The Brief –

“Using your research into artists’ books and fanzines as a starting point, think about their physical or design qualities and creatively apply some of these approaches to your own designs.
For example, there’s a distinctive visual quality to many fanzines which comes from a ‘cut and paste’ approach to designing and through the use of cheap photocopying and printing. Punk fanzines in particular make a virtue out of having limited resources, no computers and little, or no, formal training as
graphic designers. Use your sketchbooks to experiment with a similar ‘cut and paste’ approach by cutting and collaging magazines and other material. What does this approach offer you as a book designer?
Alternatively, you can find other ideas you would like to test out in your sketchbook. You don’t need to make any finished designs, just give yourself room to experiment and try things out.“

Starting out…

This is a very open brief!- there are no restrictions in what I can do with this! The brief is to start some experimentational work in my sketchbook which I am guessing I could potentially use or refer back to for Assignment 1.

When I think of experimental work in design, I automatically think of experimental typography with the likes of David Carson, Chris Ashworth and Roy Cranston. Sophia Clausse could be another contender for this too; I stumbled across her work when I was researching fanzines and artists books. I really like this style of work and I have used it in quite a few of my past exercises and assignments in Core Concepts.

It also reminded me of an experimental piece I did in Core Concepts which I was really pleased with at the time. Again, this was inspired by David Carson and Chris Ashworth:

How I made these was by using old packaging and printed barcodes and turning them into a composition to then import in digitally to add typography:

I keep a bag of packaging and random materials ever since I completed that exercise because I just never know when I might need to use them again for something similar!

I got this bag out again to see what I could come up with for some experimental collages for this exercise. I also had some old fashion magazines that I used. I found some bright yellow summery layouts in the fashion magazines – a lot of material based around lemons! With the cuttings I found I decided to make some sort of story out of them…

There was an advert of a man holding some flowers and looking all shy behind the bouquet and then I found a clipping of a woman all dressed in lemons and yellow and looking very chilled out and relaxed drinking a glass of something alcoholic! The woman looks way too self involved to want the man or his flowers and I played on that in the text I use “I don’t need flowers or a man”. I wanted some kind of balance to the piece and that is where I used the bottom clipping of the flowers but also used another part of that to go along the top. I did the same with the clippings of text I found.. I placed them across from each other on the layout, it just made the hierarchy look much more balanced out. To add some contrast to the piece I added the larger text for the main title “mellow yellow” but changed the opacity at the top so that yellow stood out much more.

This exercise shows you how much you can create some pretty cool, meaningful layouts using just some magazine clippings and typography!