OUGD603 / End Of Year Show

Collaborating with Daria Buonconti, we approached the brief by deconstructing the idea of an end of year show;

What is an end of year show?

The End Of Year show aims to celebrate, emphasize and promote the results of the colleges student’s and tutor’s hard work throughout the year in a week long exhibition. It gives students, professionals and other interested parties a rare glimpse into the produce of the institution’s students.

Once a year the college opens it’s doors and invites the professional and public to witness a flourish of work from graduating students.

What is an end of year show for a contributor?

An end of year show grants a contributor the environment and opportunity to showcase their greatest work from the entirety of their time within study. It is the final product of copious work, effort and commitment.

As students, how do we view the EOYS?

We believe Leeds College Of Art can be seen as a soil, a nurturing environment aiding in the development and growth of it’s seedlings – us, it’s students. An opportunity to show the results of a year of growth reflects an end of year show.

How can this manifest itself into a concept?

Bloom. Blossom. The EOYS is a showcase of it’s produce.

Leeds College Of Art provides an environment for any creative individual to develop, soil for any flower to bloom. This multi-disciplinary environment can be represented in a variety of flowers within the promotional material, exaggerating and celebrating the individuality and diversity found at the institution.

Flowers have been a focus within every practice of art, from traditional drawings, paintings and illustrations to contemporary Fashion, Animation, Illustration and Graphic Design practices; a focus of a bloom invites every course within Leeds College Of Art to relate, an inclusive concept that unites the creative practices of all students.

The reference to a bloom and our end of year show is a concept able to be easily understood by both professional and public audiences, ensuring no target audience is alienated through complicated conceptual approaches.

The translation of the concept into the visual began with the photography we were to undertake with the help of Sally Hornby. Curating a selection of flowers that only bloom in June, to correlate with the EOYS, proved difficult to do so in February however proved fruitful. The curation of flowers that only bloom in June was an extension of our concept, the application and informing of visual communication derived from idea.   A further selection of images can be found online.

Typography

Both myself and Daria aspired for a contemporary visual language for the promotional material, to communicate and mirror the innovative and up to date work of the course’s students. Visual research consisted of both related and unrelated subjects in order to find the medium and visual language to communicate so.

A legible and contemporary font family, the typography used was intended to compliment the imagery, the irregular form found within several glyphs of Scene Pro, initially intended to be used within identity projects, complimented the natural form of the flowers.

“Work on Scene began some time after designer Sebastian Lester joined Monotype Imaging in 2000. Clean, calm, and highly legible — thus the design brief Lester set for himself. With Scene, he wanted to provide graphic designers and creative directors with a suite of fonts that would serve as a strong foundation for identity projects, incorporating what he had learned about on-screen and print legibility. Scene was developed during two years of after-hours and weekend work. The family comes in six weights with matching italics, there is a set of “semi-sans” characters to introduce more expressive word rhythms into headlines and blocks of copy.”

The intention of the layout was to be seen as a frame, a typographic layout that could be used consistently alongside the variation of photography. This constrained the possibilities of the layout as the composition of each image varied greatly. The imagery was set to be the main communication of the concept therefore the typography was to become a neutral communication tool.

The use of a consistent point size, left aligned text style was to ensure legibility when used across the range of imagery while adhering to the growing use of a similar tool in Contemporary Graphic Design ( See blog) and being visually pleasing of course.

The pitch sent to the marketing team was intended to be as concise as possible, myself and Daria decided to submit two variations of the same concept, her own and my approach. This was to communicate more than a singularity in the final outcome, for Peter & Paul to gain a greater sense of possibilities and excitement for our concept.