MA Project: Noticing the ignored.
I am studying a masters degree in graphic design at the University of Falmouth, which I study part time around my full time job. We get given weekly briefs with 1 week to complete the lectures, research and the brief. This weeks brief:
This week will involve you going out to really look, explore and record a local geographic area. Be prepared, plan your trip and visit several times; perhaps even at different times of day / night.
• Identify your chosen geographic location. Select a street nearby to you within 1 or 2 miles from where you live.
• Document it, explore it, evidence it.
• Come up with something unique to your street.
• Present your interpretation of your street in the media and format of your choice.
Here are some of my favourite drains (never thought i'd say that sentence in my life). I wanted to see how you would emotionally respond to these images if they were in a different location, or no longer recognisable as a drain cover. So I then started tracing on the iPad some of the patterns from the drain covers, adding a bit of colour to separate what started to look like symbols.
From there I collated all of the symbols from all of the drain covers into one colour coded document, and thought i could make it into a typeface, so I chose on of the drain covers company name 'storm', and tried using only the symbols to create the word.
From there I took this back into illustrator to convert these symbols into vectors which when I arranged them on the page in black and white and thought actually this looks pretty awesome as a poster with the shapes being completely random and being a pattern and shape in itself.
So I started looking up graphic design posters, looking through my design history book and finding a few names such as Jules Cheret, Toulouse Lautrec, Leonetto Cappiello, Aubrey Beardsley etc. Which inspired me to make this into a poster, so I went back and looked at some of the interesting company names on the drain covers and thought i'd feature these. Finished design below.
