As my college is in Elephant & Castle, I thought I’d start in it’s borough of Southwark. The borough itself, while not the largest, can feel like it with lots of different places packed into a couple of postcodes. the borough has gone through a large regeneration over last decade or so and has become a large visitor attraction, home to some famous places (London Bridge and Borough Market to name a couple).
While walking through the borough, I noticed there is quite a difference between the area of Elephant & Castle and the London Bridge area. The first thing I noticed about the area is that it’s quite grim. Lots of concrete, lots of grey and just not very pleasant in general. It sort of feels like walking around Hackney; bag firmly strapped to chest and head down. Walking through the underpass to uni isn’t great…it smells like piss and there is usually a homeless person lying against the wall. It isn’t the most welcoming area.
Looking at LCC.
Photos this way…
As part of the Ice Breaker project we did in the first couple of weeks, we have to continue the work individually (ISHE project). By the end of term, I’ll have created a catalogue of my work.
As the Ice Breaker project took us around one area of London and involved the use of the colour blue, I wanted to continue this idea. Some ideas from the project area:
- Researching and photographing the 12 inner boroughs of London:
- Camden
- Greenwich
- Hackney
- Hammersmith and Fulham
- Islington
- Kensington and Chelsea
- Lambeth
- Lewisham
- Southwark
- Tower Hamlets
- Wandsworth
- Westminster
As London is a diverse, expansive and multicultural place, I want this project to convey how each area differs from one another.
- Use of colour in London
Colours of street signs you see everyday to the odd shop sign in a random shade of teal. I want to look at how colour effect us whether it be on a shop, the street or what someone is wearing. In London, the colours you see most often are Green, Red and Blue (probably in most places) but especially since Blue & Red is used in our Transport system. I might look into if certain colours are used most often in certain areas?
- Following on the use of colour, maybe allocating colours to each borough. Each borough is very distinct in their own, as are the people from each area. I could go around and ask people from London what colours they think suit each area.
Our workshop was about the LATCH theory created by Richard Saul Wurman.
L ocation
A lphabetical
T ime
C ategory
H ierarchy
After doing some group activities/discussion about the theory, we were told to put all the candy we brought with us onto a table. We each grabbed a couple of handfuls of candy and took it to our tables and laid them out on plain white paper.
Colour workshop! It was a lot more interesting than the Grids and InDesign workshop, thank god. Spent the day researching colour and sewing pieces of felt. The first thing we did was be given a brief with different titles such as Mixing/Colour, Spectrum/Colour and so on. My groups brief was to create ‘3 educational items of clothing that explain Chevreul’s colour wheel. Differentiate the 12 colours - primary colours from secondary and tertiary colours.’
After the long morning about grids and their structures, we then had a talk about InDesign and did some experimentation with text on the program.
We tried out a few fonts, a few that were appealing and a few that were less aesthetic. I just used some headline I read in the Metro, heh.
BTW, this is a picture heavy post :p
First workshop of the next 5? weeks. Grids. Yep.
We first talked about the anatomy of a grid -
And then types of grid…
- Manuscript grid
- Column grid
- Modular grid
- Hierarchical grid
Friday was…boring. We put everything together, went to a talk/snorefest and then put our pieces up for the exhibition and then waited for over 2 hours for the exhibition to start. At least I got to nap a little after pulling an all nighter. Printing photos takes a lot longer than expected.
We decided to used stacked boxes as the base of our work, mostly because the back of the piece is cardboard and suits the colouring of the work, and plus, no one else used the boxes.
I missed my CTS session on Thursday because I couldn’t find my oyster card for an hour, but once I did I went in to meet with my group and we went over what we needed to complete for the exhibtion on Friday.
We decided the main piece would be 6 x 5. Each word is typed in blue on an image of denim with a yellow filter and is around the size of a regular photograph. These are the first two lines of the text. Each photo opens up like a booklet and has facts, synonyms and definitions of the word.
Some pictures inside :)
We interviewed two people outside of the building, Simon and Bibby. We chose them as they were both wearing blue. We asked them questions such as “Do you like the colour?”, “What do you think of when you hear the word blue?”, “What does the colour remind you of?” etc.
Our main idea was to have a small booklet as part of the exhibition piece so that we can show didn’t facts/stories/images that relate to the word ‘blue’. One of the pages will be photographs of the colours blue and yellow; yellow is considered the complimentary colour to blue (aside from orange). Ieva and I took photos seperately and these photos were taken on my trip to meet with my best bud, Imo.
For the ISHE project, we had a workshop on storylines and narratives on Friday, which I missed. The idea was to use what we learnt during the workshop and create a narrative with our research on the blue plaques.
This was the main idea that the other guys came up with.
On Tuesday, only one person in my group turned apart asides me. Ieva and I planned what we could do to display our work and the night before on facebook she had the idea to expand on the idea of ‘blue’. We started with the basics; the colour, where we can see it, it’s use in everyday life etc.
