Robert Brownjohn Title sequence

Above is the title sequence to 1963 James Bond film'From Russia with Love'. The surface that the type is projected onto ie the women, is completely irrelevant but I'm interested in the way that the type can look so fluid and be distorted as it moves across surfaces.

Rules and Typography

Micheline designed a solution to the Faber & Faber book cover brief, incorporating the publisher’s new Print on Demand (PoD) service. It’s a quirky take on the old-fashioned highlighter pen combined with cutting edge technology to create a personalised cover.

Radiohead Video

Interesting Link

Fascinating use of lasers to create a film without the use of any cameras!

Ogaki PRO

A cool typeface I found at gestalten.com. Designed by Aron Jancso and released in November '09 this typeface is designed mainly for display purposes as the designer explains.

'Ogaki is an experimental typeface family for display purposes, great for logos, headlines, posters, or anything in sizes 48 points and up. The design is based on playing with unusual solutions and high contrast in shape detail. Inspiration comes from modernism, calligraphy and traditional terminology of serif typefaces. It's extra heavy and delicate, extravagant and legible at the same time. Heaviness is granted by thick stems and bold shapes lacking real interior negative spaces. Outlines were the key to legibility'.

Maps and Data Representation

Created by Christian Nold the Affect Browser is a tool for extracting the emotional slant of any text (English for now). In particular it helps to visualise how the particular words used in one text relates to the language of other texts that are focused on the same topic - RFID tags for example. To do this you can load in texts from individual internet webpages or ascii text files from your hardrive.

This is essentially the same idea as Wordle, the programme i used to analyse content for my typographic shrine where predominant semantic connotations are highlighted. The difference being that this is visualized with colours and shapes rather than simply text. The artist has written the programme and made it available for download so anybody can process whatever data they wish to analyse.

http://www.softhook.com/index.htm

This is the artist's website which has a number of fascinating projects linked to peoples emotions and their relationship with their surroundings.

I am intrigued with the concept of visualizing emotion. Being an abstract notion it is something that is intangible. At first it also seems like something almost unquantifiable but here Christian Nold seems to explore different ways in which he can visually represent emotion. He has achieved this by measuring the physical reaction a person has whilst experiencing a certain emotion and then processes the data that has been collected.

Situationism and Psychogeography

Cristian Nold and his project on emotional cartography.

Christian Nold @ geekyoto 2008 from Mark Simpkins on Vimeo.

Things of interest

Competition Brief: true stories: true geographies

This brief is about finding original ways to communicate written word and embed it within the cityscape/landscape.

As i want to carry a similar theme that will carry on into my personal project, maybe the competition could focus on the physical and my personal project could focus on trying to take the same/similar content into the virtual.

The content could be the derive and people's reactions to there environment. Try and get them to be as personal and truthful as possible. Honesty and not being inhibited to say what people really think is key to this project having meaning.

New technologies

In June '09 i went to the design museum in London and was struck by a music video that was created for the band Pet Shop Boys. It was a piece of visual communication that really made an impression on me and i had been trying to find this for a long time after and finally found this video that explains the process. Again i was fascinated by use of new technologies where barcodes were embedded into the song so that people could use a camera phone to take a picture and it would automatically recognise the geometric shapes as text. An amazing way to include a lot of information. I'm impressed with the way the Pet Shop Boys really put an emphasis on good design throughout there videos, album covers and merchandise, especially with Farrow design having done most of there work for the past few years.

Seeing as though the theme for my personal project is fairly complex and will put a heavy emphasis on displaying work on people's personal devices, i think it would be extremely important for me to make a viedo like the one above that would help explain my idea.

Absolutely fascinating use of new technologies, overlapping the printed media with that of the digital. Content crossing over from one to the other, interacting to form a very powerful relationship between the physical and the virtual. This relationship is definitely something to consider for my own work.

More (fashion) photography and type

M/M Paris posters.

Cut photography for an album cover by Berlin based graphics agency Hort.

More Expressive Moving Type

Above: a short preview of a forty-seven minute film of ecstatic visuals by LA-based film/video artist Karthik Pandian synced to a sublime minimal techno soundscape sequenced by EU-based Dee-Jay/Producer Eric D. Clark. It's a dance party on a DVD on a magic carpet ride from Berlin to Los Angeles with stops in Frankfurt, Cairo, Las Vegas and more. I was captured by the dark atmosphere created in the film. I think the way the camera focusses mainly on one

Below is a piece of expressive type i found on youtube that appears to be made by some amatuer. While by no means perfect, it has a certain grundgy quality i'm drawn to. Whoever made it appears to have married manually produced elements with filters and effect on the computer.

Tomato

I'm very interested in the sequence of moving images at the beginning of this film. Grungy, dark and atmospheric.

Publish Post

Barrie cashmere: publication format

Barrie cashmere: fashion photography and graphic design

Firstly it was the models intense gaze and strange mask that intrigued me about this image by the Richard Robinson, a freelance graphic designer based in East London. The fact that the model is looking at the viewer but there is a certain aspect of anonymity engages the viewer in an almost uncomfortable, awkward way. This is the reason i included this image in my research and think it would be interesting to recreate a similar feeling to my work, so that it does not just become a pretty piece.

After looking at these images i thought there could be so many possibilities that could arise with a pair of scissors and a fashion magazine. By simply cutting up an image and rearranging the components a completely new image is created, a new feeling, a new dynamic.

(Above) The simplicity of this idea, cutting an image in two and flipping one half the other way round is so effective in this image that the model's body looks completely contorted and doesn't look natural at all. By doing this the designer has already created a visual element that is drawing the viewer in. I also like the way there has been no effort to make the split seamless, there is a certain rough aesthetic that makes it look like manual cut and paste.

Objects have been used to obscure certain parts of the model's body. While the same effect could have been achieved on a computer far more easily there are subtle hints that suggest that it was done properly with the use of props, such as shadows.

I really like the way 'v' magazine has a very strong visual element (the v) that can be seen throughout the all of it's issues. It makes the whole collection feel far more cohesive and coherent. But the main reason i have included this image in my research is because of the way the letter interacts with the person on the front of the magazine and rather than just being a letter that has been overlaid on top of the image, it becomes part of it. This is a theme i'd like to explore in my own work.

Looking at the majority of the images on this page i think the most successful ones all feature a lot of white space, in particular the images above where it has been used to great effect. They were a series of images commissioned by Jil Sander and i found them on POP Magazines's blog. It was the way they were presented that initially caught my eye, with the emphasis lying down the right side of each image and then lining up. White space, if used correctly can be extremely important in creating a dynamic image that has tension between the constituent elements, although if used incorrectly the image can just look to sparse, even unfinished.

The simplicity of this image is what first struck me but also the bold simplicity which immediately creates a direct connection with the viewer. I'd be interested to create imagery playing with simple geometric shapes and straight lines like above that can be used to create dynamic compositions. I think influences from the images above can be combined with elements found in my research into Nagy and Sutnar.

Raf Simons - graduated in industrial design. Started working as a furniture designer for galleries and private interiors. In a radical change of profession in 1995 he became a self trained menswear fashion designer. Lives and works in Antwerp, where his studio is based. Teaches fashion at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and acts as a consultant/buyer to a private Antwerp art collector.

Although they are impeccably cut and created with love and care, clothes are not at the core of Simons’ universe. More important are attitudes, moods and statements. That’s why music, art, performance, images and words have an important role in the whole package. Together with the clothes, those elements sum up, or rather clarify the kind of world Raf Simons wants to project. In an attempt to examine today’s mens and boys psyches (and in the same take his own), he takes his inspiration from the rebellion of past and present youth cultures and blends this with notions of tradition and roots.

Pride in individuality – his clothes are both inspired by and designed for confident outsiders. His references to youth movements (punk, Goth and mod etc) are not meant to be retro; instead Simons tries to translate their energy and determination into modern statements about mental independence.
Simons has many ways to avoid the trappings of the fashion system, most notably his choice of models. Disagreeing with the common images of male beauty and identity forwarded by most fashion magazines and advertising, Simons from the start of his career only used non-professional models, often scouting them on the streets of Antwerp or other Belgian villages.