Here we are in the final project for the RCA Graduate Diploma. We launched the Launch project today, to give us an idea of how to put together our final works in a group publication. The publication is an exciting challenge for me as I ultimately got into visual communication in order to create works that would live in publications. However, this is also slightly challenging as in Realise, I created a Zine. As a result, there is a little bit of a tension as to what I should publish in Launch: prints or a documentation of my zine. At this point, I will probably have images from both or some sort of link to the online zine. In the final critique Kyung Hwa brought this up as well: how could I display my prints as both images in a book as well as standalone wall images? Here I will confront that tension to a degree.
In the project launch, Clare and Julian gave us several ideas for how we could actualize a showcase of our works in a publication. Considering that I have worked with publications before, I feel comfortable in the creation of zine. However, I think that my group will probably seek a slightly more polished final product. I am working with a group of Comms students who include Caio, Theresa, Victoria, Yumeng, and Pingping. All of our work is quite different, so it was important to look at various publications that combine quite the range of works.
After the presentation, we went over to the South Ken library to take a look at some of the journals that they have there for some spread ideas. As our works are in the field of visual communication, I thought first to look at contemporary magazines for a sleek, polished look.
I first went to Wired to get a feel for their juxtaposition of text and image. I liked their use of graphic blocks in combination with the text. This is something that I felt suited my graphic, black and white prints quite well as well as large pops of color which are evident in the works of some of the members from my group. Additionally, they use quite varied layout but because of the blocks of color, it still feels like a unified publication.
However, in another issue of Wired (December 2019) the issue had a much wider variety between spreads and color palettes. I suppose that there was consistency between specific articles within this issue, however, the big contrast from black and white to super-saturated color made them feel, for me, a little less unified as a publication as a whole in this instance. There was a pattern of an unorthodox distribution of text between unequal columns on the different pages that was consistent between different articles, but I found this distracting with too many components.
I also decided to take a look at some more traditional art publications, and I was particularly excited by an illustration publication called 2×2. This publication housed a wide variety of works in quite the range of different templates. However, there was a unified style throughout the publication as there were clear grids using rectangles and a lot of white space with minimal text. Though colors ranged widely through the book, each facing spread seemed to have some sort of color relationship between them. As a result, it felt cohesive. This example seems like a format that we could use to house the diverse body of works that we have in our group.
Though the actual book format may not be feasible in the amount of time that we have with the given works, these page layouts were immensely helpful in diagramming how we could craft a cohesive story between such different artists.
RCA Graduate Diploma 