London Trip

Today was the rescheduled London Trip; my original plan was to use this trip to help with inspiration for me to decide on what I will do for my professional project. Due to the trip being rescheduled and I now have an idea of what it is I am doing. I therefore started planning how I will use the trip to benefit and progress my project.

After some research into what was on and where I went back onto the ‘Type Museum’s website where I found something I had previously overlooked: ITS CURRENTLY CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC! I was so frustrated when I found this out as the museum would have been a huge help to my project. Therefore I used the trip as research into Exhibitions. My main goal was to go to as many places as possible and collect primary research on exhibition in the form of Photos of the exhibition (where possible) and how they publicize it, booklets, flyers, banners etc. I started off at the Tate Britain then the Design Museum, Tate Modern, LCC – basically to as many places as possible!

While looking around at the Tate Modern I spent some time looking at something, which I normally pass by – Sara Fanelli’s timeline of twentieth century art. – This was something I hadn’t planed on researching although it will be a massive help I want to achieve something similar to go into the exhibition I am designing the material for.

Another helpful thing that the Tate had was a really interesting exhibition – Rodchenko & Popova. It cost about £12 but I received a larger booklet with this – it showed me that I shouldn’t restrict myself to designing cheaper things, which would be given away.

I found this trip a lot more beneficial than I thought I would be (after finding out that the Type Museum was shut). I will later email the Museum to find out when it will open and also if they could send my any info. 

Professional Project - development

Over the past few days I have been trying to develop a decent idea to undertake for my professional project. I went back over the work I did with Dan, which was to help come up with an idea. I have now come to the conclusion that I want to use Typography quite heavily and also I want to expand my typographical knowledge.

 

One of the ways I could do this would be to design the material for a Typographical exhibition in a gallery. This would also allow me to undertake another discipline, which I thoroughly enjoyed on the course, which was the logo and identity work for the live brief.

 

I will now go onto researching into other exhibitions surrounding typography, and then onto other areas of relevance before the presentation on Thursday.  

Research Seminar

This session was on advanced research methods. Some of the session was just on recapping on how we start researching: listing key words then taking them onto the computer/ library database. I found the stuff about the databases available in the library as I was previously un aware of this. After the session I started to apply some of these methods and got a list of books to get out when they have been returned.  

13.02.09

We started to day off by splitting into seminar groups, I was very pleased with how we were split up, as the groups were categorised so the people in them had something in common. We just went over our idea briefly and showed what research we had already carried out and what we should do next.

I found this seminar very helpful as it brought something quite fundamental to my project up:

If I base my exhibition around other designers work or a specific style, then the promotional work would have to reflect this and it could end up with me just replicating other peoples approach to design.  One way around this that I thought could be more interesting was to create something to be in the exhibition and then design the promotional work around that.  

Approaching this project in that way: basing it more around the development of typography and creating something like a clearly designed timeline would allow me to do more research and then present the information in my own style!

For the rest of the day I continued collecting researching/ reading.  

12.02.09

Today we had to present our idea for the project. I had made a small slide show (mainly to remind me of what to include) as we were restricted to one minute.  This started off well but after the first few the presentations started to get longer! In the end we spent almost the whole day on them, although this was quite frustrating, as I had planed to carry on researching my idea I was aware that it was probably more beneficial to each person as they were getting more advise and feedback.

 

The feedback I received was quite helpful and reassuring – the main pointers were:

Could the exhibition be a permanent one? – as there are currently not any in London.

Possibly base this more around the historical side of type development – look at informative graphics.

Try get to as many exhibitions In London next week.

           

As I had about half an hour left before the end of the day I decided to research into the places I could go around London to make the day as beneficial as possible for me.

Introduction -Contemporary Visual Context

Today was the first seminar with Anna, we were given the brief and then spoke about our initial ideas for an essay. My first thoughts are to base mine around the affects the digital revolution had on typography. Anna seemed to think that this would be a good easy to do it on; she did mention that one of the markers has a very high degree on typography!

I am going to try develop this into a working title and carry out some basic research and then next week we will have the advanced research skills session to help research into my chosen area.  

Friday 06.02.09

Ahhh today was quite frustrating. My aim was to get a solid idea under way and take advantage of the tutors in…. after a very helpful presentation from Mike Ryan- showed us how his students started off this last year. One of them was very helpful as yesterday I briefly spoke to Mike Ryan about another idea which was to design stuff for a typography exhibition, and one of the presentations he showed was for a graphic design exhibition. Not long after he had finished the university was closed due to a sudden downpour of snow! But having seen the presentations I was confident that this would be a good idea to pursue. I think that I should narrow the typography exhibition down so it is not quite so broad.

I will there for  spend the next few days researching into possible ‘categories’ of type I could base the exhibition around.