MA Graphic Design & Art Direction / Self Study: Front-end Development: Field Research

I started out trying to arrange something for quite a few of my class mates. Explaining a few of us were going to Liverpool and asking who wanted to come.

Initially a lot of people showed interest, but restrictions were put in place, certain people couldn't do one day other couldn't do another day. Eventually we were left with only Friday as an option. This was fine but after all the restriction only three people ended up going. This, for me, was frustrating because I had to miss out on talks in Manchester that I could of otherwise gone to.

Saying all of that it was a good trip.

We visited:

The Tate Liverpool
The Bluecoat Gallery (collection of Whistler drawings, we weren't allowed to take pictures)
The Liverpool Museum

The Tate Liverpool

This was great. We saw some brilliant modern art. I'll be honest when viewing art I always look at the aspects I could take into my design, different techniques, methods, graphical elements etc, this is what is important to me, not so much the reasoning behind the piece.

In that regard I took a lot away from it.

There were a few video pieces that I couldn't capture but one in particular Felix The Cat by Mark Leckey gave me the idea of using vertical lines to cut and offset the image, in that way create something evolved from the original.

This cubist painting started me thinking about pixelation

and the different way I can transform objects using cubism.

I liked how this is functionless.

Each rider added makes it more elaborate and less usable.

It's like its saying keep it simple, don't re-invent the wheel.

These three pictures show a collection of photographs overlaid over one another. Each picture has an element that is interacting with the photograph behind it. For example, the one directly above, shows an image of a burnt out/overturned car with the image of a face in the smoke. I liked this idea of overlapping images to create something else.

This was just cool. I liked the way it transformed something flat, i.e. the metal mirrors and because of layout and orientation it created a 3d piece that brought those separate elements into a different space. This would be nice translated into a digital picture gallery, where each picture has a different orientation and depth. More interesting than just stay next to on another.

Chris asked me to take a look at this, I think what we both liked was the second look you need to see whether it was a trees shadow or just the mould creating this pattern.

This was a pollock, I took this for my dad as he is an abstract artists heavily influence by pollock.

This was displayed in a glass box and made from metal strings. It was elaborate and beautiful, I liked this sense of symmetry. It pulled on something that I had heard the other week on a show about the universe. Complex behaviours and solutions come from simple rules and simple elements. For example, and I will murder this -apologies to any astrophysicists, the universe was formed from simple rules i.e. gravity, speed of light etc and simple elements like hydrogen and oxygen. It was only when you combines these simple rules and simple elements that great things happen.

This seemed like a good idea for a speaker design, that was
until I was corrected that a speaker has to be hollow to be any good... cheers moustache.

Another piece that took me back to the idea of space and

how simple elements combine to make complex results.

This reminded me of studio gibly drawing style. I like the innocence of the style.

This image used metallic paint to create a translucent effect that made a simple image come alive.

Liverpool Museum

We just took a look around to see if there was anything interesting, turns out the Liverpool Museum is quite well designed. Easy to understand and digest information at a glance.