I think that these days designers and artist in general draw their inspiration from everywhere and everyone they can. We in this design course are incouraged to. And this makes sense. In our day and age being narrow minded and stuck with tunnel vision will never get you far. You need to be open to lots, if not all the possibilities and design is one of the areas that strives in this sense. Personally I don’t believe an area such as design can be segregated into parts based on heritage. We are involved with a group of people that believe themselves to be at the forefront of our society and it seems a step back to try and keep things PC. In saying that though I think extreme care needs to be taken with cultural aspects of design. For example Im half New Zealander, half Canadian with a bit of Hawaiian tossed in. Does this give me the right to use Hawaiian designs in my work? I don’t think so. Especially with the little knowledge of Hawaiian art that I have. Maybe if I studied it more in depthly and knew what I was doing then yes but otherwise I wouldn’t feel comfortable. Even though in a genetic sense I do have the heritage. But to me I don’t think heritage and cultural background has that much effect on me and my work. To be honest I didn’t feel the desire to be a designer until recently. Ever since I was young I wanted to be a surgeon, a marine biologist and a pilot. Obviously all three would have been quite the mission however I do almost have a private pilot’s license and watch enough animal planet and discovery channel to make David Attenborough feel dumb. And while its probably obvious from my work that I am a New Zealand designer I feel more strongly that a lot of my design comes from my interests in other things as well.
Nick Bollen
This blog contains my attempts at drawing in DSDN101
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Some more favorites.
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Kaupapa Maori Design
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My letter is quite big so for the detail shot I had to chop up some of it and only include the text showing my suggestions.
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For the letter part of the project I decided to write to DC Comics in regards to the superhero they created known as “Aquaman”. I thought it would be quite cool to put the letter in one of their comics as the characters saying it so this meant the text is quite small. Its a lot easier to read if you go the high resolution picture.
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The precedent artist I chose for this section of the project was Petros Voulgaris and his work can be seen here
http://www.typographicposters.com/#/petros-voulgaris/
I liked the grungy, weathered look of his work which I think would make the posters seem like they have been there for years. I also liked the simplicity and the bold use of colour in his work. I tried to show some of these features in my poster which is about “function over form” in regards to matches and a zippo lighter. While a zippo may look cool and stylish, matches do the same job but for a couple hundredths the price. I tried to emphasize the matches a bit more by making them more colourfull than the zippo but without detracting from the grungy look of the poster. I made the font for the “form” section out of parts that make up a zippo to give it a more metalic and industrial feel as well. I thought a fire hose was a good place to install my poster because they contrast one another in the way that the poster is almost promoting fire and the fire hose is obviously not.
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When I was developing my ideas for this part of the project I tried to focus on what can be described as Hell in the society we live in today, things like traffic jams and office buildings. But what I think is even worse is an addiction to something you hate and know is killing you. This is why I chose cigarettes as my focus for this part. I tried many ways to write “hell” on the cigarette but found the easiest way was to sew it on to the paper and then roll it. The grid its sewn on believe it or not are the tiny lines that are on cigarette papers.
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I chose this drawing because I think it shows a lot of the thought that goes into designing these boards. I tried to do a mixture of the obsessed style drawings by using only straight lines as well as a more orthographic style of drawing showing different views.
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For my six drawings I focused on my longboard. This was because there is a lot of unknown engineering that goes into them as well hundreds of hours of design. There is a huge compromise that the designers have to make between what is aesthetically pleasing and what is the best ergonomic and performance based design.
