This week has blurred a bit due to the break.
The most exciting development was the in person course meetup in Berlin!
Sadly getting out of Cornwall takes more time than travelling to Berlin, but I got the sleeper train up to London. I’ve done it once before, but they’ve had a bit of a refurb lately and it was quite comfortable. Just remember to bring ear plugs and an eyemask!
I eventually made it to Berlin, and apart from a slight problem with my hotel’s entire network being down, started having a lovely time.
We got to meet students from every cohort and explore Berlin. It was fantastic to meet everyone and to spend time with other designers.
The next morning we met up at a great space at the top of Urban Nation, a street art museum.
Sadly the museum wasn’t open while we were there, but the entire back of the building is full of flats that they give to artists for residencies to work in for a year. It was a great space, even if it had entirely too many stairs!
Patrick Thomas introduced us to the Open Collab platform and we were set loose on the city to collect examples of imagery and text. The Open Collab platform randomly combines examples of both, layering them over a simple grid framework and generating endless permutations. This was a fascinating way to explore a new city, as we had no expectations or plans, just following our intuition and letting the day unfold.
The next day we edited our finds and added them to the platform. (Key takeaway from this, is that Adobe’s ipad apps are terrible! Spent way too long struggling to do basic things and was very frustrated. Luckily in the spirit of collaboration there was plenty of sharing going one and we all helped each other. See also fighting with the networked printer….)
The combinations were nearly endless, and we were able to keep working on the platform for a short while after returning home as well.
Here are a few examples:
We printed some of the collabs out and had a great time looking at the work with a bit of a group crit and an impromptu viewing party. It was lovely to meet everyone, and we even had a bonus tutor as Ben happened to be in town and dropped by for the evening.
We ended up with a bit of a free day on Saturday, but I spent the morning well exploring a fantastic art alleyway…
where I got way too excited by a repurposed cigarette machine dispensing random pieces of art!
Afterwards we all met at the Buchstabenmuseum, a museum of display type. This was truly a magical place for a bunch of typographic nerds, and I think we cleaned the gift shop out entirely!
Despite an absolute nightmare journey home, I thoroughly enjoyed Berlin and would love to go back!
Critical Report
My critical report is starting to take shape. I had meant to work on it more during downtime while travelling, but instead I spent two hours perched between cars on the train and trying to avoid aggressive Italian Mastiffs.
Not ideal writing conditions…
I put the rough draft up on the ideas wall and had some great feedback from Gary. It is so interesting to compare out projects, as our starting points are so similar, but our projects have ended up being so different.
