Research : October 2013

summarising

Preparing ideas for the first draft. Searching for books and multi sources.

week 8

Sum-up the idea to write the first proposal draft.

From the point i'v reached i decided to put a statement talks about how people mix up government with country. I think that's half of the reality. Country is people. it's you family and friends. It's what you do in your weekend. It's the type of food that your mother cook. It's those small actions that you do and keep you one of the good guys.

So up to now I think I know what I want to do :)

So, I went around and I asked people what do you like about your country? about your society? about your life?

most of the answers i got was about gathering, religion and family.

I did ask people directly and i also posted a question on twitter and i created a hashtag called #أحب_في_بلدي

These are some of the answers i got:

Compared of what i expected the answers were not enough and didn't cover exactly what i was looking for. People thought i'm talking about country from a political point which is wrong. so I decided to change my question using different words.

week 6

This class we talked more about our ideas. We discussed some other issues like how to choose your target audience and put on a solid research statement.

I decided to change my topic a bit. I'm not going to talk about only Saudi women. I want to talk about all Saudi people as a family. I want to talk about their habits, traditions and culture. It's true that we have a private society but that doesn't upset me. Its part of who we are and i like it! and begin a member of this society would make it easier for me to work with it.

So what if my topic was about showing people what good stuff they already have? we have enough problem as anyone else but why not seeing the bright side for once?

week 6

Research proposal idea discussion. A lot of energy was there.
My first idea that i discussed was about Saudi women. I'm so upset of how people talk about us with total confidence that they know where there is no sense in what they are telling. So I thought my project could discuss the true of who are Saudi women are from an insider.
Not the typical story you want to hear but the realistic one. Most of women's rights associations talk about the bad cases they face and the interesting thing is that people who speak of the good positive values Saudi women have, are few and their voice are not as loud as the others.
I don't want to talk about all the problems that we have. We all know how terrible our life could be! But I wanted to highlight the positive aspects of the women in our society.
What did Saudi women did to themselves and to the world?

week 5

It's a presentation day. We talked about designers from 1945 tell 1980. My designer was George Tscherny.

George Tscherny is one of the few designers of his age who almost did everything in Graphic Design. He worked with packaging, advertising, poster designs and branding. He thought that the “kick” was to keep your hand on all projects and never miss any opportunity.

Tscherny is famous not only for his good design artworks but well known also for his unique way of educating Graphic Design for students and his clients as well.

He was born in Budapest in 1924 but was raised in Germany tell he had to move because of the world war. His mother was a Hungarian. His father was Russian. Tscherny is a German spelling of the Russian word for black.

In the late forties Tscherny had prospect to design a package for Proctor & Gamble. He went to the dean requesting permission to accept the job while completing the remaining assignments on the side. The dean denied. However, Tscherny, and only six weeks before graduation, left Pratt without graduating.

In 1953 George Nelson, who owned furniture company, hired Tscherny as an assistant to Irving Harper. His first assignment was to design sixth-of-a-page magazine ad. He did an admirable job, which earned him the full-page ad assignment.

From the begging of his career he has worked with the elite of design. As he said, “the most enduring lesson was not to bring preconceived ideas to any project” and that’s what he taught his student later in the School of Visual Arts, SVA.

His work was remarkable because he gave attention to the professional audience who wanted to see the product alone. He didn’t use any good-looking women in his designs; instead he used what he called “the human element implied”.

He started his own business at the age of 30 beside his career as a teacher. He thought the best way to hone persuasive skills was by teaching. And as no curriculum existed, his initial course was based on what he learned as a student and he missed. Jazz music was played in his class and he usually took students to Broadway shows.

His designs stood out because it wasn’t about the layering of type and image, It wasn’t only about commercials and money all the time, he was providing new concepts and ideas to his clients based on human psychology and abstracted ideas and he was educating them as well on that good advertising and promotions are senseless unless they treated their customers with respect and provided a real good service.

George Tscherny has done great artworks through his career life. He challenged himself with doing better work than clients thought they wanted and to educate them into accepting graphic concepts that gave their products or philosophy a better meaning that they’d never imagined.

“Elegant but never chic, serious but never pretentious, disciplined but never dull. His work delight the eye and revive the spirit,” said Silas Rhodes. He earned respect not only to himself as a designer but also to his ideas and abstracted concepts.

Here are some pictures of his work

week three

We discussed how to choose a topic for your thesis and we got 12 points to choose from as the picture above shown.

We also got the form of how to start writing.

1. Have a statement or a problem for your topic then you need to set your aims, audience, context.

2. Think of how you will achieve it? Schedule, evaluation and the output.

3. Have not less than 5 resources.

second week

This week we had presentations about designers from 1900 tell 1945. The picture above shows the most interesting ones that got my attention.

My designer was Walter Schnackenberg.

Walter Schnackenberg (1880 -1961) born in Bad Lauterburg most known for his magazine poster designs and illustrations. When looking at his work, you can tell that the serialism artists influenced him such as Salvador Dali but that wasn’t always the case. From what I saw and read there were two major styles of his work that was clearly affected by his personal life.

When he first started his designs in Franz von Stuck Academy it was all about dancers and nightclub illustrations. He was also known for his taste in fashion as he developed some different women styles. Later on his work was more conceptual, he replaced people heads with strange creatures and on some drawings he drew them without heads. He played with human scale and the idea of reflecting the dark side of people in his work.

After finishing art school he worked for "Jugend" and "Simplizissimus" magazines as a poster designer. His themes were theatre and the comic muse and I think although he did it in a really good way and his work was amazing, noticing all the basic technology they had back then, but this wasn’t his field of creativeness. However, he was taken by the market demands and that’s what usually happen when a designer begin to work.

Schnackenberg was traveling a lot mostly to Paris were he was interested in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec work. In Paris he developed his fashion style with his evident preference for frivolous ladies. He was highly fashionable in his days. You can simply understand this by imagining a French taste with a German background. At the last of his career his surreal art started to show in his work by using melting elements, mask faces and weird body shapes and gestures.

Walter Schnackenberg was a great designer with a very special taste. When looking to his work you can see how passionate he was about it and that’s what I love the most about him.

Here are some examples of his work: