Finalised Rationale- Concept, Function and Colour

Concept - 

Graffiti, a form of expression and art is placed all over Leeds. 

Although the work brings character and colour to the city, the graffiti, in a majority, is placed illegally. To resolve this problem, a super graphic wayfinding system has been created in Leeds to navigate the public, mainly graffiti Artists to Legal Graffiti walls, which is deemed legal through the legalwalls.net site. This wayfinding system will work as both a form of guidance and street art itself, allowing all of the public to accept the placement of the super graphic around Leeds.

Function- 

The wayfinding system works through the use of linked up shapes forming an easy to follow super graphic. The shapes comprise of a base and a point, the point acting as a form of directional arrow, inspired from Frutiger's concept of basic signs. The design will be placed across several buildings along the way to the location of the legal wall (a total of 3 legal walls in Leeds), however not as a continuous super graphic, but as a design that appears through a 20-30-metre interval (dependant of visibility from each super graphic design). As a super-graphic, the wayfinding system will be easy to locate and see, and also becomes a work of design itself.

Colour-

The use of Blue (Pantone 279 C) was chosen though inspiration from Raoul Dufy (French Fauvist Painter, 1877-1953), who identified Blue as the only colour that maintains its own character in all its tones, whereas as the other primary colours of yellow and red, dull and fade over a period of time. By scanning the design, several hues of blue were created further adding depth, the rest of the colours (black, grey, brown and cream yellow) picked up from the paper colours used from the collage design, add an earthy rustic tone to the design and will blend in well with it’s surroundings, this will allow the design to incorporate well with it’s surroundings making the mirror reflection more effective.