thoughts on the whole wide semester.

how much i've changed in one semester! i'm inclined to say "we," for all of my classmates too, but i'm hardly qualified to speak for all of them. but. how different my working methods are, my work ethic, my drive, my fear of failure. which is to say, i have those, in spades, in a way i have never experienced quite so potently before. i suppose it comes down to this: all throughout education until this year, the year i have begun my major, it has been possible (inadvisable, but possible) to be somewhat dismissive. "this doesn't have anything to do with the rest of my life." "this doesn't even matter." "i'm never going to have to deal with this stuff again." all that dried up this august.

finally? this is it. this really is. what i've been waiting for. no more waiting around for things to be important and pertinent. i have done some amazing learning throughout my life, and i am very thankful for it, but no matter how passionate i thought i was about it, i see now that there was always a level of removal, a skepticism about what difference it all makes. the bridge from my day-to-day to the real world was simply too long and too misty to conceive.

but now? now i can see. exactly what it's going to look like, to navigate through kcai and merge onto the motorway of the rest of my life. graphic design is important not simply because it is teaching me life lessons about listening to authority, and critical thinking skills to analyze literature, which are significant lessons and important skills, but because i will be applying the knowledge i'm gathering right this instant to a job within the next few years, and quite possibly from here on out. no lag, no delay, no removal. this equals that.

the blindfolded, trust-based processes were unfamiliar, but they have been sinking in, proving how much better a final product can be if each step is treated as its own final project, and absolutely no corners are cut. the emphasis on perfection of craft, hitherto unfamiliar, has turned me rapidly into a perfectionist, let loose the meticulous tendencies i must've always had tucked away somewhere.

i've really experienced the importance of analog methods, both as initial jump-starting techniques and also as very intentional aesthetic decisions, achieving imagery that would otherwise be totally unattainable or otherwise laughably false.

the work ethic that says to my body, "it's okay, we'll sleep later, i promise," and then gets me out of warm bed to go to studio because that is where i need to be to get my work done as i would like it to be done.

these things are simple and early and basic, but i am certain that they are pouring the graphic design concrete underneath the designer that i will be striving over the next few years to graduate as, and that, then, will be the foundation for the designer i will be spending the rest of my life striving to become.

looking back into history with a more critical eye

this plaza poster. i feel like i got pretty close, and then swung, and then missed. volleying back and forth on how specific and obvious to make the "spotlighting ornamentation" concept, i struggled to spotlight the plaza the same way i did the valentine. eventually i chose to bring the twin halves of the spotlight between the posters, where they already were utilizing alignment and continuation from the straight lines of the plaza into the zebracurves of the valentine. unfortunately, they were not quite related enough to be a successful diptych, and in demanding that they operate like one, i tied them together too much to be separated or reordered. i remain fond of the typography of this poster, and even the black and white composition, particularly on its own and not compared to my other, but the use of color in this piece was not a very successful experimentation, despite very much iterating and very much colortesting. i would not try to sell this to the plaza. but now i know more! and i'm in the process of knowing more all the time! so everything's just gonna get better and better from here on out.

project three. a final string of haiku.

review objectives,
did i meet them for each step?
i certainly hope.

markmaking goalsets:
•use nontraditional tools.
•make expressive marks.

binder full of marks!
you can't split concept from form
when media links.

generate motifs:
•both beauty and clarity
•don't lose the handmade.

the generation
of motifs from thematic
connections i made.

vectorization
careful not to lose the splats.
real live digital.

taxonomy book!
matthew and i rock partners.
bound simplicity.

•categorize marks.
•figure out how to bind it.
•one for each of us.

our categories
more than organized: told tales
about a garden.

took a risk: whitespace.
very open and quiet.
gentle little books.

bound with modest string,
printed on creamy paper,
pretty artifacts.

animation time:
•explore time based transitions,
•precisely planning.

transitions for me
follow the haiku story,
grow and then repeat.

guitars encourage
vines to sprout and fruit to grow
and seeds to start new.

each motif dances,
conceptually willful,
relationships shown.

it is gone, and then beautiful

martin venezky is a designer who immerses himself in a carefully considered and arranged world of visual noise. by collecting found materials, postcards, advertisements, and "ephemera," he generates a collaged stillshot of a moment in the form of an abstract visual field, often too complicated to pull particulars from, that keeps the eye roving without settling. venezky connects items and imagery by color, and by form, and by emotion, and by any number of things, consistent only in its inconsistency but never, ever random. it is this methodology that relates most directly to our recent work.

in our taxonomy book, we were asked to look at a vast collection of structurally related marks. the only thing that they all absolutely had in common was that they were the evidence of a nontraditional drawing material. it was then up to us, in our partner-groups, to look at the sea of data and let organizational systems swim upwards to us. the idea is not so much to split and organize as it was to look at our data as many ways as possible, and come up with divisions and associations that might not necessarily be apparent at first, but prove, in the long run, to be more meaningful.

i personally identified very strongly with the concept of detaining things with an extremely short lifespan, extending the life of an object once its usefulness has worn away, leaving only its beauty. he rescues the things he puts on his walls, keeps them from being thrown away and forgotten about, keeps them in a big visual time capsule, lets them become important in a way they were never necessarily intended to become important, until suddenly their time is up, whether only to make room for another artifact or because the entire wall must be eradicated for a move of studios. i find within myself a responsibility to the things around me to try to keep them, and let them live out in meaning and aesthetic, even once their original purpose has dried up, and in this way, i am incessantly collecting things that, unless i can display them in some fashion, i have this instinct that they resent me, that they're heartbroken and longing for respect. presumably venezky is not so much an anthropomorphizing crazy person, but he, too, compulsively displays things that would by many others be easily discarded, even though his collages are still only temporary pushpins in a wall.

yaiy emotional magpie behavior!

taxonomy book: the artifact.

taxonomy book:

earthy covers cultivate

haiku markmaking.

documentation

of marks, labeled by either

method or image.

imagery growing,

less and more information,

building clarity.

with blooming of plants,

the amounts of marks increase

by categories.

from the human touch,

through the spade of gardening,

through the plant structures...

ending in fruit,

almost quite a hundred gourds:

autumn growth on vines.

haikunimation, featuring josé gonzales's "heartbeats"

alas for quicktime,
its digital artifacts,
and lack of looping.

i must recommend
replaying once it is done
immediately...

conceptual loops,
and lifecycles repeating
season by season.

sprouting from the fertile soul

beginning with stuff:
a spade, and some plant matter.
i made lots of marks.

meanwhile: some thumbnails.
separate but equal process.
but now to combine!

analog collage
piece by piece into motifs,
cutting and pasting.

need to cradle sprout.
turn the spade mark 180?
now gently holding.

final vector marks,
and bernhard modern typeface:
the ending product.

final storyboards, final static images and type

i revised these a tiny bit in the course of my animating, so i'm posting them again.