Digital Collage for flag

Today we were tasked with creating initial ideas for our flag designs via digital collage. The medium involved using photoshop to either threshold, bitmap or halftone images from the British Library Flickr archive. The reason for using these images was the fact that they are royalty-free, quick and easy. In future, I will attempt to use these and other archival footage as well as my own imagery. There is a chance that some No Wave photography is in the public domain due to its age and the lack of copyrighting by the amateur photographers at the time, however, I'll need to look into this further.

Some of the designs built upon the pictogram exercise and the themes of destruction and obstruction. These are key elements of the genre that are easy to portray graphically. I am starting to find recuring concepts such as the purposeful and non-harmonious layering of media. Examples of this are found in the final three design bellow. I could envisage this obstruction caused by the red being caused by either a screen print over the top of an existing image/flag or via red tape stuck over something. This physical experimentation would help my idea gain traction. I could perhaps find old flags from New York and print over them.

We concluded the session with a silent crit that involved peers giving opinions on my designs. I felt my ideas had not been allowed to complete to the extent I would have liked but nonetheless received some positive comments. These were mainly regarding the latter, objective ideas with people saying that the solid red concept would work well as a typeface, however, this would raise questions over legibility. The use of contrasting patterns was also commended within the throwing sticks design and it was suggested that I could experiment with handmade patterns myself. The use of black and white imagery with a bright vivid colour to contrast was also commended which is reassuring as this is a distinctively no wave aesthetic from research. The main area for improvement was just to flesh out some of the designs and format them correctly. I'm sure this will come with development.