Hello! I’m Liesel, a Sydney-based
graphic designer, illustrator
and consultant.
Work
Illustration
About Me
Get in Contact
︎ liesel.schwinghamer@gmail.com
︎ @firoschwing
︎ Liesel Schwinghamer
︎ Interview Collection
I began this project with an interest in exploring disconnection between people and place, inspired partially by being unable to visit my hometown and family due to Covid-19 lockdowns. I was interested in the concept of Solastalgia, the feeling of mourning loss of connection with a beloved home place. I began having some casual conversations with my friends and family back in Tamworth about their perceptions of change in the world around them. However, these conversations revealed to me that there was a wide range of perceptions and experiences of Solastalgia, and so I needed to focus on something more specific and structured, on a smaller scale.
To this end, I focused in on exploring moments of tension and shared experience in a specific time; the most severe time of drought in my hometown of Tamworth, NSW in 2019, when the town’s water supply came very close to running out. I asked a few friends and family to send me voicenotes telling me stories about how that recent drought affected their lives.
To this end, I focused in on exploring moments of tension and shared experience in a specific time; the most severe time of drought in my hometown of Tamworth, NSW in 2019, when the town’s water supply came very close to running out. I asked a few friends and family to send me voicenotes telling me stories about how that recent drought affected their lives.
“But in terms of the environment there’s the worry as well because of things like fires, and there’s more of those happening which ties into the water restrictions thing and not enough water. I mean I definitely didn’t think of that when I was living out at (address) but for sure out on Matt’s property that’s definitely a worry, fires and things. He said one year that a fire got quite close up near Nundle and that was very stressful for them. That’s definitely another thing causing stress and worry.”
Early storyboarding using moments drawn from casual conversations with friends
My plan was intially to draw out key visual ideas from mine and my friends and families’ experiences around drought, and build stories around these. However, feedback helped me to realise that the casual, intimate and experience-based nature of the voicenotes let them pack a lot of story and character into small moments, and this encouraged readers to connect with them. Therefore I selected moments from these stories and built my explorations of materiality around them.
︎ Typography: Stories
Aiming to draw out the conversational, spoken and colloquial nature I had found intimate and meaningful in the voicenotes, the final type was handwritten with a pencil dipped in ink. I wanted to push the identity of a character behind these experiences by emphasising words where the speaker placed emphasis on them, and breaking the snippets into paragraphs to mirror pauses by the speaker.
︎ Typography: Titles
While I was exploring materiality, I had experimented with scanner animation as inspired by work by multimedia designer Matthias Brown (Traceloops), and how this could be applied to text and ephemera. Although this didn’t end up fitting with any of my stories, I saw potential to use this technique to give a shifting, uncertain and fluid identity to the project title, and so I created the project’s title by using the scanner to manipulate the font Moret.
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Experiments with manipulating text using a scanner
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Combining iterations of scanner experimentation for project title
While I was exploring materiality, I had experimented with scanner animation as inspired by work by multimedia designer Matthias Brown (Traceloops), and how this could be applied to text and ephemera. Although this didn’t end up fitting with any of my stories, I saw potential to use this technique to give a shifting, uncertain and fluid identity to the project title, and so I created the project’s title by using the scanner to manipulate the font Moret.
Experiments with manipulating text using a scanner
Combining iterations of scanner experimentation for project title
Final application of scanner experiments in cover and book box