Final Outcomes

After finalising my compositions I wanted to take them into Photoshop to bring them to a finished outcome. To do this, I began by scanning each design at 1200dpi; this resolution was high enough to capture all the detail of the drawing and also meant that I would have no trouble when it came to printing the designs. After scanning, I brought the designs into Photoshop and used the ‘Threshold’ tool to turn the design into solid black and white, removing the paper texture from the background and making the blacks solid blocks of colour. When using this process in the past I have sometimes found that details and shapes have been lost or simplified, however due to the very high resolution, that hasn’t happened with these designs. I am very happy with these outcomes, and I think the strong contrast between the solid black and white makes them very strong compositions.

After my research into colours, I wanted to experiment with using colours in my design, starting with Orange & Teal. I implemented the colour by removing the black and placing a gradient of the two colours behind. I think the result is a very strong design, and I think the colours make the design stand out much more than the black version. After finding that the gradient worked so well in the type, I wanted to do the same for my second composition, however with different colours. I chose to first experiment with pinks and reds as these colours can have connotations to love and romance as well as ideas of daughters and girls. Whilst perhaps being stereotypical, I think this gradient is incredibly successful with this composition, and I think the pinks work with the typography just as well as the first design. As a pair I think the two designs compliment each other very well and I think they work as a set successfully. I think the simple and limited colours work well and relate back to my research, as well as supporting what the type is actually saying.

Personally, I much prefer the coloured versions of these designs as I think they are not only stronger, but also are more successful as works of satire, conveying the message that I want to and almost making fun of Trump. I feel I made the right decision to keep with Trump quotes rather than including other people, as I think that it helps to tie the project together and give it a more concise and refined theme. I am happy with these outcomes and I think that they fulfil the brief successfully, utilising quotes to create detailed and decorative works of typography. I feel I have used my research effectively, relating my designs back to the ideas in my research and also using techniques and styles from the artists I was inspired by in my own work.

My idea has evolved many times throughout the course of this project, but I feel that my final outcome is the strongest and I am happy with the conclusion that I have arrived at. If I had more time to work on this I would like to have experimented with placing my type in more public spaces, perhaps experimenting with projection inspired by the work of Jenny Holzer and Ryan Bruner. Although there is much more I think I could have done, I feel that I have come out with a strong project and my typography skills and understanding have improved massively over the course of the project. I have also considered continuing with this idea and making more  compositions with different quotes from Trump, and it is something the I may continue with outside of the APP.

Orange & Teal

After deciding to scan my designs and finalise them digitally using Photoshop, I started to think about possible colour schemes that I could possibly experiment with when finishing my compositions. One theme that was suggested to me and that sounded very interesting was Teal & Orange.

Also known sometimes as Amber & Teal, it is a technique used, nowadays in almost every film at some point to create a sense of drama, and also balance. This technique works so well because blue and orange are complimentary colours and so the contrast creates a very strong scene, not just in films but also for the majority of film posters as well.

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Something very interesting to look at, is an infographic from blogger Edmund Helmer, who sampled the colors in a number of film trailers and put the findings into quite a surprising result:There are no set in stone reasons (that I could find) as to why orange and teal colour schemes have flooded movies, other than the fact that the two colours work so well together and create such a striking contrast, more so than any other two colours. Another theory states that is has to do with the introduction of digital filmmaking, and the ease at which an editor could colour grade an entire film. This meant that the editor’s first port of call was to enhance the colours of the skin of the actors, which is primarily made of of orangey tones. And in order to combat the increased oranges in the film, the complimentary colour would have been enhanced as well, which is blue.

This contrasting colour scheme, not surprisingly, is often used in conjunction with opposites, such as light and dark, fire and ice, humans and aliens, good and evil. In relation to my practical work, I thought that this colour scheme could be applied to my first typographic piece and could be very successful. The use of blue relates to the “freezing and snowing” mentioned by Trump, with the warm orange relating to the “global warming”. This is something I think could be very successful and I will definitely experiment with when editing my final designs.

https://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange-and-blue/

To vector or not to vector?

Throughout the process of drawing up my typographic pieces, I started to think more about the digital process that I would take after finishing the drawings, and how I could take it further into a final piece. In previous typographic projects I have both experimented with vectorising and without vectorising my type, and I wasn’t sure which route to take with these pieces.

In discussion with my tutor I was advised not to vectorise these pieces as it would involve hours and hours of work within Illustrator and it would be too long a process, whereas a very similarly high quality could be acheaved using the Threshold tool in Photoshop. This is something I have tried before with my work and whilst the lines were not as clean as a vector, is was still happy with the outcome and I liked that it still kept the ‘hand-rendered’ look that my drawing did. This is an aspect that I don’t want to lose with the typographic pieces that I have been working on for this project, and so I would agree that it would be better suited to not recreate my type as a vector, but to simply scan it and edit it using Photoshop to create an outcome of a similarly high quality.

Second Type Piece

For my second typographic piece in what would be a two part (for now) series I decided to use a quote that was less political and more personal, but equally as stupid, and much more creepy:

“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

Originally I planned to use a quote from different politicians, however with the current US inauguration of Donald Trump I decided that it would be more relevant, and would also tie the two pieces together more successfully, if I used two quotes from Trump instead. Much like my first design, I used the same process to create this composition, using small thumbnail sketches to get to grips with the different styles of type and the rough composition that I would make, before then moving on to work on each section of the text individually. During the process this time I also used a photocopier to experiment with different sizes of text, enlarging one of my original drawings to make the piece fill the page better, as well as making it stand out more in the final composition.

After getting all of my individual pieces of type to a finished state that I was happy with, I then moved 0n to piecing them together into one final composition. Just like with my first design, I used fineliner pens to make the type bolder and stronger, with deep blacks and thick, bold lines contrasting with the thin ones. Again, I finalised the design by adding in various embellishments and decorations, ultimately adding to the overall detail and impact of the design. In contrast to my first composition, I think that this design feels slightly more spaced out, where I have used less decoration to fill the gaps between the text and have left more blank space, however I don’t think that this necessarily takes away from the design and I feel that it is still a very strong piece. It is clear again to see how my influences have affected the design, with certain styles and techniques inspired by my research coming through in the final design. I think the actual text itself still reads very well and I think there is enough detail for the satirical message of the piece to be conveyed successfully.

First Type Piece

After finalising my different sections of type, I moved on to fitting them all together into one big composition. I found this process quite enjoyable and it was very interesting to see all the pieces come together and work so well as one piece. After placing everything, I went over the design with different thicknesses of fine liners ranging from 0.05mm to 0.8mm, using these to add depth, detail and strength to the design. I love the strong black lines that the pens create and I think they make the overall design stronger and more eye-catching. I think it is clear to see, throughout my design, where I have utilised my range of inspirations, specifically from the likes of Mateusz Witzcak, Tobias Hall, David A Smith and the Sanborn Insurance Maps. I think this can be seen clearly in the way I have composed the design using different styles of type, and also in the way I have decorated the piece, using a strong outline to frame, but not contain the type, and in the small marks and shapes that I have used to embellish the type.I personally am very happy with this design; I feel that it is successful in presenting the quote in a satirical way, whereby the audience is first struck by the detail and the impact of the decorative type itself, and it is only after looking into the design and reading the type that the audience can see what it says, and can fully understand the message I am conveying. I think the design is a strong typographic piece, and I think it is successful in presenting a satirical, and slightly cynical message about the politicians at the top, reminding people of some of the completely stupid things that they can say, and hopefully forcing people to think a little deeper about the politicians that they support, or disagree with as the case may often be.

Typographic Process

After finding a huge amount of ‘stupid’ quotes from politicians like Trump and Boris Johnson, I wanted to start working on my first typographic piece. I chose to start with a trump quote”

“Its freezing and snowing in New York – we need global warming!”

Personally I just felt that this was one of the more ridiculous quotes, and one that I just couldn’t believe someone could be so ignorant to say. As someone who is quite concerned about climate change and who tries to actively combat it by being as eco-friendly as I can, I felt a more personal connection with this quote as well.

The first step in my process of making was to start with some rough thumbnail sketches of my layout. This allowed me to experiment with different layouts and placements, and also allowed me to physically see how much text I had to utilise in my design. From these sketches I could get an idea of roughly what kind of type styles I would use for the design, whether it be serif, sans serif, italics, bold and thick or sleek and thin.From this point I then moved on to creating the different areas of the composition separately. Working through each section of the quote individually allowed me to evolve and rework the different pieces of type over and over using tracing paper and a light box, meaning that I could get the type to as high a quality and composition as I wanted before tracing them all together into the final design.

Initially I did have a few issues with creating my type, with certain areas of text or individual letters not coming out as strong as I wanted, but I think that working through this process of drawing and redrawing the type over and over has allowed me to work around these problems quite easily, and also helped me to see where I was going wrong, allowing me to improve and make my type better. Overall I have found this process to be quite helpful in allowing me to improve my typographic skills and in showing me how to better utilise my skills and put them into practice with multiple styles of type at once. Now that I have all of the individual sections of type, the next step is to put them together into once composition, along with the addition of various embellishments and decoration to add to the depth and detail of the final outcome.

Quotes from Political Leaders

As the clear next step for my project, I needed to start to look for some infamous quotes from different political leaders. There are of course some politicians who are much more renowned for stupid things than others, and luckily there are many articles and webpages online that list the best of these quote, and it is with these politicians that I want to start with.

Donald Trump:

“Why aren’t we smart? We used to be brilliant.”

“Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich.”

“I do not wear a rug. My hair is one hundred percent mine.”

“A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate.”

“My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well been documented, are various other parts of my body.”

“Laziness is a trait in blacks.”

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

“My twitter has become so powerful that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.”

“It’s freezing and snowing in New York—we need global warming!”

“You know, it really doesn`t matter what [the media] write as long as you`ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”

http://thoughtcatalog.com/lorenzo-jensen-iii/2015/07/50-donald-trump-quotes-that-are-so-dumb-theyll-make-your-brain-hurt/

“An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud”

“Robert Pattinson should not take back Kristen Stewart. She cheated on him like a dog & will do it again – just watch. He can do much better!”

“I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

“I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.”

“The point is, you can never be too greedy.”

http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/entertainment/people/donald-trump-quotes-57213

Boris Johnson:

“My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.”

“My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.”

“Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.”

“There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge.”

“I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn’t go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar.”

“I don’t believe that is necessarily any more dangerous than the many other risky things that people do with their free hands while driving – nose-picking, reading the paper, studying the A-Z, beating the children, and so on.”

“I forgot that to rely on a train, in Blair’s Britain, is to engage in a crapshoot with the devil.”

“Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase…”

“I’ve slept with far fewer than 1,000”

“No one obeys the speed limit except a motorised rickshaw.”

“What has the BBC come to? Toilets, that’s what”

“A horse is a safer bet than the trains”

“It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/london-mayor-election/mayor-of-london/10909094/Boris-Johnsons-top-50-quotes.html

Interim Crit Presentation

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As a way to monitor our progress our tutors held an interim crit for the APP project for which I have made as presentation documenting my process. As I had not yet started creating my work by this point there was not a lot of feedback for me to receive, however I still found the process helpful as it allowed me to find out whether I was on the right track with my research and the development of my ideas. The next point after this will be to find some suitable quotes to use for my designs and begin working on my typographic pieces.

New Idea (Political Leaders)

After looking into some of the potential issues that I could illustrate in my work, and looking at some of the facts and statements about them, I found that, often, many of them are very long and word heavy, without any real way to cut them down. From a Type perspective, I feel that it could potentially be quite hard to translate these quote into typographic pieces of design using the highly decorative and detailed techniques that I want to.

Because of this, and after looking at the work of Jonathan Barnbrook, I have decided to slightly change my idea, and take a more satirical approach to my problem. Rather than tackle a range of social and political issues, I had the thought to narrow my idea down and focus on politicians a political leaders from different countries, primarily the UK and US. Rather than tackling serious issues, I wanted to be a little more tongue-in-cheek with my work and almost take the mickey a little, inspired by Barnbrook’s work.

Still using the decorative typographic techniques that I have researched, I am going to take some of the more ridiculous quotes from political leaders, not ones necessary related to politics but simply ones that are known by people for being stupid things to say. I think this is a much simpler idea than my previous one, and in turn I think it is a much stronger idea, and I think I will be able make some much stronger work from it.