Category: Cross Year Studios

During the workshop, we’ve run a lot of interesting conversations and discussions on the speculative term “Place-based Graphic Design Publishing”. What does it mean place-based publishing? How it can help us and our work as a designer, or what are the existing examples of works that utilise place-based publishing in their work? We also talked about the changes that are made to the understanding of the projects by taking them out of the space and publishing and printing collecting them into a book or an archive, What do they gain, what do they lose? These were a few of the many questions we were exploring, followed by a little trip outside to look for our own notions of place-based publishing.

Articulating the term into my words, place-based publishing in graphic design is a form of publishing, that utilises the surroundings and the place it is positioned in itself as a way to deepen the experience and the understanding of the audience while utilising and realising the connections between the place and the project.

One of the examples that I found was a public gallery with photographs and texts in Coal Drops Yard about Scientists. It was connected to the place, as the gallery was unfolding the Scientists’ daily work happening in the buildings surrounding the space. Placing the gallery in this space, allows the audience to realise a deeper connection to the place they are in, it gives them a new set of glasses to see through when looking at the surroundings and the big, quiet buildings around. It offers the audience a new information about the place, coming from it’ß cultural or societal background.

Overall the workshop was very interesting, especially as it gave me /and also others as well) a lot of space to think about how to deepen my graphic design practice in connection to the surroundings it is placed into, providing a few great examples and inspiration for positioning my design practice.

I’ve attended another cross-year studio workshop, this time with Michaela focusing on Gestaltism principles and how we can apply them to our work, and to a collective creation, resulting in producing a printed publication at the end of the workshop. We’ve not only had so much fun, because Michaela is a great person and an inspiring tutor / practitioner, but seeing the World through optics of Gestaltism, focusing on every detail in the space surrounding us was a refreshing, fun and unique way to work. (PS. mine are the light purplish pages after yellow :))

The Gestaltism rule I was working with was the rule of PROXIMITY, which says that things closer to each other appear more related than things farther apart. I took a little twist and added a bit of my own interpretation and exploration, and focused on the rule of proximity when it comes to perspective, and how the perspective we are looking at things from, can affect if the rule is or is not applied. Was a fun experience!

On the example above you can see that when the perspective shifts, the idea of the objects being part of one group/shape (left) breaks when moving just a few steps to the left.