Higher and Haya - Design & Illustration

Finally got to visit Pick Me Up this year! So many lovely pieces of work!!!! I managed to stop myself from getting most of it and left with just a few prints by puck collective…

In the briefing the class discussed the supply brief and initial ideas. It was interesting to discuss the questions on the brief with others and hear their thoughts on what people felt a notebook was and the danger of becoming too precious with what we create, and how that can take away from it’s use or practicality. I’m sure those with a love of stationary people have has this problem before, I have so many unused notebooks which I just haven’t written in cause I don’t want to feel like I’m ruining the aesthetic.

In the afternoon the class visited the London Graphic Centre in Covent Garden (where the notebooks we create will be sold to raise funds for our degree show) to look at existing notebooks and help inspire us with our own projects. 

On my way back I also had a quick browse through the giftshop at the Welcome Collection and other places I came across during the rest of the week to help inspire me too.

As I began thinking about what I wanted to create, I initially tried working with single images and started creating a site for that, but it wasn’t as stimulating… 

I then spent the next week after the briefing painfully trying to learn code and experiment with ways to create a digital response to the brief. With the time I had - the endless tutorials and failed experimenting with code I didn’t get very far.

…So I decided to make and present a video of what I would plan this website to look like (if i were a coding genius) as I felt it’s more important to get my idea across clearly.

The video shows a site where users could sign into their spotify and instagram, and by combining your top/most listened tracks on spotify and your photos on instagram, a visual mixtape would be created, merging sound with your visual memories. And then allowing others to share this with others.

The idea was well received and I’m glad David appreciated I had answered the brief in a more unique way. To develop this, I received suggestions that I could think about other ways to intergrate the 2 social networks, or maybe present it as an idea for plugin instead - on the actual last.fm website or maybe as an app on Spotify. Maybe users could be encouraged to tag their photos with a song personal to them… 

This is something I would like to work on more and develop this idea further. If I were to make this a real working site, I may have to work with last.fm data instead as their API (data) , unlike Spotify’s, is freely available to anyone.

I think this current version is more representative of the flashes of information and memories triggered when listening to music.

Few interesting articles on the relationship between sound and vision. 

• http://techie-buzz.com/innovations/when-music-is-seen-and-not-heard.html
• http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/11/do-you-see-sounds.html

Working from the range of research and the brief I drew up for myself in the previous week, I decided on making ‘visual mix tapes’. Pictures can be seen in the next post.

I swayed from the idea of creating a game for people to identify genres and playing with stereotypes there’s only so much you can do. The idea behind it was to get others to focus on the images we get in our minds when listening to music. Everyone has a different visual experience when listening to music and I wanted to encapsulate that within covers for CD’s/tapes/vinyl. Finding images where we usually find music and making that the primary focus.  

This stemmed from thought about when we actively search for music we rely on image a lot, for example; people who have a big tangible collection of music - keep the information of the cover, like the colour or the type etc. in  mind, or even when we’re looking on the thumbnails of youtube. We know the sort of image we’re looking for.

When creating these prototypes for interim, I focused on various albums across different genres and just let images come to me, I wanted to work with as many images as I could fit in a concertina style book. To decide on the images I was thinking about the look of the sound and trying to get images that would help people to identify the theme of the song or it’s genre.  I stuck with images that I collected, because after experimenting, it seemed impossible to see if people could identify genres through images. 

Feedback was to try and transfer this idea onto something digital or a combination of the two to make it more interactive - which I was really happy with, as I initially wanted to create something interactive anyway.