This week I have been throwing myself into different materials relating to the subject of design. This is looking into academic material and documentaries about design to give myself a scope into the world of graphic design and engage with the words of industry professional designers and their thoughts on the subject.
Adrian Shaughnessy – Studio Culture: The secret life of the graphic design studio.
This was a piece of academic writing documented by Shaughnessy in which he talks about a graphic designers studio space and how important that is to the designer. They go into discussing about how the space in which a designer works is personal and how ‘the modern designer is unthinkable without the life-support system of a studio’. This idea of a ‘life-support’ as a description for a studio makes this feel as though a designer and a studio have a sort of symbiotic bond and that one can not exist without the other. The main reason I have included this within my research is because I think that it is funny how when I think of a graphic design studio, I picture this grand space of creative development with freedom to place, show and share ideas. Then I remember that I still live at home with my parents working out of my childhood box bedroom with the worlds smallest desk and work plastered all over the wall as visual inspiration.
What I have been up to…
This week, I have been working on a screen print for a local zine fair that I have invited my students at college to attend and sell their work. I saw this as an amazing opportunity for me to have a go at being more hands on creative. The quote is from the Netflix series ‘Abstract’ In which Paula Scher talks about how you need to be able to have fun and be prepared to play around with design in order to make interesting designs. This was an amazing opportunity for me to experiment and get out of my comfort zone with physical design and print processes that I have not done in such a long time.
Brief 1 – Where to begin…
Within this brief, I am tasked with creating a piece of artwork that is split into four different sections. Each of these sections has to answer four very distinct questions: Who am I? What is it that I do? Where am I? Why design? These questions in there natural state are quite simple, but when posed on the creator, leave you spiralling down a giant rabbit hole.
I started with a simple word reflection by trying to answer all four of the questions in one simple design form. This allowed me to think about myself as a person and as a designer. These four things stood out to me: I live in Barnsley. I’m a teacher and a practitioner of design. I am a lover of music and I am a lover of typography.
Artist Inspiration – Kris Andrew Small
Kris Andrew Small is an Australian based designer that works with explosive colour, typography and pattern to show distinctive pieces of work. They mainly work to look into graphically represent societal issues and tackle them through loud and abstract visuals. The main reason they are inspiring to me is because I find their visuals to be hypnotising. By this I mean that I can look at the design work over and over again and never get bored of it. The expressive typography that looks at different weight, placement and angle is placed so well and gives off the right amount of impact required to pierce the subject.
LSJ DESIGNS 
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