Thoughts about continuing with brief 1

I kept thinking about how to continue with my brief idea. The photos I had made previously felt good for now, but I wanted to try with my grandfather’s old camera (like a window into my past). But it was unfortunately broken. So I researched how to repair it. I ordered a new battery, and that was not why it didn’t work. Eventually, I found a YouTube video where I had to open the camera and clean the magnet inside. I followed the instructions, and to my surprise, the camera worked again. I took some pictures (I’m not sure if they will be good, maybe something is still broken… but we’ll see) and sent them off to be developed.

In the design crit last week, Paul suggested creating a book or similar, but I still thought about the folding idea like in the Consequences game. That’s why a brochure came up to my mind. For more interactivity and to show the influence of others in the shaping of my identity, I am considering adding stickers on the front page that others can put inside the brochure in certain places (in the negative space where no text or image is placed). I was thinking about what other symbols I could use for the stickers, but I decided for now to go with fingerprints. I started sketching some ideas:

I ordered some stickers made of biodegradable materials with the last finger-print sketch. Now looking forward to including them in my brief idea.

Next, I started searching for different foldings for brochures. For now, I am considering two options, one is called a closed gate fold, and the other one is a roll fold.

Version One – gate fold:

Version Two – roll fold:

For the font for my brochure, I thought of something that resembled a fingerprint and a stamp came to mind. So I started looking for stamp fonts. I’m going to experiment with some of them in my brochure design.

Research task: Create a Mood board of images and typography

I’m still not sure what my values as a designer are. I am not a designer professionally. I love taking photos and experimenting with different forms of design, such as jewelry making, pottery, jesmonite, drawing and painting.

My Instagram probably shows best what kind of pictures I like to take and what I like to work on with my hands:

I also created a mood board with Designers and typography:

Research material – Self and identity

Martin Hosken is asking in his lecture: “What are your values? How do you know your values? Do you share values with others?”. The answer to this questions most of us won’t be able to answer in a short amount of time.

In the past psychologists such as Sigmund Freud or his student Karl Gustav Jung had developed theories about the self. While Freud drew his main attention to the unconscious “IT” which he saw as an independent primary mechanism that controls human behavior, Jung on the other side was convinced of the self as a whole, acknowledging each part of it.

At the beginning of the 18th century high consumerism could only be achieved with the help of commerce and media so that people would desire a product instead of needing it. The years after, with the rise of technology the identity and self became more entangled in this consumer culture.

As we now live in a world where everyone takes selfies, we have to ask ourselves again what makes us “us”. In his book The Trajectory of the Self, Anthony Giddens answers this question with his idea of the self as a reflexive entity. It is our responsibility to develop a greater sense of self and continuously reflect upon it. He cites modern relationships as an example, in which both people have to constantly work on themselves to make them work, in contrast to the past, where relationships were more “external conditions of social and economic life”.¹ The self in a pure relationship, as he calls it, is a process of individual search for it and deep connection based on trust and intimacy with the partner.²

Other thoughts

This week I also had my first peer review session with Charlotte and Louis. I think it’s a nice opportunity to share some first-hand experiences and also to be able to talk about topics that are not part of the studies. For example this first weeks I missed some input regarding the Adobe Cloud programs because I never have worked with them professionally. Being able to understand them better and when to use them is a crucial part of the Graphic Designers skillset.

I also shared some updates about my first brief ideas, and Louis and Charlotte liked the idea of the stickers that users could put inside the brochure. I’m still not quite sure how to let people know where to place the fingerprints, or should it be completely up to them?

Louis mentioned the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room. A project where people could put colorful stickers in a previously white room.

1. Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age (The Trajectory of the Self), p.89, Anthony Giddens  ↩︎
2. p.89, Anthony Giddens ↩︎
   Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age (The Trajectory of the Self), p. 97, Anthony Giddens ↩︎