when frustrated, my classmates find this to be arguably better than the konica

http://www.wimp.com/legoprinter/

oh man. it's so cute. i want one. let's make one.

alumni weekend

this morning: breakfast and talks with design alumni, the mccoys, and a panel discussion.

good bagels! good talks! one alum brought his 20 year old portfolio to show us, meticulously cut and pasted together into a book. we couldn't imagine how he had gotten some of his effects, given how much they looked like photoshop. one overlay, for example, he achieved like by combining two slides on a projector.

the mccoys spoke about design projections for the future, and the different directions in which the field is splitting. there is a lot of dichotomy in current work, such as the handmade, diy aesthetic, versus the cleanest minimalism: like the amateur versus professional conflict. this also takes the form of local vs. global, looking towards the past/looking towards the future... on the brighter side, one thing that is no longer a working dichotomy is exploitation/sustainability. we're pretty much unanimously in the sustainability camp by this point (is it too late? i can't handle that question right now). as design gets exponentially more complicated, they mused about how long a design education should take in the future.

the panel was really excellent in letting us see how professionals in different (but related) fields interact with one another, whether it's through chiming in and building and agreeing or respectfully dissenting an opinion while offering constructive middleground to work from in the next moment. they gave us a lot of insight into working collaboratively, and what the world really is like today for working designers. as the talk was winding down, i asked what they wished they had known when they were our age, still in school, just about to jump into the practice. everybody had a really great answer, pretty consistently bordering on the profound... some specific wisdom i absorbed was the fact that working for just yourself, the occupation previously known as freelancing, is not just a backup plan. it can be successful and very rewarding. you don't need to just jump immediately into working, if you can get away with not doing so: we've all got the rest of our lives to work. as young designers, just about to enter the field, we have way more to share with older designers than either of us realize, given our position at the forefront of technologies. and my favourites, which were also some of the last things said: that designers are always students of design, as part of a constantly shifting, roiling, conceptual industry; that it is always, always necessary to keep learning, and lastly: that we should never, ever become professionals.

typeface: a documentary

we took a big design field trip for ten dollars' worth of extra credit and went to see a film called "typeface" in the tivoli theatre on pennsylvania (it's just a couple of blocks from my house, and kind of like the circle cinema in tulsa. i mean to watch their show-calendar and go again, it was a pretty cool place). it was fun to get everybody out of the studio for awhile to do something else: it was like having friends and a life and stuff!.

the speaker at the beginning (a previous aiga president) told us about design-week in february, which sounds like a great time, and for which i think we were all pretty excited...

and then the film started. it was endearing, sweet almost, in an imperfect-craft sort of way, filmed like real life with uncomfortable pauses and people who care too much, about the hamilton wood type museum in two rivers, wisconsin, a tiny town of 3,000. this museum is located in a functional (if no longer utilized) type workshop, and a handful of its old employees still live in the town, and are featured in the documentary.

it also featured two professors, and an art collective that call themselves "the post family," who had just bought a letterpress setup, and who were going to the museum.

it showed the man who owned the museum trying, (in vain?), to keep it alive, and to make it look nice, and to bring people in to make money... and nobody in the town board really understood what he was trying to do, or particularly cared about it. all the while, they discussed the beauty and importance of wood type as both a current, diy practice, and as a major historical step along the continuum of print.

a sad documentary, i think. ended on a particularly melancholy note: "what do we do to save beautiful historical techniques and practices from dying out with their last practitioners?" "dunno." /film.

i couldn't help but wonder a little bit why the printmakers weren't asked to see it, given how heavily it dealt with their medium. in regards to ours, as designers, it mostly just said that we, the computer design generation, were all going to get carpal tunnel and forget where art, print, and design came from.

leaving, we were all a little quiet. "well... " we said.


"guess we're gonna go back to studio and get carpal tunnel."



and that was that.

photoshop hero! warning, naughty language

in honor of the photoshopping i am doing, madly, for kelly's color class, i'm going to share with you a penny-arcade comic. i am mad photoshopping because my computer calibration is utterly unrelated to the camera calibration, which is utterly unrelated to the printer colors, which are utterly unrelated to the colors of the objects, clothing, and roommates i was photographing, which are, of course, totally fictional because i was photographing with a magic incandescent light white-balance setting on the camera, nevermind the fact that color is entirely relative in the first place and wholly dependent on the lighting. so i'm basically taking the platonic ideal of the colors that i know those objects to be in my heart and trying to make that occur in photoshop.

so first, here are some of the images i'm working on... i won't bog down your load-time with all of them.

analogous colors: green, bluegreen, and blue

complementary colors: blue and orange

a triad of orange, purple and green

"warm" colors including red and orange and yellow and warmer versions of purple and light blue

and finally, here's penny-arcade, to make us visual artists feel better about the things that we can't do. one of these days, somebody will make a game that will cater to -our- skills. and we will rock it.

an overview of line compositions

we began very gently with simple line compositions. we had to make five each to communicate three "variables," which were regularity, progression, & randomness. this was an extremely painless piece of the project.

it resulted in things like:

 

 

 

(i'm going to take this opportunity to tell you that i built that progression composition off the fibonacci sequence, an idea i was really proud to have had.)

we were then mashed up with a partner (mckenzie, here's looking at you) with whom we combined all of our simple compositions into a pool from which to draw for the next step: complex compositions.

we were to pick one simple composition as a base, rotate it 90º, and fill its lines with other simple compositions still at their original orientation. still while expressing the three variables. from here on out, the work is completely collaborative, with no particular ownership.

here's some of the things we came up with, in the same order:

then. the final step in this part of the process was taking these things and making them angular and curvilinear using the copier, the scanner, and the projector.

this for instance is an angular line composition generated by projecting straight lines on a variety of angled surfaces all at once, i.e., stairs.

and this is a curvilinear composition made by teasing a scanner. i think it had fun.

our next step was to take a photosafari, and hunt for compositions like these (we have a 2 inch binder literally full of them) out in our real kansas city environment. [the way jamie talked about it made it sound exactly like pokémon snap... i dunno if anybody else remembers that game? it was so great.] so i walked down broadway from linwood to 43rdish (i turned around at streetside records) and then cut across to pennsylvania and walked back home to 34th. two miles of photographs! hopefully i have some that will be useful. 

(from the uptown theatre, broadway & valentine. anecdotally, my illinoisan boyfriend and i saw pavement there a month ago, that place is beautiful! also pavement was great.)

    (the kc life facade, broadway & armour. they own the valentine neighborhood in which i live.)

for monday i must match up 12 photos with 12 compositions to see how i'm doing with this next step. and what follows is, as always, a mystery.

more find and share (because i'm not sure if it counts if i use myself)

hembakat är bäst is the title of an ikea cookbook featuring these images by carl kleiner and evelina brattell.

i believe these images to be a good example of unexpected line studies: they use line intervals and weights and complex grid interactions as bases for anything else, and the configuration unifies the disparate objects as well as organizes them in an elegant, visually engaging way.

they did have a slightly more straightforward time of it, though, with the luxury of building their photographs as they wanted them to appear rather than trying to find something that matches from preexisting arrangements.

trying to apply the things i'm learning!

as the communications officer for student assembly, i'm responsible for generating the signage and posters for our events. for this student forum poster, i used one of mckenzie's/my simple random line compositions in which to set my text! i also left some of the lines as additional graphic elements to add interest. i'm not certain it could stand up to a rigorous critique, but as a quick eye-grabbing informational bulletin, i think it's pretty okay.

(plus, i've got this neat optical illusory trick where it doesn't look like it's squared with 90 degree corners!)

bitmap final compositions!

i was really pleased with the critique i got on the first drafts of these compositions, (i think they were one of the only sets in the class that didn't get red pen marks!) and the recommendations marty and the class gave me resulted in a much cleaner, more effective typeface. one that kind of changed direction while i was working on it, but that i ultimately like much better.

the final incarnation of the splashyfont is a bit less splashy. for the sake of legibility (and with the added bonus of connectivity,) i ended up removing most of the splashes in favor of pursuing a round little cursive script. splashyscript?

whatever its nomenclature, here it is, tidily mounted on matboard.

line, plane, rhythm, figure, ground.

a line: defined as an infinite chain of points. length but no breadth.

plane: could be defined as an infinite rug of lines. both length and breadth.

rhythm: as in music, the pattern created by alternation of activity and gap, giving a sense of time.

figure/ground: the subject/the background.



the relationship between this reading and our current classwork is fairly transparent. we are working with lines. given their breadth or potentially the interplay of their angles, some of them become planes. rhythm alone has the capacity to convey our three thematic diving-boards, regularity/progression/randomness, and with the addition of line weight/plane use, we can achieve much more variation. creating a figure/ground relationship that is ambiguous, or even reversible, makes for a much more dynamic image that shifts even while you're looking at it. all of these things should (in a perfect world) be coming together in perfect choreography in the compositions we are generating for our line project.

i never thought i would have to think about chemistry again

but now i've got this new friend "gallium" for whom i am supposed to create an identity system (starting with a monogram). gallium is not naturally occurring. it is a "poor metal" and can be obtained by smelting. it's a poor metal because it's soft and will literally melt in your hands. this teaser will be sufficient for now.

rest assured, when i do the actual research, post-bitmap project, you will know so much about gallium.

Ga!

KERN IN SPACE

no, really... KERN IN SPACE

http://ideas.veer.com/features/kerninspace

it's kinda fun, but mostly infuriating. i would recommend letting it eat a few of your minutes, but not much more.

:D

splashyfont!

the next step in the bitmap font project was to develop 3 compositions out of four words (UPPERCASE, lowercase, & Title Case) that pertained to our object, to be built out of our already designed letters as well as necessary additions. of the already-built letters that i got to use, i don't know that i left any alone... i did a fair amount of editing as i added new letterforms and learned more about the typeface i was developing.

anyway, the extremely casually christened splashyfont looks kind of like this:

i was pleasantly surprised by how cleanly my whales came out in photoshop, sans background, without all that much difficulty. i'm hoping it's alright that i tossed an exclamation mark in there: splash just looked kind of silly without it.