Course Leader, BA (Hons) Graphic and Media Design
UAL Affiliation: London College of Communication
Contact
UAL webpage
Beginning as part of his MA Visual Communication (Cartoon Imagery) Craig Burston began a practical investigation into the relationship between mainstream media and sub-cultural forms, as well as the potential use of discarded or discredited technologies upon graphic image construction and sequential story telling.
Within undergraduate teaching and learning as well as research through practice, this on-going practical relationship with comic books plays an important role within a fundamental commitment to test and explore the practical realities of collaboration, the occasionally conflicting relationship between text and image, the function of memory and recall in storytelling and other graphic communication design practices plus audience as participatory author.
An on-going practical and reflective exploration of the relationship between narrative, sequential imagery, characterisation and graphic communication design such as typography, branding, glyphs and symbols.
All self-published and collaborative works listed provide an opportunity to practically test the relationship between; illustration, authorship, editorial control as well as graphic communication design practice. The impact of discarded technologies is also a key aspect that informs the process of creating narrative and the use of typography and language as both plot driver and graphic component.
Whilst all titles above are separate projects in their own right, each has made an explicit or inadvertent impact upon the next, from iterative approaches to media application, adoption or rejection of drawing technologies. The adoption of the moniker skipratmedia (previously the skip-rats with Richard Tomlinson) was a complicit acknowledgement of the mainstream medias over reliance upon thematic recycling, assemblage or pastiche (to say nothing of the overwhelming temptation to take what is not yours and to reappropriate it to your own ends).