Development Portfolio

PORTFOLIO

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RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT & POSITIONING

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SAMANTHA HARDING

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CONTENTS PAGEPOSITION YOURSELF 5-8FAILURE9-18DANCE19-31CHANCE32-45THE EVERYDAY46-55RUINS56-81DEVELOPMENT OF SELECTED WORK82-87EVALUATION88FINAL MAJOR PROJECT PROPOSAL89-90PORTFOLIO DESIGN 91BIBLIOGRAPHY92-94 4NOTE: Links should all be hyperlinked. Pages with images

that do not include my own content contain ‘Research’ ban-ners and ‘Fig.’ indications beneath images. References for images can be found in the Bibliography.

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For this project I decided to produce a map based on the style of Google Maps. I felt the strongest part of the project was the ‘student life’ concept. I produeced a map with road names that question the future for students. What comes after university has been a natural-ly daunting concern for myself and other stu-dents so it seemed an appropriate topic.

I did not consider the size of the map when I sketched it, it is too small and so appears pix-elated.

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I decided to create a few of my own typographical images based on failure. I used the symbolic red ‘f’ within the circle to identify the word failure. I was not really happy with the way any of them came out, they are not particularly graphically appealing, from the lay-out to the uneven changing font.

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I thought more about how to represent failure and the body language of failure as per the earlier photograph with the man with his head in his hands supposedly representing failure. I produced my own sketches of people in positions which might represent the misery/sadness/anger associated with failure.

This sketch was drawn digitially using a Wacom intu-os4 tablet.

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This was my favourite of the images that I produced. I like the composition of this though do feel I could have considered colour more purposefuly.

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30 31Link: http://tinypic.com/r/72esec/5Other Possible Link: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=72esec&s=5#.UqkBFGRdXlIOther Possible Link: http://sharding.gd.socd.io/2013/10/08/233/

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These were just some roguh sketches in my sketchbook after thinking about the boredom of everyday life.

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My friends and I occasionally go Urban Explor-ing, and recently went to what was left of West Park Asylum in Epsom. We found a small building which contained the morgue of the old hospital, a room with paper work, blood and brain sam-ples, and a decaying rat cracuss. We did not get a lot of time as there was asbestos and we were not wearing the correct clothing in the decaying building. These are some of my phtogographs of the visit.

I looked more at the history of West Park Hospital, it was a psychiatric treatment hospital in Epsom that opened in 1923. The hospital became run down in the mid 1990’s and was mostly closed and derelict by 2003. The area is in redevelopment, with many new houses already having been built on the grounds that appeared to already have people living in them.58

These are edits of the photographs. I wanted to empshasize the idea of ruins and decay in terms of the colour, so I exaggerated a lot of the blue and yellow tones.

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I had previously read about a place called St Dunstan’s in the East in Central London. It’s a garden which contains the ruins from a church which was bombed out in World War II. I went there to take photographs as I felt the ruins on the site were naturally relative to my project theme.

St Dunstan’s in the East was a church that was built in the year 1100. Since then the church suffered fire damage in the Great fire of London, was repaired and expanded in the 1600’s, until it was largely destroyed by the Blitz in 1941. London council decided to leave the grounds, and planted trees and reopened it as a public garden in 1971.

These are some photographs that I decided to edit. I wanted to make the photographs look aged and eerie to suit the subject matter.63

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I recalled the art work of Glenn Brown, and how his pieces depict this concept of ‘ruins’. Brown is a British artist born in 1966 who produces unusual oil paintings. The first image of his that came to mind when thinking about ‘ruins’, was his painting of the decaying fruit. Brown really gives his paintings a decayed and rotten look to them through both colour and texture.

Fig. 21.

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I thought about ‘ruins’ in other terms, such as ageing. Our worth in society seems to devalue as we become older and our appearances begin to change. The ‘ruins’ of youth and beauty is fascinating to me, no matter what we do to alter our appearance, we will all succumb to time and age.

I wanted to produce a painting representing this idea after being influence by the work of Glenn Brown. My painting was, however, produced digitally. In particular I liked the use of colour in Brown’s paintings and I wanted to portray this idea of decay.

I produced an initial concept sketch, I then went on to create the drawing in Paint Tool SAI and painted it in Art Rage Pro. I used Art Rage instead of Photo-shop as I find Art Rage gives a more authentic paint effect and textured appearance.70

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I realised that I have actually travelled to a few deserted sites. I have been to an abandoned caravan park with left over beach huts in the Isle of Wight and often go to Reigate Hill Fort. I have included some of the photographs that I took at these two places.

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Urban Exploring has gained populartiy recent-ly and appeared in the news a lot during Sep-tember 13th, the media really catching wind of the concept and what it is all about.

As I have been Urban Exploring, and intend to go again soon, I feel I am vaguely familiar with what to expect and the dangers to look out for. As the one who introduced my friends to urban exploring, the one to do the research on finding places I am accustomed to the process involved with urban exploring. What I would like to do is make a zine with tips for urban ex-ploring, from finding and tracking down places to equipment to take.

Dys·to·pi·a n.1. An imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppres-sion, or terror.2. A work describing such a place or state

The idea of ‘Dystopia’ is one that fascinates me, it is usually seen in fiction and describes the opposite of a ‘utopia’. Dystopia seems to refer to a particularly bad place with extremely poor living conditions for the population, it is often seen as a futuristic wasteland.

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I came across these images, they all represent the concept of ‘Dystopia’.

I was inspired by these images I found and liked the typography used in them. I decided to create my own typographical images showing the concept of Dystopia.

Following the influence of the images here I used some of my photographs of London from the cable car to create some typography in Photoshop. [See the following pages]

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Fig. 23. Fig. 24.

I went back to the concept of urban exploring and researched online. There are a number of websites which I was already aware of that contain forums with recommended places.

I found that urban exploring has become increasingly popular and recently hit mainstream news. Urban Exploring appeared in the news a lot during September 13’, the media catching wind of the concept and what it is all about as well as questioning it’s safety and legality.

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81I produced two illustrations based on the urban exploring concept of old adandoned buildings. I wanted to make them appear frightening and unusual.

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I continued my work by focusing on the ‘Ruins’ theme. Ruins was my most enjoyed project theme. I decided that I wanted to create a book based on my ruins project theme, and more specifically, Urban Exploring. By Urban Explor-ing I am referring to the discovery of hidden places within busy built up urban areas, in my case, London. The book has focussed on my photography of some of the areas I have visited in and around London, with brief histories of some of the visited areas. I have titled the book a ‘guide’ as the books main focus is on tips and information in re-gards to urban exploration. There have been very few books published on urban exploring as only recently has the activity come to hit the news and made people more aware of the activity. I tried to be extremely careful and considerate in regards to the books layout, typography and the portrayal of images, I changed and altered certain aspects of the book many times. 82

DEVELOPMENT OF SELECTED WORK

These are my initial cover designs. I much prefer the one on the left as the one on the right was far too crowded and took attention away from the background.

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One of my lecturers advised that it would be better to use perhaps a white font to blend in the backgorund a bit more, emphasizing the idea of finding something hidden, which is a big part of urban exploring. I started to put together various different page designs for inside of the book/zine.

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I tried out different layouts and typography. I think now that the inside pages perhaps should have had black backgroundas as a lot of photograpy based books have this to draw attention to the imag-es

I first produced the designs on this page for the inside pages but was not happy with them at all, so went on to change them; see the images on following pages.

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POSITION YOURSELFHaving produced my work in a particularly untidy fashion in my sketchbook I really did not want to show the pages here, I tend to find my sketchbook also quite a per-sonal entity. I do, however, quite like the photographs of my trip around London, they’re quite eye catching.

FAILURE I felt I produced an adequate amount of work on this project and it was one I quite enjoyed. It was unfortunate my sketches of people came out particularly pixelated as the images were so small, this is something I will need to consider in the future. I was surprised and intrigued by the concept of the ‘anti-self help’ book and feel this is some-thing I am interested in exploring further.

DANCEThe dance project was one I quite enjoyed as it was an unusual theme choice for me. I was quite happy with the posters I produced and have become quite interested in editorial design because of these pieces. The project made me more considerate of layout and the use of type.

CHANCE I found it quite difficult to get ideas for this project and found myself forcibly trying to generate creativity which was difficult. The piece I produced that I most like in this was the ‘Make your own luck’ poster, I think the scratchy font and layout of this piece works particularly well.

THE EVERYDAYThis was one of the projects I feel I produced the least on, I was very stuck for ideas for this project as the everyday is a theme that was close to projects I have completed in previous years, so creating something new was difficult.

RUINSRuins was my favorite project over the last few months. This project let me explore an area of personal interest to me and go out and take photographs, the opportunity to be active for a project is something appealing to me. Ruins was the theme that I took further in the few weeks following the end of the initial briefs. I worked on creating a book or potentially a zine based on urban exploring.

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FINAL MAJOR PROJECT PROPOSAL

[POSITION] Thinking about my current position in study I intend to continue my education by pursuing a masters degree. In terms of the design industry I feel I am much more able to understand professional design practices, but still want to further explore design via postgraduate education. The work throughout this year so far has allowed me to develop a better under-standing of my interests and favourite subject areas. Being based in the at and design career path I feel participants are continuously learning and growing, continuously refining their interests and style. I feel as a graphic design student I have not completely refined a definitive medium of interest, I am someone who enjoys exploring the many different areas of graphic design and do not feel ready to limit myself to one specializa-tion. As beneficial as it may be to become specialized and particularly good in one area of the field, I do not feel that is really the route I want to take, I want to continue to challenge myself after completing my de-gree with new ways of working within graphic design. Despite this, I also naturally have areas that I prefer, such as photography, illustration and editorial design. I spent a lot of the Summer consulting graphic design books, these books have helped me better understand design practices. I feel I continue to have a lot to learn within the area of graphic design, but feel much more grounded in the subject area than I did prior to start-ing third year. So far this year I have already explored and gained increasing knowledge regarding the field of graphic design. 88 89

[RESEARCH]

I feel I learnt a lot throughout my research and admittedly became a lot more imersed in it than I often have previously. The short one week projects forced me to generate ideas and produce work quickly, which is good perpetration for the professional world of design. The crits allowed me to evalu-ate my work better as with also giving others the chance to do so. I came to truly consider and understand the important aspects of design. What does the work communicate and how well does it communicate it? How original or imagina-tive is it? How purposeful is the piece? I have come to understand what sort of area of graphic de-sign I would be interested in, not so much in terms of medi-um but in regards to subject matter. I find myself very inter-ested in the concept of ‘ethical design’ and design which can be beneficial to society in some way. Having discovered the concept of ethical design I feel this is an area I would like to explore in my final project, rather than focusing on ruins and urban exploring. Urban Exploring is something of interest to me and something I occasionally participate in, but I would very much like to produce something more meaningful which relates further to the field of design I would like to find my-self in.

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[DEVELOPMENT]

In regards of development the recent projects have helped me to gain a much better understanding of my future aspirations within graphic design. I feel I want to focus on the concept of ethical design, design which is in some way able to benefit society. Initially, I thought about considering my Urban Exploring book/zine for my final major project, but this is not really something I feel enthusiastic enough about to pursue. My current idea is to produce a self help guide book. However, these are often seen to not be particularly helpful and poorly written. In my project on ‘failure’ I looked at the idea of the anti self-help book, though this seemed merely a disguise as the content was what you would typically find in a self help guide. I think the idea of the anti self-help guide is particularly interesting, it captures your attention as it is unexpected. I have the idea to create a book which has the concept of self help on one half and a cover indicating so, and an anti self help guide on the other when the book is turned upside down. My, often described as, bleak and cynical world view will be help-ful in this case. I intend to have the pages pose typogra-phy with incorporated illustrations and perhaps collage. The pages on the self help side will contain motivational posters and messages and on the anti self help side will be more bleak and somewhat de motivational. The book will be intended as a humorous observation on life and to mock self help guides. I will use language and content which will be aimed at younger generations; teenagers and young adults.

I am considering having 80 pages in total, the cur-rent average human life span in Britain, or poten-tially having the average human life span of the world across the number of pages as a metaphor-ical and hidden message. The book will be likely printed and bound at my usual print shop, ABC printers, though I am considering binding it myself to reduce costs depending on how much ABC will be charging for the book. I will also need to consid-er how many copies I want. I will spend the first few weeks creating pages for the book, using a mixture of collage, illustration and typography. I will need to spare another few weeks to edit and leave time to rearrange and alter the book as well as leave plenty of time for printing. I intend to use mainly Photoshop to create digital images and type, with my Wacom Intuos4 tablet. I particularly enjoy work-ing in this way so feel it would be the most appro-priate method.

I came to regret the amount of time that I put into the urban epxloring book in the Further Devel-opment brief. The idea for my Final Major Project came fairly late on so I did not have a lot of time to refine as much as I would have liked to. I have be-gun designing how I would like the Anti Self help book to look and be put together. The urban ex-ploring book is not something I want to leave alto-gether, but also not something I feel interested in enough to base my Final Major Project on.

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[PORTFOLIO DESIGN

Choosing a layout and font type for this project proved to be quite a difficult taks. I repeatedly changed my mind in regards of layout and colour. I chose this font as it was quite simple and easy to read but more styllized than a basic font like Arial. I experimented with a few different background ideas, I didn’t want to simply have a plain filled colour back-ground. I edited a photogoraph of the wallpaper in my house with the light reflecting onto it. I experimented initially with dark backgrounds but after looking online at various portfolios and editorial design I found most were fairly minimalist so as to not distract attention from the in-formation itself. Therefore, I changed the background to something quite light by inverting the colours. I wanted to use grey as the background to make conent with white edges still visible.I decided to number every page, including the title pages as to make navigation easier. Some of my images are unfotunatly unclear as they were not produced with a high resolution.]

Examples of other considered layout designs I produced:

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Bibliography

Fig. 1. http://fodengrealy.com/2011/12/obsessive_compulsive_incre-mentalism/ Fig. 2. http://www.deliverfreedom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/failure.jpg Fig. 3. http://eyesonwallstreet.labaton.com/ Fig. 4. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/failure?page=2Fig. 5.http://fbuk.deviantart.com/art/Rain-Dance-03-67033662Fig. 6. http://nas16.deviantart.com/art/Dance-1-35712331 Fig. 7. http://blackdragon1993.deviantart.com/art/Dance-191866025 Fig. 8. http://www.onstage-studios.com/products.htm Fig. 9. http://www.prettylusciousthings.com/2013/01/wicked.html Fig. 10. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Y20M_1FasPI/Tlj-xvTporI/AAAAAAAAJDM/RQCdUBhNU3s/s1600/ChicagoLogoGirl.jpg Fig. 11. http://visiting-britain.com/london/images/theatre/chicago-poster.jpg Fig. 12http://www.broadway.tv/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/mamma-mia.gif Fig. 13http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBk3ynRbtsw Fig. 14Google ImagesFig. 15http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/pollock/lavender-mist/ Fig. 16http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources

Fig. 17http://ikalfanis.com/2011/01/02/the-butterfly-effect-change-one-thingchange-everything/

Fig. 18http://www.mrlovenstein.com/images/comics/50_no_mere_coinci-dence.png

Fig. 19http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/wp-content/up-loads/2012/03/191_feature_anderson.jpg Fig. 20http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/ Fig. 21.http://freshnerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/glenn-brown-2.jpg Fig. 22http://jacoblegrand.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/dystopia.jpg Fig. 23.http://gwynnelanguagearts.pbworks.com/f/1357052079/Dysto-pia%20Word%20Cloud.png Fig. 24. http://kkcchallenge.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/dystopia.jpg Fig. 25. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/london-youve-never-seen-it-2294861

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BOOKS

Ruins (Documents of Contemporary Art)Brian Dillon

Whitechapel Art Gallery (1 Aug 2011)The Everyday (Documents of Contemporary Art) Stephen Johnstone Whitechapel Art Gallery (1 April 2008)

Failure (Documents of Contemporary Art)Lisa Le FeuvreWhitechapel Art Gallery (30 Sep 2010)

Chance (Documents of Contemporary Art)Margaret IversenWhitechapel Art Gallery (22 Feb 2010)

Dance (Documents of Contemporary Art)Andre Lepecki Whitechapel Art Gallery (9 Sep 2012)

The Ultimate Book of Heroic FailuresStephen Pile Faber & Faber (4 Oct 2012)

The Art of Failure - The Anti Self-Help Guide Neel BurtonAcheron Press (1 Mar 2010)

Graphic Design Rules: 365 Essential Design Dos and Don’ts Stefan G. Bucher Peter Dawson John Foster Tony Seddon, Sean AdamsFrances Lincoln; Flexibound edition (2 Aug 2012)

Design Elements: A Graphic Style ManualTimothy SamaraRockport Publishers Inc. (1 April 2007)

WEB LINKS

http://fengshui.about.com/

http://fengshui.about.com/od/thebasics/qt/fengshui.htm

https://maps.google.co.uk/

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

http://dictionary.reference.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55Zt0ukfxNc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnlkKdDXk-I

http://www.martinparr.com/

http://www.gagosian.com/artists/glenn-brown

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/glenn-brown

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/20/urban-explora-tion-robert-macfarlane-bradley-garrett

http://www.silentuk.com/

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/

http://www.derelictlondon.com/

http://www.abandonedstations.org.uk/

http://danceumbrella.co.uk/

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/dance

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/chaos-theory

http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-is-chaos-theory/

http://ryanwoodwardart.com/

Exhibitions:

LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL http://www.londondesignfestival.com/@ The Victoria & Albert MuseumSEPTEMBER 13TH-21ST 2013

MARTIN PARR AND TONY RAY JONES‘ONLY IN ENGLAND’ PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION@ The Science MuseumSEPTEMBER 21ST-MARCH 16TH 2013/14

UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING & YOU @ Science Museum SEPTEMBER 21ST-FEBRUARY 7TH 2013/14http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/Plan_your_visit/exhibitions/universal_everything_and_you.aspxVideo I uploaded: http://youtu.be/arkA8rxdOsk

Some of my photographs from the exhibitions: