The past fortnight I decided to look into a few periods of design history, the ones I was most drawn to being Swiss Modernism and Bauhaus. Upon researching these styles, I was able to come up with a few compositional strategies that I think characterise these styles.
To discuss the stylistic elements of Swiss Modernism we must first discuss Bauhaus. The Swiss Modernist movement of design was directly influenced by Bauhaus; which was, in turn, originated from artists such as El Lissitzky and Kasimir Malevich. These Russian artists reinvented design for the socialist era. Resulting in two similar but distinguishable design movements.
While adventuring into the history for these design styles I began to account for a number of techniques inherent to each style. Bauhaus, I found aligning, overlapping, bleeding white space and tone all quite distinguishable traits of the movement. In Swiss modernism I identified the before characteristics, as well as, the use of positive and negative space, form, layering, kinetic sequencing, cropping and implied space. These techniques constitute two movements emphasising clean, legible, harmonious design.
I have spent the past two weeks discovering letterform in the world around me. It’s been a thought-provoking project trying to push past my root view of my surroundings and see shape and form more objectively. I’m near done collecting my photographic alphabet and have starting moving images across to photoshop to begin my editing process.
I’ve really enjoyed getting some time to work in photoshop. I took photography in hand have always had an interest in graphic design so getting to work in these programs for a uni subject is really exciting. I have found so far that I have much preferred working with my images in greyscale. I find it more enjoyable to edit my images this way. It is easier to control the contrast/brightness/levels/etc of the letters this way and I can make my letterforms really pop. A few of my favourites so far:
For a few of my letters, I have some options of different forms I have photographed over the past two weeks, so my plan for the next few days is to try and determine a general theme of my alphabet. I have been musing over the text options for a poster to try and help me develop a consistent narrative for my letterforms. One of my favourite letterforms is the ‘T’ pictured above, I would love in the later design stages to make it a central piece of my poster so I am considering ‘ALPHABET STREET’ or ALPHABET CITY’ for my text option. Meaning the general tone of my alphabet will be quite urban.
Next week I will be continuing to edit my letterforms and start drawing up my alphabet proof sheets in InDesign. I’ve used InDesign before when I worked my traineeship in my gap year but I’m keen to further explore how to utilise some of the tools of the program.
Phoebe Mae 