A Visual Diary

Today has been the day where I begin to tackle the Visual Diary, now I don't particularly know how this is supposed to function but the way I interpreted it was that I was to put together a visual diary over the course of this 'Part'. It does advise that you: take pictures of graphic design that inspires you, collect leaflets and flyers, magazine articles and posters. Now in terms of real-life design, I wanted to leave that to chance, if you go out searching for something you'll probably end up not finding it. So for today, I searched the web. I tried to put together an array of different media as well as design from different eras. This is going to be me reflecting on it and hopefully, I can update this blog post every time I collate more images.




These first 5 are images I found whilst browsing Pinterest, the main focus was to find images inspired by the 60s. I love the vibe of 60s design, I briefly talked about it in my previous post. It's mainly the neon colours and blocks of black, whether it be behind lettering or shadows in illustrations. This acted as a contrast to the harsh colours. Although there was a large mixture of bright colours used in the 60s there was also thought put into combinations of colours. A dominant recurring theme was red and blue and colours that sprout from these such as green and pink. There was also this idea of freedom, a lot of the time design in modern day follows very strict ideas, now this works for more commercial design as this is what the average consumer responds to better. I feel like my own visual language reflects this idea, where possible I like to be more experimental. This is something I really want to shine inside this part as from my feedback from my last assignment the overall response was that I need to sketch more, this is something again I want to fit inside this unit, I want to really get as many ideas out of my brain as possible. I think overall this is one of the eras of design I respond well to. I feel like designers were defiantly more experimental and creative as a whole in this era. Today I look for designers who feel the same way, in a world full of 'Helvetica' designers I want to at least learn and strive to branch away.















These are a few really cool rave posters, again featuring a lot of 60s-80s inspired design trends. A really cool feature of these is 'vibrating' colours. This is achieved by adjusting the shade of colours from light to dark, which creates this 'dizzy' effect. Its very much inspired by hypnotising techniques. A lot of these homages to this era of design feature a lot of almost references to products such as cereal, toys, TV and film, they increase the intensity of the psychedelic features to overall increase the vibe of the 60s.













I wanted to get a couple different medians included as well in my research, this is a collection of old Penguin book covers. The reason I like this so much and wanted to include them in my visual diary is the simplicity of the design, I think these types of book covers should be respected as they aren't just a direct visual of the characters in the book like so many modern book covers. They try and represent the thoughts and messages in the book with objects and shapes.















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