Brief
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“Investigate” brief challenges you to set aside outcome-driven approaches to graphic communication design in favour of well-structured but open-ended methods of discovery and questioning such as observation, collection, measurement and recording.
Your brief is to devise and apply a creative, open-ended, and systematic method of investigating some aspect of a space, interface, or publication of your choosing. Keep the ‘site’ of your investigation small and specific so that you can interrogate it in detail, and consider how your perspective as a designer can produce a new way of understanding it.
Publication
‘Hotel Carpets’ by Bill Young | Hoxton Mini Press, 2020
Bill Young is a US pilot.
Bill Young has stayed in a lot of hotels.
Bill Young likes carpets.
Now you can share his joy.
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From Austin to Amsterdam, Lille to Las Vegas, this book shares the mesmerising, bizarre (and sometimes questionable) carpets found in hotel lobbies all over the world. Bill Young, a US pilot, finds himself in a lot of cities often with camera, time and carpet to hand. His photos are enjoyed by his 400,000 followers on Instagram and now an edit of the most striking designs appear in this playful paperback alongside Bill’s irreverent commentary.
ISBN: 978-1-910566-74-9
Why
I have decided to investigate the above publication as I found it very interesting and special. The author Bill Young who is a US pilot from Dallas, Texas, spends a lot of time in hotels all over the world. Taking photographs of the carpets of various hotels, airports etc., creates a colorful gallery full of memories.
In my way of thinking, all these carpets are the reflection of the history of an exact place. The shapes, the patterns and the colours can create a clear image of a country along with its historical, social and architectural context.
Methods of investigation
_notetaking
_mapping
_sketching
_black poetry-new stories using the text
_experimentations using an exact part of each book’s spread
_creation of a new carpet out of all the carpets (small squares)
_conversion of the new carpet to pixels
_infographic poster – record of the design elements
_stopmotion video with the carpet images
_illustrations of some carpet patterns (simplified vectors)
_colour palette of the carpet images
_experimentation with the scanner
_overlay carpets and create a new one
_analization of the meaning of the carpet (social context)
_thermography effect
Let’s investigate!
Book size: 127mm x 162mm x 10mm
Number of pages: 128pp
Book Type: paperback with French flaps
Paper: fine art paper
Bookbinding: Perfect binding
Number of images: 105 (inc. the cover image)
Size of the images: 100mm x 100mm
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Note 1
Countries from where the images of the carpets have been taken:
– USA
– Japan
– Germany
– China
– Netherlands
– France
– Croatia
– Czech Republic
Conclusion: These are the countries that most likely Bill young visits as a pilot.
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Sound recording of me going through the book
Book layout
The strict and minimal layout creates a clean look for the content of the book, helping the images of the carpets, which is the main part of the publication, stand out. Most of the spreads include only the image of the carpet along with the place where the photograph was taken, while some other spreads include a short description written by the author.
Mapping & sketches
these quick sketches and mappings, helped me to investigate the aim and the content of the book as well as some of the aspects of it.
Go to the next page for more methods of investigation >