22 May 2010

The Tree of Codes

Yesterday I worked with the graphic designer Sara De Bondt, her most recognisable piece would be the visuals she designed for Celebrity Big Brother.

She has recently been asked to put together a book called Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer. Foer has taken his favourite book - Tree of Crocodiles and derived a new story from it.

He has created a narrative out of select words from each page, the sentences are poetic and intriguing. We physically cut out all the unwanted text from each page, leaving only the words that Foer had highlighted for the new story. The end piece is a sculptural book that is visually and literally intriguing.




 

15 May 2010

The Great Escape

This is a project I call 'The Great Escape', I created a narrative where the characters within books came to life when no ones around and make a dash for the outside world.












The End.

[insert name here]

We were set a project to produce our own 20 page newspaper inspired by a story in any of the main newspapers.
My newspaper is a response to the story of the betting shop - Paddy Powers that had 'sponsored' a church confession box. It lead me to question the intention of their sponsorship, the company had requested to have their name on the front of the confession box if they forked out the money - I saw this gesture as a blatant form of advertising.


My newspaper argues the right advertisers have to invade public space with their messages, while the public
is forbidden. We have messages flashed at us everywhere: buy this, watch this, drive this...
But if we want to say something in our public space, it isn't that easy. Put your art in the public space, paint a mural, tag a wall and we're breaking the law. Even though adverting is basically tagging, both want maximum distribution of their names.
Our laws say that we can be bombarded by corporate messages, we can have their words and images shoved in our faces, but if we want to express ourselves then apparently we are criminals


These spreads here are initial ideas, I want to make a more substantial publication then this 20 page mock. I'm going to develop these pages much further, include more hard core info, writing, interviews and case studies. But for some initial ideas I think I'm starting to get my point across, and am pretty pleased with how its looking.


Above is an idea for front/back cover.



















The images are a mixture of my own photography, images sourced from books and the internet.

3 May 2010

100 Drawings


We had to do 100 drawings over Easter, they were broken into 5 categories; objects, people, furniture, architecture and vehicles.

One set of my drawings is a kind of portrait of my friends Shen and Dan through objects; I spent a whole day on their sofa drawing everything of theirs around me.
For some reason Shen has a barbie, but she was fun to draw.

Penguin Design Awards

Things got serious a week ago, I entered my first Design Competition the Penguin Design Awards.

Students were invited to design a whole new cover look for the classic, Alice in Wonderland, reinventing it for a new generation of child readers and ensuring that it remains an integral part of childhood. This is my design...
I noticed that Alice in Wonderland covers usually subject Alice, these covers make you feel like you are observing someone else’s adventure but I wanted to make you feel as if this was your adventure
The story is all about Alice’s curiosity of this fantasy world, I thought about arousing curiosity by creating a still life of strange objects which could draw the viewer in, mirroring the way Alice is drawn to numerous strange objects throughout the story.
Lewis Carrol pours out word play so I literally played with the text for the front cover, making my still life pour it out.
I wanted to celebrate this brilliant British story, and what better way then with a tea-party, quintessentially English. So the tea-party still life functions in two ways - to celebrate Englishness, and to invite the viewer into the world of the book with a seemingly interactive set up of objects you feel you can reach out to.