stefan bucher makes monsters. he makes them 100% analog, and with no planning, choosing instead to see how they develop. he begins with an inkblot, blown with air (through a straw, perhaps?) into drips and points and strands, completely random. like a rorschach test, he then looks into the inkblot and figures out what it looks like, "trying to see the shape and be very much in the moment." he says that many or even most artwork is so overfinished by the time it is viewed that it's hard to see how it was made, to see the "human hand, the human element." in his work, he turns his illustration into a performance, drawing upside down for the camera and posting his videos online for anyone to watch and collecting the stories people write for the monster characters. his work is absolutely process based, given that none of the monsters would exist without the initial random inkblot and that he builds the characters in time rather than through planning ahead.
it is this kind of haptic improvisation that makes him relevant to our project, given our working methods for our static shapes. by using the qualities of our medium, ink or paint or whatever else we might have used, we take the orchestration out of our hands. we don't get to plan ahead and sketch it out, instead, we see what the ink will do, and learn how to roll with it to get something that is useful to us.
paul rand, previously called peretz rosenbaum, is credited with turning commercial art into graphic design, making it an impressive field, one to be admired, and demonstrating to businesses that graphic design could take a product or service to the next level of both visibility and desirability.
his passion was for "defamiliarizing the ordinary," as iconoclastic artists have been doing throughout history, taking common and even mundane objects and ideas and through design making them beautiful and dynamic.
his truism, "don't try to be original, just try to be good" is a motto by which it's not a bad idea to try to live as a designer. to seek originality runs the risk of making something tied to the era of its creation, something that may seem dated or like it is trying to hard if not presently then certainly in the future. excellent design has a level of timelessness in it, without looking desperate or self aware.
his description of working with "utmost simplicity and restraint" is relevant to both our static shapes and also our upcoming animations, in which we eliminate extra data and noise until we're left with something clean and simple that communicates our ideas more effectively than a complicated, confusing image.
the animation we watched about him is extremely pertinent to the way in which we are learning about motion graphics. the simplest, most basic elements of motion and interaction are the most crucial and using only those can get results with much clarity. the animation demonstrated all the pans and wipes and other simple operations that we've been studying with perfectly smooth, exciting transitions that never go beyond the simplest answers.
