History of Animation/Graphic Design

In this lecture we mainly looked at the history of animation, we looked at Tim Hope's Wolfman from 1989 and discussed how it goes against the realism of its time, he then went on to work with The Mighty Boosh. We then looked at Emile Cohl's Fantasmagorie from 1908 who was a member of the Avant Garde group 'the incoherents' and we discussed the demonic playfulness of the animations.

Contextual Portfolio

For my contextual portfolio i have decided that i want to look in to the graffiti and street art movement, particularly looking at the the work of Banksy. I want to investigate this theme as i am really interested in Banksy's work and in particular his controversial pieces which raise issues we have in society, for example these images of two policemen kissing and two people fighting each other even though they're both fighting for peace.

For our final presentation we need to investigate the following things;

• what - title
• why - background information/literature review 
• how - approach
• conclusion

Typesetting and Presentation

This weeks process and production session was an introduction to typography which i found quite helpful and i learnt a lot as i haven't done much work on this sort of thing before.

One of our tasks was to decide which font suited the word best; 

I chose to use the font Six Caps for manhattan as i thought it looked like the sort of font used on billboards in cities in America. I chose Farray for universe as i thought it had a space feel to it. For luxury I chose Optina as it looks like it could represent something quite simple but expensive. 

Cybernetic Self; Idea Generation/research

For this project i decided i wanted to look at addictions and after talking with tracy i decided to look at gaming addictions to link it to cybernetics. I think that everyone can be addicted to something but nowadays most people are addicted to something technology based like our phones or games or just the internet in general. I thought it would be interesting to look in to gaming addictions in particular so i researched some extreme cases of these.

‘Electronic heroin’     

• men wearing nappies to avoid breaks

•  teen murders mother for not letting him play

• skipping school 

• teen burnt classmate

• fifty-hour gaming session - south Korean man collapsed and died from heart failure. It was presumed that his death was caused by exhaustion, because he had only stopped to use the washroom and for short periods of sleep.

• suicide

• girl dies of neglect - her parents spent more time raising a virtual girl than her. The couple had left for a 12-hour gaming session at an internet café, leaving their daughter unattended. Upon returning home, they found her dead.

• twins die from neglect - a man left his twins in the bathtub as he went to play on his Gameboy Advance

• teen kills woman for money - the boy confessed that he had done it because he needed money to play an online game. He strangled the woman with a piece of rope and took the money from her, before burying her in a pile of sand in front of his house.

After researching this i wanted to look at some designers to gain inspiration for styles of work for my final outcome. I like the idea of using a comic book style for my designs, for example using only 3 colours in each piece, so i had a look for designers that might use this sort of style in their work.
I like Mark Weaver's designs, although not really in that particular style, i like how he uses different images overlayed on top of each other to create a simple but effective design.

I also like the work of Shigeo Fukuda, in particular i like how it looks simple and he has only used three colours; black, white and red. 

Brief: Cybernetic Self

This lecture was our first briefing entitled 'Cybernetic Self', it's a short 4 week brief in which our final output should be a a printed document; for example a supplement for a magazine.

The three main themes are network self, sociomaterial and autopoiesis.

Network Self

• self-presentation
• behavioural norms
• routines
• privacy
• social impact
• class/gender/race divides

Sociomaterial

• an ensemble of people, materials, equipment, components, institution
• how we are defined and perceived

Autopoiesis

• emotions
• interaction
• dependency
• self-making/self-poetry
• redefine the self
• perception

week 1 should be focused on idea generation,

week 2 is for formalising and developing our ideas,
week 3 we should aim to start our final output,
week 4 is to refine and finalise our supplements.

Introductory Business Lecture

This lecture began looking at the best ways to approach getting a placement for third year.

We were told to look at www.IPA.co.uk which is the website for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. They list all agencies in the media and marketing communications industry.
Alternatively, if we were looking for a placement in a graphic design agency we can use www.freeindex.co.uk

The advice we were given was to write a letter to the company we are interested in working with, rather than an email, as they are harder to ignore and most importantly to not directly ask for a placement. We should comment on their website and take a more friendly approach to securing a placement, for example asking to come in and meet them face to face.

After that the lecture moved on to talking about the more technical, business side of graphics which i found interesting as it felt like really useful information.

We looked at the importance of knowing what is going on around us in the news as it can have a knock-on effect on us and the structure of the market. For example if we were given a brief to redesign part of the branding for a big coffee shop such as Starbucks, it would be helpful to know about the coffee industry because if there was a shortage of coffee this would affect their market which affects their sales and would therefore affect us.

We also looked at basic marketing which is about price, product, promotion and place. These are all things that need to be considered when doing a piece of work for a client.