Belle: Process Book

Belle

Comm Studio 1 Symbolic Poster Project

Rachel Bender

Belle Comm Studio 1 Symbolic Poster Project

Rachel Bender

Contents Foreword

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Week 1: Objects and Intense Overthinking

7-9

Week 2:

10-13

Visual Research

Week 3: Field Exploration

14-17

Week 4: Sadness Brings Weird Inspiration

18, 19

Week 5: I’m Back! (aka The Catch Up)

20, 21

Week 6: Why Don’t You Look Good Yet

22, 23

24 25

Labors of Love in Lettering

Week 7: Final Posters

26, 27

Final Thoughts

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Foreword Hello you, Welcome to the process of how one girl completely overthought the ways to symbolize a bell, so much so she wasn’t sure she was actually going to finish the project. I know, I thought it couldn’t be that hard at first either, but oh, I was so wrong. I found the process of this project exceedingly difficult to get engrossed in. There was a lot of fear about my ability to research, do photography and also deal with some personal issues that got in the way of me following the proper steps and time table for this project. Still once I found my way, I had fun creating such bright and lively compositions, did my best with the challenges, and in the end was able to complete two pieces that felt very me.

There’s a quote I keep above my desk from an article about the composer Philip Glass.

Sometimes I follow its sentiment, and sometimes I don’t. It reads: For Glass, the point is always process, the doing of the thing, more so than the result. And keeping that in mind, I’m inclined to let him define success here in his own terms: “If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen. That doesn’t mean I always succeeded at being interesting.

Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t.”

Looking back while creating this process book, I think even though I didn’t follow the assignment’s process to the letter, I still got somewhere I didn’t expect to be because I didn’t know what to do. And more importantly, I didn’t do what I usually do, which is panic. I kept my cool and did what I could to keep going forward. This is my process of creating two posters out of a mess of research and exploration, enjoy! xo, Rachel

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Week 1: Objects and Intense Overthinking The objects I brought to choose from for the first week of the project were a small plastic fox, a pair of scissors, and a bell. I figured that I would be able to find ways to utilize all three in my life on the off chance I forgot to return them.

tea time servants upper class annoying needy

new beginnings creation clean break cut ties hair cut maker

I’ll admit I probably had the most fun the first week of this project because it veered into a very off topic place of conversation and research. Working with a sub (missed you Kat) had an interesting effect on my initial progress. I really loved getting way too involved with everyone else’s objects on my own, discussing their deeper cultural and universal meanings. Sharing all of that information might not have been the most helpful for understanding the project at hand though. Instead my head was spinning with the denotations and infinite connotations for my chosen object, a bell. Well, more specifically a handbell. You’d think there be a lot of information out there on a such an object right? Well no, history does not really care about the handbell, unless you’re talking about the ones used to create handbell choirs (which through my research I discovered there are a TON of throughout

intelligent beautiful swift foxy “you’re a stone cold fox” dangerous fox hole companion

the world. And they compete against each other.) Research on bells themselves in a broader context was also weirdly super hard, apparently historians are not that interested in them. There are no blogs featuring them prominently. Already I was starting to panic, how on Earth was I even going to find ten images by next week from sources off the internet out there in the world? Visits to the library were proving increasingly unhelpful. How broad or narrow should I be searching? What even counts as a bell for this particular project? I ended up casting my net too wide, overwhelmed by all the different directions I could run off to with nothing clearly grabbing my attention as an obvious, but not too obvious, choice. Also, I was already freaked out about picking the business and cultural institution for my posters.

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Research Notes

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musical signal warning alert service indentured class attendance wealth aid chime tough metal call ritual mark hours tower freedom liberty charity spiritual charity time spiritual

vibration message shiny tolling annoying shrill demanding saved savior nautical knockout school recess schedule alarm clapper tone inviting rhythmic domed striking clash clang church wedding

rattle cat gloves team christmas sleigh reindeer snow whistles door dance cows protection religion servitude slaves servant elite welcome opening closing fire telephone ringing reverb

swing Quasimodo measured joy death disturb respect pause begin end swing cold echo systematic wind winner correct teacher dependent mute silent superiority congraulate celebrate tolls

100 words about the bell

musical: related to music and rhythm service: a duty or task performed by somebody else vibration: continuous movement, similar to a hum or a buzz

inviting: welcoming, encouraging reverb: an echo or vibration brought on by an object striking another celebrate: to revel in a good news or fortune

I chose these words keeping in mind the kind of places I wanted to visit and create posters for. I spent way too much time trying to communicate the underlying message that bells equaled servitude, an idea that my sub encouraged a lot even though I was hesistant to embrace it. Eventually I abandoned the idea entirely. While more often bells are associated with service and rituals, I wanted to focus more on their joyous uses.

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Week 2: Visual Research This phase of the project was probably the hardest for me because 1) I am not a confident photographer, and 2) there are only so many ways you can photograph a $5 bell. I started off simple, gathering as many different angles as I could think of, but felt very limited by that approach after only six photos. So I started placing the bell in different situations: how it’s held connotes its meaning, how other props help tell a narrative, and how literal translations of common phrases and compound words play out. I also put myself in one of the compositions as “Clearly Incredibly So Ill She Can’t Even Get Out of Bed” Girl.

Call to action

Ring for service

Position of service 10

Position of power

Stand in for cat

Bells are big in Wiccan rituals

How we see bell symbols now

Bell Jar

Ring for assistance when ill

Dinner bell

I thought I was very funny

And a little Pavlov’s bell humor 11

Since the origin of the bell is so muddled, there really aren’t any readily available biographies on its history. I looked through many books full of product design for common household objects, but it seems handbells really just weren’t that common, nor were they rare enough to dignify proper collections. Books with images of churches feature sweeping views of towers, but never the bells inside them. I ended up going to Michael’s to see if I could find any evidence of their existence in the real world. Since I went after Halloween, I found quite a

few variations of Christmas and other celebratory bells.

Looking on the Internet proved to be a tad irritating, I mostly found bad clip art until I turned to Etsy. All photos, unless otherwise sourced, were taken by me in my wanderings through the aisles and one very cool art piece my mother sent me a photo of.

My bicycle bell 12

Older AT&T Logo

Taco Bell Logo

Caitlin Mouri

Nena Crouch

Jen Holloway

Riyo

Christina Ridley

Bell Emoji

Jennifer Wright

Jen Plueger 13

Week 3: Field Research I had never been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall before this project. I’m not originally from LA, so I’m still faithful to the San Francisco Symphony but wow, what an incredibly cool space. Unfortunately the day I went to go on a supposed self guided audio tour there was a concert going on, meaning I wasn’t allowed inside past the lobby without a ticket. I did my best wandering the free spaces, definitely got some strange looks from a security guard as I stuffed multiple schedules and guides into my purse. Walking around the outside of the building

was the most inspiring part.

The metallic curved panels were crisp against a clear blue sky, it was a beautiful image I wish I could have captured better. The building’s free movement and some of the colors used in the print materials made me start thinking that this poster could have a pretty crazy color scheme, one that vibrated just like the music within the concert hall.

Gorgeous curves

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The inspiration for the madness

Clean sans serif type on all print titles

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Partyland is a strange store. The name would imply a very joyous atmosphere, filled with balloons, streamers, and candy. All those objects do exist within the store, but in small amounts. The space itself is rather unfriendly.

Almost all of the aisles are empty, except for a couple of rows in the corner, sparingly stocked with various “decade” party tableware, children’s toys, bachelorette accessories, and piñatas. Everything would indicate the store is closing, except the ceiling which is covered entirely in balloons. This makes sense, Partyland has

Empty hooks everywhere

Eclectic pinata selection 16

Bright and garish toys

recently renamed to “Balloon Concepts,” but frankly I hated the new name and didn’t want to do a project with that as the lettering. Plus the store itself still says “Partyland” on its sign outside. I stayed for as little as possible, the shopkeepers, an older couple, were eyeing me like a hawk as I tried to casually take pictures with my phone. In order to avoid them assuming I was shoplifting, I bought a few things and pet their dog who was lying on the sidewalk outside the store. From my trip though, I gathered a fun primary color palette from their original signage in the back of the store and was inspired by the confetti pattern on their very old carpet.

At least the floor was fun...and dusty

Seriously every type of balloon

Inspiration for the other poster (also I totally bought these)

The original sign and colors!

Almost every aisle was like this

The store’s friendliest employee

Lame name, lame business card

Explanation for store’s appearance?

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Week 4: Sadness and Weird Inspiration At this point in the image making process, I faced a couple of setbacks in my personal life that made it hard to get my work done the way I was supposed to have it completed. First, I was trying to manage a schedule that was just too full and I ended up dropping a class, a decision that was incredibly stressful to reach. It was also the anniversary of a close friend’s death. I generally end up taking a few days off from my life to reflect because losing him is still very hard on me. I’m from a small town in Northern California and most of my friends and family are 300 miles or farther away, so dealing with those emotions by myself without anyone to really talk to takes

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some time. I lost my motivation to work on anything this week, I let my sadness and loneliness get to me. I knew there was just no way I was going to have even close to the 26 images I should have had at this point. It felt impossible to truly catch up.

So I figured the next best thing was to just keep moving forward and finish what I needed to have done for next week. I’m not a particularly strong sketcher, but I drew out a few simple variations of bell using the most reductive shapes possible.

I experimented with ways to communicate vibrations and movement, but wasn’t feeling super confident seeing it in simple pen drawings.

Thank you Aziz Ansari for releasing Master of None on Netflix and its preceeding ad campaign. Without it, I might have never figured out how I wanted to communicate the musicality of a bell.

Bless the vibrating gradient.

My vibrating “colorful bacon� made out of tons of very bright paper

Sound waves visualized

Apparently the arts and crafts section at Target is really where I find some of my best materials. I happened to be there when they had a crazy pad of super bright neon papers on sale and snatched it up. I knew I wanted the Concert Hall poster to practially blare at you. I started cutting things out and scanning them in. To my surprise, the scanner did nothing to capture the vibrating oranges, blues, greens, pinks, and yellows. Instead, the paper ended up having a very 1970s rainbow power vibe. I decided to roll with it, even though I felt like I was working on a poster for Lisa Frank. I’ve never worked with such a fun and kooky color palette in my life and honestly probably never will again. I was making myself nauseous staring at my materials for too long.

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Week 5: I’m Back! (AKA The Catch Up)

The top posters were the first ones I ever presented for critique. I was very unsure of how they’d be received since while I’d actively participated in critiquing others two weeks prior, no one had seen anything I was working on yet. It all went over fairly well, even with the intense color palette.

With such crazy backgrounds I made the bells themselves very simple, but it actually ended up detracting away from the composition by sucking the viewer straight in boring blank spaces. Also everything was kind of the same size, I hadn’t figured out my hierarchy yet. When I went to create the 24x36 mock up, I incorporated elements from both posters and created more layers, at this point unconcerned how difficult this might be to look at.

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For these posters I tried to communicate the movement of the bell and the joy of its ringing. I worked with white backgrounds to keep things bright and clean and created my own lettering, which I’ll discuss more later on. Again, I faced the problem of a lack of hierarchy and also type lockups that didn’t feel like they’d found their place in the composition yet.

I decided to go forward with the one on the right based on the more positive feedback about the lettering and the message of celebration coming across more clearly based on the image. When translating into a larger mockup, I tried to refine my compositional strategy and find a better way to incorporate the name of the business.

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Week 6: Why Don’t You Look Good Yet

Behold, the most visually intense phase of this entire project. I really wanted to go for it and play with legibility, along with different shapes and their relationships to one another and the container. Whereas the week before I might have done too little to create varying levels, in this phase I might have gone too far. It’s hard to tell what’s going on anywhere, and the lines all being the same weight makes it feel like a giant colorful soup. I received mixed feedback on whether I should continue to try and “trick” people with an optical illusion or make it clearer. I stuck with the same lettering, determined to make it work because I loved it/it was kind of difficult to make again.

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More mixed responses on this poster as well. When I had this up as a full size black and white print, none of the yellow was visible, making it clear there was really a lot of negative space on the poster. While adding the confetti seemed to be a move in the right direction toward better conveying celebrating, my lettering and the bell itself were getting lost and seemed to be pushed to the sides of the composition. For the next iteration, I decided to take on the suggestions of trying a colored background and incorporating the text at scale growing from small to large as it “rang out� from the bell.

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Labors of Love in Lettering

It was love at first clipping mask

This was the first instance of lettering I did for this project and I knew immediately this was going to be my strongest solution. The simple serif letter forms work well to contain the chaotic colors and pattern of the “sound waves.� There is just enough illegibility to keep things interesting and suggest parts of the letterforms rather than just show them. My only issue as I worked with it was finding a background that would add to the words rather than distort the message beyond recognition.

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Sort of half baked at this point, I was really uncertain how to approach letters that had no clear triangular forms to them, the ‘T,’ ‘Y,’ and ‘L’ suffered the most.

Translating the lettering digitally gave it more systematic order, but the letterforms were still feeling too similar to one another, to the point where they were too hard to distinguish from one another and felt too abstract.

I took the suggestions to add more features of letterforms into my shapes, essentially holes where there are normally holes. I think it made a huge difference in the end in terms of legibility.

The lettering process for Partyland took a little longer since I really was creating my own type from scratch, or more accurately scrap paper. I knew I wanted it to be reminiscent of confetti, very geometric, and constructed mainly of triangles. It took three iterations to find the right system that actually acted like a full alphabet when really I only made 8 letters. I added more typographic elements as I went so it was clearer what each shape was supposed to read as.

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Week 7: Final Posters

In the end, I didn’t make too many changes, I just refined the order of hierarchy, changed the scale of the lines, and made the background more neutral by straightening the stripes and making them much smaller. I put the text on a solid color to make it more, but still kept the spirit of its once incredibly loud background by putting a few strips of color on the edge.

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Big changes in the color order, a stronger inclusion of lettering, and a few bold pieces of confetti in the once incredibly white space finally made this poster feel more complete.

Instead of screwing around with the perspective tool, I handset each letter and scaled them appropriately. There’s a lot going on, but it’s a joyful kind of organized chaos.

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Final Thoughts My path for this project deviated a bit from what was initially asked of me. Even though I encountered some roadblocks along the way that hurt my progress, I like where I ended up by the final posters. I didn’t know what I was going to do with this project for a long time; I was still lost after four weeks.

In the future, I know I need to avoid overthinking the research aspect of projects and be less afraid or indifferent to trying various methods in the process of image making.

I also need to take care of my mental health a little better so that it doesn’t end up detracting from my work each year. I put in the time for this project near the end rather than throughout, a strategy that surprisingly did not lead to that much sleep loss, but one I’d prefer to avoid in the future.

I ended up having a lot of fun working on this, the bright colors and fun locations cheered me up immensely. I liked making people’s eyes hurt and creating my own letterforms. It was also fascinating to see the projects from everyone else in my class and how they evolved at different rates. I learned a lot about hierarchy and the importance of the various ways of conveying meaning.

Big thanks to my mother again for always talking to me on the phone about my various artistic and scholastic crises and my lovely teacher Kat whose critiques and encouragement are always valued. Cheers to the end of the semester!

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