It was the release of Shaun Tan’s new book Tales from Outer Suburbia. Being fans of his previous books, especially The Red Tree, we joined the crowd. We could barely see nor hear him, but this event reminded me of one of his others books, The Arrival.

The prompting of the The Arrival lifted much of the difficulty I had drawing the visual roughs and layouts for my project. Unfortunately this would mean, to express enough details in the story would result in too many pages for the time allowed to complete them.

I considered a comic book layout but had trouble distancing it from Japanese manga. Although The Arrival uses a similar technique, it still distances itself from the comic, pop-art look. The Arrival tells a story using only images. Each detail is shown in small squares on a page, much like a comic or a storyboard.

Even without text, Tan is still capable of telling a very powerful story. This is what I hope to achieve, using  a mix of eastern and western illustrative techniques.

The night featured two speakers - Stephen Banham of Letterbox, Melbourne and James de Vries of de Luxe & Associates. It was a truly eye-opening event.

Although typography is not a focus in my project, there was one aspect that I found somewhat relating to my major project. It was the choice of projects that was undertaken by Stephen Banham. One such project was Orbit Oblique, a tribute to the animals lost in space research expressed in typography. Slightly dark and humorous and gives the spotlight to subjects that a usually forgotten.

This reminds me of a project I saw at the UTS Visual Communication graduation show  last year. It’s a vague memory, but I believe it was a design project based on the many uses of shoelaces. I do firmly believe that shoelaces are a very forgotten household item.

Although I don’t want to change my project at this stage, using design for something/someone that has be forgotten or overlooked will be a nice self-initiated side project that I could consider undertaking in the future. In the meantime, I could consider using some typography work in my project. Maybe.

This brings much relief for me as up until this point I was still having difficulty in settling a story. The story which I found was most appropriate was A Butterfly’s Dream retold by Cheou-Kang Sie. The book features beautiful illustrations and this somewhat deterred me from re-illustrating the story, as I felt that it didn’t need to be. With the rather visually bland storybooks I had already found, I was determined to illustrate those stories. However, with this new aspect of re-writing the story, I am able to choose any story that interests myself.

A Butterfly’s Dream is short story of a Taoist philosopher falling asleep and dreaming of being a butterfly. Bar the sexual scenes in this story, I am able to follow the same narrative but edited for today’s society.

Idea Generation
Image Creation
Word Interpretation
Media Realisation
Communication Culture Society
Industry