fromkeetra

(i should have blogged this earlier... but i only just woke up. woohoo spring break!)

the thing i enjoyed most about keetra dean dixon is her use of "wonder" and "irreverent whimsy."

her speaking about these things was really timely for me, considering my upcoming type project on marian bantjes, for whom wonder is a great driving force for her work. (maybe not quite so much irreverence, but definitely whimsy, too.)

wonder and whimsy are things that i recognize that my own work is lacking, not because i am a hard-ass who does not take any joy in visual things, but simply because i never quite know how to get it in there. (this is one problem that i am excited to keep learning how to remedy.)

i really adored her missions for working: facilitating social relations, questioning patterns and standards, sparking wonder, surprise, and delight, as well as patience and optimism, asking people to become attentive to things that they might previously have ignored, opening doors to the play and vulnerability that we tuck safely away during the daytoday, and twisting the cynical loop with sinister/sweet dichotomies that make people smile.

she treats design as a kind of social experiment for creating eye-opening, mind-opening, heart-opening experiences and sweetly manipulates her viewers into smiling and reconsidering what it was that they were expecting.

she does this through four types of object/experience: the summaries that look at a situation and reflect it back to the viewer, the synthesizers that make unexpected combinations into new but still basically familiar experiences, the records that take down the evidence of an experience into artifacts, and the platforms that act as a stage for new participatory experiences.

all. that. is. so. cool. and she is so obviously a design-thinker to recognize those categories in her work and sort things in that way.

all in all, i think keetra's lecture opened my eyes to a great deal of methods and reasons that would never have occurred to me otherwise, and i do feel inspired (and even slightly better equipped!) to start trying to nurture more whimsy in my own work.

seven. deadly. jars.

websites are hard! i look forward to the day i understand better how to make them. as it stands... this is a start! AND THIS IS A LINK.

icons!

end of the line for plain ol' icons! kindly stick around to see them star in an infographic.
here they are!

as a quick refresher as to what these things have gone through, here is the backstory for one icon: the macbook.

i feel like i'm more relevant to dj culture than i ever have been before with this project, with the addition of color and the "doubletracking" color treatment of the layered outline. the simple split, while it does have a tidy nod toward the idea of remix through one inversion, lacks the iconoclastic kick of an off-registration high contrast refrain. i feel like i'm taking a risk with this new addition, and i've been speaking to jamie about how i need to do more of that. hopefully this is a risk that pays off! my studiomates dug it. 

to rehash a few formal decisions that i may have addressed earlier, i chose the round bubbly icon base because of its pertinence to current tech trends, and the importance of the digital culture alongside and tangled up in dj culture. the slice represents the taking of an established form and upending it into something unexpected that nevertheless still makes sense within or outside of the context of the original. the doubletracking outline that enhances the 2 and 3 color sets allude to the layering of remixes, the amplifying of desirable or recognizable features, and a willful offset to keep the audience constantly aware of the creator's hand in the making and remaking.

to ensure legibility, i did very much simplifying. most of my artifacts are so technologically complex, with so many buttons and sliders and dials and knobs, that it took several tries until i had reduced and distilled to the point that the meaning came through clearly without the need for a whole keyboard or all 100 faders. i left my shapes largely undistorted, rounding corners and slice/inversing, but on the whole, my objects retained their silhouettes without doing too much fracturing or melting.

as for cohesion, the biggest trick was getting the few things that weren't basically square to play nicely and occupy the same visual space as all my squares. by rounding all corners and using specific circle sizes, i think i was able to create a visual language that, when rendering objects, lends them a relatedness that they might not otherwise be able to have. i also created a rule to have a doubled outline on the bottom of every icon, to give it a sense of gravity or direction, lest they threaten to float away due to the fact that they're all depicted flat front. lastly and most blatantly, by using a sharp edged quadrilateral as an inversion box on every icon, i was able to give them each roughly the same amount of black space, and square up the icons that aren't.

why humanity just can't get past the 7 deadly sins, according to cracked.com

stuck on your sins project? just cruising blogger because whatever? got a minute?

how about a cracked article about the 7 deadlies?

it's pretty fun.

i love cracked dot com.

in-class type hierarchy experiments!

given a set of copy, we constructed 5 possible hierarchies for each set of methods. these are my favourite 5.

leading

indent

weight/style

scale

orientation

type campaign wraps up like a bus. (ba dum, tsh)

final type campaign guide. the gap on the left is a margin allowing for the wrap-around cover. details to come.

color palettes generated from a target color taken from artifact photos, with some help by illustrator's friendly color guide.

applied to icons in a fashion a little something like this:

guest critic today will provide more blogworthy insight to come!

i love icons. :)