Speaking From Experience

Speaking from experience, as this brief should reflect my time on the course, the content, designs and research should all be informed by my own reflection and my own experiences.

Possible areas to exlore.

Typography is a part of graphic design I had some idea of but my apreciation and knowlage of type has greatly improved in this year. At the beggining of the year we were asked what our favorite typefaces were I said Helvetica this really shows how little I really knew, Type being such a broad subject with so many styles could be interpretated into a number of ways. We looked intially into the work of Massimo Vignelli and 'The Vignelli Canon' this book talks about the six fundimental typefaces he explains how in his eyes Garamond, Bodoni, Century Expanded, Futura, Helvetica and Times Roman are the only typefaces a graphic designer should use. A very bold statement but an intersting one. Do these cover all the basis? I straight away had an idea of creating the Vignelli alternate typefaces, a publication that looks at six different fundimental typefaces ignoring the type Vignelli surgessts. This idea I felt would be intesting but may not engage enough with the first years. As this project is for them it needs to be very approriate to what a first year student would want to know. As so many people in the class stated they liked san serif fonts and Helvetica being the most popular of these I thought about creating a publication for A Guide to Helvetica Alternatives. This would allow the students to use typefaces that follow the simplistic San Serif style of Helvetica but using less obvious and more intesting type. This idea I felt again was not engaging enough and would not be really interseting.

Another theme to explore could be looking at design studios and giving examples of a range of design studios in very different styles. We were again asked what our favorite design studio was or if we had one. This was something I hadn't fully concidered and felt I had very little real knowage on. Creating a publication of design studios seemed an exciting theme that I could do alot with. I wanted however to make it more engaging and I thought of the idea of using Instagrams to express this. My idea was then formulated ' A guide to graphic design on instagram' as instagram is a tool for viewing images that everyone seems to interact with all the time whats a better way to suround yourself with graphics than through instagram. I felt this idea really had alot of potential, not only would this encourge readers to follow instagrams associated with graphics but they could be kept updated with new designers work all year around. Throughout the first year I found a number of really great instagram acounts but always wanted to know more. There is no real way of finding Graphic Design specifically on instagram and a publication to inform this would be of great use.