Manifesto Of Futurism

Le Figaro, 20 February 1909, Futurist Manifesto

The Futurist Manifesto was one of the first documents to celebrate the automobile as an object of beauty and to cite speed and acceleration as aesthetic elements. “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed,” Marinetti proclaimed.

Futurism emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life in general. The most significant results of the movement were in the visual arts and poetry. 

The name Futurism, coined by Marinetti, reflected his emphasis on discarding what he conceived to be the static and irrelevant art of the past and celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society.

Personally I found the manifesto quite difficult to read and quite shocking taking into consideration when it was published. Marinetti glorified the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed, power and movement. He promoted violence and conflict. The manifesto's rhetoric felt passionately bombastic and the tone aggressive and explosive and purposely intended to encourage anger and confusion to motivate controversy.

I also came across a video an interpretation of futurism which gives an impression and creates feeling of that era. 

First Surrealist Manifesto

After reading The First Surrealist Manifesto I got a bit confused and decided to do a bit more research on it. This is what I came across.

http://www.createtoday.com/w/significance-of-the-first-surrealist-manifesto/16252 

There Taymaz Valley very good analyses the manifesto and after reading it trough it got much clearer for me.

"Surrealism as a movement is a very important one, as it led to the survival of avant-garde ideas. The return to classical style and ideology wich had taken place in the European nations, due to lack of identity post war, had left many unsatisfied; and Surrealism gave the intellectuals the boost they needed. This move away from the materialistic and Bourgeois values of society was celebrated by the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, and it provided an alternative. The fact that the first manifesto was named “La Revolution” gave it the attraction it needed. A war that had left many questioning the system and their morals, had a direct affect on the way Andre Breton had been thinking. His experiences as a junior doctor had given him the opportunity to broaden his knowledge in areas that interested him. Fraud and his doctrine, were a big influence on the surrealistic movement. And, surrealism in turn, had an enormous effect on other avant-garde movements later in history, Abstract-Expressionism to name one.

The first surrealist manifesto of 1924, gave the movement its basis. It provided an outline of ideas and philosophy which was to be followed and improved on. It was immensely successful in its objectives, and established surrealism as a movement."

Timeout

My first ever screen print.

The theme was: year 1971.

Had to browse quite a bit in the web and library to find something interesting and something that would stand out from others. Because there were quite number of people who produced prints of Disney-Land or Michel Jackson...which I think was quite predictable.
So taking that on board I started to dig.

By spending some time on research I got an idea to use a magazine cover from 1971, maybe not the greatest option, but at least not Disneyland. At first I thought of National Geography magazine and then Times and Rolling Stone  and so on and so forth...
Eventually I came across a magazine called Timeout and one of the covers really drew my attention and I decided to use it to produce my first screen print. A bit earlier before I even started to research we had a little talk in Art Gallery Of Wolverhampton about screen printing and some two significant print-makers and one of them was Andy Warhol who was not only a print-maker.

I had the honor to produce my own version of Andy's famous soup cans ;)

Think for the very first print it looks all right :) not as bad as I thought it's going to be, because messed up a bit during the second stage of the process...

My Space!

Have tried to produce a poster that would represent and define my space.

As my space is quite limited found this project very challenging and the factor that I am constantly challenging myself made it even harder for myself to produce what I have produced.

At the time when this project was taking place I was in process of moving houses and this circumstance had a massive effect on my work as well as influences from various sources...

 

This effect of bleeding ink really influenced me and it was a base of the whole idea of this work.

The color that I used was chosen simply because it is one of my favorite colors and by adding black I think it creates some sort mood of depressed harmony.And all the thing in the poster are positioned in a way to represent some sort of organized chaos....

Horizon cover

My complete design of 'Horizon' magazine cover...

This siluete of a man on a horse is a statue of Prince Albert located in Wolverhampton and so I thought that it would nicely fit on the cover to represent the city.

My main idea was to use a flat image on the cover, so when I started to manipulate the image I could not get desired effect, it was too flat and boring. Then I thought that I should try to turn the image upside down which made it look not as horse and rider, and I think it worked out quite well. And by adding some bleeding ink effect made it look energetic and interesting.

Also the main heading was meant to rise of the base of the image and the bottom of 'horizon' was sort of fading out but when I printed my first copy out it did not work out whatsoever, maybe that's because of not good enough knowledge of In-design software, so I decided to leave it as it is.

Experience W'hampton

By the given brief had to write an article about Wolverhampton and the Black Country of minimum of 250 words and to design page layout related to the subject.
It took me ages to figure the subject what I would like to deliver and at the beginning was struggling with that and made a mistake by starting to design layout without the title.
Eventually I decided to write body of text about  general stuff of Wolverhampton which was symbolically called "Experience Wolverhampton"

After I've done some research for inspiration I have come with this layout design. In this work I decided to use an image to complete my intended design and make it even more relevant to the subject. The idea was to have silhouette of Wolverhampton's skyline.

Based on my thumbnail produced this digital version, which did not turn out to be very successful and had to be improved. Got here a salad of typefaces, no aliments and bad composition.

After taking everything on board I started to work on design and composition and came up with some interesting ideas. I completely redesign main body text replacing randomly positioned columns around a quote with two nicely balance little columns, moving the quote away and aligning it with 'hampton'.
Also positioning 'p' and 'h' so that the are joining the big 'W'

Horizon II

Have been working and improving one of my double page spreads. In the previous post I posted a rough test piece of it, which must have been improved.

Particularly had some issues with choosing relevant type face for the article and the most difficult part for me was to decide where to position the introduction copy :D
For the main body text I selected light Helvetica type face and in the first draft for the sub-headings was used another typeface which now is forgotten because was advised to use not more that two different typefaces, otherwise it would be just a salad :D  So for the main heading as well as for sub-headings it was decided to use Didot type face which became one of my favorites.

In terms of layout design I did not want to use any images so instead I tried to use type as image, think these massive 'hello', ampersand and 'welcome' look quite balanced. I arranged them more to the left hand side so that the main body text would not be all over the place.
In this design I tried, with some difficulties, to align everything as much as possible. Such us introduction is aligning with the top of the 'L' and first two columns of body text with the top of 'W' and 'l' and so on...