icons icons icons! readings and bloggings and icons.

before i get to my new icons, there's some housekeeping to attend to. i am late on some readings/a watching, and i need to blog about that. because i detest excuses, i won't make any, but i would like to relay the following anecdotal fact about the matter because it seems fitting in an amusing way.

i started trying to blog about these readings when they were assigned, quite some time ago. as you perhaps have noticed, for good or ill, it's pretty uncommon for me to struggle with coming up with something to say. which is why it was kind of puzzling when i took some notes and tried to blog, with no success. so i set it aside to try again later. lather, rinse, repeat, until today, whereupon i decided to call myself out about the situation.

perhaps i've got it figured out: it's hard to talk about icons.

would that be just perfect? the purpose of an icon, since the earliest humans used a thing to represent a different thing, has been to communicate without speaking. the most elegant icons say everything there is to be said about a situation without requiring any additional explanation. to be perfectly legible without relying on language. to indicate clear, direct facts, without getting all muddled up in opinions and history. icons exist continuously in the present, despite their long, industrious lifespans. they have the capacity, even, to express values, although that might be less intrinsic in their usage. they can condense behaviors, ideas, individuals, objects, lives, anything, into one purely distilled image. not a snapshot of specificity, but the broadest, most indicative fragments available combined into one profoundly communicative whole.

you can say lots of things about icons.
but the idea, i think, if everything goes swimmingly, is that maybe you won't need to.

now, wanna see mine? they're all fancy vectorfied now, eagerly awaiting their refinements and continuations.

where we last left off, i wasn't sure which direction i was going to pursue. my two strongest were the high contrast/3D spray-stencils, and the flat-front/rounded corners that were sliced into black and white. both of those options really started to get at the values of dj culture in a way that none of the other things i had been trying really were. what it came down to (after pursuing both until literally the last moment of the class wherein we decided on our final direction) was that the spray stencil loses its spray at small scale. being icons, it's critical they can scale... and those just didn't look like much once they got little.

so the remix-slice it is. and here they are! i've eliminated the road case (not very 'iconic,' if you will) and the record (redundant because i'm using a flat-front, single turntable icon which displays the record quite prominently).

mixer

macbook

headphones

microphone

turntable

speaker (this one... oh goodness. i have so many pages trying to distill speakers into their most communicative aspects. they are rectangles and circles. if you try to put a horn in at the top, like i kept trying to do, then they look like ipods. if the two circles are close to the same size, they look like turntables. i tested so, so many speakers on my studiomates (thanks everybody) and this one got the best results.

& synthesizer. woohoo digital! they look so clean and scaleable!

icons

we're going to jump right into the second step here, because the first can be summed up in the following: used imprecise tools to make messy simplifications of our objects. largely an unattractive procedure, much aided by the next step.

the next step: convert messy simplifications into purposeful, principled icons. or at the very least, set them upon that path. i had a sidequest: redo some of my simplifications to get away from dull representation and into some imagery more appropriate to my values (iconoclasm/remix/revolution). 

one of the directions i was most interested in was the idea of spray stencils, graffiti and street art being tied deeply into dj culture, and being visually representative of my values: the vandalism, the reinterpretation of imagery through a different means, the anarchic undertones.

i had 22 icons to show in class, and then spoke to jamie afterward, to show her my stencils and talk about the directions i'm most interested in going.

the two directions i am pursuing from this point are two-staged. first, i am developing high-contrast designs to stencil, and then i am spraying them to get at iconoclasm and revolution, (see the first two images) and second, i am developing clean, bubble-icons to split on the diagonal, to make positive on one side and negative on the other, to get at the idea of remix. (see the bottom right four icons above)

jrr tolkien

john ronald reuel tolkien is best known for his world and his text. stepping into the shoes of a god, he wrote everything from creation mythology to generations upon generations of history; from both written and spoken languages to entire cultures and precious artifacts. i chose the most recognizable imagery i could to depict him. i used the indexes of his monogram, a map of middle-earth, his calligraphy style, the red book of westmarch (the supposedly hobbit-penned origin of his stories), and, of course, the one ring. i then added the symbols of a pipe, (which does index his tendency to smoke one, but also symbolizes the prototypical wise english gentleman, as well as implying the emergence of the world-map from his smoke), and a feather quill, symbolozing his position as a scribe in a sense more historical than typewriter-modern. the most basic of these things will be recognizable to people with even a bit of cultural literacy, considering the 2004-2006 movies, while the most obscure might only be picked up by a very few, who could then feel very clever indeed for figuring everything out.

billboards & buses. take 3.

i have spent an amount of time trying to ascertain the name for the "|" mark. thus far, i have "pipe," "bar," "vertical bar," "or-bar," and others. i'm just going to call it a bar for my purposes. stumped as to what to do with my tag, logo, & web address, i was just moving things ceaselessly around until marty
pointed that fellow out to me (lives upstairs of the backslash) and it just resolved things for me so concisely. as for my buses, whose compositions i started over on because they were too hectic and loud... their quotes got smaller, given that they would be most read by the people standing near the bus who were in no great hurry, waiting to board, and i gave up on trying to wrap a complex string of neurons all the way around the bus, choosing instead to use select pattern-pieces and fade them out rather than letting them end bluntly. this makes for a much cleaner, more subtle style, i think, and allowed me to use one iconic piece on the back panel rather than a tangled mess of trying to make my full-bleeds match up. i had thought that connectedness would be more important, but i think the clarity and simplicity of this solution works much better in action.

billboards and buses, round 2

marty was so pleased with the direction of my first billboard set that for the second round, i just worked on variants of that design, and figured out the pantone for my aqua-teal-turquoise color.
here is my color palette, arranged in neurons! and typeset in din mittelschrift. [kit of parts!]

first, a different font in the din family: neuizeit grotesk light. not so nice as mittelschrift. consequently, i went back to mittelschrift in the others.

what if the whole design was on aqua? i thought this looked pretty nice, but it came down to which looked more neurological and less like a pool. not this one. this one looks like sparkly water. maybe for a campaign for swimming lessons or an aquarium.

back to mittelschrift on white, working with the locations of the web address, tag, and logo.

and for each billboard campaign, a set of related buses. i spent a lot of time trying to wrap my neurons all the way around, which was not as successful as i'd like. hopefully that is a thing i resolved in my final version (cliffhanger for the next blog post!)



i do think that the aqua bus is beautiful. but again. not so appropriate to what my intentions are. if only i had an aquarium sponsor!

back to good ol' din mittelschrift on white. again, this is the one that moves forward, wanting for new bus compositions.