OUGD401 Studio Brief 1 - Research

OUGD401 Design Skills - Research 

I began researching into the word 'Dynamic' and found numerous different meanings. I looked into my initial idea of dynamics as the form of movement and flexibility. This led me to find really interesting fonts that certainly suggested movement. They are created in such a way that it almost looks like an illusion to the human eye, and the designers habe played around with glyph outlines at various sizes and angles and created beautiful sets of decorative caps in this manner. This one below is particularly interesting to me, it is created by Graphic designer Silvia Baz and the typeface is named 'Dynamic,' it looks at creating the illusions of movement and dimension within the flat and static sheet of paper. 

This led me to look at more of Silvia Baz's work which I have really come to admire, such as posters that includes this dynamic typeface and other ones which she too has designed. Her style is particularly suiting to my research as her designs include a lot of movement and are really interesting display typefaces. They are particularly playful and uses the context and her briefs to inform her work, it creates the illusion that the letters are in constant movement and the letter is also enforced by the letters being shaped in the centre of the typeface. Such as the vinyl cover below, 'Floating points.' The movement of the typeface informs the 'floating' nature of the piece, along with the juxtaposition of the letters. This is useful to look at as it gives me a lot of useful different ideas of how to create movement within my own work, along with looking at the juxtaposition to interpret my word 'dynamic' to create a typeface that clearly defines this as Baz has done with her concepts. 

In addition to this I have also looked at animated typography. Below is the work of the design group Letters Are My Friends, this particular typeface is named 'Buchstabengewitter.' Buchstabengewitter (letter storm), is a generative typography project that transforms three-dimensional linear structures into all the letters of the alphabet. Based on a spinning circle moving around a glyph, each point on the outline of the letter is connected to a point on the circle. Through the movement of the connecting lines new patterns emerge, our eyes are always caught between realizing a lettershape or just crossing lines. I haven't been introduced into this 3D, animated way of working with typography, and I really intrigued by this way of working. I think the concept and making typography almost into an art form itself is certainly something that I would like to work with in the future. 

http://www.lettersaremyfriends.com/portfolio_page/buchstabengewitter/

 These are the works of Rosy Gorolova, and is called Lemniscate Typeface. The type uses repetitive linear shapes to form letters forms. I particularly like how Gorolova has displayed his typeface in front of this imagery below to create a poster, creating a post is something that I am looking to do, so its interesting looking at how Gorolova has placed this and the colour tones used within this to create a simplistic, content feel to the piece. This makes the typeface dynamic as it has created a sense of simplicity despite it being a complex typeface. Below as you can see, when the typeface is given a black background, the feel of the typeface is changed and focuses purely on the complexity of the letters and the curves. This suits to my research as the typeface also creates a sense of movement and continues my initial ideas of dynamic as a flowing, moving typeface.

As well as looking at other designer's work, I looked at experimental typography to explore different ways of working to produce different outcomes. In addition how type can be applied and treated in different forms other than just text on paper, and how we can interact with it in different ways. For this I have shown a few examples below.

Besides looking into other designers work, I mainly looked into the different meanings of dynamic. The first that came to mind was musical dynamics, with its definition -  'In music, dynamics normally refers to the volume of a sound or note, but can also refer to every aspect of the execution of a given piece, either stylistic (staccato, legato etc.) or functional (velocity). The term is also applied to the written or printed musical notation used to indicate dynamics' 

Another is aerodynamics, which is the study of the properties of moving air and the interaction between the air and solid bodies moving through it and the properties of a solid object regarding the manner in which air flows around it.

Another is dynamics as constant change - a constant change in activity or process and/or a force that stimulates change or progress within a system or process.

Finally, there is dynamics as a form of versatility, and a positive in attitude and full of energy and new ideas.