Studio Practice 1 - Part 2.

Long time no blogging.

I have been quite busy the past few weeks which unfortunately meant that there has been a severe dip in the blog posts. I have my 21st birthday coming up so I have been spending alot of time organising it. At the same time there has also been a new brief issued, that compromises of three different options to choose from.

1. Punctuation Mark
2. The Internal Ephemeral 
3. Newspeak 

These new briefs have involved a lot of thinking and very little doing, which is frustrating as there has been little if no progress in the first few weeks which panics me.

Thankfully after a few days just thinking and not even looking at my sketchbook I thought of a few ideas for each of the options for the brief. I also spent a lot of time reading some books that helped my get a 'theme' or more an 'idealology' for each of the options.


Along with all of this research for the practical part of the course, I have also spent a lot of time refining what I am doing my independent contextual research project on. For that element I have decided to focus on taste and tastelessness in advertising with references to 'lad culture' and feminism. I thought this would be interesting as it is something that we talk about a lot with adverts going viral for all the wrong reasons.

Moving back to the current brief in question, I have finally decided (AFTER THREE WEEKS) that I will be doing the Newspeak option as I read Nineteen Eighty-Four which was a very interesting book full of themes, topics and ideas. I will begin by focusing on the Big Brother is watching you aspect of the book as in our current climate it is apparent that we are being watched involuntarily... or is it completely voluntary?
But this isn't the only question this book has conjured, I also wonder about the aspect of Newspeak in terms of today's languages, with text talk abbreviations and emoji. And then finally the book has encouraged me to think about the meaning of the Newspeak terms that are used such as 'facecrime' which involves your face involuntarily making same movements that could see you arrested for 'thoughtcrime'.

'Mystery Mugshots' 2011

On another note, as part of Pauls PDP class we have been encouraged to look into self publication. I have been focusing on creating a brand logo as you can see on the left. I feel my current design is quite elegant but I will work on it some more as to define a final brand image.