Danielle Muntyan

An Archive

of Inspiration and Research

An archive collating a series of researched topics and sources

inspiration which have influenced my personal practice throughout
the final year of my BA(Hons) Graphic Design degree at Leeds
College of Art.

Contents
01. An Inspiration Diary
02. The Relationship between Graphic Design and Fashion Design
03. The Fashion Industry, The Body and Eating Disorders
04. Where are all the Female Graphic Designers at?!
05. Branding and Identity
06. Editorial Design

01

AN INSPIRATION
DIARY

Jade Clark for Nasty Gal, 2014

I find inspiration comes in many forms and can also come from the
most unlikely of places.
I have been documenting sources of inspiration throughout the year
on my PPP blog, with Inspiration Diaries collating a series of images
from my personal blog.
A small collection of images have been featured to showcase my
interests surrounding Graphic Design, allowing for a visual link to be
recognised and seen within my personal practice.

02

THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN
GRAPHIC DESIGN
AND
FASHION DESIGN

Passport for Pearly Queen

Peter Saville for Yohji Yamamoto

Jay Hess & Simone Pasztorek, Graphic Design for Fashion /

There is an increased sense of creative potential when the Graphic
Design Studio is commissioned by the Fashion Industry. Synonymous
with visual and conceptual innovation, Fashion is also grounded in
commercial realities. The benefits of a more integrated creative
relationship with Fashion were not fully realised until Peter Saville
was commissioned for the Autumn/Winter 186/87 Lookbook for
Yohji Yamamoto. His collaboration with art director Marc Ascoli and
photographer Nick Knight became the defining moment of Modern
Fashion Communication. Almost immediately, Graphics became
as vital for Fashion as it had been for the Music Industry.
The creative freedom involved in working with the Fashion Industry
has made the relationship highly desirable for Graphic Designers.
The cyclical Fashion seasons provide consistent opportunity for
reinvention and rarely produce less than spectacular results. This
freedom often directly influences the broader practice of the
Design Studio: Fashion can become a unique creative playground
for experimentation within the commercial world.

Influence

Susan Barber for Chlo Sevigny & Opening Ceremony

I have always been inspired by fashion. I feel there is a beauty within

garments and their associative branded identities which draw in so
many different types of people, are marketed in different ways and
stand for different manifestos.
Fashion appeals to me within my practice for several reasons,
including a background in fashion marketing studies, an obsession
with lookbooks and an eye for quirky design, allowing one to be
creative and expressive pushing the boundaries with design, stocks
and substrates, whilst producing unusual outcomes opposed to run
of the mill design.
The fashion industry, like fine art has no boundaries. One can
interpret a garment or a painting in many different ways depending
on the eye and ones thought process. Graphic design however needs
to be understood, clear and functional, being the bridge which links
the obscure world of fashion with reality.
Different designers and different collections, all have a range of
aesthetics, use different silhouettes and have different tones
of voice, allowing for a wide variety of designs to be executed. I
personally find design influence and inspiration from the garments
themselves; their shape, colour, pattern, texture, cut, silhouette
and detailing, and try to interpret this through visual graphics,
typography, collage and photography.
When I am working on fashion briefs, my first point of call for
research is Harvey Nichols. I walk around for hours, make a few notes,
interrogate the staff for lookbooks and make a secret wish list of
things I will one day own when i am a successful graphic designer
running my own fashion related studio.
A girl can dream.

Chlo Sevigny / Fashion embraces the weirdos. They are

into that. There are always young people that people in
fashion are interested in. You know, youth and energy - it
brings something different.

My practice
The following spreads show examples of my own fashion related
work, specifically lookbooks that have produced throughout this
academic year.
I believe that my work is quite literal yet explorative, as well as being
highly experimental in regards to stocks and substrates, layout,
art direction, use of colour and vinyl for book binding. These are
elements of my own practice which I believe have developed over
time by working on both self-initiated briefs and client-led briefs.

I have worked out and developed my own way of crafting and

designing this year which I think is quite different and quirky, which
has since become my signature style, so to speak. The process of
designing and executing a final outcome I find to almost be like
crafting a garment, piecing the different elements together in order
to create something beautiful, yet functional.
Grafik Magazine hit the nail on head so to speak, in regards to my
design style and personal practice, in a feature ran about me in
November 2014.
With a feminine, Nineties-inspired aesthetic and a portfolio of
unusual lookbooks, this young graphic designer is set to go far,
whether in her natural habitat of the fashion industry or beyond.

Jade Clark Look Books, Vol. 02.

I am heavily influenced as stated briefly by the garments themselves,

their materials, shapes, textures, colours and patterns, and often use
these as key graphic elements throughout publications and digital
work produced, as a way of digitising the collection in a unique
and special way. I feel with Fashion its important to have a level
of consistency and tribute through the Graphics created and used,
relaying with the particular collection at hand, the brand and the
associative tone of voice.

Jade Clark Poster Series, Vol. 02.

Fashion can become a

unique creative playground
for experimentation within
the commercial world.
Jay Hess & Simone Pasztorek
GRAPHIC DESIGN FOR FASHION

03

THE FASHION
INDUSTRY,
THE BODY AND
EATING DISORDERS

Gossard, Wonderbra Advertisement, Vogue 1991.

Influence
When I was 15 I was diagnosed with both Anorexia and Bulimia
Nervosa. Now at almost 23 years old, I am fully recovered. I have
however, always been interested, or obsessed with fashion and
specifically magazines. I have always subconsciously known that a
small fragment of my illness was influenced by the fashion industry
and the material which I was seeing and being exposed to at the
time. High-fashion magazines such as Vogue featured skinny
models, with long legs and tiny waists, whilst the more high-street
magazines such as Glamour, featured articles and plans to lose
weight in order to look like those models seen on the runway.
Even today this is evident in the media, whether via social networks,
magazines, online blogs, articles, books and advertising. There is
always a pressure to look a certain way which is where the fashion
industry have fallen through their use of advertising and design in
recent years, promoting the diets and the skinny frames, opposed
to the subsequent illnesses which can arise from such unrealistic
desires.
For my COP module, I researched into why the media is obsessed
with an ideal or perfect body image, and how this has in-turn
effected eating disorders. In an expansion of this, for my practical
element, I produced a book which looked into the past 114 years of
commercial fashion advertising and photography, showcasing how
the female body is used to sell products, or promote a desired look
From my research, it was shown that over the past century there
have been many fluctuations of the average body size, however
the present day airbrushed and skeletal look we face everyday in
magazines and on billboards is the slimmest it has ever been.
In my opinion, the fashion industry should be using their power and
use of media, graphics and advertising to produce a campaign
against an ideal, delivering a positive message to a mass audience.

Victoria Secret Ad Campaign A/W 2014, The Perfect Body.

Lane Byrant for US Weekly, The Perfect Body rival, late 2014.

The beauty myth is always

actually prescribing behaviour
and not appearance.
NAOMI WOLF
AUTHOR, THE BEAUTY MYTH

04

WHERE ARE THE

FEMALE GRAPHIC
DESIGNERS AT?

Dawn Gardner, 2011.

Influence
As a female, I feel it is important to have female role models in the
creative industry whom new and young designers such as myself can
aspire to be like and look up to. I hadnt realised until I had started
university and began researching more in depth into the industry
and the subsequent areas that I like, that many of the designers
behind the brand names and studios are actually men. This is not
only the case with Graphic Design, this is becoming more and more
the case in the Fashion Industries too. But why? I have reflected
upon my three years at LCA, and come to the realisation that I have
not seen one female guest speaker, or visiting professional. I find it
quite disappointing in someways, however an obvious marker that
the industry is still heavily influenced and swayed by males and the
male opinion.
I find it bizarre that in industry itself, the majority of designers,
artworks and print technicians are male, when so many females
embark on and complete creative courses such as Graphic Design.
I have said before, and will state again that one day, I would like to
be seen as somewhat of a role model within the industry, and hope
to inspire female designers to further push themselves, promote
themselves and to work in the industry post-graduation.
Whilst I appreciate different forms of design and different creative
practices, I have recognised a handful of female graphic designers
which I feel are inspiring, powerful within their specialisms and work,
or have worked in industry. These are Dawn Gardner, Kate Moross,
Susan Barber, Carolyn Davidson, Paula Scher, Louise Fili and Jessica
Hische.
Fact: It was actually Carolyn Davidson who designed the iconic
Nike swoosh tick in 1971, which is now an internationally recognised
logo. The design was sold to Nike for $35.00, and 500 shares of the
company.

Rebecca Wright on the Ratio of Girls with Graphic

Design Degrees VS those in the Industry:
Theres a funny thing going on with graphic design and girls. Its
noticeable on HE courses up and down the country and writ large as
the new academic year begins again. For of all the students arriving and
returning to study undergraduate and postgraduate graphic design, the
majority are female.
At Central Saint Martins this is by no slight margin. Of the 525 students
enrolled this year on BA Graphic Design, 372 are female, which is 70.8%.
The picture is similar on MA Communication Design where female
students are 68.3% of the cohort. Within the broader context of art and
design education, this is not in itself unusual. A 2013 Guardian survey
reports that of the 12930 students at the University of the Arts London, of
which CSM is part, 9370 are female a pretty weighty 72.5%. And of the
49,920 students studying creative arts and design in Higher Education
in the UK, 30,790 or 61.7%, are women. What is unusual however,
and deserves scrutiny, is that this female domination in graphic design
education appears to be reversed when it comes to the graphic design
industry.
A much-quoted survey of the UK design industry published by the Design
Council in 2010 revealed that only 40% of designers were women, in
startling contrast to the 70% of female design students. This statistic
prompted dissertations and magazine articles, questions to awards
panels and industry line-ups, and both defence and dispute. And yet,
despite the debate, there are areas of the industry where there seems
little evidence of significant change.
Attend any design conference and the likelihood is still that the speakers
will be predominantly male; look at the boards, panels, juries, the partners,
chairpersons and even the majority of awards winners, and the picture is
the same. And this is a problem. Its a problem because, as in many other
walks of life, the higher echelons of the industry does not reflect the

demographic it purports to represent; neither the future of the industry

nor the audience it serves. Yet there was a never a time when we
needed this more. Unprecedented social, economic and health related
challenges necessitate 360 degree thinking: a diverse range of people
and perspectives to innovate, propose and provide. While graphic design
education strives to provide an environment of equality and pluralism
where competition thrives and meritocracy is the measure, there is a
culture in parts of the industry that lags behind it may recognise the value
of talent and graft, but it rewards confidence, charisma and chutzpah,
and the uncomfortable truth is that these attributes do not always sit as
comfortably with women as they often do with men.
This is not to suggest that to be a woman has a bearing on levels of skill
and competency in the discipline great graphic design is created by
both male and female students, and in this regard the issue of gender
is of little concern. However, after 15+ years in design education, my
experience is that female students are still less likely to want to grab the
limelight, less inclined to push themselves forward and to self promote.
These students show their confidence in other ways in the events they
organise, coordinate and manage, the group work they often lead and the
imagination and innovation with which they develop their project work.
But the lack of fanfare that accompanies these activities may lie behind
the lack of visibility of women graphic designers at those top tables.
The best graphic design courses teach their students, regardless of
gender, to be skillful, articulate and agile designers: to empathise, to
work with and not just for their clients and end-users, to take their role as
citizens seriously. These courses create the space for young designers to
flex their creative muscle, take risks, push boundaries and make mistakes,
to think freely and act consciously. Im not suggesting any of this should
change. But maybe we should be more honest about where resistance
and potential inequalities lie. Few courses explicitly discuss the issue of
gender in the contemporary graphic design industry, or the hierarchical
structures and cultural machismo that persist. But if we want to equip
our students to have influence in industry, and for its shape and face to
change, perhaps it is time that more of us did so.

Various works by Kate Moross.

05

BRANDING AND
IDENTITY

Influence

Credits: Behance

Branding and identity design has always been of interest to me,

however over the past year has become a much larger part of my
practice, both in terms of self-initiated briefs and commissioned
freelance work.
I love how branding gives a product or business an identity, and allows
the concept behind it to be visualised in a creative manner. I also love
how branding can be drawn across many products and elements in
different ways further expanding the identity beyond a logo. I have
found this is particularly the case in the fashion industry, with the
use of additional items such as swing tags, lookbooks, invitations,
gift bags/boxes, wrapping paper, stickers and window dressing to
create an overarching feeling and aesthetic for the brand.
I am a fan of expressive, colourful and exciting branding, which is
captivating, eye catching and remember-able, however depending
on the brief I also like working with a more minimal, stripped back
aesthetic. I feel having an interest in different styles of branding
has allowed for me to be quite a versatile designer, and driven me
to experiment and work with different fields outside of the fashion
industry also.
I have taken my personal branding and self promotion quite seriously
over the past 2 years, really pushing myself to showcase my work
and my practice as not only my profession by as an extension of

YOUR BRAND IS WHAT OTHER

PEOPLE SAY ABOUT YOU, WHEN
YOU ARE NOT IN THE ROOM
JEFF BEZOS
FOUNDER OF AMAZON

06

EDITORIAL DESIGN

BangBang by Sofia Azais

Influence
With the digital age being in full swing, there is the fear that printed
publications will no longer be wanted. I have always loved books. As
a child I would read them. As a young adult, I like to design them,
craft them and create them. I think its a terrible shame that due to
advances in technology, traditional crafts are often forgotten. This is
one of the reasons why I like to produce my own publications, whilst
there is something satisfying about achieving the perfect outcome.
In my own practice I am heavily influenced by publications such as
magazines, lookbooks, photography books and zines, which I feel
transpires through my portfolio. I feel the wide variety of outcomes
which can be produced is extensive with thought and planned
out craftsmanship. I also appreciate well designed and produced
books, lookbooks and magazines, having an extensive collection in
my own studio space at home. To be surrounded by creative work,
publications, books and various forms of inspiration is the key to a
starting point for any brief.
A variety of books, magazines and other publications have been
collated, showing a range of aesthetics, visuals, type choices, art
direction, execution and design which I feel has inspired my personal
practice throughout this year.