Determinism. Design.

Here are some select images from the my final MA project. This was a year long project, that showcased not only a the ability to design to an incredibly high standard, but also the ability to organise a project and work more independently than undergraduate standards.

This project is titled ‘Determinism. Design. An exploration in decoding complex messages through simple graphic design’. The concept behind the project was to take a complicated topic and represent it using the most minimal design possible. So the subject was determinism, which is the philosophical idea that human beings actually have no free will. Our lives are determined by chance or prior causes. It is a big topic to cover and seemed to offer a lot of scope to be designed.

When designing the project, I went for a minimal ‘Swiss’ design style, as it helped to remove emotion and allow for the subject to be a subject argument for and against determinism. I create a series of 16 images that represent major concepts within the determinism argument. To allow this minimal design style to truly reflect the meaning, there were a lot of restrictions to what I could use. No colour, no large block shapes, only lines and dots. Also the imagery itself could not contain any type. Even the formats were restricted to either a square or a 1x2 square format.

This resulted in a variety of outcomes. One book which explains the concepts of determinism and how they relate to my designs. Another large scale poster book, which contain just the imagery. Finally a small selection of flip books, which create motion for some of the images that could benefit from this.