thoughts on the whole wide semester.

how much i've changed in one semester! i'm inclined to say "we," for all of my classmates too, but i'm hardly qualified to speak for all of them. but. how different my working methods are, my work ethic, my drive, my fear of failure. which is to say, i have those, in spades, in a way i have never experienced quite so potently before. i suppose it comes down to this: all throughout education until this year, the year i have begun my major, it has been possible (inadvisable, but possible) to be somewhat dismissive. "this doesn't have anything to do with the rest of my life." "this doesn't even matter." "i'm never going to have to deal with this stuff again." all that dried up this august.

finally? this is it. this really is. what i've been waiting for. no more waiting around for things to be important and pertinent. i have done some amazing learning throughout my life, and i am very thankful for it, but no matter how passionate i thought i was about it, i see now that there was always a level of removal, a skepticism about what difference it all makes. the bridge from my day-to-day to the real world was simply too long and too misty to conceive.

but now? now i can see. exactly what it's going to look like, to navigate through kcai and merge onto the motorway of the rest of my life. graphic design is important not simply because it is teaching me life lessons about listening to authority, and critical thinking skills to analyze literature, which are significant lessons and important skills, but because i will be applying the knowledge i'm gathering right this instant to a job within the next few years, and quite possibly from here on out. no lag, no delay, no removal. this equals that.

the blindfolded, trust-based processes were unfamiliar, but they have been sinking in, proving how much better a final product can be if each step is treated as its own final project, and absolutely no corners are cut. the emphasis on perfection of craft, hitherto unfamiliar, has turned me rapidly into a perfectionist, let loose the meticulous tendencies i must've always had tucked away somewhere.

i've really experienced the importance of analog methods, both as initial jump-starting techniques and also as very intentional aesthetic decisions, achieving imagery that would otherwise be totally unattainable or otherwise laughably false.

the work ethic that says to my body, "it's okay, we'll sleep later, i promise," and then gets me out of warm bed to go to studio because that is where i need to be to get my work done as i would like it to be done.

these things are simple and early and basic, but i am certain that they are pouring the graphic design concrete underneath the designer that i will be striving over the next few years to graduate as, and that, then, will be the foundation for the designer i will be spending the rest of my life striving to become.

looking back into history with a more critical eye

this plaza poster. i feel like i got pretty close, and then swung, and then missed. volleying back and forth on how specific and obvious to make the "spotlighting ornamentation" concept, i struggled to spotlight the plaza the same way i did the valentine. eventually i chose to bring the twin halves of the spotlight between the posters, where they already were utilizing alignment and continuation from the straight lines of the plaza into the zebracurves of the valentine. unfortunately, they were not quite related enough to be a successful diptych, and in demanding that they operate like one, i tied them together too much to be separated or reordered. i remain fond of the typography of this poster, and even the black and white composition, particularly on its own and not compared to my other, but the use of color in this piece was not a very successful experimentation, despite very much iterating and very much colortesting. i would not try to sell this to the plaza. but now i know more! and i'm in the process of knowing more all the time! so everything's just gonna get better and better from here on out.

project three. a final string of haiku.

review objectives,
did i meet them for each step?
i certainly hope.

markmaking goalsets:
•use nontraditional tools.
•make expressive marks.

binder full of marks!
you can't split concept from form
when media links.

generate motifs:
•both beauty and clarity
•don't lose the handmade.

the generation
of motifs from thematic
connections i made.

vectorization
careful not to lose the splats.
real live digital.

taxonomy book!
matthew and i rock partners.
bound simplicity.

•categorize marks.
•figure out how to bind it.
•one for each of us.

our categories
more than organized: told tales
about a garden.

took a risk: whitespace.
very open and quiet.
gentle little books.

bound with modest string,
printed on creamy paper,
pretty artifacts.

animation time:
•explore time based transitions,
•precisely planning.

transitions for me
follow the haiku story,
grow and then repeat.

guitars encourage
vines to sprout and fruit to grow
and seeds to start new.

each motif dances,
conceptually willful,
relationships shown.

it is gone, and then beautiful

martin venezky is a designer who immerses himself in a carefully considered and arranged world of visual noise. by collecting found materials, postcards, advertisements, and "ephemera," he generates a collaged stillshot of a moment in the form of an abstract visual field, often too complicated to pull particulars from, that keeps the eye roving without settling. venezky connects items and imagery by color, and by form, and by emotion, and by any number of things, consistent only in its inconsistency but never, ever random. it is this methodology that relates most directly to our recent work.

in our taxonomy book, we were asked to look at a vast collection of structurally related marks. the only thing that they all absolutely had in common was that they were the evidence of a nontraditional drawing material. it was then up to us, in our partner-groups, to look at the sea of data and let organizational systems swim upwards to us. the idea is not so much to split and organize as it was to look at our data as many ways as possible, and come up with divisions and associations that might not necessarily be apparent at first, but prove, in the long run, to be more meaningful.

i personally identified very strongly with the concept of detaining things with an extremely short lifespan, extending the life of an object once its usefulness has worn away, leaving only its beauty. he rescues the things he puts on his walls, keeps them from being thrown away and forgotten about, keeps them in a big visual time capsule, lets them become important in a way they were never necessarily intended to become important, until suddenly their time is up, whether only to make room for another artifact or because the entire wall must be eradicated for a move of studios. i find within myself a responsibility to the things around me to try to keep them, and let them live out in meaning and aesthetic, even once their original purpose has dried up, and in this way, i am incessantly collecting things that, unless i can display them in some fashion, i have this instinct that they resent me, that they're heartbroken and longing for respect. presumably venezky is not so much an anthropomorphizing crazy person, but he, too, compulsively displays things that would by many others be easily discarded, even though his collages are still only temporary pushpins in a wall.

yaiy emotional magpie behavior!

taxonomy book: the artifact.

taxonomy book:

earthy covers cultivate

haiku markmaking.

documentation

of marks, labeled by either

method or image.

imagery growing,

less and more information,

building clarity.

with blooming of plants,

the amounts of marks increase

by categories.

from the human touch,

through the spade of gardening,

through the plant structures...

ending in fruit,

almost quite a hundred gourds:

autumn growth on vines.

haikunimation, featuring josé gonzales's "heartbeats"

alas for quicktime,
its digital artifacts,
and lack of looping.

i must recommend
replaying once it is done
immediately...

conceptual loops,
and lifecycles repeating
season by season.

sprouting from the fertile soul

beginning with stuff:
a spade, and some plant matter.
i made lots of marks.

meanwhile: some thumbnails.
separate but equal process.
but now to combine!

analog collage
piece by piece into motifs,
cutting and pasting.

need to cradle sprout.
turn the spade mark 180?
now gently holding.

final vector marks,
and bernhard modern typeface:
the ending product.

final storyboards, final static images and type

i revised these a tiny bit in the course of my animating, so i'm posting them again. 

one more color book

the latest in a saga of photography trial and error, another color book!

i am excited about these, i think they turned out really well, and they were fun to stage, even if they resulted in some hand cramps from all the xacto cutting. pictured: construction paper & cutting mat. each of these phrases is contained in a little origami envelope that i can't bring myself to throw away yet, even the "confetti." kelly helped me pull my layout into something much more dynamic and balanced.

keep reading!

the last blog's cliffhanger picks up here: after that first critique, i just set out to take lots of different staged idea photos. these include a few locations in my house including the stairs and an enthused & cooperative roommate's bedroom. (her room is much more fun than mine.) eventually i wound up again in the photo studio (now i am teased when i asked for the keys, i've been in and out so much) staging hand shadow puppets.

that! now. by that point i'd hit upon something that had some legitimate potential. marty did some neat folding and proposed i try to combine the pillows/bed idea and the wall/shadows idea, and incorporate the lamps on the wall (because nobody sleeps with taplights, not even children) and so then came another thousand or so photographs on that theme, resulting in the following, that i offered today.

the sad story about those are how grainy and unfortunate they are. actually, the sad story is me & photography... we've had our troubles this semester in every class. but i am buying my own camera this christmas and i am going to tame it and we are going to get along great.

so with a gentler photoshopping, i dove back in with some zooming and cropping and lightening and brightening and leveling et cetera.

which brings us to the present.

(ta-da!) here is what i'm finally working with. it all comes down to a few days worth of tweaks, and then my semester of type 1 will be at a close. so strange. anyway, color correction and general cleaning-up: onward!

the story thus far

when you last saw my reach-out-and-read project, it was in its infancy, barely beginning on its path toward identity.

in the time since then i have taken no fewer than 2000 photographs. maybe 3000. so many photographs. consequently, so many iterations. consequentlyconsequently, this will be an image heavy blog post to catch us up on all the stages that eventually led me to my final image, whose color i will be correcting manically until shortly before it is due.

firstly i built my real book-object, from a grimm book called "the fisherman's wife," chosen for its appearance in the public domain. the construction paper letters changed from "read out loud!" to a simpler "read to me," the text from the all-type poster that i didn't end up pursuing.

i opted for "read to me" as opposed to "read to your child" because it engages the viewer more directly and doesn't necessarily imply parenthood. the responsibility of reading to children need not fall only in the hands of parents, because anyone who themselves can read is capable of reading out loud to someone younger.

my original intention was to have hands holding the book, and i tried a variety of people to get some diversity. here are 3 willing or unwilling hand models.

i tried a few other totally different things, too.

it was determined that, despite its unfortunate coloring (i thought it vintage and indie; it came through as a terrible photograph... and as you & urban outfitters can tell, the two are not mutually exclusive) the last was the closest to the right idea, based on the presence of the shadows on the "wall" and the fun bedtime idea that warm lights and shadows might offer. i relinquished the "somebody holding it" idea, picked up some happy bedtime-story taplights, and went to staging.

i'm going to cut this blog post in two so that it does not become quite so unwieldy all in one go. next up: the next set of iterations up through today's process!

time & motion

graphic design: the new basics's chapter on time and motion highlights the theory behind the work we're doing currently with our haiku animation.

a critical thing to realize (that perhaps a lot of people, including newish designers, might not) is that any still image has an implied motion (or implied stasis) at the same time as motion graphics must share compositional principles with print. the two are not so separate and different as they might seem.

potential modes of visual change include literal movement, scale change, transparency/color change, & layer shift, among others, all while the background itself has the option of remaining a neutral stage or participating in the action around the figure. the eyes of painters, typographers, animators, and filmmakers must come together in the mind of the motion graphic designer in order to successfully create a work with motion.

in panning and presentation, styleframes and storyboards are critical. styleframes are composed of the contents of an animation, while adhering to the strategies of still, static design, formulated to explain the visual language of the motion graphic to come, to establish its color schemes, typographic elements, illustrations, etc. storyboards take the most important key moments from a temporal design to show its progression, movement, and changes across a visual timeline.

the basics of animation rest in the use of keyframes and tweening. keyframes refer to the critical starts and stops of particular actions, while tweens are the frames that occur in between to create a smooth transition from one keyframe to another. in animation production, often one designer or key animator will generate the keyframes and leave the "inbetweening" to assistants. in our case, (and many others, especially more recently, as it's become an easy & reliable solution) we are leaving the tweening to computer automation within adobe flash. we build the keyframes, and select the space between them, and the computer fills in the gaps with a much smoother, mathematically calculated transition than we could have created by hand. this is particularly good for type and abstract graphic elements, but for subtleties like the movement of a body or facial expressions, there's no beating a by-hand approach.

[the next step, slightly outside the scope of what we are doing currently, is interactive motion design. in this type of motion graphic, rather than building a narrative/timeline, a sequence of actions that flow from one to the next, the designer creates a system of behaviors controlled by a coded list of if,then: statements. for instance: if the cursor rolls over it, then: the logo will dance. the actions have no sequence, and the interaction may change with every user, all while being constructed from the same building blocks. (which sounds pretty exciting, but we're not quite there yet.)]

paul rand/stefan bucher (sorry, this is not in haiku)

stefan bucher makes monsters. he makes them 100% analog, and with no planning, choosing instead to see how they develop. he begins with an inkblot, blown with air (through a straw, perhaps?) into drips and points and strands, completely random. like a rorschach test, he then looks into the inkblot and figures out what it looks like, "trying to see the shape and be very much in the moment." he says that many or even most artwork is so overfinished by the time it is viewed that it's hard to see how it was made, to see the "human hand, the human element." in his work, he turns his illustration into a performance, drawing upside down for the camera and posting his videos online for anyone to watch and collecting the stories people write for the monster characters. his work is absolutely process based, given that none of the monsters would exist without the initial random inkblot and that he builds the characters in time rather than through planning ahead. 

it is this kind of haptic improvisation that makes him relevant to our project, given our working methods for our static shapes. by using the qualities of our medium, ink or paint or whatever else we might have used, we take the orchestration out of our hands. we don't get to plan ahead and sketch it out, instead, we see what the ink will do, and learn how to roll with it to get something that is useful to us.

paul rand, previously called peretz rosenbaum, is credited with turning commercial art into graphic design, making it an impressive field, one to be admired, and demonstrating to businesses that graphic design could take a product or service to the next level of both visibility and desirability. 

his passion was for "defamiliarizing the ordinary," as iconoclastic artists have been doing throughout history, taking common and even mundane objects and ideas and through design making them beautiful and dynamic.

his truism, "don't try to be original, just try to be good" is a motto by which it's not a bad idea to try to live as a designer. to seek originality runs the risk of making something tied to the era of its creation, something that may seem dated or like it is trying to hard if not presently then certainly in the future. excellent design has a level of timelessness in it, without looking desperate or self aware. 

his description of working with "utmost simplicity and restraint" is relevant to both our static shapes and also our upcoming animations, in which we eliminate extra data and noise until we're left with something clean and simple that communicates our ideas more effectively than a complicated, confusing image.

the animation we watched about him is extremely pertinent to the way in which we are learning about motion graphics. the simplest, most basic elements of motion and interaction are the most crucial and using only those can get results with much clarity. the animation demonstrated all the pans and wipes and other simple operations that we've been studying with perfectly smooth, exciting transitions that never go beyond the simplest answers.

final static imagery and type

choosing motifs and the adding of type

tough, tough decisions:
the best don't go together.
no reconciling.

the circle of gourds,
the handprint for a soul-print,
the subtle twig-vine.

jamie's favorites.
but alas: content is king.
and twig is no vine.

justifications!
now, let's have no more of them.
here's what i have done.

altered the gourd-wheel.
sprouted from the cradled soul.
used the curly vine.

read!

new type project is so fun! we're participating in an aiga poster contest for an organization called "reach out and read," who are working with pediatricians to hand out books at check-ups along with information about the importance of reading, even very young, from a trusted, medical source.

this is particularly meaningful to me because i know (or at least have been reminded on a good handful of occasions) how much my parents read to me when i was little, and i know how much i lived to read growing up. looks like a typo, right? loved to read? which is also true. but seriously. both loved and lived to read, all the time, glasses by the time i was 8 years old, that kind of little kid. and then the whole winning spelling bees and high standardized test scores for all the reading/comprehension/verbal things. babies don't just grow up and figure that stuff out. doing well in language comes from being read to and spoken to and encouraged and given lots of books! (thanks, mum and dad!)

so anyway. a cause dear to my heart.

our constraints: let the posters be typographically dominant, or strictly type. eaaasy-peasy wide-open assignment! we began with 16 sketches for posters (i probably am not going to post them on here, because they're not very impressive), at least 8 using only type and then the rest featuring some kind of imagery, if we wanted.

through chatting with a small group and eventually presenting our sketches to the class, we settled on 3 directions apiece, the starts of which being due today.

these were my three directions!

and a physical prototype that looks a little something like this: 

the eventual incarnation of which i will be photographing with two hands holding the pages open, in a full sized book, rather than a tiny dollar tree bible. sorry, bible. it's nothing personal or willfully sacrilegious.  it's just that you were so convenient and inexpensive. if for some reason you were unable to determine, the letters are construction paper on a piece of wire.

i think my text is going to be the "read to me!" tagline from the other poster, because that's so much more direct, and demands immediate action from parents rather than the waffle-y "you should read to your child this much because science" that, although factual and enlightening, is less likely to inspire a quick change. 

so now i have to build that book (i spent so long at half-price trying to find a hardback book with text in public domain that god-forbid had some nice illustrations. the one i got is brothers grimm! and the illustrations are great! and it was only a dollar fifty! well worth all the hunting.) and buckle back into photography.

i sure do miss reading sometimes.

motifs, and refined motifs

as promised: motifs!
first drafts, and then some refined,
as well as thumbnails.

(thank you studio
for getting a new scanner
we quite needed it!)

after class critique,
thoughts from classmates and jamie,
a few revisions:

to cradle the sprout,
flip the spade print on its end.
safe and less lonely.

same delicate sprig:
sprouting from the soul of earth?
earth is too weighty.

small to big and dense,
swirling, but not too heavy.
infinity gourds!

many hundred gourds,
connected, not math'matic.
much more organic.

oh the single vine
it needs love and character
curly and not sparse.

jamie liked them all!
today's one-on-one, she 'yay'ed!
now, split directions.

arrange six motifs,
permutations, sets of three...
we'll see which one works.