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Established 2010

Process

sam dal monte

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Phase 1

Thesis proposal

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My thesis originally derived from a variety of cultural sources I had already become interested in: authors, such as William Gibson, Warren Ellis, and ECU alumni Douglas Coupland, who explore the oddities and opportunities of today’s society; technological explora-tions, such as Keiichi Matsuda’s Augmented City; and publications, such as Monocle, that come into being as unique products of, and reactions to, the connected, international society they exist within.

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My original thesis statement:

Sociopolitical, economic and technological changes enable new dynamics of power. I intend to describe the opportunities and possibilities these processes have created in the first decade of the 21st century. Adapting and building upon our existing practices, in work and in life, I want to incorporate methods of thinking and operating in an increasingly post-national world.

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I simplified this statement into:

What do we do now? More importantly, what can we do now?

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Phase 2

Concept development

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I created a word cloud from my concepts:

Unpredictable (but inevitable) • Decentralized • Distant Separate • Here already • Oil • Water • Distributed (unevenly?) • Connected • Virtual • Less • Shifting Concord Pacific • Nodal • Social • Tribal • International (transnational? postnational?) • Ahistorical • Messed up Borderless • Fast

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I developed my original concepts into four main themes, and elaborated on each one.

The physical and the virtual are the same thing.•

Postnationalism.•

The distributed self.•

Creation culture.•

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Postnationalism

Cultural, sociological and national borders are becoming less relevant, replaced by supranational entities like the EU, exerting their power and influence over economic matters.

The physical and the virtual are the same thing

We’ve acclimated to the virtual world; now, we’re turning our technology back on the physical world.

GPS-enabled smartphone apps•

Location features on websites•

Physical distance as an advantage when collaborating•

Economic advantages of time zones•

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The distributed self

Now, “you” are what you and your friends leave behind in your wake

“Likes”•

Who’s tagging you? Who’s looking?•

What you’ve bought, what you’ve considered buying•

CCTV, and other forms of surveillance•

Creation culture

Changes in technology have democratized and de­centralized the processes of creation and production.

Solar panels on your roof•

Small-scale rapid fabrication•

HD video•

Community gardens and the ‘locavore’ movement•

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From these themes, I identified three possible directions.

A guide to now• : tips and strategies on how to survive and adapt to the world we’re all living in.

A mythology• : willing a product into being, within the minds of its audience, through effective branding.

A travelogue• : anthropological/sociological study as a classic road-trip narrative: a somewhat metaphorical journey through the wilds of this new frontier.

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Phase 3

Project development

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I sketched out various forms my chosen directions could take.

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I kept encountering the same problems: I didn’t have an insider perspective on the content I was drawing my inspiration from, and I was having difficulty explaining exactly what my project was “about”.

The new question I wanted to answer was “How can new developments in society and technology change how we aspire to live?”

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The best course of action, I decided, was to package this content and these “big ideas” as a sort of branding exercise, to create interest and a narrative by framing them as aspirational.

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I started storyboarding, dividing the material into three sections based on my four themes:

The new world: • physical, virtual, postnational

The new you: • distributed, connected

The new culture: • democratized, decentralized, read­write

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Then, I found I could condense this further into two sections:

You, the individual: • how you are situated within the world

Contemporary society: • how the world is defined

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Then, I considered not using sections at all — instead, I would ‘zoom out’ continuously from a view of the indi-vidual, to a view of contemporary society as a whole.

This proved to be unwieldy. Ultimately, I returned to using two sections, describing them more succinctly as “personal” and “global”.

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Graphik 17 of 32

commercialtype.comCommercial

RechtschreibregelnGrundschulkindernHöfuðborgarsvæðiInstitutionalizationAusschusssitzungDisestablishmentKunszentmártoniRangárvallasýslaCatastrophically

GRAPHIK EXTRALIGHT ITALIC, 50 PT

GRAPHIK THIN ITALIC, 50 PT

GRAPHIK REGULAR ITALIC , 50 PT

GRAPHIK LIGHT ITALIC, 50 PT

GRAPHIK SEMIBOLD ITALIC, 50 PT

GRAPHIK MEDIUM ITALIC, 50 PT

GRAPHIK BLACK ITALIC, 50 PT

GRAPHIK BOLD ITALIC, 50 PT

GRAPHIK SUPER ITALIC, 50 PT

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In constructing an aspirational brand narrative, visual language of the piece is vital in and of itself, rather than just as a container for the written content.

I created a moodboard to help me define this visual language: stark, atmospheric, structured, Modernist, European-influenced, neutral with strategic splashes of bold colour.

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You know who you are.

You know you can’t afford not to. You know

the challenges of a society that remembers every

relationship, every purchase, every meaningful

and meaningless decision you make.

You know your signal stands out from the noise.

You know what to do.

“It is change,

continuing change,

inevitable change,

that is the dominant factor in society today.

No sensible decision can be made any longer

without taking into account not only the world as it is,

but the world as it will be.”

—Isaac Asimov

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My first design explorations.

Initially, I attempted to create a publication that would not actually include the content I drew my inspiration from; however, including it did prove to make the publication clearer and more interesting.

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Phase 4

Refinement and completion

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The publication is printed in B5 format, a ISO standard paper size measuring 176 × 250 mm (about 6.9 × 9.8", slightly shorter and narrower than North American letter size).

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Headings and body copy are set in Akkurat, a contemporary grotesque face by Laurenz Brunner.

Citations, pullquotes, and folios are set in Miller, a Scotch Roman face by Matthew Carter.

Photography is sourced from images on Flickr made available under a Creative Commons licence. Where relevant, I have also included photos from Facebook and satellite imagery from Google Maps.

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The page is divided into 12 rows and 12 columns by a modular grid based on the size of the body copy (8pt/4mm leading).

Written content pages use a 4­ or 6­column grid based on the master grid.

Type is aligned to a 2mm baseline grid.

This is 8pt Akkurat. This is 8pt Akkurat.This is 8pt Akkurat.

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Written content is cited from various sources: authors and designers, interviews and articles, fiction and non-fiction.

Introducing each piece of sourced content is a short, self­written paragraph summarizing my themes and concepts, each incorporated into a graphic illustration.

The self­written content divides the publication into “personal” and “global”, terms that I have deliberately omitted from the publication itself; “personal” items start with “You”, speaking to the reader, while “global” items start with “We”, referring to the culture being described, and implicitly including the reader.

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The visual headlines incorporate several common motifs: illustrations aligned to visible grids, circles as nodal points/points of interest, visual elements distrib-uted across an entire page, layering text and imagery over each other.

Parts of an illustration carry over onto the next spread to provide continuity with the accompanying text blocks.

These common elements give the publication a distinct rhythm, a sense of forward movement, encouraging the reader to move through it.

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