jake@jhollands.co.uk
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abstracted impressions (inspiration)
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“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
A Clockwork Orange
If you’re interested in typography or graphic design at all, do yourself a favour and find a way to work with letterpress for a day. Before the workshop I would have spent maybe 5 or 10 minutes on a piece of casual work deciding on a typeface, doing some very quick kerning, etc. Now I’ll give it a lot more thought.
Unfortunately I haven’t got a final copy of what I worked on that day. We had to choose a powerful first line from a novel - I chose the first line of A Clockwork Orange.
I believe that I spent over 6 hours working on the one piece of typography, and still wasn’t happy with it at the end of the day. It’s a lot of hard work; I’m used to staring at a screen tapping the down arrow key on my laptop going through fonts until I find one that worked. This time I spent maybe a few hours going through this room filled with draws of trays loaded with wooden and metal letters, trying to find one that had at least 1 W, 3 H’s, 1 A, 4 T’s, 1 S, 2 I’s, 2 G’s, 2 O’s, 2 N’s, 1 B, 3 E’s, a comma and an apostrophe for “WHAT’S IT GOING TO BE THEN,” and spent a while longer looking for a large typeface that actually had a question mark for the “EH?” and had to compromise on both of them.
I’ve never been too short to reach the typeface that I’m considering using before in my life. It’s an odd feeling.
Photos by myself and other students in the class - I just kinda let anyone there pick up my camera and snap a few shots.
“You are to choose an iconic photo which you are to re-create in the photographic studio. There are two musts: The reference must be evident; and you must be identifiable. It must be emphasised that this is not an exercise in Photoshop, but an exercise in photography and understanding the photographic studio.
Following the briefing and induction session, you are to each choose an iconic photograph from the time zone below. You may work with other students to produce pairings or group shots.”
I had to choose a photo from the 30’s & 40’s - I chose this one of Renée Perle, one of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s wives (and a famous Romanian model). Jacques Henri Lartigue was meant to be one of the defining photographers of the 1930’s.
A year ago if someone told me to do this I would have told them to fuck off, but I thought it would be a good laugh - and it was. I had my friend Verity Pitt from Make-up & Prosthetics at the London College of Fashion come in to ‘make the magic happen’:
Uncanny, I know. Some work in progress shots:
Thanks to Kat Jenkins for being the photographer on this one, I’ll end this post with her favourite photo from the shoot, and the one which I’m sure will one day haunt me during the best man’s speech at my wedding:
asked by whateveridontgiveafuckbitch-deaAhh fair enough, well I can’t really give any advice at all for that! Haha.
asked by whateveridontgiveafuckbitch-deaHey! I know it’s a bit cliché, but I the only advice I can really give is be yourself and be interesting, don’t hold back on it. During my interview they asked me “what is your favourite passion?” I froze up and didn’t know what to say, embarrassed myself and left thinking that I hadn’t gotten in.
It’s a great course if it’s what you’re after - a totally different approach to graphic design than any other University I’ve seen. If you’re really serious about making graphic design your life but don’t want to sit in an office all day designing logos and websites, you’ll love it.
I hope this helps, good luck and I look forward to seeing you in future at Chelsea! :)
“I Love to go Exploring - especially when I’m not allowed to.”
A couple weeks back we had to do a 3-minute presentation on some thing that we’re really passionate about. I decided to do mine on music, but missed the presentation day after staying up all night trying to use a program to compose some music for the presentation and consequently waking up way too late on the day.
Although being totally gutted that I had missed what looked like one of the best days on the course yet, I was glad that I missed that day for 2 reasons;
On a side note, fuck you MySpace for changing your coding and consequently fucking my old band layout right up. I spent hours on that, no one likes you anyway!
I love to go exploring. I’ve always done it and it’s always lead to good things. I had a lot of old memories written out in my notebook for the presentation, and might get round to whacking them up on here. What reminded me of this passion was my exciting experience sneaking into the construction yard to photograph my Dingbat though.
Anyway, we were put with other people and told that we had to produce a ‘shrine’ which combined our passions. The classmates that I partnered with loved eyes and film.
After a lot of thought, we decided to go for anything that might get some ideas going. We went on a blind walk from Oxford Circus to Green Park; Tarris guided myself and April while I blindly took a photograph in whatever direction I had a ‘gut feeling’ for whilst April blindly filmed. The crazy experimentation produced some surprisingly okay results;
Only post-processing has been colour/contrast.
This was an interesting start, but there was a long way to go. I can’t quite remember how I got there (and I’m really fucking tired right now) but somehow we moved onto this:
The other day I bought a powerful flashlight and have borrowed a wide-angle lens off a friend. We’re going to try to project an image on a wall with them and photograph that for our final piece - still needs a fair amount of work before we get there though. Hopefully tomorrow will show a lot of progress.
Experimentation for the Zapf’s Dingbats project.
It’s my second shoot, but the photos from my first one got deleted after they called the police.
I like some of these - I feel as if I’m on track. I’m going to go out more and see where I can take this.
Last week I went out with my friend Alix since I needed help with one of my badly-thought-out ideas. I wanted to hang my 1-metre in diameter Wingding made of MDF from a very tall lampost with cheap string.
Long story short, when we finally got it hanging and began hoisting it up, the wind started to blow pretty hard and the bloody thing almost took out a window at which point we cut it down and accepted that it was a silly idea.
I’m not done with it though - you’ll see it pop up here one or two more times in the next fortnight.
This was finished a while ago, but I never actually posted the final result.
I can’t actually say I’m proud of it at all - I think I started going down the wrong path earlier on - possibly when we were told to create 100 logos. I never really crossed over to the abstract stage like a lot of other people which allowed them to come up with a much less literal idea for their message.
That’s the problem with a lot of my thinking at the moment - it’s too literal. It comes back to me a lot in my feedback, and I really need to escape it.
My brilliant go-to solution for a runny nose when no one is around.
On a less amazing note, I haven’t posted anything in a while. This is partly because I didn’t want to post anything after my first post to make it over 100 notes and somehow make it right up to 1,000. So thanks for that current followers, and a friendly hello to my new followers.
I have a lot of work to be posting over the next few days, a couple of stories to tell, and I’ll be back to posting regularly over the coming days.
I’m leaving London for the weekend and heading back to my happy little village to celebrate my 20th birthday with my family and friends back home - can’t wait.
Happy thanks giving, ‘Mericans!
