Senior Studio “Research”: The room where it happens
1.Overview
The design has become my way of expressing myself and helping me grasp an understanding of something that I am trying to master. I have noticed that I’ve been doing this my entire life. I put together seemingly incongruent shapes into a coherent whole. I get inspired by my chaotic challenges, the approach to managing space and certain individuals, who are already successful in the creative field. I admire anyone with the urge to create. I keep following along with their growth on Instagram and Pinterest and try my best to learn from them.
Recently I have noticed how I am messy but also clean. I have a messy room, a messy desktop and messy handwriting. However, my designs feel very clean. This is a juxtaposition in itself.
I usually try to implement this in my designs (Contrast and Cohesion in space) and draw my inspirations from the wide range of artists who do the same.
MESSY/CHAOS = CONTRAST
CLEAN = COHESION
2. Concept
For the final product of this project, I connected three artists to explore the contrast and cohesion in my design and how it got there.
I wanted to give the viewer an insight into my everyday design process. I thought the best way is to show the chaos (“contrast”) is my digital space as a desktop narrative. Due to the hybrid learning system, we spend most of our time online and therefore it has become “The room where it happens”.
3. Process
Part 1 Research:
Over the course of the last weeks, we collected important and influential individuals on Basecamp. They could be from any time period and industry. It was a mechanism of sharing cool designers, artists, musicians with our peers. Each post needed to include a video of a talk and a small description below it.
I tried to choose artists that I truly have been following over a long period of time and that I can Identify with Joy Li (Graphic Designer, Australia), Mirko Borsche (Graphic designer, Germany), Ignasi Moneral (Illustrator, Italy), Chris Labrooy (3D, England), the Eames couple (Architecture), Virgil Abloh (Fashion Designer), Olafur Eliasson (Artist, Danish-Islandic) and Catherina Bianchini (Graphic Designer and Illustrator, England). I was introduced to them by other classmates or simply by reading articles on It’s Nice that.
Part 2 The Video:
The next step was taking these eight artists and creating a 5-minute video. We could choose as many or as little of the people as we wanted.
Each creator seemed so individual in their style and they were such an important part of my design growth, that I wanted to include them all.
I started off by organizing them by their artistic field in a google doc to grasp an overall understanding of how they were all interlinked for the synopsis of the video.
My first idea was to create a simulated desktop appearance with individual screens and folders. They would be then placed on moving clouds following the idea of iCloud ( a place to store digital files in a more ‘open’ space) as well as an insight of my mind. My own involvement in space and inclusion.
Sketching out a storyboard helped me organize my thoughts and organization. I could clearly see how I wanted to approach my idea from start to finish.
But ultimately James advised me to focus on my initial concept messy vs. clean, where my desktop is the best example. I focused on doing scripted screen recordings.
I decided on a new order of the Video and noted down some ideas for effects that I wanted to include:
- A new colourful border for each artist that I felt represented them best.
- this would add personality
- Orange tones represent a passionate, positive and energetic character
- Blue tones represent calmness and responsibility
2. A new desktop background colour for every artist
- indicates that a new sector of the video starts with the new background colour
3. Overlaying images
- This creates the “messy” effect and also underlines the contrasting motions of the individual screens. It should feel almost like a physical collage.
4. A “Faded screen” for a smooth transition
5. Use different applications that I use on a daily basis: Indesign, notes, youtube
This was going to be my first video with Premiere Pro, so a new and bigger obstacle that I was excited to take. I looked into tutorials and tried to teach the rest by myself.
While I was sketching out the flow of the new video, I realized that the video would feel too overwhelming with all eight artists and narrowed it down to three. These were all artists that inspired me to create a specific piece. Such as my book“It’s all across the Biennale” with the pieces by Mirko Borsche.
I decided to follow the following structure: messy/crazy → a break “breath”→ description of topic/end. I also ended up mixing simulated photos and screens with screen recordings to create the result that I wanted.
The video starts with a video of me as the desktop background to give the audience the feeling that they are on the other side of my screen and are sharing my creative process experience. And the video ends with a recording of me.
I re-arranged the order of sequencing the narrative for each artist a different way. Either it starts with his talk and ends with his work or starts with the work and a voice-over and ends with a video of the talk. It was a response tp my experience with each artist.
The viewer is then introduced to the folder “SOURCE” that includes all the big influential people with the seven different aspects of design.
It continues to show certain aspects of clips that I wanted to highlight and pieces that I enjoy the most for the purpose of this presentation.
During some aspects of the video, I only chose an audio recording of the artist to let the viewer focus on certain pieces.
The video synthesis of the designers ends with a brief summary of my inspiration process along with a video of clouds and a moment for the audience to breath.
*structure
Design Choices:
I overlayed font, colours, photos, audio and videos with each other
Font: OCR A STD Regular
Colours: A range of blue and orange
Music: Colour of your Face from the youtube library— Upbeat music for the upbeat content. It also reflects the style of the artists.
I found it most challenging to find the perfect song, as well as adjusting it to the audio of the other video.
However, I am happy with the process that I have made.
