Brand Nu, Radim Malinic

Everything is a Work in Progress

Radim Malinic of Brand Nu is an art director, graphic designer and illustrator originally from the Czech Republic, now based in London. The ideas behind Radim's work are split into three main categories: inspiration, influence and information. Inspiration comes from colour. How can a colour communicate a certain message or emotion? For example, orange is the colour of ambition and success, and is typically used by Nike in their shoe box designs. Influence comes from experience. Experience comes from work and everyday life. Last of all, information comes from science, one of Radim's interests. His talk took us through what he called 'process 101' which aimed to help us form ideas within our own creative practices

Process 101
Search
- Ask questions and look for reasons.
- There has to be a balance between want and need. What a client wants is not always appropriate, therefore you must work on initiative to produce a pitch which focuses on what the client needs most.

Direction
- This is what Radim called the difference between good, great and amazing.
- When you have an initial first idea, do the opposite of this. Try to avoid cliques and not to be too obvious, put a different spin on the 'original' elements by telling the story in a different way.
- Try not to follow trends, develop your own unique sense of style, be true to yourself.

Skills and Knowledge
- This requires an understanding of what makes you different and stand out from other artists/designers.
- You also need to have an understanding of what you are creating your work for. Understanding your audience, the subject of your work, etc.

Meaning
- Creating work for the right reasons.

Making Ideas Happen
- Act on moments of inspiration, you never know when they may be useful in the future.

Point to remember:
"Miracles can happen on any size wave".
"Face a fear every day" - challenge yourself, work outside your comfort zone, otherwise you will never develop your skills as a designer. This will help you to produce more informed and well developed work.

Jo Blaker: Sketchbook Talk

Jo Blaker studied graphic design and advertising at Leeds College of Art before progressing on to an MA at the Royal College of Art. She does not put labels on herself, therefore her work consists of both illustrative and graphic elements, whilst other pieces of work can be seen as using elements of fine art in her practice. Her practice is mainly sketchbook based and this is what her talk focused on. Jo's inspiration for projects comes from the collecting and gathering of resources, particularly using images that relate to colour, line, materials/texture, and form. Much of her work is based on organic and natural forms in particular, for example looking at the changing form of seaweed when the sea washes it up and back in again. She relates this to a style of writing called 'nature writings' whereby people tell stories which show a connection with nature, such as through travelling. Jo uses these drawings as a different form of thinking and this is what forms the basis of her sketchbook work, trying to think through different ideas in a visual way.
This talk really motivated me to draw and inspired me to utilise my sketchbook more throughout my projects, including my own self-directed work. It taught me not to worry whether or not such work is 'good' or related to a current project, but to just document things that inspire you anyway because you never know when it may come in use. It also allows you to visually work through and develop ideas which could potentially have a big impact on an end product as well as your overall creative practice.

Interview with House Industries, Ken Barber

House Industries is a graphic design studio and digital type foundry, founded in 1993 by Andy Cruz and Rich Roat, originally starting off as Brand Design.
The studio specialises in hand lettering, which bares the same principles as layout design. For instance, Ken Barber suggests that in creating letterforms it needs to be considered how each letter relates to each other. You need to communicate a sense of balance and contrast, and understand the way in which elements relate to one another.
This relates to Massimo Vignelli's beliefs about the importance of the syntactical elements of a project (for example, type and sizes), as he also believed there must be an appropriate and balanced relationship between these elements, showing how they relate to one another.

Barber believes that to become a good letterer must have an understanding of type history. For instance, referencing existing typographic forms to produce your own hand-written forms, as this provides a foundation or underlying system of typography for which you can work from. Again, this can be considered to relate back Vignelli in his ideas of semantics, whereby he believed that you must research the history of a subject to better inform the nature and development of your work.

Along with these important elements of lettering, the main piece of advice I will take from this video is to be your own client. Provide yourself with self-directed projects in order to gain new skills and knowledge within design that, as a result, can help in the progression of your own work.

http://www.gestalten.tv/motion/house-industries

The Vignelli Canon, Massimo Vignelli

Vignelli's aim in publishing this book was to better inform young designers of typographic principles in the hope of improving their design skills, as he believed that "creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at it's best".

Part one focuses on what he calls 'the intangibles', which includes ideas on topics such as appropriateness and discipline, with the most important aspects of design, in his opinion, being semantics, syntactics and pragmatics.

Semantics refers to the search for meaning of whatever it is we have to design. Vignelli believed that this can be achieved in any project through researching the history of the subject to better understand the nature of the project and to find the most appropriate direction for design development. He stated that "design without semantics is shallow and meaningless, but unfortunately ubiquitous". In order to completely understand a subject in all of it's aspects we much relate to the receiver as well as the sender so that it makes sense to both, which means to say the design must have meaning. 

I believe Vignelli is both right and wrong in his opinions of semantics. I believe that for a work to be more informed, it should have a meaning behind it. However, there will always be some form of meaning behind everything we do, even if we may not be aware of it, therefore nothing we ever do is meaningless.

The idea of syntactics is the discipline that controls the proper use of grammar in the construction and articulation of phrases and design language. In graphic design this concerns the use of grids, typefaces, text, and illustrations, for instance. For a design to be consistent there must be an appropriate relationship between various syntactical elements in a project. For example, how type relates to the use of grids and images, and how type sizes relate to each other. 

In terms of pragmatics and discipline, Vignelli believed that "whatever we do, if not understood, fails to communicate and is wasted effort" and "without it [discipline] there is no good design, regardless of style", suggesting that design without discipline is anarchy. These ideas relate back to his ideas of semantics, that if there is no meaning behind a piece of work or the meaning is not communicated effectively, then that piece of work is useless. However, nothing is a wasted effort. Even if a piece of work does not effectively communicate the desired message, through the time and work put into such piece of work so much will have been learnt to help you grow as a designer. It allows you to see where you went wrong and what needs improving, whilst also learning new skills that can help to inform your own practice as a graphic designer.

Part two focuses on 'the tangibles', which includes typefaces, grid systems, colour and layout. In terms of typography, Vignelli's main belief was "I don't believe that when you write dog the type should bark", suggesting he prefers more objective approaches. He believed that there are six typefaces which should only ever be used and these are: Futura, Helvetica, Bodoni, Century Expanded, Times Roman and Garamond. The idea that 'type should not bark', I believe, depends on it's appropriateness and how it is used. If used in an appropriate way, decorative fonts could be quite effective in communication, such as in aid of the teaching of a young child. However, not all type needs to be like this, therefore there should be a balance when considering such elements.

In relation to these ideas of typography, Vignelli also believed that the relationship between type and paper sizes is an important aspect of design. He believed, for instance, that the size of the type should not be increased to make the message louder, and calls this "intellectual vulgarity". White space provides silence amongst a design and this should be the essence of all typographic designs.

Overall, Vignelli is an extremely opinionated designer. In terms of this publication acting as an aid to help young designers in their practice, most of the ideas and principles should be considered but interpreted in an individual way. Otherwise you would not develop your own sense of style and informed design practice, but instead regurgitating Vignelli's own personal opinions. 

OUGD402 - Time Management

This session was all about time management. It aimed to help organise our time better throughout the coming weeks. To do this we started by focusing on the things we have to do to maintain a healthy life and our responsibilities, such as eat decent meals, get enough sleep, shower, attend college. These responsibilities were laid out into a weekly timetable from 7am to 12am every day. This timetable aimed to show us the time we have spare and so, in comparison, we created a 'want to' list of activities we would like to do within this spare time. This list included things such as, start learning German again, buy a new car and join the life drawing society at LCA.

This session helped me to focus on the things I have to do vs. the things I want to do and how these could both relate to each other, such as 'want to buy a new car' and 'have to look for a new car'. However, in terms of time management it is hard to stick to a strict weekly timetable like the one below showing each individual hour in the day. I also found it hard to be realistic in how I usually manage my time, as activities and responsibilities can change week by week or day by day and I feel that this did not help me to manage my time better. Instead I found myself focusing more on what I felt was the most important and appropriate thing to do at each specific time.

OUGD402 - Dealing with Stress

The first task within this session was to anonymously write an answer to each of four questions:

1. What negative thought have you had today?
2. What are you scared of?
3. What stresses you out?
4. How do you de-stress?

Fig. 1. What negative thought have you had today?

Fig. 2. What scares you?

Fig. 3. What stresses you out?

Fig. 4. How do you de-stress?

From these answers, we then went on to pick three answers to each question to create a set of twelve answers. Answers in relation to question one included: "whether I am good enough to be on this course", "I'm wasting my time" and "I'm not going to get my work done on time". Question two: "failure", "people judging my work" and "not having good enough work". Question three: "deadlines", "being behind on work" and "thinking about stuff that might not even happen". Question four: "walking", "sleeping or taking a nap" and "calling my mum for reassurance".

The next process was to take these answers and produce a haiku out of them, such as:

Waste Of Time
Am I good enough to be on this course?
I don't want to waste my time.
Let's sleep instead.

Fig. 5. Class haiku's based on answers to first set of questions.

I personally feel that this task was helpful. It allowed to me write down a few of the negative thoughts I have had throughout this course so far rather than keeping them to myself. The task itself was quite reassuring in a way that it allowed me to see that others were feeling the exact same and that I am not alone in how I feel. Producing haiku's out of these thoughts provided a fun way to express my feelings and the feelings of others.

How could these be used to help a particular target audience who may having the same thoughts about stress?

Suggested target audience: A-level students.
Concept: Spotify playlist/extension to the app.
- uses thumb print recognition and scanner to determine how stressed you are through your pulse rate and chooses songs to play accordingly.
- the higher your stress levels, the calmer the music.
- also references music you have recently listened to to determine what music to play.
- reads out haiku's within the playlist using voiceover artists with calming voices.

Concept: An academic studies textbook.
- a general revision textbook to help a-level students with their studies.
- has such haiku's printed after every chapter, along with a positive-looking illustration of things going wrong to create juxtaposition.
- this makes the students realise their stresses and negative thoughts, and therefore forces them to have to deal with them (de-stress).