OUGD601: Inspiration - Leeza Pritychenko

Leeza Pritychenko (@leeeezaaaaa) is a graphic designer and visual artist, based in Amsterdam, currently working as a Digital Art Director. Her style is unique and contemporary, channeling 'bad design' to form new and creative modes of communication.

Bold unapologetic typography adorns her website, with complementary layout giving an immersive quality for the viewer through the aspects of multimedia augmentation. The simple use of colour and layout are transferable throughout branding platforms, acting as signifiers of her visual identity. The combination of a traditional serif typeface (Caslon/Baskerville?) mixed with something more contemporary (Druk Wide Web?) mixes traditional theory with new-age experimentation, relevant to her practice. Prityenchenko is inspired by Baudrillard's concept of "hyper-reality", in which is a postmodern movement in the visual-arts where photography, paint or sculpture is manipulated to create new-wave styles of design, introducing 'unreal' components to the art piece.

Baudrillard classes hyper reality as "a condition in which reality has been replaced with simulacra...Division between real and stimulation has collapsed, therefore an illusion of an object is no longer possible because the real object is no longer there."

Simulacra is the process in which a representation of something comes to replace the thing which is actually being represented, and in turn becomes more important than 'the real thing'. 

According to Zoe Lorenz, Baudrillard Hyper-reality specialist and lecturer at RCA says that: 

Understanding Hyperreality is best compared to Video Games...Play station games which have a lot of violence in them often have a lot of bad press, the media believe that people will copy the actions which they see in the video game. This actually happens very rarely, only a small percentage of the people who play the violent video games actually copy the actions which they see on them. For example one prime example is of a man who believed he was in a game and would therefore gain points by carrying out illegal tasks, the worst crime which he committed was killing his best friend. His argument was that he had been told to do it, meaning that he genuinely thought he was taking part in the game when in fact it was real life. Showing that he could no longer distinguish the difference between game play and real life.

https://www.slideshare.net/zlorhenley/jean-baudrillards-theory
http://leeeeza.com/