Assignment 8: Abstract Cities

The notes for this assignment, which is to create images for guidebooks of six cities beginning with M, reference the c1930s railway posters as a style that was so successful that it continues to inspire creatives to this day. As a child I had a small collection of these railway posters, mostly torn from magazines, but also a few renditions as postcards. I loved their sense of possibility, that we could step into these little worlds where the sun always shines and go on an adventure. Whilst I prefer using tonal variation rather than flat colour, this genre of image, with its feeling of joyful abandon, has had quite an influence on my own artistic style.

I began by choosing my cities. I felt very reluctant about it. I haven’t been abroad for 20 years because travel insurance with my medical conditions dwarfs the cost of the holiday itself. As we were never taken abroad by our parents, I have only been abroad five times. I’ve never visited any of the cities listed, with the exception of a rainy afternoon in Manchester. It’s unlikely that I will ever get to see any of them. I feel entirely unequipped to be designing covers for guidebooks!

The list of cities also seemed to me to lack coherence, with most of them seeming to have little in common except beginning with M. First I pulled out and listed all the US cities as at least they were in the same country. There were seven. I stared at them a few times and thought about nothing.  I googled and found comprehensive lists of cities beginning with m in various permutations. I saw a number of European cities and thought about Interrail. I considered a set of interrail guidebooks with images of the citys’ railway stations on the covers. This line of thought brought me back to the vintage railway posters and I decided to see whether the seven European cities had them or whether it was just a UK thing. The cities are: Manchester, Marseille, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Moscow and Minsk, They did indeed.

At this point I decided to remove Minsk from my research as I needed to choose six and Minsk seemed to have fewer search results.

I then did Google searches on each remaining city to try to understand something of what options I had for illustrating iconic scenes  I researched both written and visual information. I collected a number of photos of sites in each city, looking for sites that would work with abstraction and make interesting cover images. Here are beginnings of search results by city as referenced in the search bar. 

I thought about some different techniques for abstraction. I thought I would try doing line drawings of iconic buildings and collaging recognised sights. However, as I was getting set up for the line drawings, I remembered about the ‘posterise’ option within the ‘art effects’ section of Photoshop. I only have the cut-down Photoshop for IPad and it doesn’t include this feature; however, I found a posterising app, Poster Shine, which works similarly. In a way it feels a bit like cheating and letting the app do the work, but actually the creativity lies in the decision to posterise and then the selection of the degree of posterisation and the choosing of precise colours for the image, which may not be the colours found in the photo.I got thoroughly absorbed in this, creating one or two images for each city. I then put all these in an album to see them together and make the final choice of six images.

Having done so, I took these images into Photoshop to add the name of each city. I chose the font American Typewriter as it seemed to work well with the vintage theme. Initially I centred each place name but I found that doing so obscured important details in some images, so I moved them to the corners as shown. I greatly enjoyed myself doing all this digital experimentation!

So that was all lots of fun, and I was quite pleased with my body of work, especially given my initial reluctance. However, having made the last save, I sat back and thought, but where are the thumbnails? Where is the moodboard? Where are all the interminable spider diagrams? Having done my research, I found myself a new app to play with and lost track of anything sensible (time, for example) as I absorbed myself in the digital realm of posterisation. Had I neglected a better medium or approach?

I considered some past work. Here are some examples of line drawings I did for an illustration commission:

Considering them alongside my posterised work, I felt that for the guidebook genre, the posters were more appropriate than line drawings. I wondered, however, how going away from digital and creating handmade collage in the limited colour range style might work. I decided to use one of my images as source material for a collage. Madrid looked most collage-friendly so I decided to make a collage based on it, using it’s limited colour palette. The collage is, perhaps, unfinished, as I could have kept adding paper fragments to give more detail: however I think it’s complete enough for comparison.

My conclusion was that the posterised image works more effectively for a guidebook. Guidebooks are very site-specific and their cover images should not go to such a degree of abstraction as to make the landmark unrecognisable - the aim is to draw the shopper into wanting to see that place in person and buy the guidebook. On this course I’ve expanded my understanding of the range of purposes and approaches within which collage can be an effective medium, but for the purposes of this assignment I think the posterisation is more appropriate. It was good to make the collage, though, in order to confirm that. 

What began as a daunting and uninspiring task for me grew into a lot of fun and use of a new app, as well as moving between apps. This has been an interesting Project on visual dynamics, in which I especially enjoyed the experiments with colour palettes, as well as the assignment.