In a recent collaborative brief, I decided to use a technique known as liquidation to distort a piece of artwork to use in a series of poster designs. This is fundamentally a tool for abstraction, a theme which is intrinsically linked with postmodernist aesthetics and deconstructionism within graphic design practice.
The reason I am highlighting this work is because I feel it is reflective of certain external influences on my current design practice. If I think about it truly, I can't really think of a proper justification behind the choice to 'liquify' the artwork. There was no real logical reason behind it other than to make it look quirky and mysterious.
What interests me here is the motivation behind the design treatment, what are the conscious and subconscious influences at play here?
Distorting the artwork does make it instantly more visually appealing as it demands participation from the audience; they are forced to do more guesswork than usual as they are confronted with an abstracted representation of a text. This could be the motivation behind using the liquify tool.
However, I believe it to be more profound than that. I believe I decided to use the liquify tool because I have the freedom to. Protagonists of postmodern graphic design, in particular deconstructivist design, allowed me to have the freedom to abstract beyond recognition. In addition, the accessibility to personal desktop software, facilitated by the rapid development in technology has provided me with this freedom. Without these factors, perhaps I wouldn't have taken the approach I did.
Expand
No comments:
Post a Comment