show & tell

http://toko.nu/index.html#popup-gdfb contains an explanation of the poster.

This is a poster by a Dutch design agency (in Australia) called "Toko." 

it is a strongly asymmetrical design with the entire remaining composition balancing out the black circle and the white text in the top right. both repetition and layering have been used in the diagonals, as well as repetition of the thin verticals that run through those. additionally, the text is all aligned to the left.

there is so much to do that i can't even blog about it all

so here are some vis-com blog assignments, and they will have to be sufficient without any grand narrative of what's been going on in classes & studio. sorry to disappoint?

2 potential themes, twenty words/ideas apiece.

hometown:

mother
playing outside
hide & seek
growing
confidence
masturbation
partying
uninhibition
mistakes
"first love"
"virginity loss"
broken hearts
repression
familiar streets
packing
hugging
leaving
moving
unpacking
normalizing
shrine

cohabitation:

conversation
inhabiting
furniture
acquisition
duplicates
amalgam
space-sharing
intimacy
bed-sharing
sex
side-by-side
ordinary
shopping
eating
sharing
creating
union
family
inside
fulfilling


the fact that it is so miserably hard for me to pull 20 words of a topic out of the three full mindmaps i have made says something about how i must not be using mindmaps correctly.

i think that maybe with lateral thinking i end up never getting into any of the things i actually wanted to write about. i had this concept of a progression of growing up, moving out of your parents' home, moving in with somebody else, and trying to make a new home. but i got so continually (literally) sidetracked by all the tangential things, the items on the sidelines, trying to accommodate everything and include everything, that i never actually got into the meat of the story i thought i wanted to tell. so i have three full mindmaps that mostly just tell about everything without, i'm afraid, really telling about anything, leaving me with hundreds of words but no 20 together all directly (or even reasonably indirectly) related to one topic.

anyway. i'm sure this will be refined as we move forward, so it should work out in the end.

WHY, GRAPHIC DESIGN?

     Of all the disciplines available at the Kansas City Art Institute, graphic design strikes me as somewhat unique, not only because of its "send you out into the world with a way to make a living" tactics, but also because of its natural and necessary inclination towards service and communication with other people.
     Because I think of myself as such a deeply people-centric individual, working only for my own satisfaction approaches, in my mind, vacuity. If I had wanted to turn myself inwards and art out my feelings, I could have gone elsewhere, but my desire is to help people communicate. Sometimes I feel like I may not have all that much to say for myself, but if I can learn how to help others better express themselves and spread their information, I will feel as though I am having a hand in the workings of the world, and that, certainly, is more than enough reason to try.

     Meggs's description of resonance is exactly to what I'm referring. The transcendence of the mere transferral of information into something striking, meaningful, and maybe even powerful, instructing, delighting, and motivating the viewer into the solid "thought-of-it-themselves" understanding that leads to the action the designer is calling for.
    
     Hiebert's discussion on "style" is something I intend on filing away to remember in the future. Style makes its appearance in two definitions... one of them being the positive, wherein style is simply the classy, recognizable, effective inconsistencies that emerge over a long time of doing relatively similar but never identical work. The bad style, on the other hand, is what you'd imagine: lame, cheap, faddish. It rises and falls within moments, parodying and abandoning itself until a new ideal style rises and it, too, is run into the ground until it gives up.

     Stefan Sagmeister talks about his working with a sort of incredible irreverence. "Having guts always works out for me," he says, and I believe it. Looking through his student Q&As on the Sagmeister, Inc website is reaffirming and energizing. Everything revolves around just DOING things, and doing them well, and cleanly, and legibly, and with passion and vigor. Bonus points if they're completely new, never-been-done-before type things.

     My original thoughts on the matter still stand, given that I threw a gentle, central statement about what graphic design is and should be used for. If I hear two people in a conversation around me misunderstanding one another, I'm not afraid to step in and politely explain to each one what the other is hearing. And when someone comes to me with a thing that they want said, it is my intention to help get that information out into the world for them, so that others can access it and be affected, whether it's life-changing and revolutionary or (god forbid) a 25% off sale.

typography blog homework

given the letter b to illustrate, i chose to work with a lowercase garamond, a lowercase bodoni, and an uppercase clarendon.

presently, and tardily, i am going to be explaining some anatomical points about my garamond "b."

garamond, originally utilized around 1475, had its basis in handwriting. it is part of a classification known as "humanist," or old-style, and its angled stress and angled serifs call up the right-handed 45-ish-degree poise of calligraphy. its capitals are referential to ancient roman carving capitals.

the garamond "b" is composed of the following parts:

a STROKE, or rather a STEM, which is an ASCENDER, and is topped with a soft, angled SERIF, which perches on a left-side BRACKET.

a BOWL, the STRESS of which causes the right side to be thicker than the top or bottom.

a COUNTER, contained by the bowl.

i'm not sure if the TERMINAL at the end of the STEM constitutes a SPUR, or if there is another term for a stroke ending in that way?

concerning my letterform drawings, i'm afraid i erred on the side of perfection, as absurd a statement as that might have been.

i got so caught up in the letterforms themselves, and how they are constructed, and their ratios and angles and curves and straight edges, that i forgot to let myself go and bring them along into a more creative composition. instead i found myself trying to understand them, and to learn how to duplicate them, in the mathematical precision that they were created. which i'm sure is a noble path, but a project for a different time.

early impressions in typography class: probably not good, i hate to say, (i'm so sorry, marty) which is awful, because i love typography more than most other things. but. i will get back on track, get the hang of classes, take in directions more carefully, and the rest.

my future kind of counts on it and all.

nasa!

the following nasa logos are, in order, my manual vector redraw, livetrace's valiant attempt, and me fixing the livetrace. more on this as it develops.