24.06.30
Entropic process. A vignette of paths not taken and choices not chosen from old projects, tied up in a collaged bow.
23.12.01
23.03.15
This zine dissects the text on four levels: individual letterforms, words, and phrases, and overall narrative. Tension and frustration escalate as the story unfolds. The content expresses the dangers of miscommunication and a rapid escalation to chaos. The zines open to posters that emphasize the descent to death. Text excerpts from Dr. Seuss's The Zaks.
23.12.01
I found a similar creative challenge in the initial dummies of this project that I do when choreographing. It’s this notion that you have endless possibilities, or in the case of dance, 360-degree space to fill, and learning to find a direction can take time.
I cycled through many dummies during this stage of the process but settled on a simpler option that conceptually followed the content. I based the folio on Iris van Herpen’s collection Between The Lines. I was inspired by her inspiration behind the collection itself and found these concepts were ones I wanted to explore graphically and in interactions. I was also considering choosing the RENS designer group, but I felt that choosing van Herpen would be the more challenging route. Van Herpen’s work has a certain energy to it that I found difficult to pinpoint and translate to specific visual language.
I had heard of Iris van Herpen before this project, but reading her bio was awe-inspiring as I saw an example of someone drawing connections between many fields and interests to create something extraordinary. Her work reminds me of Professor Neri Oxman from MIT Media Lab in the way that both women are grounding their work in nature and connecting multiple disciplines in their creative work. Reading about Iris van Herpen was unexpectedly a little bit like looking in a mirror in that her background in ballet, fashion design, and interests in nature are all interests in my life. This work inspires me to use all my unique life experiences to inform practice in the future. Particularly, I spent so much time and energy invested in ballet and fashion growing up, and those were my creative outlets. That time and energy did not go to waste, and it is exciting to see how a designer makes these connections to her current practice.
I chose a specific collection, Between The Lines, to base the conceptual part of the folio. With the idea of bridging physical and digital systems, I developed imagery and patterns in analog methods. The 3D effect of the collection pieces reminded me of puffy paint, and I used this to experiment with both letterform distortion and abstract texture, loosely based on the back-and-forth motion of “between the lines”, and glitch-type patterning, and organic movement. These patterns inspired visual language moving forward. Experiments with paint letterforms weren’t quite working, and I probably would have needed a stencil, so I moved to another idea for glitches and distortion. I used a xerox machine and physically moved the paper around as it scanned. I could have created a similar, possibly cleaner effect digitally but I was inspired to try something different. This was a trial and error, and I experimented with multiple typefaces that had conceptual relations to Van Herpen and the specific collection. I composited the two most successful type pieces to establish the experimental typography aspect of the project.
In considering interaction, I chose pull tabs in pockets as a way of filling the between space of the book. In the future, I would like to experiment with these types of interactions further and learn more about ways this can be integrated with branding and other deliverables in design. There is something about a creative, unique interaction that makes for a memorable experience and also makes a product something that people want to keep.
a collection of thoughts / ideas / reflections / experiments / conversations / research / process work related to design