haiku: new beginnings.

a new project starts,
matthew jacobs as partner.
"choose your two haiku."

after reading lots,
we narrowed, narrowed, narrowed
ending up with these:

"night is bright with stars
...silly woman, whimpering:
shall i light the lamp?" (etsujin)

(&)

"quite a hundred gourds
sprouting from the fertile soul...
of a single vine" (chiyo-ni)

expanding the words,
we brainstormed new images.
here are some mindmaps.

"you've gotta get off the train now," or: THE END OF THE LINE

final posters! they're on the wall, looking just like this! i even plotted them. i hope critique gues well.

firstly, on employing tools and incremental process.

starting at the very beginning, we've used adobe illustrator, the various printers, the konica copier and the scanner to distort our line studies, the projector to reconfigure our line studies, our feet, bikes, cars, skateboards and cameras to attain imagery from around town, exactos & cut paper to collage our first posters, back into illustrator and then into photoshop to continue pursuing the paths we first discovered through collage all the way until our final prints for critique. as always the incremental process was invaluable, given that we could never have reached anything like our final pieces without having had to go through as many small steps as we did. as a rule, to have done something very unheard of, particularly in a long, complicated sequence, is to have the opportunity to create something nobody had ever thought of before.

and now, final reflections, on some pertinent questions, the three remaining (after that one up there) are as follows: 

activating and arranging the graphic space.

formal & conceptual juxtaposition.

communicating visual identity of a location

beginning with valentine:

i wanted my pairing of image and line composition in this poster to be basically seamless and full bleed, to be the poster itself, the ground, rather than be the figure on the poster. this transition allows the figures of the lightbulbs and particularly the text to step forward in importance, as everything, the color, the arrow shapes, and the density of lightbulbs, leads the eye to the left edge, at a height that (if i'm not mistaken) should reference the golden phi ratio. this composition contains loud, high contrast stripes, juxtaposed against a deep, low saturation glow of color. i wanted to evoke feelings of vaudeville, the performative aspect of these lights from the uptown theater. they are obviously not lights for utility, but for ornament, and to imply entertainment. formally, the juxtaposition of these two elements should result in smooth, clean continuity, with no cracks in which unwanted meanings might try to hide. i desaturated the current red & yellow of this light display to hint at the theater's age and history, a microcosm for the age and history of the entire valentine area, now filled with colleges and shopping in addition to housing and entertainment. 

my arrangement of the space for the plaza was rather more restrained, not only because it looks nicer but because that imagery & handling thereof is the most appropriate to the look and feel of the plaza itself. i let the interplay between the  placement of the text and warmer, lighted area towards opposite edges pull your eyes back and forth. together these posters should play a game of catch with your eyes, with the plaza taking you from its name and out through the warm spotlight into the curves of the valentine, which slings all the way up and out before the arrows drag you back in, passing you back off into the plaza. formally, this study was rather more of a comparison than an extension or a continuation because the shapes are very similar, and they are related in both the horizontal and vertical handling of the images. the plaza is a very, very heavily ornamented area of kansas city, and so, by keeping my composition relatively simple, i run less of a risk of completely overrunning my work with flourishes and architecture. 

i liked the idea of having both of my posters related in their treatment, their aesthetic, and also their content. the uptown theatre and the plaza were both built in the 1920s so their visual relationship is even stronger than i had originally presumed when i started. learning this helped cement my decision to tie them together, and let them each in their own way evoke a certain antiqueness while still playing with the idea of their modern incarnations, stylized and simplified into something clean and vectored. by letting the two posters, each with a very different syntax, even if they use the same visual language, "talk," so to speak, i feel as though the viewer has almost learned more about kansas city (not just the popular districts) and its architectural and cultural history. 

paula scher's geography

this video. it is exceedingly apropos. i kind of wish we had watched it at the start of the project rather than at the end, not because it's any less valuable at this juncture, but because it might have been a kind of inspirational jumpstart when we were first brainstorming.

paula scher lives new york city. that might look like a typo, but it isn't, i promise. she lives it and loves it and designs it, saying she gets the most satisfaction from designing things to exist "on the street," where you can walk by and experience her work within the context of the rest of the city.

she speaks of the character of nyc, the "layering of opinion," the neighborhoods "colliding, influencing the city," as well as the visual structure: the complicated grids, the tall, narrowness of the clutter of buildings, the locked up traffic jams, the chaos united by location.

she uses the visual language of the city itself to influence the visual language of the work she does for the city. some examples she gives: using all caps, condensed typefaces, tall and thin, close together, parallels and perpendiculars, filling all the space with a chaotic sense of order, the layering of ideas and imagery like the layering of ideas and opinions and lifestyles in the different neighborhoods.

this. being. exactly. what. we're. doing. it's like our professors have this stuff all worked out in their heads, all along!

we are looking at the character and the visual structure of a city-- our city, kc. we are taking this visual structure, this identity, and through the use of graphic elements and a splash of text, we are shining the character of the city back onto itself by taking what we see and remixing it into something less 1:1 and more complicated. we have been inspired by the language of the neighborhoods we're examining, and we have worked to create a flat graphic, 18x24, that can act as a catalyst in the brain to evoke the same feelings as being in the neighborhood.

line evolution

type: find & grid. or grid & share.

i have been finding to share throughout this class period. i have found much! i will share some.

first, though, i'm just going to throw down some cool links to sites i encountered in my traversing. they were very informative and undoubtedly will be helpful in the coming years and thus i thought i might offer them up.

exhibit a: grid based design toolbox, by fuel your creativity. this link alone will give you dozens of related helpful things, examples and tutorials and articles etc.

exhibit b: design by grid dot com. contains more examples and more resources and gallery and such.

exhibit c: designing with a grid based approach, from smashing magazine. more links, interviews, examples. a lot of really great quotes and tips about using grids in design:

The grid is the most vivid manifestation of the will to order in graphic design. [...] Units are the basic building block of a grid. They’re all uniform. Columns are the grouping of units that create the visual structure of the page. They are not necessary uniform. [ Grids are good ]

sometimes i get so caught up in reading things online that i don't know what to do with myself! i want to read everything and learn everything, a feat that becomes exponentially more impossible with every heartbeat, given the speed with which content can be generated.

anyway. i have not read all of those sites and all their links and all the links their links will link to, is what i'm saying. i would like to, but it is exceedingly improbable, particularly during just this class period.

so here's some images i happened upon through my finding:



(if you've reached this parenthetical giving me the benefit of the doubt about whether or not i can read that text, you can take back your doubtful benefit. i definitely can't. sorry to disappoint!)

this magazine page from a july issue of arena magazine uses an extremely simple grid. it was mathematically built in a four column layout, i'm noticing, but it acts like the three column page i initially thought it to be because the textblock is proportional to the man, and also proportional to his shadow, cutting the page into thirds, if with a comfortable margin to the interior. i just found this to be a pretty beautifully composed layout due to the consistency of the columns.

i also found a really exciting walkthrough of how the grid structure of the onion's website functions, which i will summarize and also link to because he explained it all very well.

(if you read this, you can skip the rest of this blog post for redundancy)

basically, the onion (above the fold of the website looks kinda like this, perhaps you've seen it?

evidently that is based, in its absolutely most basic way, on a grid rather like this one:



while they would never in a million years display that many columns of separate content, having it divided this specifically eliminates the confusion over where to align things of a much greater variety of sizes. and then they are able to combine those columns into lots of options of "supercolumns" depending on their needs.



like this, for instance, being a structure on which the homepage is largely built. given that ads are nigh  inescapable on the web, this grid allows for their integration without toooo much frustration, and they live in the spaces marked by black:



for those times they just really need to let us read a lot of text, like searches and archives, there are pages like this: (black still denotes ads)



while for the articles, they have this extremely subtle "cut in half" page which is not cut in half, being 9 & 7 columns on either side of the active gutter, giving the text its necessary attention without slighting the "value-add functionality" and links and such.



so. people use grids! all the time. they are ubiquitous and necessary when we act out of our "will to order." (what a nietzschean design principle.)

now i need to go work on mine more.