Renegade Calligraphy
The Renegade Calligraphy project encompasses the basis of my MA research at London College of Communication. The project takes a deeper look into how the letterforms found in modern wildstyle graffiti have evolved over the centuries from blackletter calligraphy that began in the 12th century. It brings to light a unique history of graffiti that had yet to be questioned. Through this this research a bloodline is traced that reaches from the present day all the way back to Europe in the 1200's, revealing that the heart of wildstyle still pumps blood rich in calligraphic DNA. The full scale of this research is brought together in detail in the soon to be released book of the same title. More information on the book can be found here.
This project has also spawned the basis for my upcoming PhD research known as the Renegade Calligraphy Urban Letterform Project or RCULP. One of the basic needs when classifying any type of letterform is having an alphabet to work from. Graffiti's ephemeral nature poses a major obstacle to this documentation, hindering most academic efforts to study its various letterforms. In its simplest form the project would seek to build an academic system to anaylze, classify, and document modern urban letterform. This project would be supplemented by building the first ever online academic library of urban letterforms establishing a formal source available to academia, artists, professionals and students. The intent is to create an ever-expanding resource of street letterform that can easily be broken down by distinct attributes just as modern fonts are classified. The prototype for the RCULP can be viewed at www.renegadecalligraphy.com
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Design Research
I am bot.
I am bot is a simple java driven web app that randomly pulls a word and image from two separate databases and smashes them together in the "I am _______." format. The concept was to take two very different subject matters and allow a script to randomly smash them together to see what kind of visual dialogues it could produce.
The images used are all from the "famous photographs that have changed the world" collections. The words have all been taken from headlines in the last three issues of Maxim Magazine (US). As designers and humans we're tasked with doing this every day - even if we're not even doing it consciously. We see a photo or anything for that matter and automatically associate it with some type of word or a string of text. It's how we are programmed from birth. For example, children's books show us a picture of a cat along with the word "cat" to reinforce our learning of the world around us. I was curious as to what would happen if we gave this ability away to some autonomous form and allowed it to just mash through it with no opinions or preexisting notions of what images should go with what text. The "i am bot" produces some quite surprising results. Words and images that I would of never have thought to put together seem to go hand in hand seamlessly bringing new meaning to their relationship. The project can be viewed at www.iambot.org
Divine Proportion
This project is based on the concept of "divine proportion" also known as the golden ratio. The research first began as a study of how divine proportion is used in the arts, design and in everyday life. But as the project progressed I began to hypothesise that divine proportion could essentially be found just about anywhere if you looked hard enough. I wanted to put this theory to a test but thought that maybe I was skewing the results by using my "designers eye" to subconsiously locate images that would work. To eliminate this issue I came up with a simple solution, I would ask others to submit random images to me. I then decided to take the 21st century approach and post up bulletins on Facebook and other social networking websites. I received a mass amount of images and began sorting through them. At first I started working with just human faces, but I continued to easily find the ratio. I decided to move to some of the more trivial and random subjects that were submitted to me in a hope that the ratio would prove me wrong. Sadly, it did not. I could find it in just about anything, including a lovely little chihuahua named Lephty. In the end I compiled some of the best works into a digital book which can be viewed here.