/ Year two / Lecture: Paul Farringdon

In his lecture Paul talked about his experiences in the design industry and showed examples of his portfolio work. Studio Tonne is a multi discipline agency but specialize in interactive web based design. It is clear that Paul finds a great deal of his inspirations in music and sound design. They design games, which the user can interact with to make music or just play with different sounds. I checked out their website to play on a few of these games and spent quite a lot of time mucking about with them, Very entertaining. Overall an interesting lecture, it showed me how important and useful interactivity can be in certain types of design.

/ Year two / Lecture: Steve Smith

Steve Smith who works under the name Neasden Control Centre is a London based artist whose output is not confined to one medium or message. He can be found drawing and painting his way through work encompassing illustration / design / typography / motion graphics / installations / art exhibitions and one off projects. He works with many different companies / artist groups / friends and so on and collaborates with a small network of like-minded freelancers from project to project. I particularly liked the motion graphic pieces he showed in the lecture, they have a very obvious hand made aesthetic but there is also a lot of computer graphics used, a nice mix.

/ Year two / Lecture: Mack Manning

In this lecture Mack talked about Our Book cover design project. He also talked about his hometown and how as designers our heritage can influence our work. He showed us work by a number of different designers and enticed us to try and push the boundaries whilst we were creating out book cover designs. He also showed some of his own work and described parts of his design process. I enjoyed this insightful lecture as he covered some interesting designers some of which I had never heard of before which made me go on to research them further.

 

/ Year two / Lecture: Matt Pyke

Matt gave us a very interesting lecture in which he showed a selection of his works to-date and talked about his working process.

Based in a log cabin studio in Sheffield, Matt Pyke is a painter / photographer / artist / curator / designer / animator / director / producer / lecturer and is the only full time designer of the company he formed in 2004, Universal Everything. Pyke brings together other designers / Programmers / musicians and artists to collaborate and utilize their specialist skills to bring his initial ideas to life. Matt’s work is very unique and inspirational. A lot of his work is created using programming to set parameters, then some kind of input such as motion or sound will trigger the Designs to self generate, making them unique every time.

Before the lecture I was selected to attend a Q&A session with Matt. This enabled me to ask a lot of questions in a more informal environment. He seemed like a really nice guy and showed me that any idea can be created no matter how ambitious and if you don’t have the skills to create it yourself, you can find people to collaborate with who do have the skills to help you realize it. I have followed Matt Pyke for quite some time and was honoured to have the chance to meet him.

/ Year two / Lecture: David Crow

In this lecture David talked about Semiotics. He talked in depth about how language is made up of a series of signs. He covered subjects such as: the origin of the term, official language/unofficial language and the differences between them, signifiers, anchorage, detonation and connotation. I found this lecture to be interesting and useful as it gave me a better understanding of Semiotics and made me question my previous knowledge of the subject.

/ Year two / Lecture: Patrick Young

In his lecture Patrick talked about a number of different design projects that he has worked on. He went into detail about what he had been commissioned to do, the people who were involved in the projects and he explained the creative decisions and processes along the way. During his lecture Patrick talked about a skateboarding company which he co founded in Liverpool called East, I found this part of his lecture particularly interesting because I have used East equipment before and I spent a lot of time in the shop Lost art in Liverpool which he talked about. I really enjoyed Patricks lecture and found the design tips useful. It was an interesting insight into a successful designers working process.

 

/ Year two / Workshop: Modern Myth Lab

During this term I also attended a workshop hosted by Sue Platt about image, text and the associated narratives that can be implied through formats, media and process. First I learned how to make a beak book, the task was to create a double sided book to illustrate one of the following subjects; Masculine and feminine, Success and Failure, Reality and Myth, Feel and Live/Touch and Live or Knock Knock, Who’s there? Next I was given an induction into using the stop-frame animation suite, then asked to produce a thirty second animation with these new skills.

For the beak book I went for masculine and feminine as my subject. My idea was to photograph the graffiti that appears in men’s toilets and I asked a friend to photograph the graffiti in women’s toilets. The point of this was so that people could compare the graffiti and look for similarities or differences in the subject matter hopefully making an interesting and comical little book. For my stop-frame animation I wanted to experiment with using computer game character sprites, so I decided to create some sprites of myself and put them into a computer game world made of sweets. Although the animation process is fairly tedious, I had a lot of fun creating it and I like the unique, spontaneous feel achieved using stop-frame. I can see myself using the stop-fame suite in the future.

This workshop took me away from working on the Mac and out of my comfort zone, it enabled me to get my hands dirty and experiment with design solutions that are hand made.