Graphic Design Basics Book

Mir

tut jeder Mensch leid, der nicht genug Phantasie hat,

um ein Wort mal so und mal so zu schreiben.

– Mark Twain

This book is the product of the Graphic Design Basics course lectured by Rebecca Morganti-Pfaffhauser during the first semester of my studies in Interaction Design at the ZHdK.

It consists of the collected creations that came into being during this course. It is consequently intended to display those creations and serve as an exercise for creating aesthetically pleasing documentation of our work. It may also be seen as an exercise to develop basic graphic skills.

In the first chapter I will show works from the first part of our course. Those intended to familiarise us with the topic of graphic design and teach us a basic understanding for the theory of form.

The second chapter displays the following exercise of finding an anagram to use in the moving poster we where going to design later in the course.

In chapter three I will give a glimpse into the process of creating said moving poster in graphic design as well as in it’s implementation in code.

Chapter four will then talk a bit about the process of creating this very book and the last chapter conclude the course and therefore this book.

01 Chapter I

Let’s Play – Yell Taps

This exercise sent us on our way to the library or the archive respectively to find books or posters that met a set of qualities. Those where, loosely translated from german: pleasant, hideous and peculiar. Since poster design absolutely fascinated me ever since the typographic education I enjoyed during my apprenticeship, I skipped the library for now and delved straight into the archives of our museum.

The following pages display my selection in large format. The most pleasant design i could find was probably a political poster from the french part of Switzerland. It is certainly closely followed by a design of Japanese origin. The Japanese designers here have perfected formal interplay of typographic, chromatic, decorative and illustrative elements on the limiting format of a printed poster. The Swiss fellows certainly had to deal with a contrasting set of requirements. The poster looks to be for a left-leaning first of may demonstration. The simplicity it’s creators where able to keep whilst efficiently transporting message and tone to me is just astonishing. Also my reasonably well trained, although slightly out of practice eye would call the use of colour, typography and space decent craftsmanship. It’s aesthetically pleasing. It just works.

My choice for hideous fell on a design which I would not per se call bad. Concept and photography certainly have their validity. Typography and grid just outright fail.

Peculiar i find the selected poster for an art exposition. The art styles of Jugendstil and Sezessionsstil have always touched me in some subliminal and unaccountable way.

We then continued to work with our selection. For the first exercise, on the subject of points we used tracing paper to trace all the «Punzen», the hollow spaces of all the «o»s in our selected designs. The results where quite interesting. Thos who selected

book pages of course got very different results then me who selected poster designs. The resulting pages are in some way designs by randomness in their own right.

For the following exercise concerning lines, we dissected one of the designs by cutting out all the lines of text using a scalpel. We then copied the sheet while making sure all cuts stayed visible. To familiarise ourselves with the creative means that is the geometric plane we covered all the figurative and typographic elements in the design with black surfaces. The result resembles a kind of censorship. We discussed this resemblance a bit in class. It’s a topic that moves society at any given moment. Historically it may seem the worst times of censorship are over. Facing challenges all over the globe now makes one reconsider this conclusion. China built a «great wall» forcing journalists and free spirits to using tunnelling technology in order to use the internet as it’s meant to be. Not only in the digital realm is censorship a current issue tho. Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei is constantly on the verge of being convicted or disappearing forever. Trump is a whole other topic when considering censorship, media and freedom.

To conclude our studies of the selected designs and with it the basic creative elements we used the selected designs for typographic substance. We chose one word and reworked it. The goal was to transform the readability of the text in favour of individually coined interpretation. I took the Spanish leftist first of may poster and reworked the typography of mail into the crowned figure of a king. Although the body shape of the «A» allows for interpreting it as a royal female too. What inspired me to building the figure was the uniquely shaped letters the posters designer chose. The outcome has something even more political to it then the original. A first of may movement as I know it is probably the most contrasting thing I could imagine to a king or queen.

This exercise consisted in the creation of black and white drawings using various analog media. We did these drawings following a matrix of words. Each drawing was based on two words, « point » and « line » for example. We worked in a quick manner, producing high output and choosing the best results for display. I chose to work with felt marker first. I then switched to china ink, a medium I did not have much experience with prior. It was a lot of fun to get to know the medium.

The different attributes of the media made me think differently about what’s possible.

Last I fired up my airbrush and plowed through the matrix using only black acrylic colour. This was the mos interesting of the media I worked with. I love my airbrush, but I’m not very good at handling it. I mainly use it to paint coat miniature models. Trying to draw exact lines and shapes on a relatively small scale was a new experience. It was very hard at first, but I improved quickly and it was a lot of fun.