Experi-paintings

Broadway Boogie Woogie - Mondrian

Inspired by the paintings of Mondrian, I decided to do some experi-paintings of my own. 

Mondrian's paintings are mainly compositions of lines, shapes and colours. It is hard to see his inspirations coming from real life, though I daresay most of them are. One painting that is known to be inspired by real life is the Broadway Boogie Woogie. This painting is Mondrian's interpretation of the city grid of Manhattan and the boogie woogie music to which he liked to dance. 

I decided to take some photographs of London and try and capture the essence of those images using only lines, circles and squares. Here are some of the results.

What I liked about these experiments is that even without the reference of the image, the result is makes an interesting composition. I do feel that even devoid of the colours and drastically simplified, the compositions do capture the essence of the photograhs. The next step would be, possibly, to add some colour. Will leave that for another sunny day :-)

The Van Doesburg Formula

Something really interesting I came across while reading up on Van Doesburg. 

Remember this image by Van Doesburg that was on display at the exhibition at the Tate? It seems like nothing more than a very balanced succession of squares..... showing perspective or distance, perhaps?

But apparently, there is a formula behind these squares that make them so splendidly balanced. It's based on a 'recursive' formula. Basically, the sides of each square and the distance between them are half the size of the preceding square.

Hence - the second painting exhibited alongside the one above (I did wonder!) which shows that he actually did the math before the seemingly innocuous painting of a bunch of black squares!

Song without Words

Does one need to see an actual image of a race car to comprehend 'speed'?

Is the image of a seesaw one of the only means to convey 'balance'?

These, I feel are the fun part of exploring the fundamentals of visual grammar. Stripped of imagery and symbolism, how can an emotion or a concept be represented with help of only lines circles and squares.

The following are some of the such examples. One concept conveyed with the help of 1) lines, 2) circles and 3) squares.

Motion:

Distance:

Growth:

Faking Depth

The introduction of gray to the BW palette conjures up a feeling of depth (while totally playing tricks on your eyes!). 

My experiment was to take 1 large black square, 1 large gray square, 1 small black square and 1 small gray square and moving them around a large white square. I created a basic composition with these squares :

Left : The squares of colours used for the experiment. Right : The basic composition that was the starting point.

So now, I started moving the squares around to see what happened. To my amusement, just by moving the larger squares (and not touching the smaller ones) I was able to create a few compositions where it seemed like I had moved all 4 squares (while I had moved only 2).

I really liked the one on the extreme RHS as it gives a really good feeling of depth. Also, I think, it was the one where one is least likely to believe that the small squares from the original composition were not touched.

Visual Grammar 101, 102, 103

Christian Leborg, in his very compelling book, Visual Grammar, says that it can help you speak and write about visual objects and their creative potential, and better understand the graphics that bombard us 24/7.  

Consciously and subconsciously,  knowingly or unknowingly we are constantly influenced by the visual world that surrounds us. Every individual has created their own visual dictionary influenced by these outside elements juxtaposed with our inner personalities. A red circle can symbolize 'stop' for most, but to me, it also signifies the Indian 'bindi'. 

Basically, to understand the working of this visual language, the best method that has helped me immensely was  to do meticulous studies of lines, circles and squares till I went googly eyed! The relationship between them, the effects on variations of thickness, colour, orientation.... I can go on and on... 

Here are some examples of my studies :

Lines, circles and square of varying sizes

Adding a little bit of variation by changing thickness, size or colour changes the visual language quite drastically :

Keeping the lines, circles and squares within a grid, but playing with colour, subtraction, placement or orientation.....

p'A'per clip

Very impressed by Oded Ezer's work in general and this work with 3D typography in particular, I decided to experiment with 3D typography myself. It was quite simple really.... I took 2 paperclips and folded them into the letter 'A' in plan view. It was the elevations that were interesting......

 

The Icons of Design - The 20th Century (Prestel)

I picked up this book to see if I could find a co-relation or a pattern in the evolution of 'good' design in the 20th Century. Or even to get familiar with what was considered 'good' in the first place!

The foreword of the book drew analogies between Christian icons and Design (in general) icons. I was amused to see myself agreeing with some of the analogies :

"... there is a clear and structured interaction between the believer and the icon..."

The common theme, according to me,  in the visual appearance of 'good' design was plain ol' simplicity! There might have been complex mechanisms and ideas driving the structure and the creation of the product, but, visually, they were brilliantly simple. 

Simply brilliant!

The Power of Posters - Margaret Timmers

Aubrey Beardsley

What I picked up from the library shelf as a simple browsing book, turned out to be quite an interesting read. It has a fantastic collection of posters along with stories, trivia and a little bit about the social climate which may have lead to a particular design. A definite leaf through - especially if you are interested in poster design.




On the left is a poster that folded up as the program as well Loved the use of colours and the 'dots'. Also loved the story behind it. apparently it was one of the first posters where the image had absolutely NOTHING to do with the content of the play. It had caused quite a furor in those days.


Came across a really interesting quote regarding this poster :
Some gazed at it in awe while others jeered at it, but that in its power to provoke attention, it had succeeded as advertisement
-Charles Hiatt

E. McKnight Kauffer

Another one that I absolutely loved was a poster design by E McKnight Kauffer for a traveling exhibition arranged by the circulation Department of the V&A in 1973. I could not get an image of the poster, but I did manage to get an image of something similar, that I think is very cleverly executed.

Just a really strong poster with a very strong grid. The grid being defined by placement of text, inversion of colour and use of colour 

Split Personalities

Being intrigued by the person that was Eric Gill, I decided to take a closer look at all the fonts that were designed by him. I thought his serif fonts were quite fantastic. From the quietly confident Perpetua, to the attention seeker - the Floriated Caps; I think Gill instilled strong personalities in his letter forms. 

Perpetua | Joanna | Gill Floriated Capitals

I thought it would be an amusing study to mix these 'personalities' and see what resulted from them. I decided to dissect the letters in half and then mix and match them to each other. What was really interesting to note, and what I learnt from this experiment, is that some important element of the letters always matched up to each other. It could be that the top of the cross bar aligned, or the peak coincided. These subtleties would not have been apparent by just looking at the letterforms in isolation.

Floriated Caps vs Jubilee

Perpetua vs Joanna

Joanna vs Floriated Caps

Jubilee vs Perpetua

Superhero Gill S

I had a lot of fun with this one. I made little placards of letters on trace paper so that I could overlay the different kinds and decide for myself which was the most interesting overlay. Came up with some really fun stuff which led to creation of completely new letters which I hope to use someday when I write my superhero Gill comic strip :-)

Analyze that : Getting somewhere

The various analysis diagrams got me addicted! I decided to keep going with the family of Gill Sans a bit more since there were both similarities and differences to map out. And the more I analyzed, the more I knew I was getting somewhere. Had no idea where yet, but was sure it was somewhere!

This exercise finally led me to a much better understanding of how a font family worked. What were those intrinsic qualities that made a letterform a part of a 'family' and what elements could be changed in it to make it either 'bold' or 'italic' without losing its essence.

Now I was analyzing with a wee bit more understanding.....

Simple Analysis by overlap

This one is quite simple. After trying out various different 'A's belonging to different typefaces, decided to do the same analysis with A's from the same font family. I decided to go for the font family of Gill Sans.
Figure 1. is achieved by folding the paper as shown in Fig.3 
I felt these analysis gave a really good sense of the volume of the letter.

Analysis Diagrams

This was basically an exercise in analytically studying the peak of an A. I took a few 'A's of varying shapes and sizes, cut them up along the base of their cross bar and studied the resultant top half. The images with the dots are not random! They are very careful and meticulous analysis of some point of the letterform with the chosen 'A's as my reference. The typefaces used were (L to R across rows from top LH corner) : Century Gothic, Optima, Helvetica, Impact, Bauhaus 93, Baskerville, Lucida Calligraphy Italic, Monotype Corsiva, Harrington, Eccentric Std, American Typewriter, Lucida Blackletter and Scriptina.

Choosing various 'A's. 

Chopping the letter to define the area between the peak and the base of the cross bar

Various analysis diagrams resulting from comparing different parameters of the letterform

(These were quite inspired after reading Tufte's Beautiful Evidence, especially 'Dotdashplot' and '3DScatterplot'

Experimenting with Analysis Diagrams

'A' in Arial, Times New Roman, Futura, Snell, Impact and Eccentric (L to R)

After analyzing the area that defined the peak of the letter 'A', I was left with a bunch of analysis diagrams that were albeit interesting to look at, but didn't translate to anything but, well, just interesting digrams!

It was only when I compared the different diagrams by laying them on top of one another that they started giving me information that I could interpret. With this thought in mind, I decided to conduct a simple experiment.

I took the letter 'A' in 6 different typefaces, Arial, Times New Roman, Futura, Snell, Impact and Eccentric. I drew them at 100 pt font size, at which they were more or less of comparable height.

Then I took the peak as I had defined in my previous post. I repeated some of the analysis and then layered the resultant diagrams on top of each other. The result was : one image formed by 6 layers of information. The information was interesting, but the resultant images were much more exciting for me!

Fig.1

 

Basically I took the height of a letters and made a square out of it (height of letter x height of letter = resultant square). I then layered the squares on top of each other in different ways creating different images.

Again I did the same kind of diagramming, but this time with squares that were created, were done using the widths of the letters instead of the heights. The resultant images, obviously similar in nature, were completely different in appearance.

Fig.2

By comparing Fig.1 and Fig.2 we could interpret a lot of information what would not be as apparent by just looking at the letters. For example, we can safely conclude that for letters ('A' in this case) of the same height, the widths a lot less varied than the heights. The 'A' for Impact and Times New Roman, has a significant difference in height, but the widths are almost the same. Such interpretations and conclusions kept me quite busy for a while!

The Peak of an 'A':Part SP (for 'Starting Point')

 
For one of the tasks, we were meant to analyze parts of a letter. We could choose any part of any letter for our study. I chose the letter 'A' because 1) I spent waaaay too long staring at it that I never got to even the second letter, ie 'a' of the Aa Bb Cc patterned type sheet in front of me and 2) I was quite mesmerized with the various different different ways that two lines joined to form the 'peak' of the letter 'A'. So it was time to break it down. Literally.

I took the part of the 'A' between the cross bar and the peak and did a series of analysis diagrams on a bunch of different 'A's.

Tracing only the horizontal lines

Defining the area that I thought formed the peak

Outlining the shape of the triangle that formed the top part of the 'A'

so on and so forth.... 

(Quite a comprehensive online resource on parts of a letter can be found here)

Hand Rendering

I never quite put so much thought into writing my name!

The real task was to trace our names from a set of different typefaces that were provided so that we could 'feel' the letterforms. Also realize the importance of placement and spacing between the letters. I, as usual, ended up concentrating more on the tertiary task which was, to write out our names in such a way that it conveyed something about ourselves.
I love tracing! So the real task that was given, might as well have been a nice, gooey, warm, chocolate brownie! At the moment, I cannot quite remember which typefaces I used (annotation alert!), but I think they were Caslon for 'Roopa' and definitely Gill Sans for 'basu'. I used a classic serif and a classic san serif to convey my contradictions : strong but delicate, traditional but modern, or even dreamer AND a believer!
I centered my surname because I wanted to convey a 'strong base' that would visually 'hold me up'. I remember being torn about using a bigger font size for 'basu' to give 'Roopa' a bit more support. But then I remember discarding that idea because I wanted 'Roopa' to stand out much more than 'basu'. Overall, I remember wanting for it to have a balanced feel even though the typefaces used were different from each other.