Friday 2nd October, 2015
After being given the project brief for the first segment of the year, 'Sense of Place' came with some weekly focuses that are to be researched into over the next four weeks. The first of these weekly focuses was; Grids, Frames, Macro and Micro - of which I have explored in a few different ways.
Grids
The grids section of this weekly focus can be easily picked apart by using someone such as Josef Muller-Brockmann as an influence because of his book "Grid Systems". As you can likely gather, his book goes into the forms of grids in Graphic Design and how they can be applied to the industry's work. Throughout the book you can find several examples of his explanations, explaining how type and image should be displayed around a page amongst other things. He mainly brings grids into Graphic Design through composition of the design, but it can mean much more than that as it can determine how certain shapes are created - take a look at his work for instance:
As you can see, his composition methods of which he uses grids become apparent as you look at his different pieces of work. There is a second person that I researched into slightly for the Grids and that is Cameron Davidson, his use of grids in his aerial photography is something I found rather interesting, as he is finding the composition out there already created - all he is doing is framing it and taking a photograph, something I can explore.
Frames
After delving into the likes of grids, I moved onto looking into the frames section of this weekly focus, something that can be taken more broadly and brings in many other aspects of art rather than just basing itself on composition for the most part - as is evident with grids. Framing is something that can be seen in things like photography rather commonly, because of how the camera itself can be considered as a frame - what had interested me for the most part was how you could take photographs of frames within frames.
This kind of approach led me to the designers Jayme Odgers and Sarah Joy Jordahl Verville. First bringing your attention to Odgers, his work that interested me was the piece found in the book by Ellen Lupton "Graphic Design The New Basics" where he had cut out some letters in a material and had taken a photograph with an interesting background breaking through the open cuts of the letters. And I had researched Verville because of her exercises with taking photographs of frames within frames, using inanimate objects and utilizing their form to take a photograph of the frame within a frame ideal. Both of their works can be seen here:
Macro and Micro
Macro and Micro is the very last segment of this weekly focus, this, in comparison to the previous two focuses, is something that is quite difficult to reflect in the Graphic Design way of working.
The only designer that I had considered looking into was someone that I had found in the book by Ellen Lupton "Graphic Design The New Basics" by the name of Grey Haas. Haas is not as recognized as some of the other designers that I have researched, but his mixture of typography and Macro/Micro photography is what interested me. As you can see from the example shown below, he keeps the tone of the image running across it with the right colours of text, being sure to follow each detail of the image with a new line of lettering. This is something that can easily be transferred and applied to the likes of portrait photography (which is going to be playing a large part in my brief's idea). Examples of his work:
