Breaking The Rules (Graphic Communication/Graphic Design)

"Write a bike" by Juri Zaech

He is a specialist in typography and through his project of "Write a bike" we can see how he made series of bike designs using owners name as the frame design. This makes the bike as a personal item for the owners. We can see how he explored typography and relate it to people's personal items.

WTF Series by Minga

The group of designers from Argentina have their own style of portraying graphic designs. They add in great visual and sense of humour in their work. Their work can be seen as playful however it actually depicts our everyday lives as we clearly don't understand why such things happened to us and we recall our own WTF moments through this playful yet amazing visuals.

  

'I SPEAK FLUID COLOURS' by  Maria Gronlund

These artworks were created with Adobe Illustrator with her trying new tools each day. She uses blends and gets inspiration of the organic shapes from nature such as fire, flowers and smoke. The designer loves colours and with her experimentation of primary and secondary colours, she created a fresh impression. This is something I admire as I really love using the software and would definitely want to explore her methods.

Two-frame pictograms movie posters by Viktor Hertz

The designer created some colourful pictograms movie posters and depicting them in only two frames. The designer think as if it is a short film and he wants to summarise and visually change the characters throughout the film. In my opinion, this is a unique approach to movie posters and it is a fresh idea from him, creating something new and different.

Nerdy Dirty postcards series by Nicole Martinez

The designer portrays how love speaks with science. Her cute illustrations and nerdy phrases or pick up lines gives a fresh approach to graphic designs. Instead of love through speaking, she uses illustrations which I find it interesting and cute. I really love her minimalistic work, something I inspire to do.

PICTURE OF THE WEEK

NEW

Trying new and exciting stuffs interests me. During the Drawing Fundamentals class, I experienced just that. It's my first time actually learning to use ink with a straw even though I took up Art in secondary school. It was rather challenging to get the hang of it. It would be a lie to say that I did not have any trouble in my first few tries. Controlling of the straw and the flow of the ink is already challenging and at the same time you need to have darker areas for the shadows and lighter ones for when the light source hits. I told myself I need to get myself comfortable with this new tool. Thankfully after creative thinking class, which made me feel that exploration is something that I need to practice more often while doing work. I know that if I don't try to find different ways to improve myself, it will not help me in my work progression. Will I learn from where did I went wrong? Will I feel good and comfortable handling the tool? Definitely a no if I didn't explore. With that, I used different kinds of objects as an exploration. Objects from seashells, plants and even my water bottle. Different objects made me realise on how to control the straw even better. Being able to get that technique was all I wanted at that moment as I thought it shall be a great start for something new. Before entering the school, I definitely expect new knowledge and skills that I can put to good use and I shall say that for now, everything is giving me the good vibes. Not forgetting new friends and new environment, I think I'm off to a great start and I can't wait to go on new adventures as I go along the way. Here we go, the start of something new.

Tim Brown TED Talk: Tales of creativity and play

Most adults are very conservative in their thinking as they fear judgements from fellow peers. This is far way different from kids, who tend to care or fear less of judgements. From this talk, Tim Brown compares between adults and kids on how they work and think.


Drawing of the person beside in 30 seconds

• most of the audience(adults) were laughing at each other
• there were a few "sorry's" from them
• the reason behind these "sorry's" are because adults fear of what others might think of their opinions or work
• they are embarrassed about showing their ideas 

Playful atmosphere

• creative workplaces that make people feel relaxed and have that playful environment
• microbus meeting rooms at IDEO
• working in wooden huts at Pixar
• one of the office in Google has slide and a fireman pole to create some fun in the workplace
• IDEO founder, David Kelley created a company where all of his employees are his best friends
• having the same kind of security for work and play
• a sense of trust 

Finger blast

• pulling the finger blasts all the way to the stage
• after most did it, a few still have yet to do so
• adults tend to think and categorised everything to solve a problem
• kids tend to figure it out fast 

Exploration

• when adults encounter a new situation, they would want it to be categorised quickly and settle the problem
• kids are more open to exploring possibilities

30 Circles Test

• drawing each of the circles in forms of an object
• quantity than quality
• adults tend to self edit

Psychedelic drugs

• to test on the effects of creativity
• test before and after the drugs on 27 professionals with the question of "How many uses can you find for a paper clip?"
• they came up with interesting ideas and solutions 

Building

• kids learn through a construction way
• building play is when the hands do the thinking

Role playing in kids

• kids learn how and what to do from their experiences
• they observe and follow what others do
• this is like the process of learning the rules/ solution to solve a problem

To sum up, Tim Brown is emphasising on how adults will have a hard time of kicking their habits. Through the experiments he made, it shows how adults think and find a way for a solution to their problems. Sometimes, adults need to follow rules or a process to find creativity and prevent them from limiting themselves to possibilities. It's hard for adults to get out of the behaviour however when everyone follows a certain rules, they will all be able to brainstorm, have more creative outcomes and everything will work well. 

TAG a stranger

The task of playing TAG in public was actually more challenging that I thought it would be. I feel that it's not easy to randomly tag someone in public as you might not know their reactions. To me, our journey of doing  the activity didn't go as smooth as I expect it to be. We spent a lot of time in decision making. We didn't know whether to proceed quickly on tagging someone or not. However, we got some pretty good reactions. I still think that we can improve in future group work by making decision quickly rather than delaying. Delaying will only slow down the progression of our work. In my opinion, the way to prevent ourselves from delaying is by communicating well in the beginning. We must get ourselves organise and have it all planned out nicely. That's when the progression of work will be faster and that the group can achieve the goals set. Nevertheless, I am proud of my group members' hardwork and efforts.

We began our discussion of whether there is a relationship between play and creativity. We also discussed and brainstormed about whether playfulness can be taught or not.

We discussed and decided that we wanted to do the tag activity at a certain spot in Bugis+

Our plan was to have two of us playing tag in public. One of us is to tag a random person in public and we did just that. We got a few who ran along and a few who didn't actually bother. Here in this video we can see this young adult running with us. He actually thought that there was something going wrong. Later did he knew that it was all a social experiment. He took everything with cool and I was glad for him to do so.

To sum up, I had a really enjoyable time with my group mates while doing this activity. I am actually looking forward for much more fun activities such as this one with my group mates!