VISIT TO THE BARBICAN - POP ART DESIGN EXHIBITION

The purpose of today's visit to the Barbican Art Gallery was to supplement our research for our street food brands created earlier on in the week. As pop art features heavily in different aspects of graphic design and branding in general, we visited the Pop Art Design exhibition which featured work from Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein amoungst many others of that post war period in the USA. Not only was there successful branding in the exhibition, there was clearly evidence of successful way finding and branding throughout the Barbican's interior. It utilises an orange theme throughout their space which really stands out with the Futura typeface making navigating the Barbican very easy. This gave us all an idea of how to make our branding consistent across all medias. I was also quite surprised at the variety on offer at the Barbican as I had never been before. The buildings and architecture are one of a kind in their concrete nature, there is a greenhouse, cinemas, theaters and overall great places to work creatively in. 

The Pop Art Design exhibition itself was very good in my view as it displayed a large amount of work that I felt was relevant to me and my own style with bold colours and clear statements. I enjoyed studying original merchandise and packaging designs from that era. There was also a pop art film which was higlighted different forms of media inspired by pop art such as the traditional Chevrolet adverts and the title sequence for Ian Fleming's 'From Russia With Love'. In addition there were many posters from the 20th century culture such as the 1986 Olympic games in Mexico and subway maps in New York which I thought was interesting.

A few sketches and artist names I recorded whilst in the exhibition

Some street art around Whitecross market

Following our tour of the exhibition and the Barbican space, we went to Whitecross market offering us a collection of street foods from around the world. This was frankly an overwhelming experience because of the amount of great aromas in the air and delicious food displayed. However the aim of this experience was to gain some inspiration and expertise from real street food brands in order to inform our own design process. This I feel did help me and I now have a idea of what successful branding looks like and how it functions in the real world. In conclusion I thought today's trip was extremely beneficial to our current project and in general because of the variety of things we experienced. The Pop Art Design exhibiton, touring the Barbican space and visiting the street market were all varied experiences and the fact did this in a day was great because we got a little taste of everything on offer in and around the Barbican.

Images - Author's Own 29/11/13