The Typo-Gateaux brief was set throughout the 3 years on the BA (Hons) Graphic Design Course at LCA. We were to create something typographic out of cakes and you could work on your own or in a group.
I was in a group with:
Joe Leadbeater
&
Sarah Heal
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Initial Ideas
At first, we struggled to come up with some really good ideas that hadn't been created previously...
Sarah had her heart set on created a gingerbread house, with some sort of clever typography related name written somewhere on the house, for example Hanselvetica and Gretamond. We also thought that the different parts of the house could represent different letters - the candy cane fence could be made up of lots of J's, or the windows could be made of O's. However, we thought the name concept for the house sounded rather Pokemon-like, and decided that making a full on ginger bread house would be quite difficult and time consuming!
One night Joe came up with a really good idea of making the Guttenburg Press out of Battenburg and calling it "The Battenburg Press". We hovered over this idea quite often, trying to figure out how we could make the battenburg look like little pieces of led type you'd find in the cases at old print presses. However, we had heard another student in the class was making something Battenburg related, and we really wanted to stand out!
Our final idea was to create "The Bauhaus Kuchen" (The Bauhaus Cake). After learning a lot about the Bauhaus and it's importance in Graphic Design, we thought it would be amazing if we could create the building itself out of cake and then the Typographic element would be the word Bauhaus written on the front of the building. The main problem was the fact the building is so big and complicated, so we decided to stick to the most known part of the building that you always see in photographs..
After a lot of negotiation to what we could call the cake (with me being extremely set on calling it "The Baukuchenhaus"), we decided to name the cake "The Centre of Creation" - a play on the idea of the building being the beginning of a whole new era of Graphic Design, and the centre of the cake exploding with garish colours when it was cut open, representing the 'explosion' of ideas that came from the Bauhaus.
We thought that it would be pretty difficult to create the Bauhaus out of cake, and we were extremely correct...
Experimentation of Production
After experimenting with creating the trial version of our cake, we learn quite a few things that could easily go wrong when producing our final cake!
- Some of the colours didn't really work very well, especially the purple. Make sure that the colours used in the final cake are exciting, bright, and contrasting with each other so that they all stand out well when baked!
- Don't just pour cake mixture wherever you feel like, try to spread it out so the cake has an even amount of variation in colours.
- Be patient - don't try putting icing and buttercream etc all over the cake before it has cooled, otherwise it just makes a sloppy mess!
Final Production
We decided to fill this cake with a plan, rather than scattering colours here and there, this way the centre of the cake will spill out to loads of different colours across the cake. We also found that when researching into how to produce rainbow coloured cakes, this was one of the methods that was used most often!
We created the final cake out of a mass quantity of 4 victoria sponge mixes and plenty of food colouring.. The icing was made out of a layer of concrete icing that helped to hold the roll-out icing in place, we then painted over the top of the white roll-out icing with some previously made icing with black food colouring mixed in to create greys and blacks for the building.
We also decided to add a picture of Fred's face to the window of the Bauhaus, to make it relate to our course, and thought that we could make it a bit more festive by adding a little Christmas tree and sprinkling icing sugar all over the building to create the effect of snow!
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