not all those who wander are lost.

tolkien poster, round one!

it was easily determined that the first one is the composition i should move forward with, and i had another nice chat with tyler about what to do with my pipe smoke, because as fun as my papersmoke is, it sticks out a little in a bad way and doesn't really do what i need it to. i'm going to redo my calligraphy and rework the smoke, playing with some transparent or tracing paper, trying to incorporate it all throughout my composition to really unify things.

dj culture archeology

the following are artifacts from a culture built around music. archaically known as the disc jockey, but more recently called "DJs," these individuals are the holy men of their music and dance rituals, playing the feelings and energy of their listeners like a musician plays an instrument. to conduct their ceremonies well, DJs need certain equipment. headphones are necessary to allow the DJ to commune alone with the revelation of the music, to prepare his services. having a laptop can allow for a digital index of his canon of established tracks, and it can provide a means for communication, particularly with other DJs. before any music can be played aloud, it must be diverted through a series of electronic devices. a mixer allows the DJ to sort through inputs, whether pre-recorded or generated live. in order to give music to the crowd, the DJ needs access to large speakers to amplify it, and a microphone can be helpful in allowing him to speak directly to his listeners, an act whose very rarity gives it a good deal of weight. more commonly than the DJ talks to the crowd with words, he expresses his sentiments through a sound-generating synthesizer, to add his artist's voice, his character and his sermon, to the canon of replayed music, which often comes in the form of flat vinyl records. every DJ has a sacred duty to take what auditory relics have already been recorded, released, and overplayed, and bash them to their component pieces, freeing them from sold constraints to become something new, something different, and something game changing. a well-loved method of this dismantling is referred to as turntablism, which is the use of turntables to manipulate and generate sound, especially by scratching the record to create new percussion or a totally different rhythm to a familiar song. Having set up all the necessary equipment, the DJ constructs a full night's experience, and weaves his audience into it. and once the evening's rituals draw to a close, the crowd having been coaxed through ups and downs all night, now ready to go home, the DJ steps down from his position as a small god, and packs his equipment lovingly away so he can take it on the road, spreading his gospel in new places, and striving always to do something that no one has ever done before.

book, in its final incarnation:

all the process can, of course, be found right here.

more digital and analog revisions.

without any real preface, here is the other set of revisions, the ones that i didn't put in that earlier blog post because it just seemed too unwieldily huge.


texture

repetition

gradation

 space

concentration

anomaly

direction

and some analog that were revised by peeling some old letters off: (and let it be known that when these are used in my campaign, they will be re-vectored. there will be no peel-y paper.)

texture

repetition

concentration

one ring to rule them all

john ronald reuel tolkien, 3 january 1892 to 2 september 1973, smoking a pipe and grinning.
 (his family called him ronald, if you ever wondered.)


if you are not familiar with that name, firstly, shame on you, and secondly, let me help: he is the creator of middle-earth, of hobbits and elves and a mythology for england with a span and depth that borders on incomprehensible. tolkien is the author of the hobbit and the lord of the rings, as well as the silmarillion, the book of lost tales, and others. 


a dedicated linguist, he not only created lands and populated them with generations and generations of people, he gave each race and nation their own language and history and culture. his attention to detail is legendary. 


orphaned by the time he was 12, his appointed guardian was bound to raising him catholic. when he met his wife-to-be at 16, he was forbidden to communicate with her until he was 21, because she was protestant. on the night of his 21st birthday, without having spoken to her in years, he proposed marriage. she was, at that moment, already engaged to someone else, but only because she thought she would never hear from him again. she broke off that engagement immediately, and they married, and lived, by all accounts, happily ever after, with four children.

after he graduated from exeter college, oxford, he went to war in 1915, where he lost, one by one, all of his friends.

as an academic, tolkien wrote the most pivotal critical analysis of beowulf to the point, changing the way people have interpreted that work ever since, from a childish fairy-story of monster fighting to a tale of human destiny.

a devout catholic, he nevertheless staunchly refused any implications that his work was directly allegorical, even politically, despite his hatred for war, and indicted his friend c.s. lewis for having been so transparent in his own allegories.

as it stands, i have three quotes i'm looking at. i think it will depend on the calligraphy i plan to do, and what looks and fits the best in with everything else. those three quotes are as follows:

"it's a dangerous business, going out your door. you step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might end up!"

"all that is gold does not glitter. not all those who wander are lost. the old that is strong does not wither. deep roots are not reached by the frost. from the ashes, a fire shall be woken. a light from the shadows shall spring. renewed shall be blade that was broken: the crownless again shall be king."

and

"not even the very wise can see all ends."

when i spoke to tyler earlier today, i felt like i had no real idea about how i was going to assemble my construction, but as of this afternoon, and the acquisition of an item, i feel like i'm on track!

for my indexes/indices?:
his monogram.
maps of middle earth.
calligraphy of his languages.
gold ring.

symbols:
a red book.
a quill pen.
and a pipe, which i bought this afternoon. it is charmingly small and not very expensive, which help to make it a symbol rather than an index, as it is in no way tolkien's pipe, but is indicative of both his penchant for smoking, as well as his character's tendency to do the same.

i'm excited about this again. i was really nervous for a while. i'm still, of course, nervous. but. much more manageably so. i care too much about my subject matter to be careless.

type campaign

we were to choose 2 additional quotes to work with the quote we chose for letterpress, and devise a campaign to inform the public about some aspect of design. as you may or may not recall, my letterpress project was based off the robin mathew quote that "design is where science and art break even."

to complement this, i chose the following two others:

" a designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic,

objective economist and evolutionary strategist. "

richard buckminster fuller (1895-1983)

"bucky" the engineer, designer, inventor, author, futurist. he is the person whose name was given to "buckyballs," spherical carbon molecules, shaped like soccer balls. he was the person who coined the term "spaceship earth." set about trying to help the world after the death of his daughter. he is the creator of the geodesic dome. he was focused on environmentally friendly design and ephemeralization: doing more with less. 

" designers may be the true intellectuals of the future. "

paola antonelli

she is the senior curator of moma. she wants everyone to realize the influence design has on both society and progress, and respect designers as the extremely powerful influence-wielders and world-shapers that they are.

as for my campaign itself, i want to target the left-brained math/science/tech demographic who are prone to thinking they can't or don't want to have anything to do with art or design, often because we draw such hard lines between left/right brain endeavors. at the same time, i want to target the artist types who don't think they're capable of tackling left brained issues, because it's been so heavily implied that you can't have it both ways. it's important for everyone to recognize the blur of those divisions and how critical it is to collaborate across the way.

so much more experimental type!

we're going to start here with my first set of analog type compositions, those that i thought were due on monday, and thus, spent all of a miserable sunday hammering out some really mediocre cut-paper type compositions just to get them done. which i still didn't even do very efficiently. oh well! the week's over half done by now, and i got much better analog work in my second go-round.

to begin with:

direction

texture

repetition

gradation

anomaly

space

concentration

a lot of these had some level of potential, and marty gave me directions on almost all of them, but still recommended that i try some totally new things. i went and checked out a projector from the media center, and rifled through my old things to find my construction paper letters from kelly's color book last semester.

here was where i went next:

repetition

anomaly

space

gradation

direction

direction (again)

texture

concentration

i also presented another set of digital revisions, and i revised some of my cut-paper analog, but i think i'm going to relegate that to a different blog post, because this is pretty lengthy in the image department as it is.

documentation of some failures, and other odds and ends.

this alternate cover might not be a failure, i honestly think it's pretty cool:

it's not quite as directly pertinent to the interior color palette, but it is a bit more, like, "hip," which isn't necessarily inappropriate, either.

for the sake of trying out some other options, i returned to my runner-up layout designs... they are not so good.

circles: they're cool, and some of these are pretty interesting, but the name of the game here is documentation of objects, which includes the full shape of the object, because that's the most descriptive depiction. and circles do not allow for that so much. (unless it's a record.)

and of course the equalizer. i wanted this to work so bad. i really tried. i just couldn't pull it together.
this was the point at which i gave in, understanding that if i had to try this hard to make it happen in the first place, it was probably not a successful design decision, and goodness knows how it would handle any other spreads. to be quite honest, i just didn't know what to do with it. this image was an in-between step, and it was never my intention to fill all the space with bars, but i was unable to do anything else with it, even just for a mockup.

dj book self-critique

there's something so enchanting about small books! i don't know why. they give me a modest little surge of dopamine. my most recent mock-up is a full color 5x5 scaled down version, to test some of the changes i implemented since last my layouts appeared on the blog. after taking care of some nitpicky, housekeeping, digital craft sorts of issues, such as removing almost-white backgrounds and making sure bled images actually bleed as far as they need to, i really sat about analyzing my color palette in hopes that the background color of my cover would be revealed to me in an epiphany. unexpectedly, it worked. once i identified that red appeared on almost every page as (at the very least) an accent, it was simple enough to replace some of the imagery i was least attached to with images that were just as strong, but also more red. this unification of red splashes joins forces with my 8square grid to tie together many spreads of what could be viewed as fairly disparate objects in a way that uses some level of continuity from page to page.

having established a color field for my cover, i set about scanning the word "scratch" repeatedly, wagging the paper as the light-bar interacted with the text, trying for that perfect visualization of the sound of a recordscratch. amusingly, i think the one i've ultimately chosen may have been one of the first tries. sometimes, dumb luck makes perfecter than practice. very, very rarely... but sometimes.

another thing that jamie and i had discussed was my attempt at using the greater-than symbol (>) between my values to try to invoke the play, skip, or fast forward buttons. hint: it wasn't working. she recommended that, if i wanted to utilize that imagery, i would do better to go ahead and utilize it. after some cursory image searching, i constructed my very own advance track/fast forward symbol.

 the design in the center of my first new cover looked like this:

which i was pretty pleased with, although i also tried black on red instead of white. 3 out of 3 randomly selected classmates given a quick-opinion-survey agreed that white was the way to go. it still looked a little flat, though, and that first page of headphones has such bright colors on it! to go from just red and white (and a little bit of black) to those vivid headphones wasn't really working for me. so i began analyzing my colors again, to see if i could find supplemental hues, those that maybe didn't show up on every page like red did, but did turn up again and again, sprinkled throughout. i could. those were blue, yellow, and green, and they made appearances on all kinds of labels and screens and buttons and knobs.

i moved to the following cover, careful to lighten my blue and green so that they didn't value-fight the red:

(you probably might not notice that my 3 values have changed. during my talk with jamie, we unearthed a worry that the intentions behind iconoclasm and revisionism were too similar, and i found that by using a word like remix instead, i can indicate towards what my culture actually is rather than staying so lofty and ideological. at the same time, progression was never a terribly exciting word, so i opted for a stronger, related word like revolution, which is a bit more accurate, culturally speaking, and which also has a bit of a pun on the turntables, if you stop to think about it.)

the following are my new, improved, dj-spreads, complete with gently unified colors, slightly cleaner images, and more attractive grid obedience.

the addition of another angle of red headphones, giving the green ones company in their not-vertical orientation.

cleaned out the background of black sabbath vol 4.

happened upon some red turntables! so handsome. also swapped the two right-side images for cleaner, more engaging photos. that means this spread got a 50% turnover, and much for the better.

this spread felt pretty sturdy, although i'm thinking now about shrinking the things on the right page a little because when i trim a book to a smooth outer edge, i lose quite a bit of information along that side.

i spent a great deal of time looking for a high-res "ferrari macbook" because it would have been very ideal. i was never able to get better than about 400px, which was insufficient for the double-block space i wanted it to occupy. i settled for injecting a red dj-interface into the screen of the far-right computer.

that full-bleed column was previously occupied by two tower-speakers with a confusing white space between them, dividing my grid-unit in two. i found this much nicer speaker to fill the space... (and it even had red.)

this one didn't really need much help, just housekeeping.

here, i did some minor mic replacing with better specimens. check out that fancy top left.

and finally, these guys. i have spent so much time trying to figure out what to call them. stringing together words like "metal sound equipment case" over and over again. turns out, if i'd just asked collin or michael, they would have told me immediately that it was a "road case," and i wouldn't have had to struggle for so long trying to guess that name. oh well. learn something new all the time! this spread swapped a row for a column in bleed images.