by Miao Liu
What a semester! Everything feels like it’s going by incredibly fast.
As a senior, I feel that everyone is picking up the pace and progress. Especially during the quarantine, taking the class remotely did not slow down our design pace. Everyone has a great passion for working on all kinds of projects, especially for Question Installation, the installation was amazing. It was also a productive semester for me because I’ve learned a lot of new skills, including 3D modeling, urban design, architecture design and product design. In order to prepare for graduate school, I spent most of my spare time taking exams and making portfolios. The pandemic saved me a lot of time and allows me to think. The theme of the graphic design studio this semester is Collaboration. It was a magical experience to collaborate with our classmates remotely and working together tacitly.
Project 1: Impact and Empathy
On the Grid
Our first project is the redesign of Hyperakt’s project On the Grid. We began with an analysis of Hyperakt’s project On the Grid, which is a digital guide of different cities around the world curated by designers. Visually, we liked the use of line art iconography on the website, and we used it as an inspiration for the visual language of our own books. We liked the idea of a tour guide being made through a specific perspective, and in this case, it was the perspective of creatives like ourselves. We collected visual inspiration and thought about approaching our content with a digital format in mind.
We decided to create three books in three cities, each city had meaning to us. Additionally, we wanted to make content that reflected our personal interests, while following a similar structure to make the books part of a cohesive collection. Here are projects that inspired us. In these examples, we liked how different distinct books and additional print materials were being brought together.
My chosen city is Guangzhou, China. We started off by making iterations using colors, patterns, shapes, typography, photos, and illustrations that we felt reflected these cities. The feedback we received initially was to focus more on the process than the final product, and make more iterations. We also were exploring distinct creative approaches that we needed to bring together so that our final books would be more related.
We then each made a book for our city, consisting of line drawings, written descriptions, and information such as hours of different locations to visit, and spaces to place maps. AS you can see the layouts are similar inline drawing elements and grid, but they are each completely different in style. Additionally, we thought we could make our books more interactive by designing small city maps with hole cutouts that could be placed over circles within our books, representing the different locations we chose to feature.
The final product is a collection of books and maps, bringing three different cities together in this sort of travel guide folder. The idea is that there could be pamphlets for many cities and you can choose which ones you want to include in your physical on the grid folder. The maps were printed separately and placed in pockets in a folder containing all of our books. The colors of each map match the colors of their corresponding book.
Project 2: Research Video
The second project is a research video about our chosen artist. My chosen artist is Vasjen Katro, a graphic and visual designer from Albania, who has design experience for more than 10 years. He created Baugasm, which is a self-driven design project. By doing this project, he creates a poster every day for three years, and in total, he made over 700 posters.
By printing out his works and rearrange different elements into a collage, a lot of new design ideas can jump out of my mind. The dynamic shapes and textures he created always look good in any direction, even combine with other elements. In order to have more visual enhancement, I even cut out some portraits to combine with his works.
Finally, I made a collage video about Vasjen Katro to show how I got inspired by him. Great artists and designers should have their own style. By doing this, we should keep designing and practice, to get to know what’s our personal style. Valjean Kato's works are great visual enhancement and we should keep developing new styles as he did.
Project 3: Design in Question
Defining and Dissection Graphic Design
In this project, we started by asking a series of questions related to graphic design and took the questions as inspiration for our installation. We firstly made 25 iterations each and combined all of our iterations together. Our constraints were to print on tabloid-size paper with the RISO printer or cut on the vinyl cutter.
My iterations focused on the questions such as: “Is talent important?”, “Does education limit innovation and creativity?” I used abstract lines and shapes to demonstrate the complexity of the questions and the diversity of the answers. The yarn on top of the illustrations is faintly visible, which implies that there’s no final solution to a lot of the design questions.
To add another layer of our installation, we also rented a projector, intended to show all our installing questions on top of our iterations. However, unexpectedly technical problems made us reconsider the way of adding the layer. We completely reframed the problem and finally decided to use yarn attached on top of our iterations to demonstrate our design.
In our final installation, we wanted our varying visual languages to meld into one larger composition. The best way we could think of doing that was by using a gradient of the colors used in the Riso printer. Due to the way we all designed our twenty-five iteration we were able to easily change the colors to which every color sequence we needed for each design. Our gradient went from black and blue on the left side, then blue red, black-red, red yellow, and then yellow and black on the right side. We used a grid system to place our iterations on a wall in the form of a larger poster. It was made out of 4 rows and ten columns. There were two columns of each color combination right next to each other. Each column had four posters, one from each member of the group. To further meld our composition together we used the theme of defining and dissecting. We wanted to emphasize and dissect the elements of design that we all used in our iterations. Those elements were line, shape, and typography. We decided to use yarn and pins to portray this idea because it gave the installation a tactile layer and pins and thread are often used to define or dissect things in other occupations.
Project 4: Thoughts on Thesis
Illuminating Imperfection
People strifes for being perfect. The truth is imperfection is perfection in its best form because in the end there really is no such thing as perfect. The human body is an amazing creation. But sometimes it can be frustrating to deal with the frailties and weaknesses inherent in a mortal body. Sometimes we may focus on imperfections and how we don’t measure up to the “ideal” beauty. Take Tiktok as an example, I was shocked when I found out they developing an algorithm to assess human beauty. For years, machine learning algorithms have been able to be trained by humans to differentiate between attractive and unattractive.
People also tend to have biases on differences. Take me as an example, I’ve gained a full belly of stretch marks during pregnancy. I don’t mind having stretch marks, because it tells a story of what I have been through — they’re reminders of the amazing thing I did to bring my baby into this world. However, when you search on Google about stretch marks, everything you can see is how to get rid of stretch marks and lists of products help control their growth. Hundreds of articles and videos talking about how to remove stretch marks seem to convey the idea that stretch marks are something to be ashamed of. This is simply not true. Our body is unique and absolutely beautiful and imperfection adds personality. We should love every inch of our skin. Body confidence comes from within so ensure that we work on our self-love every day.
By making a series of installation designs, I want to convey that our body is as beautiful as the way it is instead of stereotypical beauty. No one can define what beauty is and no one is truly perfect. We should Illuminating Imperfection and praise our difference.
Thank you!