Art Collective
Design:A Creative Approach by Emerson, Sybil. It’s a really great old book (1953). 125 pages of “experiments” and summaries of graphic design elements. Here are the experiments I completed. Experiments exploring: line, line and texture, lots of texture with some repetition, volume, color, pattern and lastly grouping. Some of the exercises are fairly simple and quick to do. A pleasant reminder to all designers that design doesn’t have to be complicated and computer generated.
Last president’s day, my team for the video module shot the video after some storyboard changes. The main concept about touch– leaving paint where someone touched– remained, which I really appreciated. I think it’s a strong idea and it was visually appealing. My teammates made the editing cuts and the rough cut was good. The music wasn’t my taste for this particular movie (I think some kind of upbeat dance music). I enjoyed the positive attitude of my team and the actors that starred in the video (I had a cameo). In the photograph here is a brick wall we painted on and the lovely Becca behind a poncho-ed camera. It was raining in the park that day.
Update 3-4-12:
Here’s the end product from 3 weeks ago (the start) to finish. We called our production team Convergence. And remember my teammates had four other classes and who knows how many other projects to contend with. Pretty Awesome.
After reading this book, Microstyl by Christopher Johnson, I realized my online efforts (this blog mostly) were somewhat disconnected, but mostly un-Google-able. One of his many tenets in micro-writing (this includes blogs, tweets and copy for advertisements) is that it’s important secure a brand name that is unique. Seeing as how my blog’s title was Basement Cat– I named the blog after a lolcat caption– I decided to abbreviate it, perhaps robbing it of its apparent origins, but giving it a place in the twitter name realm.
Another inspiration for this new approach to social media, I have been reading the magazine, Communication Arts. My school has a shelf half-full (I’m an optimist) of these magazines. I read them and notice where the award-winning design firms are (a few in Seattle!) and I note that a few of the authors and some of the designers have twitter handles. I always feel like each platform (linkedin, twitter, pinterest) have great (and the not-so-great) cultural conversations that affect the users’ success in some tiny way and I’m missing out.
One of my friends, more twitter-y than I, said he appreciated Conan O’Brian’s twitter strategy. One a day. Sometimes good, sometimes hilarious. I like that, only one chance to screw up your message– a day. I have some musings about stuff that isn’t worth a blog post, but perhaps some 140 characters.
So, that’s me, explaining that my facebook is going to be littered with these daily transfers of tweets from twitter.com proper to facebook. There’s always a catch when linking other accounts to facebook, it seems. Mostly that their brand shows up with your status update, reminding everyone you know of an institution helping you with self-expression. It’s like seeing the brand of a microphone in big letters over someone’s head at a concert.
(above, a semi-accurate representation of the Allpak Trojan facility. They discouraged publishing unapproved photographs during the tour, so I stole this from my favorite webcomic.) The program (60 of us with two teacher chaperones) went to a package/print/display factory in Renton. Considering the number of hipsters present (true fact: the teachers requested/encouraged us to wear plaid– we’re not that obvious, usually), the trip was well documented by camera phones, DLSRs and someone was assigned to do video. I hope he edits it to look like one by one each student was lost on the tour and then found to be horribly maimed by the laminator-corrugator.
Yes, it was a factory/two factories. One featured aluminum plates and the other rubber blankets to do imprints on cardboard that they make on site. There are conveyor contraptions, die-cutting devices and lots and lots of corrugated cardboard. It wasn’t as boring as it sounds. It was really eye opening to see people with glum expressions stack and straighten flat-fresh of the press boxes. Think about anything manufactured, and it’ll dawn on you that those things have to be made somewhere. That box your electric toothbrush came in– it might have been touched by people in Renton.
We broke up into groups of 1o students to one TROJANLITHO employee. The tour guide for my group was really enthusiastic about what his company does. (Later I learned that the tour is not standardized. Each group got a unique set of information about the company.) In this day and age, it’s silly to try and be competitive price-wise. Not when you have a company in the United States, bound by wage and safety regulations. So, Mark, the guide, emphasizes when he pitches to a new client that he offers innovation. He showed us a box that is two pieces of cardboard “married by machine” into something that is stable and protected for shipping and then with some punches of tabs and a tug, it’s shelf-ready. You are then saving on materials, tools for unboxing, labor time and it looks neater. Pretty cool. As he was demonstrating this marvel of corrugated engineering, there was an audible “wow.” He also demonstrated something called a “llama” which, held together by industrial strength rubber bands, snapping together to form a narrow pillar from being flat. I was impressed resisted asking the question of where I could get some slightly defected ones for the making of a cheap living room fort. (At the end of the tour, the guide said how important it “to think outside of the box.” We groaned, but I think that it had to be said and I’m glad he said it at the end, like a sad punchline at the end of a long-winded joke, which makes it almost hilarious.)
From a professional standpoint, these inventions of disposable displays are good news. There will always be more need for print design. Even if it’s for cardboard candy-stands, I’m excited for that amount of design real-estate. It’s practically IKEA furniture. Some of them are fairly elaborate and have little shelves that stick out the sides like tree fungi in the rainforest.
(above, a still from Ferngully. I don’t know why that stuck with me. Perhaps it was the most aesthetic thing in the box factory, but still. I want to design one of these displays sometime in my life. And it will be an organic happy carboard design that feels like it grew from the storeroom floor, instead of shipped from Renton, Washington.)
Update 2-26:
I liked this conveyor belt. The metal rods move an item on the x-axis and the green rubber tracks move a thing on the y-axis.
I was looking at a picture I wanted to paint and decided to get the subtle tones of the background down on the canvas first. I do like the suggestive nature of these tones and tints.
In critique today, I realized my logo was dead. It had no life, no spark of inspiration to carry me through developing all the necessary accessories, the business card and the letterhead. I mean, who uses Times New Roman as a logo font, anyways! As I told Jill and my small critique group, the logo had undergone so many revisions before it wasn’t what I liked about the concept in the first place. But, mostly I sobbed listing off the things I didn’t like about it: composition, color, font choice, position, scale, hierarchy… I think I said every new design vocab word we’ve had to learn so far. I loved what Ryan, another classmate did. He said “Hey Jill,” with one of those apologetic grins, before presenting a new moodboard and a new logo with a business card layout and all. That’s proactive. I should have done that, instead of going into that meeting with a half-baked and yet fully rotten, live-traced ick fest.
So after that, I worked the rest of the class on a new logo, first starting somewhere kind of random, yet related to the project (a brainstorm tip!). I turned to Avatar for inspiration. There’s a scene when the blue cats are by a life-tree and it’s spewing dandelion-esque spores. So I looked for a font to match that feeling, then traced over it when a pen tool in Illustrator, reworked the spacing. I tried to incorporate a fern-esque alien spore thing, but it didn’t work out. As I was going out to lunch, I was thinking, scratch that, but I love that loopy “d”. I thought, man, when I get back to the classroom, I’m going to find out what it can do for me. I looked at it and I started to see something familiar in its shape. So, I knocked it on its side and, ah. Landscape design, indeed. I’m not sure about the Helvetica Light text I added at the bottom. This company as an exceptionally long name.
One of my teachers said that art school students throw out their ideas rather than try to fix what’s not working with their project, but designers are problem solvers and see ways to salvage defective designs. I think that as a creative, you shouldn’t be afraid to start over because at the end of the day, your inspiration fuels your work and new starts create energy.
This assignment is about conveying “opera” using color and copy. Vertical tabloid size with bleed, a fictional show at a local (real) Tavern or Nightclub like Neumo’s, one night only. Poster must include website (i.e. ticket master or venue’s website). DO NOT include ticket prices. Audience, think telephone pole by-passers. Must have harmonious colors.
Copy: Frederica von Stade The Twilight Exit 2514 East Cherry St April 15th, 2012, twilightexit.com
This is what I have so far. I’ll probably end up painting the whole thing, because I would enjoy that, but sketching in the computer before going to real life is a good way to look productive in the classroom… maybe? Here, I used the symbol spray in Adobe Illustrator to make random patterns. I like it.
Update 2-20:
I’ve worked on this poster. Adding a picture of the singer and adding “pencil sketch” artistic effect to all and then using the “coca-cola” font. I like to think this brings it all together.
Update 2-25: Working on this in photoshop using color adjustment skills I learned last tuesday. “Skills.”
I hope that Tom will like my “secondaries” color palette. I think it’s harmonious, but I’m just a first-year. I haven’t learned if I should trust my judgment at this point.
Update 3-4:
Post-critique, Tom didn’t like my treatment of the building. He said it was too shape-y to be architectural. Or something like that. He pointed to Frederica’s face and said that the illustration, the texture, should be the focal point. I considered the fact that I couldn’t really get away with taking the photo into PowerPoint (adding the pencil effect which is ten times better than the one in Illustrator) and then making it into a PDF and printing that (it gets very pixel-y for reasons I’ll probably learn next year). I decided to make an illustration and hope the handmade quality will overshadow its imperfect proportions.
Update 3-5: To the wire (it’s due today), here’s my final iteration of this poster. Post-critique edits made it something I could love.
Kismet Arts Tangent 