Monday 19 December 2016

Creativity needs time

A short video that tries to quickly explain why time is important in the creative processes. This video represents a real problem in the creative industries where clients don't fully understand creative processes, but it is also creatives' responsibility to use their time wisely.



Thursday 8 December 2016

Post-modernism design lecture

In the post-modernist design lecture given by Richard feminism was a core topic, which made the lecture much more interesting for me.

In a way I feel like modernist design fits into my way of working, designing and reasoning, but I can't agree with their political ideas and I tend to find myself more comfortable within a post-modernist theoretical frame.

Richard introduced a very interesting author (which I came across doing my research for COP) called Jacques Derrida, who talks about binary mirrors and how humanity has assigned values and meanings to things. For instance, the west is considered more advanced and civilised than the east, but the truth is that the west cannot survive as we know it without the east, and this applies to everything with the same kind of connotations. This mirrors are not to compare, but to make one side superior to another.

woman - man
white - black
east - west
speech - writing
culture - nature
present - past
art - design


men - women

active - passive
sun - moon
rational - irrational
culture - nature
head - heart
father - mother

Learned two words in this lecture: Logocentrism and phallogocentrism, both used by this author in his books, which I really need to read.

What was really interesting and mind blowing is how this could applied into graphic design to deconstruct the meaning. Richard Eckersely was very talented identifying this and making a text with paragraphs crazily laid out for the readers to find links between ideas, leaving an open interpretation to them.

It's overwhelming and at the same time makes me feel very small as a graphic designer because there is so much power in the meaning of things and it works so subtlety that the responsibility becomes obvious.

Responding to commercial briefs

This lecture was very interesting to me as I have had to learn what was taught in the hard way: by not getting paid.

The types of work one can do for free are categorised in 3: charity, good exposure, future work. None of these should make someone work for free. Even if it's a charity. If the person working for that charity is not getting any money, then the job can be considered.

In my experience working for low money only brings more people interested in your prices and not in your work, and that means people that don't really care about quality and have to give explanations if one day one decides to raise the prices.

The Flipped Classroom

The Flipped Classroom was one of the first COP lectures of this year.

In this lecture two interesting books were mentioned: 'The ignorant schoolmaster' and 'The politics of aesthetics', both written by Jacques RanciƩre, a communist writer.

The 60's were highlighted as an revolutionary decade for educational roles. Visual communication was a tool students used back in the days to protest. And it was very interesting to see how revolution visual symbols were commercialised to defeat it. At this point I realised as a graphic designer how powerful was to commercialise, for instance, the image of the Che Guevara as a way to defeat the ideas of the cuban revolution.

It was also very interesting to see how actually teacher needs students and not the other way around. We've come to believe that the teacher is the expert, the one to speak to naive students to control and indoctrinate them in a judgemental environment. On the other hand, there's is a more communist approach to education where teacher and students are equally intelligent.

An alive example of this is the School of the Damned, run by students and challenging old methodologies.

I found all this really interesting and I think LCA is pretty close of this second model, which makes me happy to be part of. This made me think about society thinks everything has been figured out when in fact there is a lot of work to do yet not just to progress, but to go against the steam.