Day number 2, Bauhaus and Zoo.

On the second day we were up bright and early again (after another nights drinking and an aborted attempt at going out to a club) and headed for the Bauhaus. This was the part of the trip I was looking forward to the most after seeing the itinerary, as I felt it would have the most relevance to design. I was impressed with the gallery, in particular the photography by Andreas Feininger, which was absolutely stunning.

After the bauhaus seven of us headed off for the zoo, finding it after eventually gleaning directions out of a poor confused german bloke...

"excuse me, do you know where the zoo is?" "huh?" "the zoo??" "say it slowly..." "um, zoooo?? Animals?" "Oh!! The zoo!"

The zoo was absolutely incredible, better than any I had been to before (although we're hardly spoilt for choice with zoo's in Cumbria) and we spent a good four or five hours in here, before heading back to the hotel.

That night we ate out at White Trash, a quirky german bar/restaurant with an odd menu,

"Fuck off fries, anyone??"

Before heading back to the hotel for another night of drinking, resulting in the seven of us that went to the zoo going out in search of some nightlife. After heading towards Alexanderplatz we asked a German couple where to go, which resulted in yet another confusing conversation; 

"Excuse me, we were wondering if you know where there is a good place to go out around here?" "Ja, white trash." "We've already been there tonight, we were wondering if there's anywhere good to dance?" "I think the weekend ist gut?" "We're not here at the weekend, sorry, do you know anywhere good for tonight?" "Ja, ja the weekend is gut" "Nooo..." Turns out the club was called The Weekend, and it was 15 floors up one of the big buildings right in the centre of Alexanderplatz. After eventually finding it we had an epic night, German techno all round, the novelty of indoor smoking, and some luxury toilets which frankly, amazed us. (Free perfume, hair products, hand cream, and a black marble decor).

Berlin, baby! 17th - 20th March '09

I'd never been to Germany before the trip and really didn't know what to expect from Berlin. I was really looking forward to this trip as I hadn't had a holiday in three years and couldn't wait to experience a new country. I also had a feeling it would be a good bonding experience. 

After a long and eventful journey (for some reason during the plane landing I thought I was going to die, perhaps due to the fact the pilot seemed to want to drop us hundreds of feet at a time with no warning, so my stomach was literally in my mouth) we finally made it to the hotel. I was expecting some kind of shack seeing as the trip was so cheap, but was pleasantly surprised to find a decent hotel, complete with reception area with a bar, music, computer and the knowledge we could bring our own booze there. After going in search of food and finding a freshly made pizza and beer for 3.50 we got down to business in true Brit abroad style. Namely drinking games. Next morning, after much hilarity and probably more alcohol than is healthy, we were up bright and early and left for the Jewish museum. My favourite thing about the Jewish museum, aside from the architecture of the building itself, was the 'Fallen Leaves' exhibit. This was made up of over 10,000 solid metal faces on the floor, some large and some with baby-sized proportions. This had a really eerie feel to it, as the echoes of the metal faces clashing together as you stood on them ricocheted off the walls of the enormous room that contained them.

Type Design

I've just realised that I haven't made any mention of the type design workshops I've been doing. Basically, we've had a visiting lecturer called Sally Castle coming in to teach some of us how to design a typeface. Sally gained her first job at Pentagram as a second year student purely on the strength of a typeface she designed, so maybe this will be more useful than I anticipated. Basically we began sketching out designs on to tracing paper, then scanned them in and used the FontLab Studio program to start drawing our letters. Although time consuming, I'm quite happy with my type design so far. It needs a bit of tweaking, but after printing out a 'waterfall' (a sheet filled with my typeface, getting larger and larger) I found my font scales down really well, in fact it's still just about legible even at 5 points. The image is of my rough draft before I scanned it in. I'll upload my final typeface once it's finished.

Mmm...Type Radio, Now We Are Talking!

The dust has barely had chance to settle on our flash animation, and here we are again, at the start of a new unit. This is another unit I was anticipating, as I've seen some of the second years type radio articles, and was highly impressed with them. 

So far I've picked Vince Frost out of a hat (yay!), begun the laborious task of transcripting his interview (I can only seem to remember about 3 words at a time, so that involves a lot of stop/starting) and done a couple of sessions of InDesign (definitely better than Quark, in my opinion). So far I'm feeling positive about this unit. Magazine design is definitely something i'd be very interested in doing, and what better opportunity to see how well I can do it. 

I must say though, if I hear the words 'ya'know' one more time I may well throw my Mac out of the window. These words seem to make up 80% of everything Vince Frost says, and it's starting to wear very thin. That aside, he does seem to have quite a dry sense of humour, which is keeping me slightly amused throughout this task.

I guess there's not much else to say at the moment, so i'll leave it at that for now.

Hamish Muir

Today we had a lecture from the typographer Hamish Muir. I wasn't aware of his work until I heard about the talk, but after getting a bit of last minute research in (basically in the half hour before the talk) I found I did recognise some of his design. I must admit, I wasn't overly keen on most of his work, but still tried to keep an open mind. I must say I was quite pleasantly suprised with the lecture, I found it quite interesting. These are the notes I took;

• Bournemouth College of Art, 1975 - 1976
• Bath academy of Art, 1976 - 1979
• Basel School of Design, 1980 - 1981
• Moved to London in 1985, started the company 8vo with two others.
• As a collective they treated type as image, all in the days before computers were used for design. They designed everything by hand, layering up paper until it was sometimes 20 sheets thick.
• The company name, 8vo, came from the printing term 'octavo'.
• The most important lesson Muir learned was to always work full size.
• You don't always have to have 'big ideas'. Small ideas/responses often work the best.
• Unica, typeface commissioned by Haas. Mix of Univers and Helvetica.
• As a company they created the Octavo International Journal of Typography, which was a very limited edition series of 8 journals, some of which cost up to £200 for an issue.
• Muir regards Wim Crouwel as being the best typographer ever.

Animation; Done!!

Well, i've finally finished my animation, after weeks of stress and several episodes of Flash rage. I feel this has been one of my strongest units so far and I'm pretty happy with my animation, although I wish I could have added some music to it. I had a song picked out, but then heard we had to seek permission from the artist to use it, and I had no idea how to do that. I'm going to get that done though before uploading my flash to my online portfolio (which doesn't actually exist yet). I'm also going to go on to create the other two statistics, and have an intro scene which is used to navigate between the three stats, using buttons.

Aside from the usual difficulties I have picking up new software I felt the most difficult part of the unit was learning to think in moving images, which is something i've never done. I feel I've picked this up now though, and definitely want to use flash again, both in university/working world projects, and personal projects.

All I need to do now is create an advertising banner, plus a website/portfolio for my ABC. 

Visual Elements

I'm going to animate the chalkboard at the top so the text appears as if being written. The 'bin' and 'yogurt' are visual elements to illustrate the statistics, and the 'UK' is part of the animated text.