pop star!

faked you out with that analog/digital stuff, huh? i tried that. i also kept working on pop star. it ended up working a lot better. so i went with that!

i'm sure you remember how unfortunate looking my pop star concept when it started. and how much worse it was in the second go-round. feeling like i just didn't even know where to go with it, i asked jamie for some advice on where to start, and one of the things she said was "maybe it isn't a full bleed."

so i started cutting people off their backgrounds, and thought of a spotlight as a potential graphic treatment, which led me to this stop along the way:

once i got there, i thought it might be more interesting to use dynamic silhouettes, which also takes care of the issue of the photographs being too recognizable or not recognizable enough.

then i generated a bunch of synthfaces/mixerfaces/computerfaces and set about doing different things with them!

it turns out that the spotlights, despite being the idea that got me to this place, were not so successful. the type that i used on that set, though, the futura with the star, is something that i am moving forward with (it was my favourite type style!) and i'm going to be working on combining the movement of the slice banners with more of the star cut-out identity. i'm so glad to have gotten this concept out of its rut and back on a track where i can see progress. yaiy!

hey, classmates cruisin' blogger... penny for your thoughts?

presently working on trying to come up with better pairs of old/new tech for synthesizer and laptop. 

obviously the record player/victrola horn is just so miserably concise and logical and intuitive that i'm having an awful time trying to bring my other pairings to that point. do these make any sense at all? (this is obviously not in the context of any design yet, they're just 3 separate related icon-things.)

answer key: it's a pipe-organ on the synthesizer... and typewriter with the macbook. these make sense in my head, but i have a feeling they might not make sense to the rest of the world quite so well.

most important question of all: looking at those three little guys, did you have any quick flashes of better ideas? :D

viscom exhibits, bringing you up to date.

here are two rounds of visual systems for smithsonian exhibits! these are the result of all that brainstorming and stuff we were talking about earlier. i left the pirates back in the brainstorming phase, and ended up splitting my mainstream music concept into two different visual ideas, one more about production, and another more about consumption. the concepts at this point were an old vs new look at music technology:

the biography look at the people who set hip hop and dj culture off on its course:

the falsified production of popular music:

and the basically unavoidable consumption of popular music:

from that point i said goodbye to music-for-the-masses, despite its nice use of icon scale, which i tried to recycle later to no particular avail. here was the next step.

i tried to incorporate more scale in victrola to itunes. it looks slightly more like wrapping paper than it did when i started. i need to consider different relationships for my mac and my synth than the old add-ons they currently have, trying to find something with a more beautiful form to go better with the recordplayer.

i swapped out some images for the hip-hop ancestors, and cleaned up the messy icon pattern, electing just one icon to represent their contribution to the culture instead. by the by, if you're wondering, these gents are grand wizard theodore, dj kool herc, and afrika bambaataa, going left-right-down. i tried out two different versions of this, trying out different names/typestyles and icon usage.

for my pop star idea, my classmates encouraged me to look at different processes or outside imagery i could use to reinforce the production methods. i tried out the photoshop interface and magic wand tool to reference the idea of computerized alteration, and then i tried another version that focused more on the industrial manufacturing concept using factories and a conveyor belt. i also tried out a different title to try to use another copyright symbol. none of this worked.

so, to date: my undergroundkings/godfathers are no longer in the running, given that it was more about using the look of that culture than utilizing my own designyvoice. that leaves me with pop stars and the evolution of music tech, both concepts that i love, and both executions that are pretty weak.

being me, i am of course still dragging both of them along for the ride, letting them play chicken to see which one i can get a better idea out of first. which will be applied to real forms, in three iterations, by friday.

wiiiish me luck!

ipad: the new magazine playground.

tablets and touchscreens are a big part of the future, for sure. when the ipad was first announced, i was among the crowd who was a little quietly disappointed that it wasn't the tablet-style but fully powerful macbook that had been rumored so long ago in the messageboards. but as the ipad has taken hold, and as other tablets join it in the marketplace, i've really begun to understand its niche better. these tablets are not supposed to be heavyweight computers. they're not supposed to be hyperactive, teeny-tiny smartphones. they are a middle-weight something totally different, an intuitive container for all sorts of media, a bridge between reading/watching/listening and physically participating. they open doors to new ways of learning and interacting with information, new ways to explore ideas and experience situations.

there are a lot of super-nifty things that ipad design allows for that nothing else really does right now. a few that i'm excited about are the dimensional aspects (not just 2d, but 3d, and also 4d!), the potential for lateral instead of just linear organization of information, and really deep integration of primary and supplementary information into a single, compelling, personalizable experience.

all layout design deals with two dimensions, given that you're arranging "flat" shapes on a "flat" surface. you can move your elements up/down or left/right, or maybe overlap them to create the illusion of some space... but with the digital surface of the ipad, the third dimension of depth really comes out to play. it's especially fun because we continue to treat the ipad screen for the most part like a flat surface, so when something 3d does happen, it becomes this really exciting, unexpected moment. a good example of this is in advertisements where, instead of a nice hi-res image of a car or a camera, they embed a 3d model to allow you to spin it all around, see every side. there's also a fascinating allowance for time-based (4d) components, even still within the 2d layout, like in time magazine's covers... a video plays under the titles and standards rather than simply a still image, making for an interesting interaction between what we expect from a cover design and what we expect from a film clip.

another interesting possibility is the idea of lateral organization of content rather than page by page linear organization. it looks like lots of ipad magazines are already doing this just in their content order, that you scroll laterally side to side to change topics and scroll deeper down to get the full story, so that the row of opening pages are all equivalent and they occupy locations rather than durations. this makes so much sense and has, in my opinion, always been a thing that's somewhat difficult about magazines as they are.

finally, the most exciting thing of all about ipad design: totally integrated experience. your magazine is no longer a one-way street. advertisements aren't just obstinately there, glaring at you. every moment invites you to participate, to move through the content at your pace, and puts you in charge of the revelation of additional information at your leisure. where previously a mostly a's-mostly b's-mostly c's personality quiz may have been, now you can plug in your own answers and receive the explanation tailored to your input. where previously a single image may have been, now a whole paradigm of images might shift through, one by one, or even a film clip. if a picture is worth a thousand words, image when a short video must be worth! advertisements no longer need you to remember and pursue their products at the mall next week because they can win you over in an interactive experience and then link you to a page to buy the product right then and there while you're still excited about it. hyperlinking, expanding/collapsing footnotes, extra information... without being tied to a static page, the content can stretch out and back up any way it needs to.

anyway. i think this stuff is pretty cool.

museum exhibit ketchup, backstory, or whatever you'd like to call it

so about that anchorage & relay idea. i think i've explained it previously, but just in case, here's a super-quickest explanation: anchorage relationships reinforce one another, whereas relay relationships expand one another.

here are my 24 anchorage/relay exercises that sparked the museum exhibit discussions.

first, text anchorage, using my icons and words that reinforce what they are.

next, image anchorage, using my icons and images that reinforce what they are.

now, text relay, which uses my icons and words that aren't directly related, asking the viewer to draw conclusions.

here are some details, because some of those are kind of hard to read.

and lastly, image relay, which takes my icons and pairs them with not-directly-related imagery and asks the viewer to figure out what is being said by the relationship.