Kismet Arts Tangent

Art Collective

recent posts

  • What You Experience is Material

    A lady came into my dry-cleaning shop today (my part-time job currently is at a drycleaners) and she just graduated from business school with a minor in information technology. I was motivated to talk to her because I am still working on the copy for this video I’m making about IT. Is there a thing called coincidence? I think that’s how the world works. We are looking for answers and they present themselves.
    Lately, I’ve looked at my experiences as raw material for art product later and I wonder how genuine that is. Do other people have underlying motives for socializing? Is there a pure joy in other people that I’m not aware of? I wish other people could get integral pieces of what they are building from me. Perhaps that is the joy of my choices that I have found an occupation where my world is so integrated, I live with interspersed production. I don’t leave work at school or at a job (I am looking for one actually) but it becomes part of my menu, when I can pause and think, “what do I want to think about?” my projects pop-up as something that can always use some contemplation. I have done that many times with this IT project. And it was using everyone around me as walls to bounce off of that allowed it to flourish the way it has. My housemate looked over the second rough draft (that no one else will see because it has already become the first half-polished draft) and said that I used too many buzzwords like information highway and imagination. I am constantly reaffirming the main strategy that I know I need to implement in my projects and that is authenticity. It has to feel real, natural, something smooth. So much of advertising is selling something that its recipients can no longer tolerate anything that has too much of a punch. If it has a punch, it has to be loud and provocative and extreme like camp.
    As filmmaker Akira Kurasawa said, “To be an artist means to never avert ones eyes.”

    (Earlier Post Relating to This Project)

     

  • Design Brief

    Today, my team presented the initial deliverables to Jill. (Chris was at a conference.) We had our team name, team logo, prototype logo, concept, design brief and mood board. She approved it saying that the timeline and the logo needed finessing and the rest of it was in an unfinished state, so it was a safe assumption that there is still a long way to go to complete this assignment. You could tell that she was happy with the idea itself and excited to see where we’ll take it. She seemed inspired by it, too. She seemed to bubble with ideas, but she constantly reminds herself that she really ought not to give the students ideas.

     

    The assignment: create identity materials for the branding of the summer and Evening non-credit classes for Seattle Central Creative Academy.

     

    We assigned roles and deadlines for all the components, the logo, buttons, tee shirt, web pages and more. I am now the Project Manager. It’s a great feeling because I had some difficulty with this role last quarter and I already feel the rewards of some hard lessons learned. I have a schedule delineating when a project gets started, reviewed and completed and we have a week I noted for finishing and finessing (Jill’s suggestion.) My team is responsive to feedback and so far has delivered promptly. I think it’s going to be a great team effort.

     

  • Blake Island

    I went with the University of Washington’s Yacht Club on their Spring Trip to Blake Island. An island that you can only get to by boat. We went on a keel boat with winds about 2 knots at most. We motored most of the way there, but spent about three hours slowly tacking, zigzagging back and forth across a part of the Puget Sound, looking at the Space Needle, its top painted “Galaxy Gold” for their 50th anniversary. Our crew was very mellow and on the way there and back, we mostly sat quietly and enjoyed the gray calm and the occasional accidental tack. When the person at the steering wheel doesn’t watch where the wind is blowing, the winds will decided to push the sail to the opposite side of the boat and we have to adjust the ropes tied to it accordingly. The Yacht Club arranged for a group camp site and a Salmon dinner for the evening. Dmitriy and I fell in with the Russian group (and their American friends) where we enjoyed Russian Standard Vodka and some Sailor Jerry. We had a brief interlude with what appeared to be the Crème Brulee subgroup of the yacht club. They had brought little brulee bowls of crème, poured some sugar and fired away at it with a little travel torch they brought. They all had something to say about the joys of cracking the brulee surface.

    We woke up too late for the pancake breakfast. I seem to never be in time for those sorts of things, so I wasn’t disappointed. We were on duty for making sandwiches. Quite the operation, making about 200 sandwiches. The sail back was about the same as on the way there. 3 hours in, Skipper Skip (his name really is Skip!) said “bored? Alright, we’re going to motor in.” Music to my ears. Not that I don’t like sailing, but this is the hardcore kind of sailing, combatting boredom when you have no place to go.

    I filmed this using my point and shoot Kodak share camera and edited it using Windows Live Movie Maker. In the editing process, I clicked the button that said “Auto-movie” and it cross-faded my clips together. I changed the length of most of my clips to a few seconds, deleted ones that ruined the flow and voila! My weekend in a video nutshell.

  • Systems, the Vid

    I am exhausted. This week has been full of due assignments. I don’t remember what all was said in the critique. One girl said that the text was one the screen longer than the time she needed to read it and it irritated her. I have irritated someone with my video. It’s true that she and others said that it was good, but I kind of shut down the moment she said the word “irritated.” I wish I remembered what else was said. I think something about how it was distracting when the overlays worked against instead of for the vid’s message. I love the movie. I think the parts that are discordant are part of its jammy charm. I like that it pours out like a bad headache. That’s what technology is to me, a blur, a mess, a series of layers that somehow connect to create most of what I love about culture, information and connectivity. The good and the bad and certainly the ugly. I didn’t get as much satisfaction from presenting this as I did the other film. Was it that no one laughed? I think that was a part of it. Making serious things, people enjoyed the metaphors. I heard some people say that they were strong. Good, I thought. That weariness of producing something this time overshadows my pride.

    (Earlier Post Relating to This Project)

  • How to Make a Record Album Cover

    (this is for a made up album featuring the photograph(s) of an electribe/monotribe, a collaboration with the photography department)

    1)    Thumbnailing: It’s interesting how the teacher commented how we weren’t ready for critiquing these thumbnails because the lack of typography sketches. How developed do thumbnails need to be? Every boss has a different standard, I think. I can’t really understand sketching out typography. I can understand printing out bit of fonts that are inspiring or the base for flourishes or what have you, but unless you’re designing new typefaces, I’m not going to labor over the shape of a standard Helvetica “D.”

    2)     grab some fonts you like, add some adjustments to integrate it into the idea

    3)    consider the mathematics of what you’re up to. With sketches, there is no perfect circle, but maybe denoting that the width of the circle matches the height of the header is helpful.

    Update 5-10-12:

    I finished this design yesterday after some extra time and critiquing from some of my classmates. When I started out, I had thought that unformatted blocks of text would help convey the mood of messy techno, but I am much happier with the solution I found here. Jill during the critique of the original sketch emphasized ratios. She said to keep in mind some kind of consistency when laying this out. After my initial attempt, I added structure (read: tabs) to my copy, organized it, side A, side B, made some display text in illustrator and arranged the photographs to flow instead of float. I got lazy and made a white box to have consistent margins instead of moving the pictures around and during this process, one of these boxes got on my photo, and I liked the way it seemed to punch the photo. So, I took it there.

    A lot of teachers will emphasize that the computer is a refining tool and not an ideation tool. People go to the computer immediately after getting an assignment and try to churn out something based on what they can do with the program rather than what they can imagine. A part of designing with the computer is understanding that just because the lines look straight and the image crisp, it doesn’t mean your idea is as polished as what you see on the screen.

    When I sketch, you can tell by the line quality that there is ways to go, one of the few but effective cues that denotes progress. The hardest part about being a creative is to keep pushing your idea until it becomes fabulous.

     

  • Rules vs. No Rules

    purple menu for la place
    (sorry about the pixelation.) Screen grab from InDesign

    Today I presented this in class. After reading the first chapter of “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This” I realize that I shouldn’t have approached this menu design in the way that I did. This is my first group of things that I have designed in InDesign. One of the first quotes I came across in the book (I’m a quote-fiend and take anything in quotation marks to be something of sublime wisdom) and it said I should follow the rules first. So, although Jason chastised those of us who used two column layouts and center-stacked the type for the drink menu, he made the comment, “random.” On my work. I think a part of it was that I didn’t explain the angles and seemingly random boxes I adopted as my foster grid (instead of lining things up to the columns that align to the page, I used this). The grid is loosely based off of a Picasso painting. Though, people thought French when they heard “La Place” I was thinking Spanish. Spanish painter’s need a modern classy hangout where they can eat gravy fries.

    For my next layout project, I’m going to use restraint. I’m going to play by the rules and produce something that looks organized and elegant. That’s been something I half-envied in others’ work. I say half because I really stand by my approach and the phrase “student work” means a chance to play.

  • Systems, the Idea

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfj3fQ_PE1o

    For more information about this project, check out last week’s post.

    Marc (during Friday’s critique) asked my team how we ended up with this idea of cities and IT for this New Media video. I said “visual analogies” because it’s what gave Chris an eyebrow raise and he said that’s interesting during our concept critique.

    During the initial brainstorm, the word association with all the components of our project, words: information, techonology, SCCC, school, we made lists. For information, sometime after the mention of the word “knowledge” I forget who said “blossoming flower” and I loved that. It resonated with me. Later when discussing how to integrate that, I looked out the window of room  5142 and there were all of these cranes.

    In subsequent storyboards, we discussed the use of overlays, and we had a scene with wires overlaid by a highway scene (this did not end up in the film, through some disorganization, but no regrets). Jill and Tim responded to that storyboard among the 35 or so we presented to them. @e went back and restructured them after Jill initially poo-pooed the concept of comparing old and new technology with pop-up interface components. Tim and Jill said that we should unify the metaphors. We had frames with comparing technology to paper airplanes, flower arrangement and bicycles and libraries. She liked the car scene and they mentioned cities, urban connection.

    But, how to tie that together… We went through a concept I called “Hello from the future” where a future-person congratulates SCCC on making the foundation for the cybercity they enjoy in that present day. My teammates said that was too complicated. So, I thought, how about a poem, (I was thinking like T.S. Eliot’s style. Lyrical and heavy.)

    The idea solidified when I went over the footage and snipped everything together, and made multiply overlays over the whole thing. That’s my fascination with video. Making a collage out of clips. It’s not a style that will work with every project. The beauty of creativity is that when you get specialists together, they bring their unique spin to the table and when it works, it feels fresh and special. I’m convinced there is a perfect font for everything and a musical piece that is just right. As a graphic designer, I am in the camp of assembly. I am convinced that these pieces are out there and waiting for me to put them together to create the visual puzzle that is just the right amount of incomplete to make people imagine what’s missing.

    (Earlier Post Relating to This Project)

  • Top 12 things graphic design teachers say:

    1)Scale and Position

    2) Think about the Negative Space

    3) Oh, god. I hate this font. Never use this again.

    4) Never stack type like this.

    5) What are you trying to say with this?

    6) This needs more work.

    7) Remember Scale and Position

    8)Weren’t you listening? I said not to use that font… ever.

    9)The vibration on these colors is really tripping me out.

    10)Don’t get defensive.

    11)Ironing out problems in the process is just part of the process.

    12)Just think of it as a real world exercise.