Foundation Degree (FdA) Digital Media Design
AF102 Visual Language
Assignment 2: 75% Weighting
Assignment title: Design Time Capsule
Brief
You are going to produce a piece of packaging, for example a box, envelope or gift bag, that will give anyone who delves into it an insight into the designer or design movement that it is themed around, like a time capsule gives insights into an era. You will design and produce every element of the package, the surface and content, using appropriate visual language based on visual research.
Elements of your Design Time Capsule
You will produce:-
1. A package such as a printed gift bag with tag or a measured box with a designed surface (either wrapped, covered or printed) and labelling
2. At least one poster (A3) full colour
3. A folding leaflet in full colour
4. Essay with full referencing and bibliography presented as an A5 booklet
Package
Your package will be a time capsule of the past rather than the future, it will detail a graphic design movement or period or an artist/typographer or designer. All the details and aspects of your package will work together to reinforce one overall meaning and combine to strengthen that meaning.
For this assignment you will consider and focus on the meanings, combined meanings, contextual and contrasting meanings of the these elements:
• Graphic design
• Typeface choices
• Compositions and arrangements
• Colours
• Relationship of elements
• Choice of elements for different purposes within the design
• Visual language and message
What you will do:
• Make a package such as a cardboard box which will be either wrapped, printed or covered in a style suitable to your design theme or a printed gift bag and tag. The package must be clearly labelled with your name and a title for your theme in a way that is in keeping with the overall design and uses appropriate typography.
• You will be physically creating this package as a container for the content. For example you may need to create a template for a box made with cutting and gluing flaps and folds from one piece of card, the use scissors and scalpels with glue to cut and make your box
• Produce the documents for inside the package
• You should use a professional print service to print your packaging and poster, so you need to allow time for this in the deadline week
What your documents are about:
• Choose a designer / style from the given list in the page headed ‘historical periods and designers’ (or another after agreement with a member of the teaching team)
• Create a set of typefaces that are sympathetic to one another and your chosen style
• Create a set of colours/ tones that are sympathetic and harmonious (AI Colour tools, Kuler and sharing swatches for Adobe applications)
• Create a poster that advertises and makes explicit your style in its appropriate type, configuration, colours, composition etc
• Create a folded leaflet that details the historical context in the form of a timeline for the context of your chosen style or design. You should feature contemporary events, culture and technological developments that run around the time and place of the original design work.
• Research and write an essay on the history, function, ideology and context of the designer or style. (See page headed ‘points to consider for your essay’ for guidance)
• Layout your essay as an A5 booklet, with a cover page and some illustrations taken from relevant original artwork
• Ensure that everything you do is conveyed in a dedicated and chosen set of typefaces or a family of typefaces or weights of one face
Software
You can use Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Bridge and InDesign for this assignment.
You can choose to use any combination of the above titles for any part of the assignment other than the layout and design of the essay which must be made in Adobe InDesign.
You must use Character styles, Paragraph styles and master pages when working in InDesign. You are free to use any tools or techniques available in Photoshop and Illustrator. You must also make at least one set of swatches that you share between Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop.
Technical Specifications
This is a print assignment and so you will need to ensure that your work is saved in CMYK and at a resolution of 300 dpi.
You will need to submit a CD or a DVD data disc with all your files on it. You should order the files into the prescribed sub folders:
Working files
Poster (sub folder with files)
Leaflet (sub folder with files)
Essay booklet (sub folder with files)
Finished files as PDFs
A3 Poster.pdf
Essay.pdf
Leaflet.pdf
You will also submit the final print quality pdfs onto Remus and web versions of all of your documents displayed in the given code both on Remus and the courses web server.
Deadline
· Friday 10th December is interim crit. You must show your visual research, your design choice and the first draft of your design responses. Interim crit is part of your assessment so is compulsory. You must have material prepared for this and be present in this session.
· Friday 14th January is deadline and crit day. Crits will start from 2.00pm and you must be ready to crit and submit by that time. You cannot use class time on that day for any other purpose than taking part in crit, putting work on servers, burning discs and submitting.
Pass criteria
· You will produce package with a designed surface and labelling, containing a poster (A3) full colour, a leaflet in full colour, an essay in the form of a booklet with full referencing and bibliography
· Your sketchbook and blog will show research (visual and factual) into time capsules, box containers ad other packaging, designers and design movements.
· Your sketchbook will show design development and experimentation.
· Your blog will show and comment on designs in progress and comment on production process.
Extended criteria
· Your designs are well suited to the design theme, consistent and visually interesting
· The level of technical execution is high
· Your sketchbook, blog and essay are well researched, well written with a wide range of relevant examples
· Your sketchbook shows extensive design development and experimentation
· Your blog shows a development process which implements thoughtful design solutions and innovative problem solving
Reference material for the cardboard box as container:
• See Duchamp's Museum in a valise
• The idea of a time capsule
• Contemporary branded collection e.g. new phone and SIM card welcome pack
• Body Shop skin care gift pack
• Early Learning Centre toy box/ package
Historical periods and designers
Here is a list of designers and movements. Choose one of the following for the subject of your box.
Art nouveau - typically, art nouveau is fluid and organic with cool decorative languor. Much ornamented with smooth contours and a flat, ‘one speed’ sinuous sense of balance and design
The posters of Toulouse Lautrec
The graphic design and black and white work of Jugendstil - Aubrey Beardsley, Peter Behrens, Otto Eckmann, August Endell, Gustav Klimt, Max Klinger, Hermann Obrist, Johan Thorn Prikker, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Henry van der Velde, Heinrich Vogeler, Otto Wagner
Alphonse Mucha
1910s flat colours - Still flowing and long lines and clear handmade origin- clearly designed but less highly finished than the seamless surfaces of art nouveau. Flat colours and simple shapes with clear messages whilst retaining a decorated and handmade feel.
Beggerstaff -William Nicholson and James Pryde
Machine age -1910s - 1930s
English seaside posters of the 20’s and 30’s - speed, flat colours, simples shapes, elegance
Tom Purvis posters
English linocutting artists - Cyril Edward Power, Claude Flight, Sybil Andrews
Constructivists- asymmetric, reduced colour sets such as Red, Black and White, high contrast, machine aesthetic - Russian Revolutionary work see the Stenberg Brothers, Luibov Popova, El Lizzitsky, Rodchenko, Solomon Telingater and Anton Lavinsky
Bauhaus - type alone and reduced large scaled layouts with sans serif as golden rule - Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky
American 40s/50s
Heavy bold and machine typefaces like Rockwell, impact, Blocks of colour and straight edges or rough edges against high contrast backgrounds
Will Burtin, Alexy Brodovitch, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Joseph Binder, Saul Bass, Bradbury Thompson, J Howard Miller, Lester Beall
Post modernism
The combination and appropriation of found elements with the goal of self conscious and endless fun. Meaning implodes and the various elements sucks the life out of each other. This involves a lot of taking things out of their historic contexts and meanings to create a new pleasure of the moment. Style triumphs over meaning. Everything becomes the same experience wherever and whenever you interact with it. This is summed up in the phrase ‘the blur of the perpetual present’.
The Memphis Group - brightly coloured, retro elements that combine in vibrant and decorated surfaces. Ettore Sottsass, Martine Bedine, Andrea Branzi, Aldo Cibic, Michele de Lucchi, Nathalie du Pasquier, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Shiro Kuromata, Matteo Thun, Javier Mariscal, George Sowden, Marco Zanini
Machine stamp – Grotesk, Clarendon, Egyptienne, Playbill, Courier, Rockwell,
Employment of the computer as basic means to camp up and overplay the early machine aesthetic. Mixing sets of type together to create a bold message of highly contrasting sets.
Neville Brody the Face and The Guardian redesign
Handmade - aesthetic of scruffy and visible means of manufacture. Scatter and retreat from ideology as a way of restaging the self. Brit art nonsense.
David Carson - Ray Gun Magazine
Points to consider for your essay:
You can sue some or all of these questions as points to answer and arrange in order to help you structure and over the most important areas of your essay.
1. What is the context and meaning of the design?
What were the original historical, political and geographical contexts of your chosen design movement/ designer?
Where and when was it thought up and produced?
Was this style a reaction against something that had happened before or was it an expression of a new phase in social development or technology?
Was your chosen design/ designer leading or being lead by developments and the pace of change?
How was the style intended to function?
Was it for a large or a small audience and did it speak about quality or mass availability and usefulness?
2. How does design work through visual language and visual style?
Does it try to be legible and functional or does it take pleasure or emphasise its own decoration and signature?
Was the design style concerned with work or leisure?
Does it prioritise elegance and balance or dynamism and vigor?
Is it cool, classical, calm and collected or is it moving, disintegrating, agitated and high tempo?
Is it serious as an expression of strong ideas?
By contrast, is it an attempt at escapism? Is it chiefly concerned with fun and relaxation?
Why is this and how is it expressed in visual terms?
How is colour used?
How is type used to convey a graphical meaning?
What are the relationship of the elements - is it simple and large scaled or small and crowded?
3. How is design used?
When a designer makes something, does he or she completely manufacture the design from start to finish?
Does the design grown from something that already exists?
Is the design completed when it is used by the public?
Consider audience and form and meaning:
• How do they interrelate?
• Can they ever be split? (Can the style be used n its own or is it glued to the time and place in which it was made?)
• Does form follow function? (Is that why it looks the way it does?)
• Is there a referent in the language of the design? (Literally does it refer to a specific meaning from the time and place in which it was first generated?)
• Is this lost? (Is the style left just on its own with the specific historical meaning being ‘long gone’)
• Does this referent have a social/ political context?
• Does the designer work to promote a definite ideology (set of ideas and beliefs) of which he/she/ they are self conscious?
• How does mass circulation and reproduction relate to the meaning of the design and the visual language?
• Does the design mean to be handmade and unique or handmade-looking, mass-made and common?
• What is the user’s experience of the design?
• Is this experience intended by the designer or has another set of meanings crept in? (Do people remake things and use them in another way to that which the designer had in mind?)
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