university in Brazil. They were everywhere, with clustered layouts, bold clashing colours, low quality stock pictures, poor font choices, the list goes on. Today, though, there is nothing I’d hate to see more than a complete redesign of those to conform to established, professional (western?) design rules. It would take away all the homely charm of the place and make it look like a shopping mall food court. Almost feels a bit like aesthetic colonization (sorry), imposing a dominant set of rules to make everything look a little “safer”(emphasis on the quotation marks), a little more the same, a little more bland.

I’m sure I’m being a bit contradictory in the wider scope of my design preferences and if I’m being completely honest with myself I can even fear, on a bad day, that this might be coming from a bit of an excessively post-ironic taste that is almost elitist in some ways. I can’t really put this particular taste into very cohesive words, but I’m trying to be as honest as possible about it, and I swear I mean well as far as I know. But still, the point is I’d hate living in a world where everything is designed by the most qualified professionals in the market.

But anyway, back to the topic: I’ve taken a lot of interest in the aesthetics behind bootleg/knock-off products. I’m very interested in exploring the comical juxtapositions, the accidental kitsch, their ironic appreciation which seems to be a bit trendy in fashion right now, and most of all, the transgression behind the appropriation of brand elements for their commercial and cultural value.

One image that got me thinking about the topic is this picture of a backpack that went on to become viral on the internet:

Can’t help but wonder how the thought process for this worked: how did the designer got all these very different elements together and what choices were behind the colouring of Sonic? did he do it from memory? Did he just want to have some fun with it? Did he just look up some trending topics on and mash them all together?

For the Essay Launch we were shown a presentation and read a number of different critical writings on other practitioner’s works to get a feel for what a good critical writing essay is supposed to do.

I had some trouble choosing the right practitioner to write about. The first one I choose was Jim Woodring, a comic illustrator whose work I like a lot:

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While I can definitely see some of my own practice in his work, particularly on his interest for surreal landscapes with imaginary creatures through a comic, slightly eery tone, I thought that maybe choosing a comic illustrator to research wasn’t going to be ideal as that is not a field I can see myself working with. I went on to explore someone whose work was closer to mine in practical terms.

I thought of choosing David Shrigley because I can see a lot of myself on his work as well, especially on his comic outlook on everyday situations and (presumably) intentional form of rough, childlike drawings:

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Although I can certainly enjoy it and relate kinda hard to it in practical terms, I’m not a particularly big fan of Shrigley’s work. I like the look he’s established and really respect him for making it in the art world with it, I’m a big defender of the “poorly drawn” art style, but I guess I find his work a bit stale and not very inventive after having established his identity, it relies a bit too much on his comic quips in my opinion, which is kinda the point but doesn’t really do it for me.

Anyway, even though I’m sure a lot could be gained from it, I thought doing the research on an artist I’m not particularly fond of wouldn’t be the right move, so I scrapped that idea. Still thought he was worth a mention here though as I really considered making the work on him and there are lots of aspects to his artwork that I find really progressive.

All the while I had been casually researching and watching videos on Takashi Murakami’s work. I wasn’t really considering doing the essay on him up to this point, maybe because he’s so commercially big and well established, or possibly because I’ve just grown used to his presence. I’ve known him for a long time through Kanye West’s different album art done by him and he’s just an artist I’ve always taken some interest in. I’m a bit fascinated by his process of making digital artwork into very intricate, materially rich maximalist pieces and think he’s doing a great work of moving art discussion forward, especially with his muddying the distinctions between “high” and “low” art and his innovative approaches towards digital art.

Then came the realization: I do identify with different aspects of his work, am already researching him for fun, and would definitely (obviously) love to be in a position similar to his someday, why not write my essay on Takashi Murakami? So I switched from Jim Woodring to him (sorry tutors):

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Here are some of the videos I had been watching on him before deciding to research him:

For the Comms trip we first went to the Design Museum. We were reminded of the practitioner we had to be choosing for our essay, and encouraged to look out for practitioners that might be on display that we would like to write about, as being able to experience their work in person instead of through the internet or books would make our perception of it and our ability to assess it much more powerful. A physical piece of work on the site that it’s displayed has an entirely different baggage and evidences a number of different relations we can analyse as opposed to looking up digitalized versions of the work on the internet or in third party publications.

While looking through the Design Museum I also had my different thoughts for work I might accomplish for the project in mind, and analysed the displays in there partly thinking about how they might relate and inspire my own work. Here are some of the pictures I took:

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After the Design Museum we went to an exhibit in 180 The Strand called Other Spaces. It was basically different dark rooms with interactive light and sound installations. I thought they were all very cool, my favourite room was probably the one with field recordings of different biomes from around the world. There were beanbags on the ground where you could lay down, and the names of different animals would appear as their sounds could be heard through the recording. Very simple yet very immersive, I feel like I could lay there listening forever.

I didn’t take too many pictures of this one, but here are the ones I did take:

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Needless to say, they don’t do the exhibition justice. 😛

Since this exhibit was quite short and we still had some time in the afternoon, we went to another one in the same building called Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder. Unfortunately I was out of battery on my phone by this time but this one was my favourite of the day. It was a much bigger exhibition displaying works from a range of different contemporary artists. I thought it was very well curated and each room built upon the concepts of wonder, otherworldly experiences and hallucinations in entirely different ways.

The entrance to the exhibit was also quite interesting: It was basically in a parking lot with a little white cube with a door at the end. Upon entering it, though, the rooms were surprisingly large and intricately produced, each evoking different and unique imaginary places, with heavy use of mirrors, colours, and peculiar textures. It’s all very surreal, and I was completely enthralled.

One of my favourite pieces (or at least one of the pieces that I remember more vividly) was a written recounting on the walls of an experience the artist went through of taking acid and watching Planet Earth with her guy friends, which, because of the guys’ comments during a scene of animals mating, ends up spiralling into a very eery, very uncomfortable feminist stream of consciousness in which she compares human and animal bodies, goes into complex notions of consent, and goes on to use cows as metaphors for women, among other things. It’s impossible to convey it through here but I thought it was some very powerful, very uneasy stuff, and it definitely had me thinking about the kinds of insensible comments which I might make casually that when closely inspected are reflexes of a sick, very established patriarchal society that often times has its scary implications go unnoticed.

I ended up spending a bit too long in there, by the end I found out the group had been waiting for me for a while (oops). I got some free posters from my room though!

Terrible poster placement but I’ll basically paste anything on to the walls of my room, if anyone has any posters laying around send them my way. 😀

For the launch of stage 2 we were briefed that this would take on a different format from stage 1: Instead of making individual pieces of not necessarily finished work per stage, this one is about developing and publicizing one focused project throughout the three stages.

While this thought scared me a bit as its more pressure than the previous projects, we were also told project IV is dedicated entirely to experimentation. We aren’t supposed to present a piece, but a diverse range of different speculative experimental pieces, which comforted me a lot, not only because we are gonna have a good amount of time to think about our final project and see what works but also because I already had some loose ideas from the previous projects that I wasn’t sure where they fit, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try to execute some of them and see what happens.

We were also tasked with choosing a practitioner that we would write an essay (longer than the ones we’ve wrote so far) about. While I do know a lot of practitioners that I like and would enjoy researching about, ideally I want to decide on one that I feel relates to my own practice and that I can gain something from researching.

I couldn’t book the capture studio, so with the help of Pody and some big sheets of white paper she got, we assembled a makeshift studio on the tables of our base room.

I’m not a very good photographer and was trying to get the hang of the camera, so unfortunately most of the pictures I took turned out blurry and too bright, which is a shame. I believe some of them can be salvaged with the help of Photoshop though. Here are some of the pictures I took:

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I had ordered a pack of white ashtrays for reasonably cheap from the internet, it was now time to transfer my designs onto them. Since I can’t paint, I decided to print sticker stencils on the vinyl printer to paint on top of, and pray that it works.

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I took too long to be satisfied with the initial digital design of the prints, so I only had the last week of the project for the actual physical experimentation, so I had to get it right. I printed a lot more copies than I needed in different formats to have backup plans in case the first ones didn’t work. Here’s my makeshift workspace in my room:

I applied the vinyl to the ashtrays:

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Since I went for aesthetic instead of practicality and didn’t go for a stencil font, I had to go through the work of fitting minuscule pieces in the gaps where they needed to be. The holes in the lowercase Es were particularly challenging:

The first ones were a nightmare to get to stay in place but after some I got the technique down. I then went on to mix the paints and apply them on top of the vinyl prints:

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Painting them and trying to make the colours uniform was a lot harder than I had anticipated. The paint is very runny and you have to apply a lot if you want a solid look. I let them dry overnight, on the morning of the next day I went to pull one of the vinyls out to see if it worked out:

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Oh no, pulling out the vinyl sticker ripped some of the letters out. The paint had become a thin film that wasn’t too firmly attached to the ceramic. For the porcelain paint I was using to fixate I knew I had to take the ashtrays to the oven, but I was afraid to do it with the vinyl still on and melting it together with the paint or something. Seeing as how my first option didn’t work, I had to try it anyways:

It worked! I was able to peel the vinyl and the letters were firmly attached to the ceramic. Some black paint had leaked out of the stencil on the curvier edges of the ashtray where the vinyl hadn’t stuck too snugly, so I had to scrape the leaked paint off with some scissors. I brought the rest of the ashtrays to the oven:

Now I just had to peel the stickers so that I could do the second layer of paint for the black outlines on top, which includes removing the tiny pieces I had to place on there.

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It was time to do the black outlines. I washed all of them good to make sure I wouldn’t paint over dirt, and found that even though the film of paint was palpable it was very well attached to the ceramic, I could rub it pretty hard with a sponge and it would stay in place.

Since the paint had leaked on the first layer I was afraid that if the same happened with the black paint on the second, I wouldn’t be able to scrape it off since it would leak on top of the previous layer of paint. For that reason and taking the time I had left into consideration as well, I decided to instead of painting over the contour stencils, simply stick the leftover vinyls of the black outlines on top of the first layer of paint:

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Had to work with some VERY tiny pieces for some of the designs once again:

After carefully positioning the black vinyl outlines around the colours I had painted, which was also kind of delicate and annoying, I went on to apply varnish to make absolutely sure that the cigarette burns wouldn’t damage the illustrations.

I wanted them to be washable as well, as ashtrays should be, as was confident that the paint would be no problem, but the vinyl stickers worried me, and I didn’t want them to be accidentally pulled off when washing, so I applied varnish on top of the designs very liberally (and also carelessly, I didn’t apply it as is usually recommended and had to wait a lot longer than the usual for it to dry.

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I think they turned out very good, though. The process was a lot more intricate than I would have liked it to be, as I wanted to use vinyls as possibilities for simple serial transfers of my digital designs to physical formats, but I’m very pleased with how they turned out, especially the bright colours of the paint.

Next time I can experiment with simply printing out sticker stencils and varnishing them for simpler solutions to the application of digital designs in a similar fashion. I’d sacrifice the nice colours of the paint, but it’d be a lot simpler to make.

Funnily enough, I recalled back to my first design idea before I got sidetracked by other new ideas that seemed exciting, and it was the one that ended up working. I used the illustration style I used for the crying baby this time, though, to create varied illustrations that didn’t follow one single theme or character. turned out pretty nice.

I then went on to test different typefaces to write the text around them, here’s a screen capture of the type tests:

I went with the Astloch font because it had the Gothic, ornate look that I was trying to emulate yet at the the same time with a very modern, geometric execution, and it’s thick, straight and unvarying line weight matched perfectly with the thick black lines of my illustrations. Here’s how the final pieces turned out:

I’m pretty pleased with the results.

I didn’t like the look of the print designs I had so far, but I did like the idea behind them and the relations I managed to create of the character I had developed and the text of the health warnings they were based on.

One that I liked and that seemed to be a crowd pleaser judging from the reactions of the people that I showed was the smoking baby illustration, so I experimented with other drawing styles for it and arrived in this one:

I really like how hilariously unsettling it turned out, so I tested making the other iterations of the the different prints in a similar style:

I wasn’t a big fan of how the other faces turned out, it still didn’t feel quite right…Here’s what my workspace in illustrator looked like at this point, by the way:

To get ideas for further developing the design of the ashtray prints to a point I liked I went to google ashtray designs to draw some inspiration from them and gather some pictures. Here are some from “anti-smoking” ashtrays:

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And here are some of the pictures that I saved for aesthetic inspiration:

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I got particularly inspired by souvenir ashtrays, which tend to have designs painted on top of white ceramics with accompanying text, which was how I was intended to make mine.

My first idea was creating different illustrations for each of the cigarette pack health warnings. I made a couple, but after I made a character for the “you get sick” (você adoece) one I went on to experiment using this same character for all of them.

I made several different versions of final desings trying to save the format but couldn’t be satisfied with the pieces I had created so far.

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Focusing more on the smoking health warnings idea, I went on to try to create different interactions between the warnings and the ornate nature of ashtrays. I had the Brazilian tobacco health warnings in mind due to the fact that they are fairly infamous in the country for having messages that are direct and forceful to an almost comic level. Warning, explicit imagery ahead:

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I experimented with using the UK warnings in my design as well, but they are too factual and informative, and don’t have the almost romantic “you + verb” format of the Brazilian ones which I felt could make for some pretty impactful parody design, so I decided to create product models for a Brazilian audience.