During this project I had to create a Swiss design inspired movie poster for the Helvetica film, a magazine spread in the Dada style, and a Now TV animation in the “Pretty Ugly” style. All these pieces present a different art style, I had to research each and determine common design choices within that style. This would allow me to create my work to convincingly reflect the style.
The first thing I designed was the magazine spread in the Dada style. The piece had to relate to the magazine article which was about how death sells. The piece had to reflect the theme of death and resemble the Dada style. I collected a range of images that could represent the theme death, but I wanted them to look like illustrations torn from old books. I thought of skeletal and anatomical diagrams and medieval depictions of the Grim Reaper. I chose images that I thought suited the absurdity of Dada and edited them over the top of a collage I made and scanned into the computer. I decided to give the work a rusty orange-brown colour scheme that I feel represents the Dada style well. I think this artwork was very effective in putting across the theme of death and I think I mirrored the style perfectly, it resembles a handmade collage allowing it to look almost like an original Dada artwork.
I created a movie poster for the Helvetica film in the Swiss design style. I used Helvetica font and a clean, abstract design in the background. For the background I incorporated elements of Bauhaus into the design, another art style I researched and one that Swiss design derived from. To reflect the Swiss design style in my posters, I used a minimal colour pallet, sans serif "Helvetica" font, and large areas of dead space on the right-hand side. I took inspiration from Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy and Swiss designer Josef Müller-Brockmann.
I created multiple variations of an original design for the posters. With each one I adjusted the colour scheme, arranged the objects and fonts differently and added or removed other shapes, mainly circles.
My favourite of the designs are the ones that feature red as the predominant colour because it makes them incredibly vivid pieces that could catch attention from a mile away, this is a valuable aspect for a movie poster to have. The red also complements the black and the grey well. I like the design of the black circle coming out of the H in Helvetica and how the smaller circle looks like a shadow being cast upon the background, this design is really effective as the main tittle appears to come out at you while the design sinks back and appears like a flat image with writing floating in front, this technique is more effective in some variations than others.
One thing I could change about these posters is to make the lettering lowercase so that it conforms more to the Swiss design style.
For my final piece I created an animation for Now TV in the Pretty Ugly style. I adapted a Now TV poster I had created in the Pretty ugly style on Adobe Illustrator into a moving film using Photoshop and After Effects. On photoshop I did a simple frame animation where garishly coloured circles appear over the top of the poster, each one getting larger in each frame until the last one fills the screen. Here I wanted to be able to zoom into the black circle in the centre of the “O” in Now and have the Now TV logo expand out of the black. This idea was hard to accomplish using Photoshop frame animation, so I had to overcome this challenge in After Effects where I could do tweening between frames. So, I could do zooming in and enlarging tweens to create this sequence easily and effectively.
The target audience for my Now TV “Pretty ugly” animation is generally young people that are into the kind of shows and films that Now TV has. The target audience is well suited for the use of “Pretty ugly” design because young people are more likely to appreciate the style because it’s a modern art movement with art dominantly created on computers that uses things that are familiar to young people that grew up using technology.
I arrived at my final piece idea through experimentation with the pretty ugly style in creating multiple artworks, and from taking inspiration from Pretty Ugly art. As well as other art styles such as swiss design to make something completely opposed to its ideals.
I think the final piece is successful as it appears well designed and professional, yet still retaining the distinct style of Pretty Ugly, making the piece striking and controversially appealing.
If I were to change anything about the final outcome, I feel that the design could be considered “not ugly enough” and I could have done things like using unappealing font and unorthodox placement of letters.
