BOOKLETS
WHEN
2008
UNIVERSITY
AMD - Academy for Fshion & Design
WHAT I DID
Illustration/Graphic Design
THE PROJECT
This small project was part of my BA studies. The submission counted towards my course grade.
The brief was to design several experimental booklets related to the theme “living in the city”. I had complete creative freedom for my approach and the content I wanted to showcase.
THE APPROACH
My idea was to showcase a city in two different ways.
The first was from an observer point of view, how I felt most people experience and notice it if they were to pass through or in a hurry to get somewhere. Snippets of billboards, buildings, commonly found street artefacts such as lamp posts and trees. Things people see but not always consciously acknowledge as they move about their day. The mood setting for this work is of loneliness and coldness, associated with distance and impersonality. However, it is also that of calmness as familiar shapes bring focal points to the chaos, islands of rest.
The second showcase intends to represent the city from a worker's (bee) point of view. The insect is a metaphor for humans who are the architects, participants and observers of their urban environment. It is contrasting to my first idea in a way that the worker is satisfied being part of that busy life; happy living in high rises surrounded by industrial factories in a constantly changing setting. Those workers don't stop until the end and their environment is almost not relevant to what they do day to day; it is merely a background setting.
CONCLUSION
My design method was experimental. I selected a number of vectors, graphics, images in order to reuse them at different scales and in numerous combinations and positions to tell my abstract story of urbanity. An urban digital collage.
I wanted to create an ambiguous atmosphere for both showcases. One the one hand metropolitan life can be distant, be just there with islands of calmness and repose noted by its inhabitants once in a while. On the other hand urban life is full with overload and busyness to which the non-rural citizen is oblivious as they are the ones creating it in the first place.