Create your own insignia by finding your inner hero.
BY ISMAEL GARCIA-ABAD
1. Introduction:
All of us have, deep inside ourselves, an aspiration, a yearning of our being, a password that has a special meaning for us, the very thing that puts us on the path of being the best we can be in the first place. It may start being an inner force which is not something to be found readily-made, but something to kindle like a fire. Human excellence has always been accompanied by this strength. Our childhood often bears witness to this pure enthusiasm and this inexplicable nostalgia... Sundry great examples of this human awareness can be discovered in the most unexpected places and situations, we just need to put our eyes on the tiniest details.
This proposal, this workshop, is an attempt to share the experience of finding our best values to embody them into the creation of a personal INSIGNIA. What Insignias allow us to do is to crystallize expressions of human imaginaries, moments, ideas, feelings, values, stories that are invisible but let us create a form of “usness” that goes beyond any border.
The workshop, through a guided exercise of visual language, wants to show how different artistic postulates can be mixed with the intention of erasing boundaries between elite art and folk art. Firstly, participants will shake those personal actions and memorials, where a real “I” will burst forth, and where one will need to find the insignia’s conceptual seed. Then, through a specific visual communication methodology, they will be able to outline an image by using seven keys concepts: style, symbolism, visual rhetoric, shape, color, texture and composition.
A selection of insignias and emblems from different sources (from artistic fields to military forces) will be shown and used as part of the workshop. We will find a rich geography of representations of this particular experience: minimal or baroque, colorful or plane, an exclamation or a cry, with a heroic or sacred mood, rare and unusual but always creative with intricate layers of different meanings.
This process of visual language and strategic design will bring up the personal emblem that concentrates this unique force latent inside each participant. Once the insignia is done, they will be able to cling to it anytime. It will work as a memory activator and the more they repeat it as a password, the most powerful it will be. The emblem will suddenly come to life, and it will send its vision and knowledge to the surface in the form of a yearning, seeking, or experience, like an “inexplicable” faith.
Personal stories only become History when they’re shared. Let’s create an experience in the form of an insignia and let’s live as everyday heroes!
2. Practice/Methodology:
2.1. Insignia analysis and examples.
We could imagine an insignia embroidered or painted, digital or verbal, or even imaginary. Any word or image that encapsulates and shares a strength of dignity is an insignia. The selection taken from different sources will be shown with the intention of seeing different ranges and how its symbolic composition and visual language works: the way a symbol is oriented, the importance of the location of the object, and combinations of symbols as evidence of a cumulative meaning. It is necessary to recall that each detail will invariably have some particular meaning. What did people find in their insignias? How did they represent or support them? Where did they find the inspiration?
2.2. What represents us? Identifying self-target.
We sometimes become aware of a memory, pleasant association, ideal, or belief that swells up unexpectedly from an unknown place. We sense that we have carried these elements somewhere inside us for a long time. Participants will make an easy and guided exercise to surface those values, ideas, facts, stories, and parts of them ready to make changes that will be the fuel for their own insignia. It will be like a personal conversation with their subconscious mind in a language it can understand.
2.3. Strategy.
Thinking and creating insignias. The aim is to create an experience in the form of an insignia. They will be useful and functional for the participants, and they will act as protectors and symbols of each one’s values. Participants will be able to add to their design the life symbols they may consider important. What did our ancestors think throughout the process of creating their emblems? Self-expression and individuality are great skills.
2.4. Visual application methodology.
Although creative processes can find new rules and discover different paths, guidance is useful and necessary. We’ll learn to work with visual language and with the help of seven tools to create and a meaningful emblem. The graphic designer will explain in detail each key concept for participants to understand, create and combine symbols, texts, rhetorical figures, etc. with the aim of creating a visual representation.
