Clara Saez Calabuig spent lockdown living at home in Spain but has now returned to London for her final year. Her practice looks at themes of a socio-political nature, often stemming from a personal, autobiographical place. Clara’s projects are concept-driven and adaptable with an increasing interest in typesetting, editorial design, bookmaking, photography and website design.

For the UPLOADING project, Clara’s role involved typesetting her entire year group's content. This required her to work with a wide range of submissions. She was also the coordinator of any budget-related communications, working closing with course staff and academics.

We asked Clara about her work titled Leaving, Non-places & Roots: stories of migration:

“My current final year project focuses on personal stories of migration. Through conversations and exchanges with people who have migrated and a series of printed and digital documentation methods, I aim to pay homage to the people who, for varied and complex reasons, leave their own spaces of comfort and/or birth and physically settle elsewhere - temporarily, or permanently.

“I’ve lived far away from loved ones and spaces of comfort for many years now, so migrating is something I am very familiar with. I really wanted to develop a series of projects that collected stories of migration, as a way of confronting the often-dehumanising portrayals of this phenomenon and the impersonal data-driven, macro-statistics portals on migration.

“The aim is to place individual, family and personal stories at the forefront and create a multi-platform collection of sound, written and visual stories, with a specific focus on people who have moved under the age of 30.

“The project started with photography and self-reflection on my own experience of migration. For months, I photographed moments of leaving, travelling, journeys, places and geographies. These images are now becoming a map-shaped publication that traces my routes. Simultaneously, I’ve been having conversations and exchanges with people who have migrated under the age of 30. Their voices, experiences and archival images will form part of a website I’m currently building. Excerpts of the transcribed conversations and images that people share will also become printed outcomes, using screen printing and riso to visualise these stories.”

View Clara’s work on the UPLOADING website

Maddy Tetchner, currently based in south east London, is a multidisciplinary designer. Her practice is influenced and inspired by elements of music and is particularly focused around publication design, type design, motion graphics and web design.

Maddy’s involvement in the UPLOADING Project was helping create a strong graphic identity as well as building the website. Here she tells us more:

“My role within the project was helping create a bold graphic identity. I specifically developed the gradient background and colour scheme used for the website and poster. I also played a key role in building the website on Cargo collective, uploading image content and organising the layout of the Zoom page.

"Our idea behind using this format and theme was to reflect the difficulties of organising a work in progress show or physical publication while in the midst of a pandemic.”

“I am currently in the middle of a project working with colour and sound, creating a series of animated playlists and building an interactive website. ‘CHROMA’ is a digital experience of sound music and colour and was developed to act as a relaxing visual playlist to experience on screen.

“The works of Oskar Fischingers and Wassily Kandinsky had a great influence on this brief. Fischinger’s abstract animations and Kandinsky’s paintings of colour and music, heavily inspired this work. I hope to launch the website very soon.”

View Maddy’s work on the UPLOADING website

Ines Chaves Costa Campilho is currently based in south London, but also works freelance in Portugal. As a designer she seeks to explore new techniques, relating them to graphic design and feels her final pieces should be fun, interactive and appealing, not boring or serious.

For the UPLOADING Project, Ines role was creating content for their social media pages which included creating a buzz around the launch of the website across platforms such as Instagram: “My work has been creating content for social media, specifically for Instagram, to encourage our audience to get excited and view sneak peeks of the website before it was launched. Within the graphic identity of the website, I created an interactive poster that was very similar to the email invitation, but animated.

“Each day on Instagram, I would post an animated letter that in the end would spell out the name of the website UPLOADING. On each post, we would give further information about the launch and the projects behind it, eventually all the letters lead us to the final day, like a countdown to the launch of the website.”

Here, Ines tell us about her work Puzzle Mania:

“My work in progress is about jigsaw puzzles, I started by questioning what made people interested in puzzles, was it just a hobby, the process, or the satisfaction of the outcome? I am currently exploring different ways of playing puzzles and the concept of puzzles being a process and not an object.”

View Ines’s work on the UPLOADING website

Dejana Draganic is an interdisciplinary designer based in London. Her practice lies at the intersection of design and discourse with emerging technology. She has a huge interest in how data can be used to measure how we feel, and the impact this has on society.

During her degree, Dejana also spent a year studying with the UAL Creative Computing Institute (CCI), located at Camberwell, where she completed a UAL Creative Computing Diploma before returning to her 3rd year in BA Graphic Design. During this time, Dejana redefined her design process and discovered tools to further develop her ideas, such as exploring web interactions using JavaScript and Google machine-learning models.

Dejana’s role in the UPLOADING project was focused on developing the identity of the project:

“As a team we chose the vibrant typeface GlyphWorld by Leah Maldonado for the graphic identity. We wanted to capture the different interests of the BA Graphic Design class, so I worked on adding more physicality to the identity of the project. Focussing on the project name UPLOADING, I designed the letters so that they were 3D.This was very effective and was used for our social media content and the printed poster invitations.”

Here, Dejana tells us more about her work Emotional AI:

“My work-in-progress is based around my short film [are you still watching?] which depicts a speculative future where a smile is a form of currency. The film traces the deteriorating relationship with a new form of technology which recognises users’ emotions.

“Rooted in research of emerging technology which collects emotional data based on our facial expressions, and 19th century experiments in neurology, the film touches on themes of racial bias, fake positivity and surveillance capitalism. Tech can often feel elusive and distant, and this short film aims to provoke dialogue about the social issues that arise with emotion recognition technology.”

“I wanted the speculative future to feel plausible – drawing from notions in Dunne and Raby’s Speculative Everything I used the repeated yellow webcam screen as a prop which appears throughout. It was made quickly using JavaScript and html, and screen recording those scenes allowed me to put it together with the rest of my footage in premiere pro. This was my first time working with film and I’m excited to develop it further. “

View Dejana’s work on the UPLOADING website