The above image is a piece of student work of text messaging in the guise of fern fronds or the dilution and dispersal of calligraphy ink over time.

I think it is interesting to present data and information using imagery, it is visually significant and understandable.

From a book <Aleatory compositions>, it is a book of sheet music, in the book they use a colour scale translated their visual compositions into musical notes, it is amazing to see how many things can be visualized.

Visit to The Barbican Centre

I went to see the artist collection in the Barbican Centre, it was not allowed to take pictures in the exhibition...however we managed to sneak some, because one of the artist that I am currently researching is also included in the exhibition, I had the chance to see Sol Lewitt's own collection of photos and work, it shows the artist's own ideas development and personal interests. There are also a lot of photos about the open cube piece so I was really happy to see them.

Jan Maarten Voskuil

http://www.janmaartenvoskuil.nl/impressions.html

Based on the premise formulated by De Stijl cofounder (and fellow Dutchman) Theo van Doesburg that a work of art refers only to itself, Jan Maarten Voskuil’s abstract, wonkily geometric paintings-cum-sculptures are full of rigor and humor. His works are oriented on the circle and the rectangle, whose forms he alters and distorts using mathematical principles. These calculations guide the shape of his wooden frames, across which he stretches monochromatic canvases, presented singly or combined into multipart works that may be found hanging on or propped against walls, installed in the middle of a room, or even attached to the ceiling. At once austerely minimal and exuberant, Voskuil’s compositions often appear to be in the process of shape-shifting—peeling off of the wall, stretching, or collapsing in on themselves—as if imbued with minds of their own.

I started looking at Jan Maarten Voskuil's typographic works, as they are quite well known for distortions, however still following the artist's own rules, so they are all distorted and transformed within constraints. From his work I think the high light is the unusual use of medium, the artist uses canvas, but distorted them, this is what I should consider in the future, using familiar medium maybe in a new way.

Willem van Weeghel

http://www.willemvanweeghel.nl/profile/en

The kinetic objects by Williem Van Weeghel demonstrate transformation that is guided and set. As the simple linear shapes are rotated, thousands of different possible combinations are created. I want to look into the kinetic features in a design, maybe not formed by technology and machines, but by the perception of human sight.

Researches Based on Order

Above picture How To Use It is a colourful manual on the use of a toothbrush, Design Benjamin Dennel investigates human learning process and the representation of movement in space. In this piece Dennel translate the various swoops and swishes into a new and universal language for presentation. It is strongly linked to 'order' and 'guide', the idea of visualizing movement is also a subject that I am keen to explore more of.

The Seed by Johnny Kelly, I would say it is quite a well-know piece of short film, which combined stop-motion papercraft with illustrated 2D animation, it also explained brilliantly how a piece of fruit has been eaten and digested in a humor and playful way.

I would love to be able to make animations like this, but I don't yet know how to make the sound to go with the beat and movement in the graphics, also the making of crops would take a long time.

A random piece of work I found on pinterest, it is a typography print by James Croft, and the work is called order and chaos, I like how the information is printed on a very unusual way, it can be assembled like a puzzle, or can be separated, explained order and chaos very well using both the information in the print and also the form of the final outcome.

Sol LeWitt

LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he preferred instead of "sculptures") but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, photography, and painting. He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965.

LeWitt's refined vocabulary of visual art consisted of lines, basic colors and simplified shapes. He applied them according to formulae of his own invention, which hinted at mathematical equations and architectural specifications, but were neither predictable nor necessarily logical. For LeWitt, the directions for producing a work of art became the work itself; a work was no longer required to have an actual material presence in order to be considered art.

Alexander Calder
Tony Cragg

English sculptor. His work is notable for its exploration of different materials, including found objects and raw matter of various kinds. Cragg's method of dispassionate ordering and composing seeks to make evident the vast array of objects and images that surround us, but with which he feels modern man has only a superficial relationship, based on function alone. In order to enhance our imaginative and emotional relationship with the world at large, Cragg proposed beginning with physical matter as the fundamental basis of experience.

The way Tony Cragg arrange items by their sizes and colours are very interesting, as they form an appealing visual, also the number of objects also make the pieces more fun to look at. Lots of ways that artist arrange items, his work reminds me of Ursus Wehrli's order work.

Bridget Riley http://www.op-art.co.uk/bridget-riley/
##### The Responsive Eye – 1965

“The Responsive Eye” was a huge hit with the public but proved to be less popular with the critics, who dismissed the works as trompe l’oeil (literally ‘tricks of the eye’). A short film – ‘The Responsive Eye’ – documenting the opening night of the exhibition was made by Brian de Palma.  Despite the critics, Riley held another wildly popular exhibition at this time in the US, at the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York. Tickets sold out on the first day that they went on sale – a remarkable achievement for an artist who was still in her early thirties.

##### “Op Art” – 1965

The basis of the Op Art movement was a form of geometric abstraction, which was in a way impersonal and not obviously related to the real world. “I couldn’t get near what I wanted through seeing, recognizing and recreating, so I stood the problem on its head. I started studying squares, rectangles, triangles and the sensations they give rise to… It is untrue that my work depends on any literary impulse or has any illustrative intention. The marks on the canvas are sole and essential agents in a series of relationships which form the structure of the painting.”

Nick Smith

http://www.smithandstuff.com/

Nick Smith‘s playfully arranges Pantone swatches to paper to re-create famous paintings from “Girl with a Pearl Earring” to “Mona Lisa.” Though his work uses broad swaths of colors, the pictures are still recognizable, looking almost like 8-bit art. He takes classic pieces and brings them into the 21st century, adding a little twist of tongue-in-cheek pop art to it along the way.

Song Dong

http://hereelsewhere.com/see/song-dong-waste-not/

Although Waste Not is technically one work, it consists of approximately 10,000 belongings of every imaginable domestic kind – pots and pans, umbrellas, clothes, bed frames, chairs, old tea canisters and even the frame of the house where the artist was born – brought together in a bewildering maze of objects that surround you at every turn. While the work was being installed at the Vancouver Art Gallery, we were privy to the artist’s quiet installation process which took place over several days. Aided by his sister, what started as an overwhelming mass of disparate objects was eventually transformed into a meticulously ordered presentation in which items were carefully grouped by kind – stuffed animals with stuffed animals, plastic bags with plastic bags, bits of soap with bits of soap – creating a stunning classification of types.

Waste Not is actually a collaboration with the artist’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, who collected this array of objects over 50 years until her death in 2009. It is a striking illustration of the psychological impact of the Cultural Revolution on those who lived through it – a period during which the Chinese concept of wu jin qi yong, or “waste not” was drummed into the population – and was necessary for survival. During this period of displacement, persecution, imprisonment and poverty, nothing was discarded in case it could somehow be repurposed at a later date. This philosophy is perhaps never more poignant than in our current state of ecological and financial uncertainty with the scarcity experienced by the artist’s mother certainly resonating in these times of looming environmental and economic difficulty. But the work is also a powerfully personal one. After Song Dong’s father passed away in 2002, his mother’s prudent saving turned into hoarding, which filled her house to the brim with things her son considered rubbish. When questioned, she replied: “If I fill the room, the things remind me of your father.”

I was particularly interested in the open cube series of work, I was amazed by the instruction he created 'Variations of Incomplete open cubes', I find that there can be set a frame, which would guide and constrain developments of graphic, which is interesting, as some of the open cube 'blueprints' already look like typography already.

'The Art Of Clean Up, Life made neat and tidy' by Ursus Wehrli, when I read the book I truly think the artist has OCD....but his way of looking at things and situations is very broad-thinking, he arrange and sort many things that we might have never imagined. His works are humourous, at the same time giving the audience a neat and nice feeling.

Agi Chen

http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/agi_chen.htm?section_name=postpop

Agi Chen was born in 1980. She is now studying the Doctoral Program in the Art Creation and Theory Department of Tainan National University of the Arts, and is based in Taipei.

As an artist and a consumer of public culture, Agi creates a range of contemporary works with modern significance through reversing the colors of animations to reveal the public culture and to remind the visual collective memories.

‘Until now, the reason that most references of cartoons in my series of works are from Japan and the U.S.A, is because all cartoons and comics in Taiwan are imported from these two countries. Through working between Japanese and American cartoons, I not only found different preferences, distributions and structures of colours, but also found similar usage in colours since I started to build up the family tree by decades.'

I saw one of the piece by Agi Chen, below is the picture, at first I was not very impressed by the print, as it looks quite childish and messy, and I didn't really like the collage, however when I had a closer look, I realise the artist has been representing different cartoon characters using coloured circles, which represent their look, for example Superman would be a red circle, which is the logo and the pants, surround by a bigger blue circle which represent the blue super tight outfit, when there is another smaller black circle within the red circle to represent the hair. I think it is a very interesting way of utilising colour, I have never seen something like this, but it reminds me of Nick Smith's work, who uses the Pantone Swatches to recreate famous paintings.

Today I went to the 100 years of graphic design exhibition, to be honest at first I was quite disappointed about the exhibition,  because the size of the exhibition is very small, seeing 100 years I was expecting a lot of works and works that are symbolic to every development stage of graphic design, the exhibition is free, but there are not description and information about the work in there, if we want to read about them we need to buy the exhibition catalogue which cost 15 pounds, it would be good if there can be a free handout or a cheaper guide.

However what I got from the exhibition is that I say some amazing graphic design work, almost all items are imagery based, poster and prints, some of the printing techniques and material used are quite new to me, for example using a matt spray on a gloss base, it creates a different effect to normal printing imageries. Those might become useful during the print and image week.