Individual Design Practise based in Sheffield, UK.
Available for commission. Working with small brands and individuals across a wide range of industries, focused on delivering alternate approaches to traditional design processes.
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Contact: sam@project-----one.com
Find Attached: @project_____one @90.6fm
Appropriate experimental processes and thorough concept development should subdue any preference for personal aesthetics and imagining outcomes in predefined mediums. Approaching ideas solely through the scope of one discipline removes the possibility of accurately representing the idea in the most appropriate way. Being reductive in our approach to creative problems and the subsequent descriptions of ourselves as a creatives can never and should never define our practice.
This practice will never station itself within one medium, but rather maintain it’s malleability in its approach to problems. We shouldn’t feel neccesity in the need to justify our ideas, but it is essential that the choices we make are not superfluous.
The terms form, colour and texture refer to three of the seven elements of design, the three that feel the most relevant to this practise. Form; ‘the shape or visible structure of a thing or person’ as well as ‘the boundary line of a material object.’ Colour: ‘the property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way it reflects or emits light.’ Texture; ‘the feel, appearance, or consistency of a surface or substance.’
These three terms feel the most relevant to this practise as they encapsulate the idea of what something is (form/shape), what something looks like (colour) and what something feels like (texture). There is nothing more, or less, to the design practice than these three core principles, it ignores aesthetic and strips an object down into its simplest terms. These terms can also be applied to any medium, style and outcome, these three universal properties are essential to this (project one)’s approach, exploring all of these options until the most appropriate one is found.
Publication
01-08-2024
Title
The title of the publication ‘Psychogeographie — Neue Typographie’ is the German translation of ‘Psychogeography — New Typography’. This best summarises the experience of the whole process, using psychogeographic ideas as a tool to navigate the often unnoticed typographic aspects of our urban environment, highlighting the role typography plays both functionally and aesthetically in our modern world.
Relevant Terminology
Psychogeography:
Psychogeography is defined as the ‘exploration of urban environments that emphasises interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes.’ It was in-part inspired by the nineteenth-century French term ‘flaneur’, a word used to describe an affluent, urban-dwelling man, who possessed the ‘ability to wander detached from society, for an entertainment from the observation of the urban life’.
One of the key theories involved in psychogeography is the theory of the ‘dérive’, a dérive is described as ‘an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants stop focusing on their everyday relations to their social environment.’ The term was popularised by the Letterist International, and most famously explored by philosopher Guy Debord in “Theory of the Dérive” (1956). It was then used as an important tool by the Situationist International, a group of political theorists and avant-garde artists that adopted this idea to combat the boredom facilitated by the modernised urban environments that were growing around them.
Typography:
Typography simply refers to the ‘art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed.’
Notes on Context
I find typography is always more apparent in places where it doesn’t make sense to us. Our day-to-day lives are filled with communicative design on signage, transport, packaging, adverts, amongst the swathe of other branded structures found in most modern metropolitan landscapes. Our accommodation of design as well as the quantity of which it exists in the modern world, to which we have become accustomed, means over time it loses its attraction and loses our attention. We often see through the design choices in which information is displayed to us, through its colours, its form, its material and its type, it becomes almost transparent, seamless within its environment. We digest these aspects subconsciously, with little attention to the finer details of how the information has been specifically laid out for us, whether it be on a music event poster, a shopfront or a street sign. Within our daily lives, we become used to navigating the same landscapes, seeing the same signs, the same shops, the same adverts and much of this repetitive visual noise blends together into a forgetful haze of information.
The environments that we so consistently spend our time in, despite their familiarity, can eventually become feature-less. Utilising the same routes for the same purposes, exposed to the same streets, parks and facades for a prolonged period of time, we stop seeing, we stop looking at the things around us as isolated structures and more as a collection of emotions tied to previous experiences. In these environments we have all of our routes mapped efficiently in our heads, never straying away from the comfort of this familiarity. We never take time to notice things we haven’t noticed before, often traversing these landscapes guided by our phones with music muffling the sounds of our environment.
By changing our environment we can alter this state of mind, the unfamiliarity causes us to reconnect with our surroundings and by allowing ourselves to explore new environments freely with no guide or predetermined route, we invite new experiences not permitted by our previous way of existing. It is only when you allow yourself to explore in this way that you can uncover the smaller details of our urban landscapes, previously smothered by the visual noise. The amount of our immediate world that remains unseen, due to convenience and efficiency is far greater than you would think, and although undertaking a process such as a dérive requires patience, it is ultimately therapeutic, physically and emotionally.
This experience can be exaggerated in environments outside the country you live in, due to the variations in architecture, culture and lifestyle. It is in these ‘foreign’ landscapes that finer urban details such as typography are more readily noticed, caused by the unfamiliarity of language we either don’t understand or are not used to seeing. When we see words in a language different to our usual expectation their physical form becomes far more apparent, some languages may share familiarity through their origin and alphabet, but when the arrangement of these letters and words do not make sense to us, we are forced to look at the words as individual structures consisting of basic shapes and lines.
Notes on Process
The process was relatively simple, this was important as it meant the experience felt as natural as possible, there was little to no forward planning, outside of what time I would aim to start the dérive. It started at an apartment in the Samariter Quarter (Friedrichshain), carrying only a compact digital camera and my phone (in case of emergencies). From this point I would begin freely choosing which way I wanted to go from there, with no time limit or directions set. I had been in Berlin two days at the point of conducting the dérive, so there would be some places I slightly recognised, but I accepted that this couldn’t be helped.
The main goal was just to explore Berlin, I tried to go in with as few preconceived outcomes as possible, and allow the journey to take its course naturally. The only fixed idea in mind was to photograph any type-containing things that I liked during the dérive, with no constraint on type of object or an amount of images I would like to end up with. The floowing details a brief summary of the experience after completing it.
‘After leaving the apartment at the start of the dérive I ended up doing a few circles of blocks in the area I started in, before dead-ends pushed me out onto the main roads going into central Berlin. I began following the U-Bahn route down from Frankfurter Tor to Weberwiese which ran only about 10m below where I was walking at street level. I then worked my way down towards the East Side Gallery, skirting around Berghain before doing a loop back on myself and headed towards, and across, the Spree via Schillingbrücke. Once across I walked down past Baumhaus an der Mauer, Mariannenplatz and Engelbecken Park. From here I can’t remember exacty where I walked but I ended up at a Netto Supermarket (Bergmannstraße 5, 10965 Berlin, Germany). The dérive came to an end around this time, after walking slightly further down this street, this left me with around 100 images, which wasn’t planned, but was enough to sift through and find some of the best ones.’
Specifications
Dimensions:
297mm x 210mm
208 pages
100 colour images
Paper:
Uncoated 350gsm
Uncoated 120gsm
Type:
Helvetica Neue
Exhibition, Video, Publication
19-06-2023
Video
The body of work consisted of me freely exploring Leeds City Centre and surrounding areas over the space of 2-3 hours, recording the process using a GoPro, allowing me to capture the city as I see it. Once completed, the recording was edited to only allow the viewer to see a small section of what I saw, focussing on the top-left of my peripheral vision and highlighting what occupies the spaces we can’t see. As shown in the video, this displays abstract stills of objects, buildings, people etc. as well as creating unexampled combinations of shape, colour and texture. The sound that accompanies the video also reworks and layers a variety of sounds captured throughout the dérive.
Publication
A 100 image series was taken from the original video and printed as a publication, allowing for more thorough examination of some of these stills. The image layout in the publication takes inspiration from 3D maps, using Ordanance Survey to plot the points in Leeds at which each of the stills are taken. With the publication set landscape, the image position on the Y-Axis is based on the relative altitude at which it was taken in comparison to the rest of the series. The image position on the X-Axis is based on the relative latitude at which it was taken in comparison to the rest of the series. This caused some images to not fit onto the page, due to their relative position being outside of it.
Specifications
Video:
Duration: 02:52
Dimensions: 476 × 394px / 60fps
Publication:
Size: A4 (Double-Sided)
Composition: 100 Pages: 118gsm - Spiral Bound
Conducted: 20th April 2023
Art, Exhibition
10-05-2023
The original pieces were created using paint, the different squares symbolising different senses; vision, sound, movement and memory. The squares were then put into a scanner and moved around, demonstrating how the stability of the intersecting squares can become disordered, this created the various types of distorted outcomes seen across the series. The physical (painted) aspects of the work reflect the physiological parts of a person (our body/mind), the digital (scanned) aspects of the work reflect the cognitive elements of a person and how once these become affected, it can change the overall appearance of the individual, depite them still consisting of the same physiological material (the painted squares).
Specifications:
Size: A1
Composition: Black Acrylic Paint on Paper (150gsm)