Production: ITAP lecture 9

This week my ITAP lecture was about production. Highlighted in red are the two principles I decided to write about today. The 5 key principles from my lecture were the following:

1. A brief history of production

2. Essential Milestones

3. The design workflow

4. From novice to expert

5. The experts

I have produced a simple diagram showing my workflow (below). I believe this workflow diagram works when having a three week project brief, because it can be easily adapted to my work. This diagram helps me because it also has a good structure for example in week one: Research (primary & secondary), week two: Initial ideas and experimenting, week three: Final outcome. So it keeps me on schedule and it is easy to plan ahead.

Designed by Kawsar Ahmed

Who is your favourite expert & why? My Design Workflow   

Alexey Brodovitch (historical) & Tarek Atrissi (contemporary)

There are many favourite designers and art directors that I personally like and follow. However I will be discussing only two designers that have inspired me. One is Alexey Brodovitch a famous historical art director and second is a contemporary graphic designer called Tarek Atrissi. The reason why these two are one of my favourite are as follows;

Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971)     

                                 

     

·         Brodovitch was a pioneer in graphic design. He bought modernist ideas, he was also the first art director to integrate image and text in covers of ‘Harper Bazaar magazine’ and was known for contradicting himself. There are number of things that interest me about his work, I will name a couple.

·         Firstly, he used fresh innovative ideas. For instance this is when he designed a poster for an upcoming ball competition, which won 1^st place from contestants like Picasso and other good designer/artists.

·        Secondly, in the 1950’s he perfected his style of using crisp, sharp composition of text and photography with white space he used this in magazine layouts and covers.

      One of my favourite quote from Brodovitch was "We learn by making mistakes. We must be critical of ourselves and have the courage to start all over again after each failure. Only then do we really absorb, really

      start to know."

Tarek Atrissi

·         Tarek Atrissi is a Netherland based designer. Who has a unique style of interpreting his Arabic heritage in a modern way.

·         He designs and experiment with a lot of different mediums like websites, posters, logo design, packaging, broadcast design, newspaper design and even fashion. I particularly admire his Arabic typography/calligraphy. For example his logo for the country of Qatar (below) shows his creative thinking and his idea.  

This is a simple calligraphic logo which became a famous icon for the tourism sector across the Middle East. The colours all connects together, the blue symbolises the water and hospitality, the orange & red representing the sun and desert. I can see that he really focussed on getting the colours right by testing them out. “To a non Arab speaking person, the Qatar (Arabic text) becomes endless abstract shapes, a smiley face, dunes, waves. The logo starts as calligraphy but it then becomes more of an icon”, said by Atrissi.

Bibliography

Pictures from ‘Google Images’

http://archive.thepeninsulaqatar.com/component/content/article/349-qatar-newsarchive/38830.html

http://www.atrissi.com/index.php?pageID=10

Image and Text (ITAP Critical Commentry)

Integrating Theory and Practice: Image and text

(Level 4) Lecture 8

Last week I had a lecture on image and text, it was basically talking about how photographer uses text on their photos to express emotions or text could be used to describe the image. To name examples of good photographers who use text in their work are Gillian Wearing, Rene Magritte, Jim Goldberg, Barbara Kruger and John Heartfield. When observing each of these photographers work more thoroughly I noticed that without the text the message the photographer is sending might not come through as best as it can with text. Today I will write about how ‘how text can influence our emotions’ and ‘how text can be added to change the context of an image.
How text can influence our emotions

John Heartfield

John Heartfield is best known for his photomontages of Hitler. Hitler came to power in 1933 then John Heartfield was forced to leave the country. His work photos show photomontage with a political message. Below is one example of his photomontages. It shows Hitler sharpening his knife to kill a chicken. However the title is ‘don’t be afraid Hitler is a vegetarian’ so it’s ironic and to the left is the Heartfield. This image was for a magazine, at the bottom of the photo I can see the text and it is describing the photo.  

Artist: John Heartfield -‘Don’t be afraid Hitler is a vegetarian’

My work from a photography project

Below is an example where I used photomontage and text for a project that I done last year. The image is to show the transition to basic materials to mechanical or how time has change throughout the years of architecture. Before starting my work I had to find examples of artists in the past who used photomontage, this was when I came across John Heartfield, other photographers I looked at was Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann. At that time when producing the work I knew a little of how to use Photoshop however by looking back at my work now there are a few things to improve on one being to handwrite the text to make it feel personal and to connect with the audience.  

Artist: Kawsar Ahmed

How text can be added to change the context of an image

Example 1:

                                                       

        

This is an example of how text can be added to change the context of a photo. When first looking at the photograph without the text I wanted to know the background of these kids and why the photographer chosen to take this particular image. I later found the poster which is presented to the right above. This made it clear to me that the kids where from Cambodia and suffering from poverty and injustice there are more information about life in Cambodia as a child below the heading of poster. The poster was to inform the audience that there was an photography exhibition to raise money for the children of Cambodia.   

Written by Kawsar Ahmed

*Image: both from Google Images