Graphics Elective - First Week - Typography

-TYPOGRAPHY-

So this is the elective I was waiting for the whole time. I was definitely nervous going into it because I had seen the work that had gone before me the four weeks previous and I was seriously impressed with the standard that was shown. I was also hoping not to get a word that was too obscure or too unapproachable so I was a little bit relieved when I pulled the word 'BETWEEN' out of the box. I thought that it was definitely workable and I was off thinking straight away. Down to the scribble pad I went and hammered out some concepts for the word. As this week was purely typographical we had to find a way of representing our word using only text, but using it in any means possible.

At first everything was very safe and not really pushing the idea anywhere but I kept at it and made some pieces in Illustrator that I thought were ok but I knew myself that I could do better. My concerns were confirmed when I should the first few bits to my tutor Patricia, she echoed my thoughts on it all being very safe and far too 2 dimensional. I think it was around lunch time that this happened and I remember going through my bag and finding some electrical tape, wires from my sculpture project, my camera and grabbing my scalpel and a good bit of A3 card and suddenly had a flood of ideas to work from. It was a pretty constructive lunch.

First thing's first, a mind-map.

Very rough ideas about how to approach playing with the style of the word.

Everything between I could think of at the time.

A little more exploration.

My intention here was to sew the letters into my fingers just under the very top layer of skin,
something I remember doing in class a few times when I was a lot younger, oddly enough. It turns out this was a bit too illustrative for that week, and it ended up being too typographic for the illustration week. Go figure.

Onto the first few treatments I did for the word 'Between'. These are all pretty easy and safe and I'm glad I didn't go that route for the final piece but it was good to get them out of the way so that I knew what not to do.

I was hoping to use two pieces of perspex here to frame the words.

Quick sketch for the short movie.

This is where the scalpel, card, and fishing wire come in.

This pathway was outside the window where my desk was and by chance I counted the
rows of trees and realised it was the same as my word, lucky break.

I think this piece is the most effective in a typographical sense. Using the negative space between the off cuts of the letters from the piece in the trees outside it shows the meaning of the word pretty well. I was happy with how it turned out. The white card is a strong contrast to the environment around it and stands out well.

Couldn't resist taking a video of the view between the trees, the letters look 

like they are just floating in mid-air.

Between between and between.

Goodbye friend

I didn't know for a good while what to call this but I settled on the one above. Television recently has become a very frustrating process involving much grating advertising and pointless, vapid shows. I also remember learning a lot from tv growing up and as a current non owner of a tv and a occupier of the internet I thought that this was fitting to not only break an old , dated tv, but that just breaking a tv might sever whatever old ties I had to the old pastime. Many hours spent watching pointless, unengaging programming, with the odd ever decreasing good viewing thrown in led me to the point of wishing to unmake a television. My initial intention was to see it off a roof but weather, time, and health and safety put paid to that. This I would recommend to anyone wishing they could ever get away from the tv, or anyone sick of being pestered to buy things they don't need or want. Football is all you had left for me and now the internet has taken that too, not to mind the fact that a lot of news is now second hand reporting from the internet. TV, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, upgrade already.

Pieces from the end of the brief

These videos are sideways, apologies, and these were the first attempt at the spinning mechanism.

This part was very enjoyable.

The final arrangement of this odd construct. I like the way it continues to spin as if hovering in mid air.

Satisfied

All the screws that came from the various devices.

I like order.

Vibrance

CD Unrecorder

Video pieces.

Electropsy

This one's a bit long but it's most of my photos from the project

Typographic incidents and electronic parts

The process

Minidisc shots. Big fan of these colours.