Itap 15/02/2011 So-Me

This weeks Itap was a visual documentation of Art Director So-Me’s life and work.

I’m going to talk about So-Me in regards to Creative Strategies and idea generation which relates to the project I’m on at the minute. Coming back from Tuesday’s session I was hyped, excited and inspired. So-Me has a very distinct personal style and this is why people want him. A lot of his stuff is hand rendered, especially the type and a lot of the images. It really brought home to me how important it was to create and find your own working style, not only to create recognition and familiarity but if you have a style you work in, it becomes so much easier to create ideas. You concentrate more on what will work with your style, instead of having a million different options running around in your head.

So-Me plays on his own style a lot and the way in which he gets his ideas seems to make the process extremely quick and efficient for him. Like a DJ who mash’s up other people’s work, his own work, samples and borrows from everywhere, So-Me does this in a visual way. As he knows people want his style, he just needs to come up with the base idea. A lot of what he does is samples and takes pieces of past and modern day culture and just adapts it.

For example with this Uffie branding that So-Me created, you look at it and can tell by the way it was executed it is So-Me but you can’t ignore the massive nod to pop art and the way that he has borrowed that and adapted it to the artist he is branding

Another flat piece of So-Me is the Justice cross. This particular one with the yellow hue, go back a few years to this T-Rex piece and the sampling and inspiration he took is just screaming you in the face.

He also re-samples a lot of his own work. He created this sleeve for the Ed Banger Records Vol. 2 and if you look at the cd sleeve for the Kanye West video he art directed, it’s just another version. It’s importing to note that he isn’t copying these pieces of himself and other people, he’s just adapting them and mixing them up, just like you would with a recipe, he’s paying homage more than anything.

I’d also recommend you take another look at the Justice D.A.N.C.E video and just take in all the visual references you get from The Buggles, Beethoven, Snow White, Disney and I think I even spotted a slight reference to QOTSA aswell.

During class one of the ways we discussed about creating ideas was this one of adaptation and sampling and it’s so refreshing to see it done so well and in such an inspiring way!