Project Tag: Adobe Illustrator

  • Life is Orange

    Life is Orange

    ‘l love every minute of my life… I squeeze it like an orange and eat the peel, because I don’t want to miss a thing.’ Huguette Caland

    I chose ‘Orange’ because I wanted to start this series of projects with something bright and optimistic. Initially I had worked with ‘Lost in Blue’ from my first visit to St Ives in March – a time when the weather was fairly consistently cold and rainy and the atmosphere very tense with uncertainty of a No Deal Brexit. My work at this time was pretty depressing.

    But then in the second visit in July there was an exhibition by Huguette Caland at Tate St Ives that really inspired me with her bold abstract shapes and bright colours – though I also like her thin pen and ink drawings. I enjoyed her playful innovative approach to sexuality and enjoyment in shocking what was at the time a male-dominated art establishment. And the quote below seemed to sum up the more lively and optimistic side of my somewhat bipolar psyche.

    Developing the Concept

    This project was the first of three warm up exercises:

    TASK Using an image, text, a flat block of colour and a limited colour palette, create as many text and image combinations as possible.

    I decided to take quite some time over because it was a useful framework within which to explore Project 1.3 Creative Design Toolkit in much more depth and also significantly develop my practical skills and experience with the many stylistic possibilities of Adobe Illustrator.

    I started with a review of the work of Huguette Caland to understand a bit more about her work. From this I selected a palette of orange, red, warm yellow contrasting with turquoise, dark brown and black. I also did an Internet search on ‘Orange’ to look at the different cultural interpretations and uses in graphic design. I experimented with ideas and acrylic colours on large A2 sheets in my Cornwall sketchbook to loosen up before working digitally.

    Version 1 Define It

    My first attempts were rather standard graphic design that interpreted the task in a rather uninteresting way – though I did experiment with distortion of the text, different text effects and image trace in Illustrator. This looks like an advert for oranges and the meaning of the text is lost – particularly in the final version where Love and Eat are the same size and the eye seems to go straight through to the orange. The first line of the much plainer text in version 3, without any attempt at illustrative manipulation, lets the meaning through much more clearly, without competition from ‘eat’. The first line containing the real essence of the meaning of the rest of the text.

    Version 2 Make It Bold

    In ‘Make It Bold’ in order to give prominence to the text, I swapped the solid colour block to make that a large orange circle, initially with a grain texture, and reduced the image to a very small logo by Hugette Caland’s name. My initial attempts were uninspired – looking like cork mats and the text did not stand out in red, but using the other colours with that design looked strange. So I decided to go back to my sketchbook and play a bit more – doing a large orange/red/yellow acrylic painting with sponge and fingers like Caland’s ‘Red Sun’.

    Going back to Illustrator I removed the texture from the circle, and put a bold ‘I’ in the middle as the ‘backbone’ of the meaning – the woman in charge of her life and reactions to it. The diagonal strokes into the centre were discovered when by accident I used a very wide stroke on a dotted art brush when I was experimenting with different brush settings. I used the bold and showy Broadway font with some distortion and kerning to vary the text. The logo I put on its side in black – Caland was Lebanese – and this attracts attention to her name. I am quite pleased with what I managed to achieve here in Illustrator. Though if I was not tied by the task in brief and my aims to work in Adobe Illustrator, I think this would have been a very interesting starting point for a much more dynamic joyful treatment in paint – using also the lipstick and chocolate for the text that I experiment with below.

    Version 3 Let’s look at the real thing

    Let’s look at the real thing raises the question of what is meant by ‘real thing’? Just the image, or the meaning of the text. In the first image the eye is attracted by the big orange, but then does go to try and make out the meaning of the turquoise text – more in this simple image than in the more manipulated ‘Define It’ version. I also like the simplicity of the version with the large rather anonymous text.

    Version 4 Introduce Time Motion Sound

    Version 4 Introduce Time Motion Sound was a bit of a discovery – aiming to draw typographic inspiration from Dave Carson. Unlike Photoshop, Illustrator has no motion blur and no matter how I experimented with the other blurs and feathering, it was difficult to simulate motion.

    But when I was experimenting with clipping masks I discovered that the pixelation of the background image introduced motion. I then exaggerated this through changing the font to Acumin Pro condensed black italic -thick enough and slanted enough to show the image through. I then set the type to narrow tracking and leading and resized the text block to the full width of the frame and horizontally centred. This produces a dynamic triangular bird-shaped block of text. I contrasted Magneto Bold for Caland’s name to preserve the sense of ‘magnetic’ motion.

    Version 5 What is the Key Moment

    This variation focuses in on the verbs – with the final eating as the main moment. In the final version I kept the other text consistent as Myriad Pro, just emphasising Love and Squeeze through colour, size and tracking. The colour block was transformed as the orange drips from the squeeze. To emphasise the main moment: EAT, I chose a ‘fat’ font – Franklin Gothic Heavy. I needed to make the letterforms more symmetrical as a ‘fat block. I set the tops of the E and T to the same width, and altered the kerning to make the bottoms touch and adjusted using the character panel and touch type tool. The orange logo vertically centred on the orange drips to make the bottom corner point. ‘the peel’ was aligned with the diagonal of the A to emphasise it and set in a justified text box in line with the orange. The kerning was then altered by eye to make it roughly consistent. Huguette Caland was put in a softer brown colour to differentiate from the harder black text.

    But although the emphasis on EAT makes sense in terms of the visual dynamics, maybe I need to rethink the semantic change of emphasis from Loving Life to Eating Peel and do a new design focusing on Love.

    6 Create a Variation

    Inspired by Tomato, Verson 6 variation originated with 5 the Key Moment. But experimented with variable font Acumin and black/white contrast with coloured outlines to see what that would look like. The next version experimented with manipulating the type.

    7 Connect Play, fantasies and daydreams

    In version 7 I decided to go back to playing with textures and ways of using physical media to create letterforms. I had very much enjoyed doing this in Assignment 5 A to Z from Armageddon in Book Design 1. In my A2 sketchbook I experimented with lipstick (love), chocolate orange foil and chocolate orange segments as a brush.

    Taking these into Illustrator, I then converted these into brushes and fills.

    These still need quite a bit more work eg experimenting more with types of path for the lipstick text, incorporating the foil as fills to the orange text (kept getting an error message to clipping mask because the text is warped), and making the straight text on the chocolate image drippy. I would also like to experiment with a style more like that of Sarah Fanelli’s ‘Onion’s Great Escape’ using these same physical experiments. But this was fun and a way of working I enjoy.

    8 Combine seemingly arbitrary content

    This variation was a lot of fun to do, but raised many questions about what might be meant by ‘arbitrary’.

    I maintained certain rules like the limited colour palette where it was possible to experiment with many random variations, only altering colours through different blend modes. The background mosaic grain I selected because it suggests snake skin – not oranges. In the case of fonts there were too many, so I selected ones that might in some way suggest the opposite of the meaning of the text and laid things out to also suggest something different e.g love is Chiller far apart. Squeeze was more arbitrary in that I selected a contradictory font and then set the tracking to high as opposite of squeeze. But had not altered the text box width and so it came out in a tangled lump that I quite like. I adjusted colours and effects through blend modes to preserve a reasonable label of contrast and legibility. I did four versions just changing the background and adjusting the colours. The black version is the most ‘arbitrary’ in the sense of getting furthest away from meaning of the text. I also like the art nouveau feel of the turquoise version, though it would need more purposeful work to achieve real impact.

    Assessment, learning and further Versions

    I found this exercise enjoyable and useful – the apparently random order and near repetition of some of the versions eg bold/obvious, define/real thing, time/key moment etc and alternations between them in the list order made me think much more deeply about ways of doing things differently. Inclusion of versions like ‘arbitrary’ gave me license to really do something different that I would not have tried if I was just left on my own to think of variations.

    As I was doing a lot of work on each version in order to learn Illustrator skills, I was quite tired and getting a bit stale by Version 8. I will return to this project again in Assignment 5 when I have improved my Illustrator skills in the Visual Research module and had a complete break to come back again fresh.

  • Anonymous: Experimental Book

    Anonymous: Experimental Book

    This project revisited the theme of ‘Identity’.

    I had had in mind a narrative of an ‘anonymous’ individual seeking hard to find their identity in a crowded and competitive world where advertisements are always trying to make people feel inadequate in order to buy products. Those who are not able to cope with these pressures are given very little help, and often descend into serious mental health problems. My images are informed by novels about experiences in mental health institutions like Janet Came’s ‘Faces in the Water’, also the experiences of people I know, and my own experiences of depression.

    Concertina Book MockUp

    Printed as a Concertina on Everyday Photo Paper

    Image Spreads

    I started with experimental images using Adobe Illustrator styles on the letter ‘I’.

    Some experimental accidents

    Reflections on my Creative Design Process

    To be developed

    The brief was to be very open and exploratory, going with the flow and ‘happy accidents’ in order to maximise creativity and discovery. Rather than following a strict linear sequence. My linking thread was an exploration of the theme of ‘identity’ – and the brief by the end to produce of about 12 or more printed images that could form some sort of narrative sequence and be bound together as an experimental book of  about 16 pages.

    The project aimed to extend my exploration into materials, the design process, and alternative, inventive approaches to book production. It involved four interlinked exercises:

    Project 4.1: Papers:  broadened significantly my concept of book design and the many possibilities for one single image, thinking about emotional associations as well as technical considerations of paper qualities. And exploring more papers I had not looked at in other OCA courses.

    Project 4.2 : Creating Images : here I found it was very interesting to really narrow down my options to Illustrator, and black and white exploration of styles. Although this meant that in many ways technique preceded meaning, I discovered new themes and potential meanings in the quite random process of image experimentation.

     Project 4.3: Printing  I focused on Inkjet printing  because this was I type of printing I had so far mostly taken for granted and had not really explored all the possibilities of using different types of paper, mediums, overprinting and so on. Other types of printmaking I had done in my OCA printmaking course, and also incorporate in the Assignment piece. I produced a sketchbook of images on the papers I had collected. This led to many ‘Happy Accidents’ and discoveries, for example with OHP Transparencies as well as overprinting text.

    Project 4.4: Collating and binding  I looked at different combinations and narratives using InDesign but going back and forth between printing, selection, collation.

    BUT my design process was not at all linear. It was more useful to see the projects as parallel aspects between which I moved as questions from one level raised questions or possibilities in another.

    • My selection and trial of papers was (and is) ongoing as I think more about what effects I am trying to have, and also discover more about different ways of printing – for example the Happy Accidents with OHP transparencies led to me trying similar types of smearing on other glossy types of paper. Different papers were added to my experimentation as I went along.
    • Development of the images was interlinked with considerations of narrative and the ways they were to be bound (linear or cyclical, as booklet or concertina where all the spreads would be seen at once?) and also papers and printing (what effects would different papers have, inclusion of happy accidents to accentuate/contrast the meaning, what is possible or not possible to print)
    • Printing and the various unexpected outcomes led me back to re-evaluate and explore other possibilities in the images, and try different types of paper
    • Binding and collating involved questions of narrative and the relationship between images, which again led me back to the images themselves in terms of both colour and stylistic consistency as a sequence, whether or not different types of paper should be used for different images and types of overprinting.

    Throughout the process to avoid just getting lost in ‘accidents’ I needed to keep asking myself – what am I trying to say with all this?

    • delve deeper and deeper into madness and depression as a futile search for a phantom identity (does it exist???if so can I find it??? or is the brain incapable of doing that?)
    • come to the conclusion that is it better to just go with the flow of life and enjoy it?
    • show a brave anonymous individual being made to feel they have to ‘be cool’ and explore their individuality?
    • is their self-exploration just amusing?
    • or does it lead to disintegration and loss of sense of self?
    • do they then reach any happy ending? or just a compromise?

    But my understanding and narrative through some of these issues also evolved from the technical and design discoveries, not from pre-planning, and I think this external and somewhat random input helped the narrative from becoming too navel-gazing and enabled a bit of humour.