Jamie Reid is a post-modern designer and anarchist best known for his Sex Pistols album covers. Reids work is reactionary to the politics and society of the 70s and 80s, featuring ransom style typography cut from newspapers, torn images, and bright contrasting colours. A lot of his work is currently on display in the “Taking Liberties” exhibition in Ulster University. After attending both the exhibition and a talk on the exhibition I found myself fascinated with Reids work and style. I’m so used to seeing the grid based, clean, and elegant design that is usually associated with graphic design so Reid’s work is a breath of fresh air. I really wanted to experiment with this style of design as it’s now just as relevant as it was in the 70s and 80s. The 70s and 80s saw a long standing conservative government lead by a hated pm (Thatcher), constant miner strikes, and the threat of black outs. Today we see a long standing conservative government lead by hated pms (Johnston, Truss, Sunak), constant rail and transit strikes, and the threat of black outs.
The hilarity of Liz Truss’ resignation was my initial inspiration for exploring post-modernism. The budget, the publics criticism, and her laughably short time standing as PM was initially really funny to me, however, when I actually thought about it, I found myself getting very annoyed at how humiliating this was for the country. I picked a few newspapers on the day of her resignation to work with and set about cutting out relevant images and quotes.
One of my favourite TV shows of all time is “The Thick of It”, a comedic political satire which is filled brutal quotes about the ministers who run the country. During the final season, the party leader “Nicola Murray” undergoes an awfully mismanaged and humiliating time as leader with her eventually resigning at the end of the series. Sound familiar? I selected some quotes from her party’s spin doctors brutal speech about her which I felt also applied to Truss’ time as leader.
While I was pleased with this first attempt, I felt I could do better with the medium. I liked the varied fonts making up lines of text, I think the quote I selected was too long and was it was hard to have a natural flow to the text without it feeling too structured. I also thought the image wasn’t the best, as I cut it too linearly and it’s not really iconic enough. It was a good start but I wanted to try again as I think I could do better.
I was much more pleased with this second attempt. I think the image, composition, and text all work much better and create a really simple but good design. I particularly enjoyed playing with the typography in this one, and I especially like the contrasting heights of the “f” and “u” as it creates a really playful and contrasting style. I think the smaller quote is better and allows the type to be bigger which is good for a political protest piece like this.
Overall, this first venture into postmodernism has went well and I look forward to exploring it further.
It’s truly disgusting that itv allowed a standing mp to take time off to go on reality tv for as shot at redemption. While, at the end of the day, the handling of the pandemic overall is the fault of the UK ministerial system rather than Hancock himself, he still broke lockdown rules. The fact that a member of parliament who is paid by taxpayers broke his own laws, cheated on his wife, and is somewhat responsible for deaths of thousands is allowed a chance at redemption is ridiculous. The worst part is, the general public will probably allow him that redemption, and while I wish that wasn’t true, you should never give the general public the benefit of the doubt.
These pieces play with a quote from his intro interview on “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here”. I wanted to experiment more with image itself as I was pretty happy with the typography side of things when I did the Liz Truss pieces. I wanted to keep the image whole, choosing to cut and fold it rather than remove areas entirely. I liked the effect of him pulling open his chest to reveal the real him. I tried a few different images for the inside him part, but felt the first image was funniest and encapsulated everything that was wrong with him. I also used the hand from the cctv image to “pull” the chest open which I thought added a nice comedic value to it.
Overall, I was pleased with how I have been able to push this style more.