final breathe

my final "breathe" type composition, xeroxed onto lovely bright white laser paper, scanned.

 it was important to me in this piece that the placement of the text be somewhat taken for granted. this is why i put it directly in the center of the frame, a place wherein the imagery is expected to be found, where it doesn't surprise you, or rattle you, or make you inform your reading differently like you might have if it had a significant location. it's kind of similar to the idea of working in a vacuum... it isn't that the type doesn't have a location in the composition, just that its location is so imminently forgettable you don't have to think about it.

as for the text itself, i knew i needed a thin, sans-serif. futura turned out the font i wanted, its circles allowing for plenty of airflow. i experimented with very many variations on the sizing, sometimes making it much more pronounced, but mostly striving to get it just pronounced enough not to look as though it were receding into space or anything. i sketched out this composition to mimic the feeling of exhalation and inhalation, soft and rhythmic and smooth. when i laid out my letters, i first tried to put them all along a baseline together, but the straight line looked too out of place. i then tried to align them through the middle, which didn't seem to look right, either. it became too much of a symmetrical shape, and not secure or level enough. eventually i averaged those two shapes and took the arrangement  between them.

i really wanted this piece to feel gentle, to approach the viewer like you approach something flighty without startling it. the biggest critique i got dealt with the framing, whether i could have let it bleed off the frame, or brought it in closer. i'm afraid it might have worked better in that regard if i'd given more space around the border because there is some amount of tension in how closely the b and the e hug those lines.

all in all, though, it was pretty well received and i like how it came out.

"experiential typography"

a "one day" sun poem that can only be read on the solstices...

you've got to check this out, it's so lovely.

it is a structure with perforations that allow for the sun to spell out poetry from bright pinholes. it contains two poems, one for the summer and one for the winter, and the poem cycles through its lines depending on the sun's angle throughout those days.

the amount of forethought required for such a piece is kind of staggering. i wonder if they just started experimenting, using trial and error, or if they figured out some sort of perfect formula to make it work properly the first time? at least, if it didn't work that first solstice, you'd have six months to fix it before it was expected to work again.

marty is giving one on one critiques in class presently. apparently i didn't do the project wrong after all! sweet relief! it's hard to trust yourself, though, if you've messed up like that before (and i have, and it's awful).

now to add-to/organize a process binder!

[update: it's cool! no worries!] with a sinking feeling...

i have had this horrible realization that i think i did this typography project incorrectly by using weights other than standard regular and standard bold. i was so excited about my compositions, too... now i don't really have the heart to put them on here, because i think i'm learning a cold dark lesson about checking back with the assignment the whole time you're working on it rather than just going with what you think you're supposed to be doing. i'm sure i can recreate them with the required weights, but certainly not by class in the morning. i'm sorry! i feel so stupid. maybe by some miracle it will turn out okay, anyway.

anyway, here's my desk in the middle of it. askdjfhaskdfjh.

yesterday's daily "desk"

is actually the floor of my house with all my dot compositions laid out.

you can almost tell from this image quality how late/early it was taken.

this method actually really did help me figure out what i was doing in a way that flipping endlessly back and forth between pages couldn't do, and shortly after this, i was stacking my source materials out on the compositions in which i wanted to use them.

i got an unexpectedly good critique on the directions i was taking for my imagery, which was really refreshing, and had a good talk with jamie about getting into the graphic design swing of things.

maybe i can finish this project with a reasonable amount of success after all!

in conclusion, pantone is a brilliant conspiracy.

today as our kelly-sub, chris chapin came in to speak to us some more about color theory. he helped us put together once for all the relationship between CMY and RGB (if RGB are your primaries, their intersections create the secondary CMY) which was amazingly illuminating. in this teaching, it was revealed to us how, exactly, four-color-process printing works in terms of how it reflects light and generates the colors we see.

i'm so excited about this, it made so much crazy scientific sense. a recap: when you lay down a CMY color of ink, you are neutralizing its complement in the RGB light spectrum. after removing the complement of a color, the remaining primaries necessarily combine to make the color of ink you first set down, which is what reflects back off the paper, and is the color that you see! so cyan ink doesn't appear cyan just because it's cyan ink, it's that color because it captures and neutralizes the red light waves, leaving only blue and green reflecting back out, which, when combined, make cyan!


guys, that is so cool.


we also discussed pantone's system as a good way to get print colors you might not otherwise be able to generate through cmyk alone. pantone has a thus far benevolent monopoly on consistent color recipes, and their pms numbers are used to describe print colors all over the world. suddenly hit with a curiosity, i asked chris what they mixed in order to get their colors. he half-answered, leaving me more confused, until i saw the pantone mixing swatchbook. they make their colors out of their own colors, which are presumably also made from their own colors. so recursive! so confusing! so diabolical! you cannot duplicate a pantone color without the exact specifications, and you cannot use those specifications if you don't already have their stuff.

pantone is so clever. they've really got it made. maybe they need an intern or something.

tulips and windmills

the meggs reading introduces two graphic designers and details how they make use of tension in their work. the first is piet zwart, a designer from the netherlands in the 1920s, who is compared to lissitzky as another pioneer. the work in question is a spread from a cableworks catalog from 1928, dominated by 45 & 90 degree angles. the images are presented in their proper vertical orientation but all of the text is set along diagonals. an arrow that runs parallel to the type unifies the two halves of the composition while they remain separate halves of a spread. the second designer is cheryl a. brzezinski, about whom we are not told anything else. there is so much going on in this poster design for "new dutch graphics" that it is something of a miracle that the piece holds together so well. divided into a light side and a dark side, both text and imagery cross the dividing line and interact with it in different ways. tulips are held together by sheer content properties alone, because their appearance is astoundingly different in every instance, especially the largest, which is divided into halves with photographic duotone one one side and a high contrast line drawing on the other. the repetition of the windmills is 2/3rds encapsulated in whirling circles and while one windmill is large and inverted to balance the darker side out.

what i'm learning from this is how little it takes to bind together a design, as though all it takes is one simple, well placed element, and how precarious a composition could look while still being effective. tension is all about being one misstep away from chaos while holding it all in with simplicity and precision.

i'd be so curious to learn more about the mathematics of composing things in this way... my sense (when i have one) of composition is, at this juncture, rather instinctive and indistinct.

blog posting idea: the daily desk

i spoke to marty about trying to figure out how to document my processes, being somebody who has no history of or inclination towards doing that, and i'm going to condense and paraphrase what she said into "err on the side of too much." in the spirit of that advice, i've got a concept and i'm not positive i'll be able to keep up with it, but i thought it might be interesting just every day to document the state of my desk when i'm right in the middle of things and describe what it is i am working on.

a "daily desk," if you will.

so anyway. here is yesterday's... and today's should come along later, if all goes according to plan

this is working on the next step of the typography assignment, creating compositions out of our narrative-words using the same principles as the warm up: seeing how syntax, the technical presentation of the text, can impact the semantics, what it's saying. we are doing this "analogue" to see where the serendipity of cutting and moving and overlaying ends up taking us, ideally to places we would not have thought to go were we just moving things around on a computer screen and resizing as we go. i started out with a few pages of sketches before choosing monotype grotesque and beginning to print out some options. as you can see, i'm excited about the possibility to mirror letters, i think i will be able to heighten the meanings of some of my words by doing that.

UP TO DATE DAILY DESK:

this is a combo of viscom and color/form. as you can see, my itten color wheel is onscreen, where i was adding the cmyk percentages after building it in class. it was so hard to reconcile the math with what i was seeing, so while i began using math, i frequently ended up tweaking what i was seeing. so you'll notice that my numbers are all rounded off into fives, but they might be a little bit arbitrary.

all the physical stuff you can see, i have been accumulating for my viscom dotbook. some notable examples are the spools of ribbon, the cookbook, the king james new testament, and a box of bandaids.
i'm also currently finding high-res images for the remaining things i want to use that i was not able to satisfactorily find in real life.

now back to it.

itten colorstar!

(it's so pretty!) the middle ring is pure colors, inside is tints, & outside is shades... working towards white and black respectively.

complementary: direct opposites, these have the most visual contrast and tend to vibrate. they are jarring. don't you dare use them for text or you will burn in type hell. 

split complementary: a three-color combo, one hue and two others that are equidistant from its complement. it doesn't have so much tension, it's hard to mess up.

double complementary/tetradic: a four-color combo, with two complementary pairs. it is wise to let one pair be dominant.

square: a tetradic set of colors, but all equally spaced around the color wheel.

analogous: a set of colors (three?) that are net door to one another on the wheel. pleasant, similar harmony. 

triadic: a three-color combo that are all equally spaced. so vibrant! usually smart to desaturate a little.

monochromatic: a color-set of tints and shades, all derived from the same hue.

with any color-sets, it is generally smart to pick a dominant hue and then a sort of "second-in-command" and let the rest be accents. it can hurt to have too many colors wanting to be dominant.

breathe, just breathe

trying to capture breath in size and kerning. it took a lot of tries before i was happy with it. it ended up with one "breathebreathe," not two; i was just comparing sizes.

in the process!:

i borrowed michael's camera for this because my cameraphone was charging. it came out pretty nice. i kind of wish i had a real camera.