Manchester based graphic design studio DR. ME consists of a duo of
designers, Mark Edwards and Ryan Doyle, who base a lot of their work on collage and recently moving image. Most
of their works come from album artwork commissions because of their unique
graphic style.
They are very well known for their works in collage, especially their
project to create a new image every day for a year, which were affordable so
anyone could have their own little piece of design. Made entirely from found
imagery the compositions were no bigger than 230mm x 150mm, the pieces were
sold through Instagram and twitter, and the unsold pieces made an exhibition.
Mark Edwards stated “We had been talking for a while about wanting to do a big
studio project separate from our commercial work for the pure joy of creativity”,
this gave them the perfect opportunity to do so. This project has shown me how
successful design can include so many different elements, collage, paint,
digital and this is something I want to work on in the future and build up a
knowledge of how to make work together successfully. I want to try and do something
similar in the future, taking a little time out to try develop something, not
particularly relevant to any other projects I’m doing but to build up a visual
collection of personal work to help myself develop in handmade elements of
graphic design.
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| 365 Days of Collage |
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| 365 Days of Collage |
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| 365 Days of Collage |
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| 365 Days of Collage |
DR. ME came in some weeks later to do a workshop with us working on
collaging skills, as it is something as a group we were all quite interested in
and wanted to build up a knowledge of how to do it successfully. We were put
into groups with people around our surnames, giving us the opportunity to work
with others that we haven’t before, allowing us to bring together a contrast of
each other’s creative styles and opinions.
My collaborative group was given the word ‘dare’, this was to be portrayed
in our collage pieces which are to be placed in squares of 150mm x 150mm, there
will be 10 pieces each of which will make up a frame which will be placed into
GIF format.
To start our collage, we didn’t really know where we were going or what
images we were looking for, so we started picking out a few select images we
thought would work well together and then coming back together as a group to
decide what to do with our random imagery. I think this is a successful method
of collaging, especially with found imagery because it makes the outcome random
and unique, which I think in the style we are working towards (DR. ME) it would
work best. The image we selected comprised of some backgrounds, foregrounds and
extras – such as people, a tiger and some dominos. From this idea we began to
think about the ‘dares’ aspect of the concept, the image of a bridge gave us
the idea of ‘dare you to jump off a bridge’. We began making the composition
using found pictures of a diving man, jumping from the bridge, into a river of
flowers below, causing a splash of dominoes… as he is being chased by a giant
tiger in the church tower – we thought this clearly depicted what came straight
to our minds when we thought of the word dares. Rather than gluing the image
sections down we created various slits in the paper which the different fragments
could be added and taken away from the composition as it changes in each frame.
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| Finished GIF |
Our finished gif can be seen above, I think it was successful, it was
random and unobvious, yet still managed to depict our word without the use of
any typography. The workshop overall was positive, it’s give me the drive and
the confidence to not worry about not knowing how to create collage imagery,
but still try and experiment. This is something I enjoyed and I hope to be
bringing into my future design work, as well as further developing outside of
uni in my personal visual explorations.
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