A few ideations. The first three I started before consuming weekly lectures and resources, I like to prematurely ideate; to get any lingering ideas out and clear my mind. Hardly ever do these make it into the final piece. My initial reaction is to always challenge the brief not (always) in a petulant, ignorant way, but as an exercise in seeing where the limits are. Hence the first thought of layering, which in turn led to layering with an attempt at creating four areas. I liked the idea of representing chaos Jules Feiffer’s quote ‘Design is so important because chaos is so hard’ ending it as well as being overcome with a desire not to share, hence Roland Barthes’s Death of the author reference and the obfuscation of information with more visual information. I don’t completely hate it, but I don’t like it. Not visually and not really in its message, it feels a bit try-hard, quote-heavy, wanna-be-ish, maybe. The third was then a return to minimal information and hard to see visual representation. Now this one I do quite like visually, and it fits in generally with not wanting to share much about myself – which to Jasmine’s question is less about shyness and vulnerability, but not wanting to sound like a bore and showing off (not that I have a more amazing life than anyone else).

There is a futility in trying to explain who you are, and even if you could it is mostly data, they will never say anything about how I will feel about anyone, or whether I work well or poorly with them, or share the same sense of humour, etc. Nevertheless, it is where you start. I do wonder though if we might be able to tell more from the overall gestalt of the final piece than the individual elements and data, which would make a nice segue into Michael Wolff. The – what I consider final piece will attempt to take from all of the goals of the ideations while incorporating information from the online resources and doing the exact opposite of the watermark version, in terms of data, while keeping the attempt at obfuscation intact.

(Images enlarge when clicked on)