Alex Clarke: Design student

“Art Feud”, while it seems to not have any connection to my HOPE Outdoor Gallery projects, was actually inspired by them. I took the idea of street art being at its base, a place for rivalry, since it’s considered to be a personal diss to an artist if someone paints over their work. This happens all the time at the gallery since it’s so open to the public, but in every city there’s a code of honor for how street art works. As I said in the beginning of the book, feuds occur because people are competing for something, whether that be territory, fame, or artistic dominance. To show that this is not a contemporary phenomenon, I decided to take five famous art feuds throughout history and design the book to teach about them. I used typefaces that followed the graffiti aesthetic, in keeping with the inspiration of the book, and based the system of the book off of each individual feud.

 

 

The HOPE Outdoor Gallery website that I designed is meant to be a challenge because the three pages required for the project had to all be typographically driven. No images allowed. I had to include a home page, an about page, and another page of my choosing. Since the HOPE gallery has such a strong connection to graffiti I chose typefaces that resembled and complimented that style. I also kept the colors to a minimum; since graffiti can come in all shapes and colors, I decided to stick with black and white, and chose red as an accent color to show typographic hierarchy.

 

This poster project was the start of a longer project based on the HOPE (Help Other People Everywhere) Outdoor Gallery project in central Austin. My job was to create two posters, over any part of the Gallery that I chose, including advertising for an event, informing viewers about the Gallery, or displaying an artistic expression of the site. A little background on the gallery: due to cramped spaces and the site’s popularity, the HOPE organization has decided to move the gallery to a more accessible space. Based on that information, I created the “HOPE is moving” poster, which in application would be posted all over the Gallery to let people know that they could find information about it online. I also created a poster to be posted at other places around town to get everyday vandals off of the streets and into a space where they could practice their graffiti skills in a more accepting environment. Both of these were stenciled out and spray painted on poster board, in order to hold true to the spirit of the Gallery.