this scanner is so great

i borrowed jessica's camera but succeeded only in taking a bunch of pictures with my shadow falling right across my book. i'm not so good at cameras. obviously i need to dive in and figure 'em out a little bit, but the task at hand was simply to document the book, so i decided i'd just scan in each of my pages. honestly, it was probably easier.

so, with zero ado, book:

as i grow weary and verbose:

a page-by-page overview of some formal design principles, and a reflecting kind of blog.

innocence: i used scale to show the difference between the world/setting and the two tiny characters, playing hide and seek inside it. it is also an asymmetrical composition, hinting that the setting is much bigger than just what's on the page. compound shapes are formed by the dots where they intersect to create something of a landscape.

puberty: i again used scale in hopes of showing the physical growth of the body during the upheaval of puberty. this composition is based off one asymmetrical compound shape. hopefully it is representative of the explosion of changes in the body, and the leveling off/droop is indicative of how mentally and physically taxing it can be to grow up.

mistakes: i used alignment in this composition by organizing the dots along a grid. scale is used, yet again, in an attempt at perspective. compound shapes are formed by the double-dots, which are also examples of the repetition i was trying to use to depict a sort of unsettling double-vision.

separation: proximity was crucial to this composition in that it had to be clear that one character was leaving and its family was remaining, together, where they were. i also utilized framing in cutting off part of the exiting dot to show its departure.

homecoming: once more, a big scale shift between the traveling character and the idea of home. the size of the home-circle is enhanced by the framing of the composition cutting most of it, leaving only a corner. ideally the exaggerated size of home and diminutive returning dot should get at a kind of humility.

union: finally an almost symmetrical composition. it is balanced, but offset. i hope that positive/negative comes clearly across on this page, because even though the black dots are, physically speaking, positive, they represent the negative space between the two interlocking white pieces. repetition and correspondence occur in the interlocking "teeth," establishing which is positive space and which is negative. there is also a compound shape built of circles, and layering was necessary to ensure that the negative space was entirely filled with darkness.

amalgam: another basically symmetrical composition. there is correspondence between all the small dots not necessarily due to their imagery but simply because they're so much smaller than the two large source-dots. thus, scale appears here as well.

attachment: asymmetric framing and scale were important in this page because they help to show the size of the idea of mother or father in relation to a child, and the ever-increasing "preciousness" of family.

lastly, relinquishment: this composition utilizes a compound shape (created out of two smaller compound shapes linked in layers and correspondence) to build the idea of a nest. proximity is crucial in the same way it was in separation, and scale emphasizes how fragile the new traveler is. the asymmetry should heighten the sense of distance between the nest and the individual striking out.

dot compositions are a good way to make absolutely certain you understand a concept by testing to see if you are able to communicate it through the most basic, abstract arrangements of a single shape. using imagery is so very much a double-edged sword in that it can bring into very vibrant clarity exactly what it is that your composition is alluding to, but at the same time, can hijack your composition into being about something else entirely without you even noticing. nevermind if your imagery is simply redundant and takes all the fun out of figuring a composition out.

i think as a cohesive artifact, my book turned out much more unified than i was worried it might turn out to be. pleasant surprises! i just wish so very much that i'd had a few more days to work on the actual construction of the object. having had several weeks of process and preparation, the two days between our final discussions/approvals/critiques and our due dates seemed a little anti-climactic and less than conducive to the kind of work i would have liked to have produced. i'm not so satisfied with my craft, but as occasionally happens in the real world, priorities come into play as to whether it would be most beneficial to have a completed artifact with less than stellar craft, or beautiful craft on a few pages without ever completing the project. obviously i realize that the correct answer would have been to achieve both one way or another and i hope that i can reach a point in my design career whereat that becomes an easier solution than it currently is.

the biggest thing i would do differently, aside from taking the time to get really clean, pristine craft, is narrow my scope, and try harder to understand what is really being asked of me. upon hearing the word "narrative" during the brainstorming process, i latched upon literally the idea of it being necessary for a narrative to run through the book. much much too late to change anything, it dawned on me that all we were really required to have is a clear topic, something around which we could think of a set of items or ideas that maybe don't so much tell a story as simply explain or describe or build upon that topic. not that i know, necessarily, what i would have done otherwise, but i do think that perhaps my scope was a bit too wide. nevertheless i wrangled it! and i would like to think that i have done a bit better than simply going down with a sinking ship.

colorstorming

I LOVE COLORS.

it proved interesting, i think, how different my expectation of a color given its name and the actuality of the color when viewed turned out to be. because i find that so bizarre, i've left both my in-my-mind's-eye expectations and then, if my emotional response changed once i saw the real color being referenced, also the revised statement of associations. eventually i began just looking the colors up initially, no expectations writing. probably much more effective, if less psychologically telling.

bright red: passion, either violent or romantic: all's fair in love and war. heart pumping blood through thrill or panic.

vibrant orange: hunger, excitement, casualness. (no relation.) supposedly enhances appetite, vibrates, looks joyful and fun. summery. shows a distinct lack of stuffy professionalism.

bright yellow: in my head: happiness, sunshine, spring and summer. baby chicks and rubber ducks and yellow birthday cake. again, lacking in staunch professional inclinations. if it tends a bit more toward green, it becomes manic. looking at it actually in the color bridge book, it looks a little more like school bus or road sign or taxi-cab than the yellow i was writing about.

earth brown: in my head: calm, reassuring, simple, or chocolate-rich and perhaps sumptuous. invokes doing-it-yourself and the satisfaction that can bring. the actual color in the bridge book, on the other hand, is almost indistinguishable from a neutral grey. given that, this has a sleek, more businesslike tint to it.

deep blue: oscillates between soothing and melancholy. calm and slow moving either way. supposedly blue is an appetite suppressant. looking at the book, it is very regal and luxurious, containing some idea of violet. a very classy color, not to be trifled with.

chartreuse green: springtime, new baby plants. filled with the idea of a fresh start and the beginning of growth and the idea of sustainability, of continually being reborn. could potentially be viewed as juvenile, probably inappropriate for important, serious content.

blue purple: i would definitely just call this purple. this is what purple means in my head. it has a richness, like velvet, and perhaps it's invoking the old idea of only royal blood being allowed/able to attain and wear purple garments. theatrical, dramatic, romantic. on the other hand, there are some real jerks in the world who would just call it gay.

charcoal grey: clean and smooth and classy. as a neutral, it is almost by default very versatile. the accent colors would be crucial in using this kind of grey, because on its own, it simply gives a slate (see what i did there?) on which to draw. a good corporate color. works similarly to black but in a way less edgy and melodramatic. on the other hand, it could be dull, polluted, and urban, if given the context of brighter "pretty" colors or white.

white: white is new, fresh, unstarted, pure. it has a perfect simplicity, and a minimalist charm. you may run into trouble using it as your predominant tone, however, unless you can successfully make it look completed and polished: it can look unfinished, by the same coin.

and lastly black: slick and complicated as well as flat and simple. you can play it up or down or in or out depending on with what other colors it is partnered. it has the clean, crispness of a night sky or a certain uncharted feeling.

layering & transparency & simultaneity & other things that mean occurring at the same time.

this reading, which discusses two systems for expressing an overlap through time or space, is particularly timely for the book we're almost about to finish with. (it's as though we're trying to learn something!)

first, some quick to-see-if-i-get-it defining.

layering, i think, refers to the arrangement of (usually) disparate elements together in space or through time in a composition. in terms of static imagery, it refers to the generation of a sense of depth in a flat plane by putting some things in front of or behind other things, or even using such obviously separate pieces that they look as though they have been cut and pasted into one composition, hearkening back to the cubists. in terms of time-based work, such as animation, film, or music, layering refers to a sort of sensory multitasking: hearing a violin play the melody while a viola plays a harmony, for instance, or two scenes occurring at the same time, whether in split screen or jumping back and forth. the layering comes from the understanding that everything everywhere runs on its own parallel timeline, and they can be doing separate things but still doing them in a way that is "together."

transparency seems to oscillate between heightening clarity and obscuring clarity, depending on how it is used. it has the potential to be a sort of omniscient system of layering, showing all the things occurring at once without any of them blocking out any others, each being of equal importance, or with a subtle variation in priority, still while showing all things at once. alternately, transparent elements can keep piling up, and adding and adding until not only can you not read the first ones put into place, but nor can you even read the latest, what would be the top layer, because everything, all together, at the same time,  has become much more complex than any one or even several given things on their own.

in our books we get to layer WITH transparency. we may be unable to see through the text itself, at its full opacity, but we can see through the counterforms and around the perimeters of the shapes, and the rest of the composition should be "perfectly" transparent. This is crucial because we get to experiment with our compositions as complex, multilayered objects, with a unified image-based piece, and a unified text-based piece, juxtaposed to create a higher level of meaning.

our method for doing this is particularly valuable because we aren't just creating one composition with both text and image. we may be putting in one plus one and (ideally) deriving three, but we are also able to subtract and look at one or one independently, to see their value as a separate composition and then consider why they work together as they do to generate meaning in excess of what they could mean separately.

when text and image work together at their most effective, i think, you have that sort of a-ha moment. a quiet click into place of having comprehended one, and then the other, and then all of a sudden across the synapse jumps the realization of what meaning these elements, together, have created: ideally a related but perhaps more elaborate, hybridized concept utilizing the content of both the text and the image and even, if you're really good, the way the text is presented.

in terms of my own book, i will consider myself successful if the images and the composition alone have the capacity to give the reader a sort of familiarity, a sense that the relationship in the things depicted makes sense in a way that they may have known but may have forgotten, while the text acts as a jog for the memory, snapping the pieces into place, perhaps even providing the "missing link" to what the images have in common.

layering strikes me as something that will be particularly important to my book thematically because each page will represent the progression of time, and so, frequently, the imagery will stack up. the idea behind this notion is that you bring all your feelings and experiences with you since early childhood, and you internalize them and they color your present and even your future actions as you continue to accumulate more experiences and relationships that continue the process. in this way, i hope to echo some of the colors and textures from earlier in the book in small moments later on in the book, to give the sense of the layering complexity you develop as you grow up. it's not as though you become somebody different. it's just that you add layers to yourself, new and new and new, of varying opacities, and sometimes you can see all the way through for a long time and you're relatively unchanged, and sometimes you might develop a layer that's 100% opaque and feel like something wholly unrelated, but all your previous layers are still there. they're just deeper down, and they're underneath a layer you can't so easily see through.

the things in my book that i have control over are: my imagery, my compositions, my words, my typographical compositions, my material handling. the domain of serendipity currently contains: some of the interplay between my image compositions and my type compositions, and most importantly of all, the feelings and experiences that the reader will bring with them as they take in what i'm presenting and how it relates to them: everyone's own personal "hometown," that they've loved and lost or found or kept or made, and the people and relationships that it has contained.

josef albers is playing mindgames

it struck me as a little bit funny how many of these color studies i had previously been exposed to under the guise of email forwards or "oh wow you won't believe this!" perception tricks, like the immortal shaded checkerboard.



i'm sure know this one, so this is no spoiler: a & b are actually the same! i'll be honest, that always did boggle my mind, but as soon as i squinted, i was able to see the greys as identical despite the checkerboard logic that my brain was imposing on them.

it turns out that color, while undeniably a scientific phenomenon all on its own, is basically meaningless and imperceptible (or at the very least, boring and nonspecific) without the context and relationships of other colors. in an attempt to avoid waxing altogether too philosophical, i'll cut the entire soliloquy down to the following: like everything else about our perception, once our puny infant-brains started to realize that, instead of taking in every detail of everything, they could just lump vast amounts of things together into big silly ideas, it became easier to understand that something was black or white than to actually look at the colors that are being shown to you, that all somehow, mysteriously, work together to become black or white. aka: we don't see blue, we have this platonic-ideal-transcendental-signified BLUE that lives in our heads that we apply to things that we know are "blue." but. that's not science. that's a mashup of ancient greek philosophy postmodern self loathing.

concerning the little colorplaying widgets, i found the overlapping/layering/transparency experiment the most interesting and informative so i thought i might try to lay out how it seems to work as best i can.

here's what i'm coming up with.

let's assume there's always a lighter and a darker "paper" in the overlap.
when the overlap is...

...the lightest shape, the lighter page appears to be on top, and transparent, but additive of light.

...in between, either page could be on top, and it seems to shift order as you look at it.

...the darkest shape, the darker page is on top, and it is subtractive of light.

meatballs and worms, aka the american space program

     In 1958, in the excitement of the United States vs. Soviet Union space race, President Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration out of what was previously the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The current NASA visual identity system comprises 3 separate parts that are never intended to be intermixed, each with their own particular reasons for creation and separate usages.
     Firstly, there is the NASA "seal". It is the most complicated of the three, and it originated in 1959. The seal was created by an illustrator at the NASA Reasearch Center at Lewis Field and is used strictly for ceremonial and formal occasions in connection with the NASA Administrator, never as a logo. The seal is a blue circle, containing imagery of the Earth and the Moon, an orbital path, several star clusters, and a red "vector." It is encircled by red text.




     Shortly after the generation of the seal, James Modarelli, the head of Lewis's Research Reports Division, was tasked with the creation of a simplified, usable logo utilizing similar shapes and iconography. This is known as the NASA "insignia." He eliminated the planets and the red text, opting to let the blue circle itself be representative of a planet. He retained the stars, representative of space; the red chevron, depicting a state-of-the-art hypersonic wing from the time of its creation, representative of aeronautics; and the orbital path, obviously representative of space travel. He reoriented these elements around his newly added white NASA letters. In NASA jargon, this logo has been nicknamed the
"meatball."



     In 1975, the NASA logotype was created to be a more modern look. This design, which is officially deemed the "logo," was nicknamed the "worm." It is made of thick red lines that create simple letterforms to spell NASA, and is considered by Ellen Lupton in Mixing Messages to be one of the "few graphical triumphs of the Nixon administration's Federal Design Program." The simplified angles of the "A"s are said to be indicative of rockets. In 1992, however, 6 years after the Challenger disaster, Dan Goldin, who was the administrator of NASA, felt they needed the nostalgic romance of its old insignia to rejuvenate optimism towards the space program. The meatball was reinstated to prove that, in his words, "the magic is back at NASA." Since the worm's official retirement from NASA's true visual identity, however, it has stayed around, and its primary usage is in merchandising opportunities.



     According to the NASA Visual Identity Office, the meatball insignia consists of two basic colors: red (PMS185) and blue (PMS286). Building through 4 color process, the ratios are as follows: red=100 magenta + 100 yellow, blue=100 cyan + 60 magenta. Used in full color, the insignia must be presented on either white, black, grey (PMS423), or silver (PMS877). The insignia is never meant to have a white outline around it.
     Space being the final frontier, NASA has grappled, visually, with how they would like people to relate to it. The worms were modern, and cutting edge, and a little mysterious, intentionally futuristic and potentially unsettling in that they give a sort of adrenaline rush of the unknown. The meatball, on the other hand, has this classicism, a kind of storybook quality, and beauty, as though there was just this unclaimed knowledge and experience waiting for us, and all we had to do was make it into space. The worms were exciting, while the meatball was reassuring. Each had their crucial times of use, and we've come back around to the meatball most recently, but who is to say, if NASA picked back up in momentum, if it would still be appropriate to the feelings of the space program today? And if not, what direction might the newest logo take?










on an utterly different note, i'm going to share with you this link whether or not it is appropriate because it is a brilliantly well made short mockumentary: the old negro space program. if you've got 10 or so spare minutes, i highly recommend it.