The event: First Blood

After having seen all the other amazing presentations, it was our turn. Thankfully, a lot of people showed up! Two departments fighting for glory: Art Direction vs Graphic Design. Liv & Eirik vs Yann & Aleks. It was a great ending for an awesome common project. With newly-acquired key-necklaces, we gathered around the white board, the two projectors and a glass of white wine in hand. it went down in history as the first ever Vulkan League battle. Who were to draw first blood?

Thank you all for coming, and special thanks goes to Liv, Yann, Aleks and Eirik who were all good contestants!

This is just the beginning of The Vulkan League. We are looking forward to making this a regular event, bringing in teams from all creative schools in not just the Vulkan area, but from the rest of Oslo, and maybe even the industry. Stay tuned for more!

Testing phase

We were playing around with an idea that it would be fun to have one league with digital art, and one with analog / traditional medium based art, at least to begin with before expanding past graphic design and drawing, and onto different forms where text and film/TV, expo, event, etc also could take part. But for now, those two would suffice. It was when we first tested drawing on a white board in a classroom while also hooking up a mac to a projector, that we understood that it could work if we joined the two leagues into something new none of us had seen before.

Basically, this was what we ended up with, description taken from our Facebook event page:

“A community of creative students striving to become the best in spontaneous design. We invite all schools in the Vulkan area to compete against each other in an exciting head-to-head battle. In true improv style, the “audience” can help with suggestions for the designers, as well as deciding the winning team.

(…..)
…..we have selected a “Live trace” style of competition.
Two teams will compete against each other simultaneously. Each team has two people: one who draws on a whiteboard, and one who draws digitally on their Mac, through a projector. The two work together as a team to create one finished work. “

It seemed that people, when asked, liked the idea, and Yann was pumped about it, because he had done something similar in France when he himself was a graphic design student. We felt that we now could start designing a profile and begin planning a demo event.

We sat hours upon hours designing and learning from eachother. We wanted something that would hint at American sports leagues, teams, the pride of schools as seen in Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League, not to forget Hogwart’s Quidditch league in the Harry Potter books and movies. We also wanted to have a certain aggressive feel to it, as we felt that the word battle was important, and could give a lot to the overall feel, especially with a sort of over-the-top aesthetic to follow it.

Baard came up with this:

While Petter got good results with a logo we all liked, which was also used in Aleksander’s teaser video that we used on the big announcement screen in the school’s reception area.

After many days of work, the day where we were to present our solution to the task was closing in.

Idea phase

It all started with us using the spin method to throw our ideas out there. We were all really excited about the possibilities, which also led us to work pretty fast and structured. We even used SWOT to analyze our ideas, but were told it wasn’t really necessary, as this was something we would “learn next year”.

Early on, the idea that naboskap/community also can be something internal in a school (the departments are for example each others neighbours), came to us and kind of stuck. We tested out a lot of different things, but somehow, we always got back to this. To begin with, before we had the first proper guidance talk with some of the teachers, we ended up with focusing way too much on an idea about a knowledge sharing network/forum for the students of our school. We got really into detail, and the ideas were flowing over the table, constantly shaping and streamlining something we all thought would be a really good project. As we talked to the teachers, we realised that we had gone way too far in terms of focusing on only one idea, and understood that it would be healthy for our process to let the idea rest for a while and start from scratch again.

Thankfully, we did just that.

The Vulkan League started out as a sports league for the different schools in the area, where the focus was on having fun, being physically active after long days in front of the computer, all the while engaging in friendly competition between the schools. After some discussion, we realised that we also had something else in common with the other schools, besides the obvious geographical location. What if we could compete in creativity and skill? The idea intrigued us, and we did a lot of research on this, and found out that live art battles was something that had been done before, but that we could tweak to make it something different and unique.

Now we had to start testing.

Catching up…

So, lately we have been hard at work on our first common project at Westerdals. We were given a task that we had to solve in groups: ”Skap naboskap” (Or, in English, “create community”, or a relation between entities / beings in close proximity to one another). This is to give us the basics on all the creative tools and methods that are used at the school, making us ready for the three coming years of heavy learning and problem solving.

All the freshmen are divided into groups of around six people, the so-called “line groups“, based on what department each student is in. In the end of the project the group has to have a physical product as an answer to the task. Here, the definition of physical is rather vague, but the groups had to create something: an object; an idea presented on posters and boards; an event; acts for the bettering of the community; etc.

Over the following three posts, I will give an overview of our process on our road to the final product.

The Surrealist short film I mentioned

Yeah, it’s done, and it’s on the interwebs for the bewilderment of the masses.

Surrealism

This week we, amongst other things, made a surrealistic short film. We worked in groups of people from all of the different departments at Westerdal’s and had a lot of fun producing the short in the streets of Oslo’s Grünerløkka.

This is only a small behind the scenes-look at what we did! More tomorrow! Until then: eat your bananas, children!

 

First project done.

This is the result of the first graphic design spesific project. We had to produce an A2-sized poster where we would present a fellow student through the inspiration of a famous designer.

My team was given James Victore. I didn’t try to copy his style, but rather be inspired by his way of working. Therefore, I chose to make most of the elements by hand, both with traditional media (black marker and a sheet of paper) and illustrating in photoshop. I also chose to portray my classmate Guro in a rather morbid way for some provocation points (Victore’s style can often be seen as pretty aggressive and at times provocing). Quite happy with the result.

Fun fact: When I posted this at my other blog (tumblr), teens from the emo scene were all over it. In only a few seconds after I posted it, it was reblogged three times on their blogs. I guess they must have a thing for bleeding hearts or something….

The famous first words.

And it begins. The first blog post. Probably about nothing. It never is.

BUT, I can start by saying that this blog is made to function as an outlet for my thoughts on graphic design, for things I find inspiration in or just plain hate. (Probably not so much of the latter.)

Oh, and I will also post some of my work.

WELCOME!