My initial idea was ‘Water’ , but as the list went on, I didn’t feel like the outcome was going to be good, even the top 6 didn’t feel particularly interesting to me.

I decided to try Money as a topic next. Considering how many connotations money has and just how subjective it’s value is I thought this would be a particularly interesting subject to centralize the ideas upon.

1. Money from the POV of The Poor is A Goal
2. Money from the POV of a Farmer are Potatoes
3. Money from the POV of a Tribe is Meaningless/Useless
4. Money from the POV of The Rich is A Solution
5. Money from the POV of Drug runners is Desperation
6. Money from the POV of a Scanner is Illegal
7. Money from the POV of Politics is Power
8. Money from the POV of a Tree are Slices of Skin
9. Money from the POV of a Piggy Bank are Intestines
10. Money from the POV of a Bank Teller is Numbness
11. Money from the POV of a Counterfeiter is details
12. Money from the POV of a Beggar is Cans

The issues I have with this is that in my mind, I see money ending up being the goal or end. Hence some of these feel awkward, eg. drug runners/potatoes as they’re doing it for money, but I’m not sure how far I can push the phrasing, which I’d rather not do cause it feels disingenuous if past this point. The other issue being I’ve run out of ideas for money [said no rich person]. Despite the malleability of how money is perceived, it seems to be distilled into, “it’s important” or “it’s not important” to this particular group. I’m afraid it might be a little too one note though.

Hence, I thought of using Time, particularly ‘The Past’, to give myself a better bearing and a more solid place to start or focus on. I chose time because I wanted to try something intangible.

1. The Past from the POV of an Old Person is Youth
2. The Past from the POV of a Collector is Money
3. The Past from the POV of a Hipster is Novelty
4. The Past from the POV of A Kid is Boring
5. The Past from the POV of The Past is Abstract/Conceptual
6. The Past from the POV of A Clock nothing
7. The Past from the POV of a Company is Heritage
8. The Past from the POV of a Witness is Subjective/Fuzzy
9. The Past from the POV of Someone who’s lost an item is Missing/Inaccurate
10. The Past from the POV of Fruits/Plants was a Fortunate Event
11. The Past from the POV of a Fraud was a mistake/slip-up
12. The Past from the POV of

The issues brought up in class were really in helping me make these idea’s less subjective to me. I didn’t realize this at first, but some of my terminology was subjective; “boring”, “The Past”

It helped shape my perceptions of my concept a little better and opened a few more ideas on how I could work with this.

For my references, I’ll be using Kyle Thompson

I often refer to him as I really like the atmosphere in his pictures and for this project I aim to capture similar sentiments

I am also referencing Dutch artists Lernert and Sander. They did this concept below for de Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper.

My focus on for this image is just how abstraction, or changing the form of something makes the viewer look at it from a different perspective. Familiarity of the form breaks down and certain aspects appear more prominent. I really just enjoy unexpected ways of altering perception. This is something I aim to do in this project as well.

Similar to Andy Warhol, through the use of repetition, meaning can be taken away or made vague. Much like how when a word is repeated over and over, it starts to sound strange and loses it’s linguistic “form”

Representing The Past seems like it’s going to be a fun challenge. Being so open ended, I feel like there is much more to explore in terms of execution and topic. Hopefully this recess week, though busy, is a good chunk of time for me to refine these ideas much further.

Welp, last batch of updates before the finals

AUDIO

For audio, as stated previously, I wasn’t very satisfied with the visuals of the software I was using – ‘CoagulaLight1666’ I realized I didn’t include an example, mainly because I didn’t think it looks good enough.

If you want, you can click the above image and it’ll link you to the full sized image.

The software so far I have found to be focused on turning images into audio.

Eg. The above image sounds like this

 

Hidden pictures in ‘Look’ by Venetian Snares from Dave Williams on Vimeo.

The link above is an example of an image put into a song, the last track on the Venetian Snares Album ‘Songs About My Cats’. The song, ‘Look’, only really makes sense when run through software and as you can see, is pictures of his cats!

Though, this project is typography based, so imagery out of sound isn’t exactly the way to go it seems.

This section reminds me of Vaporwave‘s (a genre of music) A E S T H E T I C S, which some might consider the be gaudy.

However in further tests of the software’s capabilities, I wasn’t able to find a suitable use for the look.

Below, I tried just writing my name out using the various brushes. Some, like the stuff at the bottom I do like, but it’s not very feasible to draw consistently with the mouse, unless that’s the look you’re going for.

The software also is very difficult to work in A5 formats. It very clearly wasn’t made to handle files of that size. For one, I can’t zoom out to fully view the canvas in it’s entirety.

Moving on from that, I recorded my mom’s voice saying my name, ‘Makoto’ for maximum authenticity haahaha.

There’s the section that I decided to use.

In waveforms, I had to catch it in 3 syllables as seen below

 Ma

 Ko

 To

I’m still contemplating how to lay these out interestingly. One idea was to spell the words with vinyl records, but that looked a little too awkward than what I envisioned in my head.

I accidentally stumbled upon this idea of making the waveforms look like records, though my concern is if this is too much a deviation into abstraction. Though, it was mentioned that waveform representations were alright, looping them into circles worries me that it’s pushing too far away from the conventions. I do like where this is going though. Had a few ideas on how to layer these as one set of loops in the picture below is one syllable, one line for each channel (Left and Right)

 This however, since my screen is 1920 x 1080 at most, I can’t screenshot or export any higher in the current oscilloscope visualizer, hence A5 is a little scary to work in, as there’s going to be visible artefacts from scaling the image up.

 Trying to vectorise the waveform in Illustrator makes it a little jittery and a little too paint-like for my liking.

 These are the spectrogram visualizations of my name as said by my mom, except, one set of the 3 peaked patterns is my name once, they’re a little too short and I can’t figure out how to stretch them out at the moment.

So, with these elements I’m still wondering how to piece them together, but I’m not satisfied at the moment, fortunately I have a few more ideas I haven’t tried out, hopefully the answer lies there.

N A M E T A G

Abstract

When I heard that I could drop some degree of meaning or sense from abstraction, I lept on to the opportunity to deviate from what I usually do, having the tendency to have meaning in the elements.

This squiggly sort of doodle also stems a little from what I wanted to do for typography, a Tim Burton-esque type font. While this is quite distant from “meaning” I still feel a strong connection to these squiggles, as I like to doodle and I often doodle in a similar manner and let my hand wander. A look at this does give me the vibe that it is a representation of me.

 

Typography

As previously mentioned, I wanted to go for a font/type reminiscent of Tim Burton’s spooky branch-like aesthetics. Due to lack of ability/training, as you’ll see in the tests I’ve done on paper, that fell by the wayside. I then decided to go with a cryptic/occult style font to keep with le spooky aesthetic that I wanted, mixing about with my Conceptual ideas (The Witch house genre of music, taking points from the aforementioned styles.) The outcome, clearly falls short of my ideas and even probably turned out better in the test doodles that I did.

 

Concept

The aesthetic of music is often an aspect that, while not exactly overlooked, is something that we sort of absorb unconsciously. Digging into the Witch House genre of music for their A E S T H E T I C . Themes of, as the name implies, witchcraft as well as horror, glitchy elements and other ‘dark’ styles. Musically, the most well known would be Grimes, Crystal Castles and Purity Ring. Artists in this genre often utilize unicode in their names as well eg. Horse MacGyver (formerly ///▲▲▲\\\). My aims were to be able to capture all that, in a conceptual name tag without relying on copying symbols (except for the band Xiu Xiu’s logo/symbol, which I put in cause I like these sort of low-key, somewhat irrelevant references and getting away with it.)

These were the ideas I doodled down, there’s no particular route that entails chronological order though. I did start with the eye and the Triangle Eye Symbol next to it. Tried to dip into blackletter, but I wasn’t satisfied with the quality that I was putting out. You can also see the typography that was to be that never was :T.

More tests, and trying to finalize a layout for Concept, trying to get the typography down too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASSIGNMENT 1

The attributes that I’m considering are

• Hungry
• Reserved/Anxious
• Messy
• Mental
• Slow
• Inquisitive – I’m thinking of challenging myself with a word that isn’t so apparent with visuals
• Tired
• Driven
• Asian/Japanese/Indian
• Audiophile
• Drugs

I’m planning to take a real-word-handmade-photography approach. Thinking of dabbling in some perspective illusion type things too.

Something that really helped me jog my mind, was the point about context. I have yet to generate ideas that toy with that idea, but I really really want to play around with that aspect.

One way I learnt you could roughly explain typography, is a bunch of rules that you can apply to the alphanumeric characters.

I personally really like when the type seems to focus more on concept/abstraction than on legibility, but I also like when even through all that, it’s still very functional.

The one above feels like it’s dipping in that territory. It’s also reminds me of the font associated with Tyler the Creator, often referred to the ‘boxcutter’ font, reminding me that concepts can come from anywhere.

Now for some ‘handmade’ fonts.

As seen above, playing with depth, embossing, shadows, alternative materials and environments are just some of the ways that ‘handmade’ typography has it’s own distinctive qualities.

Having typography manifest in the ‘analog’ world gives it a very tangible and captivating aspect, which doesn’t quite seem to occur with me in digital typo.

As with most projects, I’m often worried about my ability to execute the ideas I have, and cultivating the discernment to know where my boundaries lie is something I’m having to discover out every time.

With the references I’ve collected so far and those that I have yet to amass, I hope to be able to find the apex of inspiration and ability :T

Also, as much as possible, I’ve linked the artist’s page/WIP/similar works in the images, so just click on the images to get to those pages~