Category: Sketchbook

Futurism does not use photographs or drawings within it’s designs, instead designers of the Futurist era use text and shapes to create images. As shown in the posters below, the way the text and shapes are placed and layered on top of each other creates visual images. They use visual metaphors of speed, movement, violence, technology, energy, dynamism etc.

The scattered placement and overlapping text and shapes was very uncommon for the era of Futurism, it embraces ‘avant garde’ and forward thinking design. The ‘random’ and scattered effect also has connotations with noise and energy. The shape of the text moves from large to small or small to large and plays with the idea of speed and movement, with the text moving across the screen. The Bold colours colours used such as red and orange emphasise energy and power within the piece which are two of the main ideas of the Futurist movement.

I researched into the type of typography used within the Futurism art movement for inspiration for my poster. After looking through previous designs I noticed that all of them use a variety of fonts within each word, other than script or similar styles. They usually only contain upper case letters for the main headers, however lower case letterforms are also used. Each word has a range of different sized letters as well as different thicknesses. Designers within the Futurism movement abandoned traditional uses of grammar and punctuation.

All of these features within Futurist designs create images with the typography and focus more on design than functionality. The free words and letters give the impression of trains, cars and movement.  I noticed that no words had a baseline so were not in a line, each letter is placed on different lines and appears to be random. This random placement breaks the symmetrical page and the grid system and makes the design look as if theres no real structure. Futurism was also the first ‘hand made’ looking art form so the text doesn’t look properly in line.  The scattered effect has connotations with noise and which is one of the main themes of Futurism, it also has connotations with movement as it looks like the letters are moving across the page as they get larger.

As well as looking into individual letterforms, I also looked into the shapes created by the words as a whole. As seen below in my sketchbook the word goes from small to large as it moves across the page. This gives a sense of movement and speed within the design.

 

Today we looked at how metaphors within art and images convey different feeling and emotions within a piece. I learnt how to look past the obvious meaning of an image and look deeper to find hidden meanings, as well as how to use images to convey a message without the use of any words. Metaphors can be used in many different ways, for example politics, advertising, films etc.

I then used the idea of visual metaphors to design 5, a45 poster designs using visual metaphors to design a poster about Futurism. Using different coloured paper, no text or images I designed my posters to include all the most important features of Futurism to give the essence of a poster created in the Futurism era. I used lots of bold colours, and put scattered boxes across the page to act as the ‘random’ text and shapes used in Futurist posters. Futurism is about speed and movement and I tried to convey that through the use of size in my poster. I also tried to convey the idea of nice within the poster using the scattered text and images.

I think this exercise was helpful in giving me ideas about my final poster design. It showed me how to take ideas of speed and movement and add them into my design using size, colour and the layout.