Time for another semester of Medium. I’m thrilled for this project because there really is so much design out there that I’m absolutely in love with.
I didn’t have a hard time trying to figure out who some of my favorite designers were; Karel Martens popped into my head almost immediately. His use of color, pattern, as well as his layout in books is so distinct and feels more elevated than other graphic designers of his level.
I was lucky to receive his latest book, Re-Printed Matter, from a good friend. It’s amazing. Every page is so well composed, with edge-to edge images, and it’s is beautifully bound. It felt like a designed experience in itself, instead of many other books that are just pictures of work thrown onto a page.
Yet, although Karel Martens is my favorite graphic designer, I wanted to take this opportunity to look into some different fields of design. I feel like I probably have the rest of my time in C to emulate his style if I really pleased. So I started looking more into fashion. Anna Sui is one that I thought about, although I personally would not be really into wearing her clothes- her brand language is really well defined with a lot of floral patterns, rich textures, and deep colors.
Another designer that I progressively found more and more intriguing and suited to me was Courreges, a French fashion brand founded by the husband-wife duo Andre and Coqueline Courreges. They’re credited with inventing the go-go boot and mini skirt. Their style was bold, minimalist, and definitely ahead of their time; it still looks great today.
I really thought debated the pros and cons of each designer for a long time. After some deliberation, Anna Sui was eliminated, because I do think her style and mine are a little misaligned, although I can appreciate it. I just don’t think I would have as much fun doing it. Then it was between Courreges and Martens, which felt more challenging because I think they are very similar aesthetically, just in different mediums.
With Martens, there is better documentation of his work and more out there of him sharing his ethos and work. I think the challenge comes into how I would work within his style to create my own voice. I think some of his work is a little too minimalist? Also, his color palettes are a big part of his design language. I believe some of these colors can only be achieved through custom color/ riso printing, which is probably something I won’t have access to. Not being able to work with his signature color combinations would really take a lot of the fun out of his work, in my opinion.
With Courreges, there is less consistent documentation of his work, as he first started his fashion label in the late 60s, so videos are minimal and photos are grainy. He even designed the staff uniforms for the ’72 Olympics and there’s only like, 3 photos of one outfit although he designed multiple. Also, a lot of his interviews are in French (I believe his English was very poor) and challenging to search for on the English side of Google and Youtube. Maybe I need a VPN so I can be on French Google? Furthermore with documentation, the Courreges label changed hands, didn’t have shows for a few years, etc., which gets pretty messy.
But I went to the library and got a book on Courreges, and I was sold. The book talked about how they were dedicated to cutting-edge materials, such as using parachute material in windbreakers. They also talked about the inspiration from Constructivism and Futurism (my favorites) in their work and their dedication to make the body move in their clothing; the models are always jumping, moving, and smiling in their photoshoots.
Can you tell I get really excited about this stuff? This was an absurd amount to write about just picking a designer.
Brainstorming time!
I immediately set upon trying to picture what I wanted to do with my Courreges design language. Some of my ideas:
- Creating a typeface based on the ‘AC’ wordmark. It’s so clean, distinctive, and the negative space created by the gap in the ‘AC’ is a sillhouette that they often reference in their lines.
- Rendering materials in Blender. They were known for their innovation and structured, sturdy materials. Often: patent leather, vinyl, tight knits, chrome, mesh cutouts.
- Color palettes: Red, for sure. Red was Andre’s favorite color (as is mine). In the book, it mentioned that in the 60’s a new way to dye fabrics white was developed, which produced a brighter white than ever before. It was called an ‘optical white’, as the white often had a purplish-blue tinge in order to seem like a pure white than a warm yellow white. White is very essential to the Courreges look, so it will be interesting to see how I can incorporate lots of white without making the space in my compositions look careless/empty.
- Patterns: Vertical stripes. Circular patterns that emulate flowers. Check/grid pattern. Diamond patterns. Colorblocking.
Font Choice
I found a font that I really like and I will probably stick with it. I was looking at fonts through the ‘mid-century’ tag on Fonts in Use, and some possibilites were Hanno, Anzeigen-Grotesk, and Euclid (which I found out was never released as a font:( ).
But I wanted the European look. I think all of these fonts I selected could be used pretty convincingly along with the time period and aesthetic of Courreges, but something was missing. Another French brand that I like has a really sexy logo that feels vintage, timeless, and European all at the same time:
After looking into the magical Internet, I found that this typeface is called ‘Eurostile Extended’. I love it. Bold, rectangular but with the right amount of curves. Of course, this is pretty early on in the process and I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up changing it. But it is a great font family that has condensed, regular, and extended versions.
More font thoughts:
After some more research, looking at random clothing tags and other branding aspects of Courreges, I found that they literally already use Eurostile in some of their lines. Good coincidence I guess.
I’d like a pairing to go with Eurostile, or maybe an alternative just in case I don’t like how spread out the font is.
Other candidates are Stolzl and New Order, and Nimbus Sans for bodycopy.
My own typeface???
Going back to the Courreges logo, I was quite inspired by the irregular proportions of the letters as well as the swallow-detail, and I would love to extend that into a typeface that was a little more usable for headers and whatnot instead of something that was so decorative. Have I made a typeface before? Technically yes, but it is so decorative it is unusable and I spent a ridiculous amount of time on it. Do I know how to use any type-building software? No.
- picture of draft here*.
Crit 2/2
Was pretty happy with the way most of these turned out and I felt like I had some solid ground to work off of. Some of them definitely were a lot more well though out and fleshed out than others. Whatever. I really only need one of these to work out in the end, so that’s irrelevant.
Feedback: Confusing. Left me very frustrated. Maybe it was partially my fault; I was on Zoom and did not do a very good job of explaining my designer. But since I barely explained what my designer did, there were multiple people who agreed that they thought Courreges was a children’s clothing designer because of the daisies (?!?!?!). Whatever. There’s a good quote from Chanel on Courreges relating to this, actually:
‘This man is trying to destroy women by covering up their figures and turning them into little girls’.
So yeah. The Courreges look is very cute and irreverent and turns the previous decade of fashion on its head. Going back to feedback, it was basically that I should probably try to define more if I’m going for the ‘cutesy’ look or the ‘high fashion’ look in my poster. Which is valid, but I think my end goal is to combine them both. I don’t know. I was excited for my vision and I don’t really think other people got it, which was disappointing. I do believe in it though, so I think I will probably keep refining a few of my favorites and see where it goes. I think the addition of color and imagery will really help the too cutesy look that people were pointing out.
Poster Refinement, in Illustrator
Ok. I’m getting pretty excited. I spent a lot of time on these color palettes and honestly on literally just picking out the poster background color and main text color pairing.
Let me explain my color palette a little bit: A lot of Courreges’ clothes were white. They loooooved white. Most of the pictures of Andre and Coqueline, they’re wearing almost all white. Their signature sunglasses and go-go boot are white.
Not only that, I read that Courreges were one of the first to use ‘optical white’, which was a process of dying fabrics that actually gave them a blue-violet tinge so they appeared super white in natural light instead of a yellow-white. So that’s how I chose the pastel blue color. A spring yellow was also frequented in their clothing, as well as pops of pink, orange, and green. Andre’s favorite color was red (as is mine) and so of course, a red is absolutely essential.
Thursday 2/9
I ended up presenting 3 posters at our crit. I was kind of freaking out the night before because I felt like my big font Courreges poster was a little rigid in style, and that my second pastel blue poster lacked hierarchy. So I pumped out another poster really quick that obviously, was not that good.
It was pretty much universally agreed that I should go forward with the first one. I like it too, but again, I was a little concerned with the very rigid setup of the poster.
Some things that I got from the poster crit:
- Not being scared to crop some things out of the page.
- Have to figure out how to get rid of the hotspots (the little corners) of the ‘courreges’ title.
- The poster is not fully informational. It is an enticement. I can go without all of my text.
Things that I’m thinking about going forward:
- What text do I cut out?
- How do I treat Courreges in a way that gets rid of the little gaps? Pushing them closer together is not an option, in my opinion.
- Accurately printing out images… might be a bit of a pain in the ass. A lot of the images are low quality scans of original film taken back in the 60s.
- How do I make the poster follow less of a grid?
Brainstorming and trying things out!
I knew that the Courreges type was the most glaring issue in the poster, and honestly, if I couldn’t solve that, then I couldn’t move forward with stylistically defining the rest of my poster. Some things that I was thinking about was perhaps a vinyl texture- since the Courreges were famous for their vinyl jackets and skirts. I tried this out on the title, but it looks a little too modern and shiny compared to the look I’m going for:
I also considered an embroidered texture, but that would require me to literally embroider it by hand because all of the effects to do it in Photoshop looked pretty bad. Furthermore, I think the embroidery would make the vibes of the poster look a little too kitschy/old womany, because there would be stitching and embroidery on the poster.
The Halftone Spiral…
This was a more obvious and easily accomplishable option. Since I was already treating my images in a halftone pattern, I wanted to maybe echo this texture in the type. Also, I was thinking that a halftone pattern would almost ‘blur’ the type out a bit so the edges won’t be so noticeable and harsh.
I tried many different things…
Halftone effect with a bit of a new layout. I had the revelation that putting ‘Andre and Coqueline’ within the Courreges would be more effective than just kind of tacking it above. It again helps with the edges of the type. These new shapes that I put in were from some experimentation that I did the night before:
I was really inspired by Karel Martens and his work- I think that this kind of pattern plotting lends itself really well to the Courreges. It’s fun, bright, and detailed and has heavy use of pattern.
Now, although I came up with some shapes, as well as my daisy motif from past iterations, I was at a loss at how I could possibly achieve this effect without plotting every single point manually and layering the various patterns on top of each other. So I looked for more automatic ways to do it online, which mainly involved bitmapping effects like this:
This was starting to approach what I wanted, as it had a gradient effect where each line of ‘courreges’ begins to dissolve due to the scale of the shape, but my daisy motif was totally lost (it kind of just looks like square dots from far away). Also, the gradient at the top was a little too solid and looked kind of ‘fake’.
Random side quests…
I really liked the stitching pattern I had in my first iteration, but there were a lot of strange intersections in the stitching that came from doing it automatically using the ‘dotted line’ feature in Illustrator. So I learned how to use a sewing machine in Hunt, shoutout to Parrish for teaching me:
This was a little wonky since it was my first go, but I was interested in seeing what I could accomplish by manually sewing and scanning the texture in.
(edit: this did not come to fruition. there would be too much going on in the end).
Pattern and Halftone Craziness, Resumed
Going back to my patterns that I made. An obvious answer to my question was to use the motifs I made and make them patterns in Illustrator. But I had two problems with this:
- Filling a shape with a pattern will mean that there are cut off edges of the pattern, which I think would ruin the effect.
- There is no simple way to scale the pattern (like earlier in the bitmap example where the dots shrunk as they went down).
But! After some googling, I was able to find this great resource that showed how to make the edges of a pattern cut off on a path. Basically it involves expanding the pattern so they’re all little shapes and using the Pathfinder tool. Did this make my Illustrator files blow up? Yes.
These are some of the refined patterns that I made, designed specifically with layering in mind — some of them are larger, smaller, have negative space or take up different parts of the square so that when they’re made different colors, different parts of the patterning will show through.
Now comes time for the first iteration where I actually try to cut out the text and have these patterns in use.
This was pretty crazy looking. It doesn’t have a refined look because all of the patterns are not on the same point, if that makes sense. They are all different scales and so they don’t overlap nicely like the way I wanted them to, and they are also still all the same scale so there is no nice fade-out effect. My mind literally could NOT process how I could possibly begin to do this since I already made these pattterns on Illustrator and they don’t seem to work. So I gave up for the day.
Today, I showed both Maggie and Francis as well as Brett where I’m currently at in my poster and where I’d like to be. I was glad to hear that Brett liked the direction that I was going, but thought the way I was treating the design looked a little wall-papery with the stitching in the background (which I agree with). There are definitely still some issues of scale and whatnot that I need to resolve because everything feels a little dense and I can’t seem to create enough space on the poster right now.
Maggie and Francis gave me some technical pointers on how to solve my issues, and kind of how to conceptually approach it.
After brewing over this for a few hours, I finally figured out in my head how I could accomplish the effect. Basically, there is a ‘tile size’ in Illustrator that tends to automatically adjust based on the size of the artwork that you put in. But this time around, I made my patterns again, making sure that the tile size was all the same despite my motifs being at different scales. I also made sure that every pattern had the same tiling pattern — a grid, instead of the ‘hex’ option or something like that.
And better success did I have!
I was so excited at this point.
But now comes the tedious part, which is expanding all of these patterns (5) and overlaying them on top of the cou/rre/ges, which makes for a total of 15 huge masking/pathfinder things.
Basically, with this technique, I masked the courreges five different times. And then, I expanded the pattern to be their own separate shapes instead of a pattern, then manually shrunk them towards the bottom to get the shrinking halftone effect.
To be honest, this was a total bitch to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if this took me 4 hours just to assemble these things together. But I do love the final look that it produced, it’s 60s mod but not exactly, and it’s kind of hypnotizing to look at up close.
Ok. Now I had the final title treatment, and it was already Monday night with no new layout. I held back on doing any layout before knowing what my final type looked like, because the rest of the poster really should solely revolve around it. So I really had to come up with something, like ASAP.
I did like how I was doing the past iteration’s year/object name, so I decided that I was going to continue down a similar path with that. I also still liked the way my motifs backed the image, but I wanted to do it in a less subtle way (going back to wall paper vibes) and also start rotating them for less of a uniform effect.
I also wanted to:
- put in more pictures
- make a pixel scatter effect (where it feels like the pixels are expanding and contracting throughout the poster)
- get rid of the stitching somehow but not have a fully white background.
Crit Tuesday 2/14
Today in class, we went around placing stickies on other’s posters, general comments and critiques. I got a lot of flak for the placement of the body paragraph (which is fair, I didn’t really know where to put it and kind of gave up). I got a lot of positive feedback on the halftone text which was awesome. Also, everyone generally said that in the poster, they saw ‘Andre & Coqueline’ first instead of the ‘Courreges’ first since it was so red and bright. I will definitely have to do some experimentation on that. I tried doing lighter colors before I just settled on the red, but they felt a little too pastel and wrong for some reason. So that will have to be something else to fix.
The final sprint…
Things that I needed to do:
- Add in a quote (whoops)
- add more ‘pixels’ to get the full fade in/out effect
- ‘Andre & Coqueline’ should be less loud
- Tighten placement of bodycopy, scaling
- Clean up photoshop files (too pixelated for print)
I played around with the ‘Andre & Coqueline for a bit, changing blend modes, colors, and whatnot, till I realized I could literally also make that text a pattern. So I made it the red daisy motif and that was agreed upon by my peers that it was the right thing to do compared to my other experimentation.
I got some more feedback from Brett on Wednesday night. I scaled up the car in the bottom left, which felt silly, but it made a huge difference in anchoring the poster and balancing the big photo of the mini skirt models in the top right corner.
Other than that, I did a ton of pixelmania, which I was kind of freaking out about in the end because I thought it looked too messy. But it was fine. I think I was getting too fatigued from looking at my poster all the time.
Here she is, the final:
Overall, I am pretty happy with the way the poster turned out. I honestly do think there is something minute that is missing, but I can’t place it, and Brett couldn’t seem to either when I asked him. I think that it was almost refreshing to really struggle through something and have to spend a ton of time thinking about it. I don’t think I’ve challenged myself technically in this way in a while, and though I don’t know excatly how I feel about the poster all together, (again perhaps fatigue), I am very happy with the long way its come and the amount of work I put into it.
