Page 16 - flip-wordtures

What, why and how?

Wordtures in an online gallery designed to combine expressive words and design hand in hand. The shi�ing in
design and art that is caused by new technologies is the reason we as designers are considering the aesthe�cs
of digital art. The most convenient and expressive way I have found to do this is by using digital collage. To me,
the way words are set side by side to possess a certain topic or idea is very similar to the way digital collage art
allows you to layer and add different pictures to send out the idea and message meant. In this gallery is a number
of my favorite quotes that I have collected. For each quote I have designed a digital collage. For some I have
designed GIF’s and for three quotes, I made 3 different short clips as stories talking about the quote itself.
Imagine yourself wandering around a gallery for a famous ar�st, or perhaps a variety of ar�sts that have their art
hanged up to be looked at and evaluated. Each person standing in front of a pain�ng or portrait will have his/her
own explana�on of what that ar�st wanted to say. That will only be perspec�ve and as ar�sts, other opinions are
equally as important as ours.
Poetry, books and art have always been my interest in life. A�er developing my design skills the past two years
and being more intact with the digital world, i found that combining words and pictures together would be the
most suitable project for me to do. Through the passage of �me , people are leaning more towards having less
to read and more to look at and observe. Perhaps through clips, movies or even some one else’s voice over
explaining to them how to assemble a table. If thats not there, a detailed figure would do just fine. I thought why
not revive old sayings by designing collages and GIF’s that tell their story ? from my point of view at least.
My approach to designing these quuotes was to highlight the main keywords. These words would be my gate-
way to a very large collec�on of images that i can choose from. A�er gathering all the images, i begin to layer
them in the digital collage, change their color and crop them to come up with the final collage that mirrors that
specific quote. The sofwares that i used in this project are Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe A�er
Effects.

Cas�ng the light on a problem

One of the problems that i have faced whilst designing for my project was not allowing myself to completely
undulge in my past experience of life and just le�ng it out. I had to find a middle ground where some personality
and personal print is kept, yet when the people look at my designs i wanted to be able to open up a gate for them
to walk through and see what i am seeing. Some�mes perhaps shine a light on a cultural issue that poeple
werent much aware of and spread awareness is that specific field. Another difficulty faced was to include arabic
calligraphy and camouflage it in a way where it would look like part of the design and also is a summa�on of what
i would say this quote means to me in arabic. During my prepara�on for the 2D clip, i found a hard �me referenc-
ing the girl that i wanted to show walking back and forth. I then ended up referencing my sister, making and
sketch and sending it back to Adobe A�er Effects. YouTube and Lynda.com have been very helpful in providing
tutorial videos that guided me through. Moving on to finding fonts and type faces that were suitable for the
meaning and general theme of the clip was also �me consuming. The last challenge that i met during my journey
in designing for this project was turning the text into a visual scene in the 2D clips. I had to begin with a text,
imagine how it should look like, turn it into a storyline and story board then transla�ng that into a video.