Movement Project: Week 1-3
- Alexandra Markova
- 4 нояб. 2015 г.
- 4 мин. чтения
The first project we were given at Creativity & Context section is called “The Movement”. During 10 weeks in a groups of four we need to invent our own art movement with a defined aims, identity and aesthetics. In the end of the term we will have an exhibition, where each group will present the material (could be anything) that somehow connects with our core values. During the first 4 weeks our task is mainly to develop a poster that would advertise the exhibition and to form our identity (including influences, purposes and etc).
Week 1.
We started out with talking about our interests to see, how much in common do we have. As we started to know more about each other a little bit, we understood that we all like minimalistic and functional style in design. We also talked a lot about how nowadays people get too much information (Internet made it really easy), which can be really confusing, because it limits the ability to access the relevant information. Based on that we decided that our movement would focus on restructuring the certain kind of information in order to make it more accessible, aesthetically pleasing and clear.
Week 2.
Throughout the next week we tried to do as much research as we can on the information design and designers/movements that had purposes similar to ours. I always liked the style of Bauhaus school as they used mainly primary colours and shapes creating beautiful geometric posters, that were really complex in terms of composition on one hand, but still readable at the other. Also Swiss designers were always famous for their ability to create beautiful pieces of typography, highlighting the main information using scale and colours.
Also we found out that work of American professor Edward Tufte is quite relevant with our ideas. Basically he is best known for his books that teach how to take an extremely complicated data and turn it to easy-for-understanding pieces using design. Below is his quotes that I feel the most relevant for our movement:
“There is no such thing as information overload. There is only bad design. If something is cluttered and/or confusing, fix your design”
Both of his books are available in our library and I think it is really important for us to see them as it will give us an understanding of how to keep design of information simple, without cutting down the content.
We also shared some links, that might be useful for the group in the future, when we will pick up an issue and start transforming it for an exhibition:
The Guardian Data Blog – is a perfect example of how confusing and complex grids and charts can be visualised simple.
Fastcompany‘s – infographic of the day feature has a lot of different examples of data visualised fully and in an engaging manner.
Virgin America’s redesign – an article about updating the company’s website as well as boarding passes, in order to make them easier to use
David McCandless’s talk – about the importance of data and striking examples of information visualised beautifully.
Week 3.
Inspired by the gathered research, we moved on to creating the poster. As we stand for the accessibility of information it was decided to keep it simple and straightforward. Basically, the advert should include only three points:
what’s the exhibition it is gonna be (name)
where (place)
when (time and date)
But, it is also important to give people an understanding of why this exhibition is interesting/important for them. What are they going to see/learn there? Why should they be interested in it? That’s why we decided to give a clue on our poster of what’s going to happen on an exhibition.
As a base we took the timeline with different movements of 20th century, that are commonly known to everybody – Expressionism, Futurism, Pop Art, etc. People know who they were and what were their core values. But what they don’t know is that in 2015 there was a new wave of movements created. Based on that we finished the timeline with our exhibition, as it will be a place to discover that movement-wave didn’t end up yet. Three of us did versions of posters, then we met to decide which one is the best. All of them were really different (and it was really interesting to see how with one idea each of us came out with an own outcome), but seemed to be slightly unfinished.
We spent some time discussing the strengths and weakness of each piece and decided to combine all of the posters. Parts and ideas were taken from each and turned into a single finished one:
I’am really glad with the work we did as well as how we performed as a group. We didn’t argue, but listened and considered opinions of each and in the end it allowed us to achieve an excellent result. It would be interesting to know what other people would say about our work and I hope that their critical evaluation would give us an ability to improve our design, if needed.
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