Idea

I was really looking forward to participating in „The Hyper Student“. Many questions had already been raised by the course description before the semester had started: „What does it mean to study design nowadays? Where would one encounter problems, and what would come easily? What are critical positions? Tell us your story through artistic-researching, critical and authentic means of editorial design.[…]“ (translated). My mind was immediately full of ideas for experimental and loud performances, staged photographs, interactive info graphics and some eye-catching room installations. Let's just say: I was hyped.

Sooner or later I had to pick one of these ideas and drop the others.
My journey started with photography.

Norman Behrendts photographic work „burning down the house“ served as my first visual orientation. It's a photographic study of Berliner graffiti writers. I was particularly drawn to the examples of his work in which he gave depicted persons the opportunity to anonymise polaroid portraits of themselves.

Without further ado I got my own polaroid camera and ordered some film. While waiting for its delivery I started taking digital portraits of my fellow students in the context of their everyday life at the FH Potsdam.

Another impressive work worth mentioning is the „Photo-Reportage“ by Bruno Munari of which I was reminded by a fellow student.

For me, this work was a perfect example of how pictures can express and communicate situations without (m)any words. It served me as a model for the composition of my pictures.

Jim Goldberg proceeded in a similar and yet completely different way when compared to Behrendt. Goldberg gave his photographs back to those portrayed to receive their personal comments and published the combined result.

I loved the honesty and authenticity of his documentation and firstly made it my goal to have the students write down their own comments about studying design and to combine image and text in this way.

While looking for more inspiration I came across Max Kersting and his work „In search of trouble“ (translated). As typical for his idiosyncratic style, Max Kersting personally commented onto photographs he found to recontextualize them. On his website his art is described like „playing ping-pong on the concrete slab of reality.“ (translated).

Inspired by his lightness and humorous results I decided to write my own comments and to give more thought to a shared imagery editorial design. From experimenting with markers and poscas to tipp ex and blackliners, it went away from handwriting to typewriter fonts, symbols and finally got a digital aesthetic. The end result was mainly designed in Photoshop and Illustrator.

In addition, I want to mention these other inspiring personalities, onto whose work I stumbled during the research for other project ideas:

Valie Export

Klasse Hickmann

DESIGN EDUCATION IN GERMANY 2023 CONTRIBUTION TO PUBLIC VALUE

Typografie im Raum

three-dimensional topography of the self

Concept

So my concept was set: 

In parallel to photographically documentating everyday life at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, I wanted to generate short statements on the subject „hyper“ in the context of studying design, and combine the results to develop a series of collages.

The last remaining challenge was how to link the students' situation with my work through written commentary. On the one hand, I didn't want to delegate the design itself to the students to take on, but on the other hand they should find the statements to be reflective of themselves. ​First I tried to write whole sentences and questions, but nothing seemed to fit.

As a course we collectively wrote a manifesto to represent our vision of studying design in 2023. We expressed our wishes directly, boldly and clearly by formulating nine basic principles for design students:

          Manifesto

1. form follows fun - create the type of stuff, where you yourself are curious about the outcome
2. talk about it - share each others' work and drive constructive discussions
3. comfort commute - find a commute routine that you enjoy
4. holistic approach - be concious about the process from creation to what happens when the job is done 
5. inspiration sources - surround yourself with people and things that inspire you and get inspired by your surroundings
6. make changes and take breaks - if you get stuck with a detail, change the environment and take a break
7. create leave repeat - oftentimes the magic happens after you think you are finished for the first time
8. know when to stop - be aware of the best point to end a project, sometimes it's good to let go and see what happens
9. Jump in a pool of cold water and don't hesitate to experiment and do what you have never done before

For me, manifests come with an ironic aftertaste. As a form of writing down goals, intentions and values, a manifest is supposed to give a sense of orientation and security. At the same time it can be overwhelming and unattainably utopian, which comes with an inherent risk of limiting its contributors. Within that challenge I found my starting point.

I based my comments on our manifesto, but decided to tackle each of its elements with a touch of irony. It is intended to amuse the onlookers while giving them something to think about in relation to their design studies. I dedicate this work to my fellow students in 2023.

Design

Later on I remembered „Lightning Fields“ and more photographic series by HIROSHI SUGIMOTO. He used overexposure in phenomenal ways.

In the context of hyperstudy, working with overexposure effects seemed appropriate to me and I came up with a completely different approach.

After cutting the image to a square format I used the overexposure warning from Photoshop's RAW converter and changed some settings to create a shape in the background of the chosen image which was part of the photograph itself.  Once I finished the process of finding a suitable shape, I screenshoted, imported and vectorized it in Illustrator with image trace. I limited the results to 3 colors and enabled ignore white, with high path and edge values to preserve the unique borders of the overexposure warning.

I wanted the lettering to blend in perfectly and particularly stand out from the composition at the same time. Through using the extracted shape of the overexposure warning as the contour for the text I achieved that effect.

For the editing I started from a clean, well-crafted font with few anchor points in black weight, the new Haas Unica designed by Toshi Omagari and published through Monotype. I then adapted the letters to the shape.

With the function Envelope Distort > Make with Top Object I started with  the shaping of the complete phrase. In addition I manually divided the shape, matching to the words or individual letters. For fine tuning I also influenced the results with mesh distortion and warp effects. In particular I used the expand option to edit in further detail. After I had achieved a legible and compelling aesthetic I reworked the outlines into interesting contours. I also adjusted the positioning of the lettering within the picture to ensure a border by downsizing the letters when necessary or manually narrowing their anchor points.

After reapplying the lettering to the photograph I still had the feeling that something was missing. I thought about changing the color or pattern of the slogan but quickly came to the conclusion that this would distract the viewer from the content. I decided to modify the original look of the images and experimented with different threshhold options. Here I make reference to a video tutorial by Doron Studio.

I spent a lot of time finding the sweetspot that maintains the right amount of noise, to achieve a balanced amount of detail. I ended up using the threshold adjustment layer with values set between 80 and 140 (editing at 8 bit), depending on the picture. I created an additional solid 50% grey layer as an overlay and added noise to it with the camera raw filter then adjusting the grain, size and roughness under_ effects_. For some motives I added multiple layers to get the visual effect I wanted. Finally I added a color fill layer with 0000FF blue 1 (0|0|255) as the opposite warning color of FF0000 red 1 (255|0|0), which I used for the letters.

I had finalized my visual concept and was able to repeat and optimize the process with several motives and texts.

I picked photographs, with which I associated points of our manifesto,  then choosing the excerpts with potential for interesting shapes within the exposure warnings. Next I scripted matching comments, which sounds way easier than it actually was.

I developed 12 different collages, but still had to decide how I wanted to use the results. Should I print the squares in a large format and spread them around the campus?  Print stickers or prepare stencils for graffiti?

After I had all the collages printed in front of me I decided to design a DINA1 poster. It was interesting to see how much one could change the outcome, just through differently positioning the collages with each other. I had also experimented with repetition. My final chosen arrangement was as follows:

Looking at the layout I asked myself how the colors would look separated and tried to split the image and snippet layers into individual posters.

Pleased by the impression I had achieved, the next step did not seem too far away: printing the results on a risograph.

Production

I had to split the DINA1 poster into two DINA2 sheets for the risograph. Also separating the colors and converting the data to black and white, as is required for risography.

I continued with my choice of color and used skyblue and red riso ink.

Werkschau

At the Werkschau 2023 I displayed the three different posters multiple times in the corner of the room. I also covered a white semitranslucent perspex disc and hung it from the ceiling.

Conclusion

This semester I have spent considerable time working out details, while designing and experimenting with less pressure. This was also influenced by the fact that I was able to take fewer courses this semester for the first time. If this is possible for you in some way, I recommend extending your studies and taking more time for yourself. Studies in Humboldt's sense, as research-based learning, and a never-ending search for truth that must be pursued incessantly, require time.

I would like to thank the participants from my courses this semester for letting me take their picture and making this work possible. Inspiration is all around us, especially in our everyday student life and on our campus.

At the Werkschau I was happy to see that I was able to reach my target audience: design students of the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. During my shift I was able to catch up some conversations about my work and answer some questions about my design process. I got a bunch of positive feedback which motivates me to use the technique that I have developed for other projects and keep working on it to get more out of it. 

Also some of the depicted students recognized themselves and talked to me about it happily. To me, that confirmed my assumption that it is truly important to somehow personally involve people in order to reach them in a targeted manner. It's just about how to do it.