Caio's Graduate Diploma

Today was the launch of the artefact project, which was pretty interesting. My first thought is I didn’t properly know what an artefact was beforehand. I thought it could be any object with any kind of significance to someone but apparently the word is a lot more specific. An artefact must be fabricated by a human being, and it usually has some kind of cultural or historical significance.

I thought natural objects could be artefacts as well. Can an object become an artefact by just being displaced by a human being?

For the launch presentation the tutors showed us examples of design projects that take into consideration the previous narrative baggage and significance that the objects or ideas they applied to their product-making carried beforehand. I thought it was very interesting to see the different kinds of media where this thought process can be applied.

While not my favourite project from the presentation, I thought the Shakespeare’s Globe logo redesign by The Partners was very inspiring from a graphic design point of view: The narrative power of artefacts can be applied to graphic design, and an infinitely reproducible logo design, if well thought out and sensibly imagined, can carry just as much historical and cultural weight in its application as a physical object.

I was feeling pretty inspired to think about artefacts during the lecture so I started doodling some objects that I generally take interest to before even visiting the museum. I’ll post pictures of those soon.

On the last few days of the project, after having worked so much on the city illustration and on complex animations with hundreds of frames and layers, I wanted to do something lighter to decompress.

I drew a quick character closer to the style of the stuff I usually doodle on my sketchbook. I wasn’t too precious about the process and just went with what I felt like drawing, but I meant for the character to be a very tongue-in-cheek anthropomorphism of the concept of advertising.

I made him into a very simple 4 frame animation:

I made the blank sign meaning to paste some of the very early experiments with type that I had created, with the words relating to consumerist culture.

I couldn’t figure out a nice way to make the words transition in the sign though, so I just ended up going with a different sample text instead. I liked how it looked so I made it into a more polished final piece:

I might still try to fit the type experiments I had created into it someday. Maybe make different coloured versions of the character displaying some of my favourite letterings?

It’s meant to be very simple but I still plan on changing two small details that look off to me: I’m gonna change the placement of the coin marks in the money bag between frames to make it seem like the coins are dangling inside, and the movement of the back leg looks a bit weird so I’m still gonna try to correct that. All in all, though, I like how it looks and had fun doing this one.

After having spent the weekend writing down text from adverts I saw around the city, it was time to try assembling them into an animated GIF. At first I just made the animation I had already worked on longer and added the words to the background:

I thought the words could go by a little faster to transmit a more overwhelming, disorienting feeling that I feel that the excess of urban advertising creates. Instead of just making it quicker, I decided to experiment with a different look as well: Instead of using the same city illustration I had been working on for so long I created another quick one with different forms of the star shapes that I had been using to represent advertising:

I used the same effect to distort these new shapes, but I did it in a different way: I made it so that the distorting forms slowly built up, gradually creating a heavier, darker image. Here’s how it ended up looking:

I liked the visual possibilities I could achieve with all the elements I had been working on for that, so I started playing with the layer positioning to see the different images I could get. These are two stills that I liked:

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For some reason I had been thinking about the song Koka Kola by the Clash. A classic:

There is a line in the chorus that goes “I get good advice from the advertising world.” which I thought was kinda inspiring for my project, as I decided to explore what kind of advice advertising we can extract from advertising.

Walking around the city and paying particular attention to ads, I realized most of them have imperative verbs, or verbs in sentences that are giving the reader orders or commands. I thought this must be the advice advertising is trying to give us, so I started writing down every sentence I saw that was in the imperative form.

Over one weekend of going out and casually writing down sentences from adverts and graphic communications I saw, mostly in the tube during my commutes, I got quite a few advices:

Use the red emergency button.
Follow instructions.
Keep your belongings and clothing clear of doors.
Tell us what you think.
Lower window for ventilation.
Keep left.
See it. Say it.
Look right.
Look left.
Stand.
Hold.
Take.
Spice.
Speak.
Build.

Find your used car.
Find your perfect running shoes.
Join the rental rebellion.
Get your box.
Share more, waste less.
Save delicious meals.
Get that coffee morning feeling.
Stay true to your values.
Start an ethical investment.
Start your 100 nights trial.
Try our mattresses.
Walk all over wall street.
Fly direct.
Tap into the wonderful world of off-peak.
Sign up today.
Be a soberhero.
Go bottomless.
Love what you’ve got.
Move on.
Apply for a refund.
Get qured now.
Free your skin.
Choose fewer chemicals.
Travel off peak.
Take 5.
Contact.
Join vitality.
Dip into the joy of organic.
Infest the rats’ nest.
Search “hiscox”.
Get 16% off our mattresses online.
Receive 9000 bonus avios for each friend approved.
Visit.
Discover the LSO’s new 2019/2020 season.
Don’t miss this wonderful exhibition.
Join us.
Join our family festival and 5k run.
Feel wonder first hand.

The ones from the upper paragraph are from different forms of public signage, such as subway and street signs and warnings, but I decided to discard them because they didn’t make sense within what I was researching. The ones on the lower paragraph are the phrases I extracted directly from advertising prints.

I decided I could use these phrases in conjunction with the distorting city animations I had been creating, so I selected and rearranged them in an attempt to create a narrative that made sense to me:

Sign up today.
Start your 100 nights trial.
Get your box.
Find your used car.
Try our mattresses.
Fly direct.
Travel off peak.
Get 16% off.
Find your perfect running shoes.
Apply for a refund.
Start an ethical investment.
Move on.
Get cured.
Choose fewer chemicals.
Be a soberhero.
Dip into the joy of organic.
Save delicious meals.
Free your skin.
Waste less.
Go bottomless.
Love what you’ve got.
Share more.
Join our family.
Tap into the wonderful world.
Get that coffee morning feeling.
Feel wonder first hand.
Stay true to your values.
Join the rental rebellion.
Infest the rats nest.
Walk all over wall street.
Don’t miss.

With such a handful of good advice from the advertising world I could now go on and experiment creating different juxtapositions with the images I had been creating.

I had initially meant for my illustration to be a time-based piece, as I think that projections make much more sense as moving images. Still with the concepts of distorting the city I had created in mind, I went on to try out different manners of doing so:

I used the black and white version of my illustration with only the strokes because the coloured versions didn’t look quite right when animated. I wanted the animation to look messy and chaotic, and the visual hierarchy the colours established made it seem a lot more orderly and geometric.

Even so, I thought making an animation with only black strokes wasn’t ideal for the projection format, and didn’t reflect the neon-bright feel of a city covered in adverts that I wanted to transmit. I tried simply changing the stroke colours to a vibrant pink at first, but then, recalling my research experiments in the Museum of London and how typography closely relates to modern visuality and to advertising, I decided to try to experiment adding bright coloured type that would blend with the distorting image.

I just had to decide what I wanted to write.

After having finished the initial illustration of the city and still not being quite satisfied with it, I was quite tired of being meticulous with it and trying to get it to look visually harmonious. At this point, I didn’t think it made much sense either, as I didn’t really consider the relations I was trying to evidence through my concept particularly harmonious.

Still, though, I kind of liked what I had created and still wanted to see where I could take it to try to develop my concept further. I then started experimenting with different Illustrator effects to try out different ways of distorting the city, having in mind the concepts I had been thinking while developing the illustration about advertising blending with the city’s physical forms and distorting them.

I then found the Blend effect on Illustrator and applied it to every object in my illustration at once to see what happened. I thought the results were quite interesting, so I experimented adding them to several different iterations of the illustration that I had created.

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What better way to represent the concept of advertising blending with and distorting architecture than by using the blend command to distort my illustration? I think the results I got from these were pretty cool. 😀

I ended up leaving most of my research on actual urban projections for a bit too late since I got too enthralled by finishing the illustration into a final piece before, which in retrospect I don’t think was the right order to conduce my work.

I booked a simple projector to make some tests from the RCA but the results didn’t please me too much. I realized a regular projector’s light would be too weak and it’d look too dark to project on random street buildings, as they usually need very regular white surfaces.

I went on to research portable, battery powered projectors that could be tested onto the streets. While I did find some interesting options, they seemed to be too weak as well, design to project films on home walls, and I couldn’t find anywhere that would rent them either.

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Further researching projections I found a collective called Urban Projection that works with street projections, projection mapping, projection murals and many more specialisms. Apparently they can be hired, but that would require a much bigger and well thought out project, so evidently it was out of my options. I looked for their setup for guerrilla street projections and found that they use a device they developed called the Light Cycle: a bicycle mounted with a high power projector.

I started getting a bit unmotivated to test out actual projections at this point. Meanwhile I was also researching visual artists who use projections as their medium, and found some interesting ones:

I thought this project was very interesting for its careful integration of the projected visuals to the building’s architecture, creating fascinating surreal illusions that seem to change the building’s physical form.

It made me realize that it may be a lot more effective to choose a venue I want to use as a canvas for my projections and study how I can engage with it in interesting manners, instead of simply making an illustration and projecting it onto different walls.

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgrzWax_aLI

This is a great example of using guerrilla projection in an impactful manner for protest. Goes to show that a simple sentence with the right message placed onto the right surface can create a powerful narrative.

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For the project that I found the most visually relatable to my personal work, the Brazilian duo VJ Suave created two tricycles infused with sound systems and image projectors. They created moving image animations that, by being projected around the city on the moving tricycles, interact with the city’s architecture in very fun ways. It’s very inspiring seeing the children interacting with their projections on their video.

Watch and read more here: http://projection-mapping.org/animating-streets-using-tryicycles-with-projectors/

Even though at this point I was already getting very close to the end of the Navigators Project and had spent a lot of time designing an illustration without thinking the venues and purposes for it very thoroughly, researching these got me inspired to go different routes with my work and test out other executions. Maybe next time I should try to not get too caught up in the execution and do my research earlier and more carefully. 😛

The illustration of the city I had made still wasn’t coloured, only black lines. And since I had decided I wanted to try making it into a piece for urban projection, I figured it’d be nice to colour it in bright, vibrant colours to make it stand out when being projected at night. I then began experimenting with colouring.

These are some of the first free colour tests I did. Basically just used the adobe illustrator live paint function to manually colour different sections whichever way I thought might work.

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I didn’t like how they looked coloured at all. I thought they weren’t very harmonious and didn’t look too easy on the eyes, and my favourite version of the illustration was still the simple black and white one with just the strokes:

Having decided I wouldn’t be able to get decent colourways by simply colouring every single shape manually I began researching how to make the colours work. I then went on to apply preset Edit Colour effects from adobe illustrator into the manual colouring experiments I had done, testing different forms of blend modes and whatnot:

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Even though I still wasn’t quite satisfied, I started liking where the experiments were going from there. I thought they still weren’t ideal for projection as I didn’t think the sober colours would work too well, but wanted to experiment with them further. I then made another manual free colouring version of the illustration, but this time using exaggerated gradient colours, to see how they would look under similar effects.

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Unfortunately I then found out the blend effects I had used on the previous version don’t work on gradient objects. Still, I thought the gradients could look quite interesting if done right, so I went on test out the illustrator recolour artwork commands to try to make them look nicer. After several tests through innumerous different colouring presets, these are the ones I thought looked the best:

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For the one on the left with blander colours I made the stroke thicker by 0.5 points, and for the one on the right with stronger colours I made the strokes invisible. I couldn’t figure out which one I liked best so I just went with the two for final pieces instead.

After having done my first experiments I decided to expand on them and see where they took me. At first I decided to merge them together to try to get the idea of excessive typographical information and advertising blending with the forms of the city:

I still thought all the edgy consumerist words together were a bit much. Even so, I like the design of some, so I coloured them to think how I could possibly use them individually or something:

Still not really having any concrete ideas of where to apply them and not quite satisfied with them on their own, I went on to instead work on the illustration of the city more, which I quite liked and thought had potential to become something bigger.

It still looked a lot like a quick sketch (which it was), so I went on to try and make it look more like a finished piece, fixing and organizing the lines and shapes (trying to make the dimensions less random and more calculated, even if the calculations were fairly arbitrary and aesthetic) and developing and adding more stuff throughout as I thought fit. Here’s the before and after:

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I ended up adding a bunch of elements that I thought would fit and further develop the concept of city architectural forms and graphic advertising blending together. I added some additional elements that weren’t present in the first sketch, some of the themes I had in mind being alarms and sirens, street signs, tunnels, people (loneliness and smallness), open spaces, graffiti, pareidolia, layering, depth and perspective.

Here’s a quick hand drawn sketch I did while working on the illustration:

When adding layering, perspective and depth to the illustration I tried drawing a bit from M.C. Escher’s surreal impossible angles, making buildings and structures blend in forms that make no physical sense.

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This is a screen capture of the illustrator workspace where I did a big part of the experiments, with some that were quickly discarded that I didn’t mention here:

I ended up spending a lot more time perfecting my illustration than I planned on or think I should have. By then I had started thinking different applications and places to put my illustration, as I wanted it to be somewhere other than just my computer and try to avoid it being a passive piece of work that no one would ever see. One of the ideas I had that I liked the most was making it into urban guerrilla projections to project in buildings around the city.

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:

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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:

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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:

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