Process leading to “NEXT 2014”

NEXT is an annual exhibit in which the work of graduating students of the Corcoran College is on display, so the works in this exhibit are part of a semester long thesis project from students of all majors. My project is about graphic design in popular music.

Since NEXT is a large project for senior students at my school, this has been divided in two parts. The first one consist in writing the thesis paper. My essay talks about the role of design when depicting our pop culture, especially through its music. In it I discuss that if we look back at the history of pop music, we can distinguish a particular aesthetic for almost any given time. Design is one of those things that is expected to be part of the vernacular that distinguish a period of time, and thanks to the work of designers today we have a visual clue of how these different periods of time looked aesthetically. I chose to talk about this topic because music is something almost anybody can relate to. Who does not remember the cover of his/her favorite music album? Graphic design in a figurative way has given and continues to construct the visual, the image; the aesthetic side of our popular culture. In my thesis paper I talked a lot more about this topic, and I use several album covers as examples of this link between design and culture. Fortunately I chose a topic I have enjoyed learning more about; which made the extensive writing not so daunting. The other part of this project, after finishing the thesis paper, consist of turning our writing into a publication; digital and print. For now we are only in the beginning states of the publication, so these below are some pictures of my paper and thumbnails of some possible design layouts.

Thesis paper, which we will turn into a publication.

first designs and layouts of publication.

Exhibition

The second part of the thesis project is the NEXT exhibition that would go up in the Corcoran gallery, I like this part of the project because it has been another challenge of its own, I am trying to make the entire project a cohesive and well branded body of work, however, I have been working on this aspect at different times during the semester. Ideally we were supposed to work on the design of the exhibit simultaneously while we wrote our thesis. I just could not put that much passion in both projects, so I put more time on the paper at that time because I had a bit of a struggle articulating my paper. I did not want to have a mediocre paper. After all it is going to become our last school project. I think of it as that final show before a star retires, you want to give your best. So I am glad I put all that time in my writing, I had a good thesis paper I believe.

Now that the writing is over I can put more time on having fun with the design part, I believe that our brief break and that awesome trip to Mexico got me that inspiration every designer craves for, so the best part is yet to come. This is only the tip of the iceberg. My exhibit its going to have a main premise that I want the viewer to get from watching my work. This idea is that design is the catalyst between music and culture. Here I have an illustration I made to convey this idea.

This illustration, which pretty much conveys the main premise I mentioned before, will also be in my publication. I like it so much  that I already see it animated in the digital version.

These bellow are some images of what the exhibit is going to look like. I have three long banner and an infographic video, the design of the banners are halfway done, I will post more updates on those in the upcoming weeks.

Early sketch of my exhibit, idea still subject to subtle changes.

Tittle treatment for infographic video.

Illustrations for the first part the video.

Lastly, the second part of my video; is a timeline of album covers, I have over one hundred songs in this video. Is so long it goes over 16 minutes, I do not expect people to see the entire video instead I picture this video as visually appealing for its graphic that compliment the other parts of the work. I like how the cover are running in one direction; by the way this one of my first revision of the video. In my latest revision the entire video is running vertically instead of horizontally. I will have more updates on this as well.