i just realized i never blogged the end of image class!

eli and i presented first in our class, and i had only just been shaken out of a coma-deep desknap, so while it was not a bad presentation, it was not exactly as stellar as it might have been. here is what we showed, in nifty scribd form.

for our "expressing a condition" work for national geographic's 6 degrees could change the world, we wanted to focus on the narrative of mankind's careless destruction of the planet. between the various applications of imagery, we sought to create an easily legible story from the  relationships between the images. from the figure and his gas can, to the oil-dripping globe, and the empty can, to the stopmotion staccato flames of the dvd menu, and eventually the charred husk and ashpile. this story is not just in the passive voice. it has an actor, an identity-free villain that represents the carelessness if not malice that we all demonstrate towards the environment in our quest for energy consumption and our domination of nature. it was critical to our concept of personal responsibility that we not only take our own photos, but also do our own physical damage, to remind ourselves that we are not excluded. our images are also linked through the use of a red screen bar, often with a sense of progression up or out of the frame, representational of the feed-forward cycle of warming and destruction increasing exponentially and getting out of hand. our image system has the push the national geographic needs. it's not neutral and distant. it doesn't candycoat. it may even be accused of being melodramatic because of the simplicity of its narrative, but it is not afraid to implicate the viewer, or themselves, because we are all responsible and we are also all capable of doing some good work to fix things. 

Six Degrees Could Change the World Presentation


our final digital imagery, just so you can see a bit more clearly than in the context shots, are as follows:


outside covers, back and front

interiors, left and disc-tray right

disc label  

the poster 

and finally, here's a screen grab of the dvd menu. the background is a stopmotion animation of the globe burning all the way down to the grey pile of ash depicted in the tray under the disc. this stopmotion was a good example of what pros probably call "rolling with it" because we had a video camera that, as electronics often do, went from an ostensibly full battery to a low alert to dead immediately after we lit the globe, and that's not really a thing you can do twice. so instead we snapped lots of photos and stitched them together which, honestly, probably was a more interesting formal solution than just film in the background, anyway.

i really enjoyed this project because i love collaborative work. i just feel like two or more designers working together can create so much more than the sum of their parts, and eli and i reinforced one another's work and had a pretty excellent partnership.


now: summertime!

sophomore review

(this photo is appalling, but i haven't imported from my camera yet. i'll swap it out when i do.)

my presentation went rather like this:

good morning, everybody. i'm jessi wilson, and i think that design is all about storytelling.

this puts me in a good spot, because i'm a creative writing double major. i'd like to take these few moments to describe my experience and growth as a designer iand communicator through the lens of writing. 

i see there being four main ways i have been utilizing this design/writing relationship, heavyhanded or subtle. literal creative text, emergent narrative, character study, and type as image.

first came first: dot book. a project devised to teach us to tell a story without spelling it all out in words. i ran into immediate brick walls, so what did i do? spelled it all out in words, and then built my project from there. this worked really well for this project because my book is about growing up and family cycles and the story helped me get at the emotional heart of what i wanted my piece to be about in a way that mindmapping wasn't doing. 

i soon realized i could use my writing as more than a crutch, such as during process for the haiku project. i could use my writing to enhance my design! i blogged almost exclusively in haiku. the taxonomy of markmaking that matthew jacobs and i made first semester was heavily inspired by the cyclical nature of our haiku, and the looping animations we were building for it, which i'd like to show real quick. for our taxonomy,  we created a structure of categories not simply out of sets and subsets but along a storyline, and provided with it, a set of haiku i had written myself to work cooperatively with both the structure and function of the book. 

i've also taken opportunities to supplement my designwork with personal wordplay like this in places like my infographics. at this stage in my career, unweighted by provided body copy, i was able to give my information graphics, which detail a collection of facts and stats that new or curious djs might need or enjoy knowing, some extra personality. 

speaking of personality, an aspect of design storytelling I've really been excited about lately is the idea of character building. whether this is the character of my work itself, as in my pop star exhibition, or my roommates and me in my photo colorbook, or even if it's the constructed character of your target audience, giving a designstory a subject can heighten the experience so profoundly. i was able to make my formal decisions for my dj magazine only once i considered the sort of hip, young music fans who might want to become a dj that i considered my target demographic. luckily for my interpretation, the next step in this process was to develop some aspect of this same article for the ipad, and i from what i hear hip, young people are all about the apple technology. 

character development has a lot to do in my mind with the idea of emergence of narrative or information. since beginning the study of semiotics at the start of the year, the way i've conceived of imagemaking has certainly changed. i've gotten excited about the practice of building information around and around a shape until the shape itself becomes clear. my tolkien identity poster is a good example of this because the assignment itself was to use symbols and indexes to convey something that could much more easily but much less descriptively been gleaned from text or direct iconographic references. 

as for emergent narrative, eli brumbaugh and i really played with cross-platform relationships for our 6 degrees project. each moment of the system implies an aspect of a bad situation all on its own, but when everything is seen within the context of the rest of the system, the story of a character (character building!) dousing the globe in careless flammables and setting it alight. this was exciting to me because it represented a real push off from just starting with or even using personal text: it was communicating just as much information and even nuance as a story might, only instantly, and through only images.

finally, here's where it starts getting really crazy: when you take the text out of type, and let your type stand all on its own, as an image. this was a huge part of our typographic campaign and really shook what i had thought possible to do with type. the abstraction of text into just expressive letterforms that can still get across an idea, if you're paying close attention (perhaps the y letterforms of my neuron shape could stand in for the question "why?", favored as it is by both designers and scientists, the characters i had been working with as my audience for the campaign.

at the start of the year, i was clinging to my writing as a crutch, maybe even an  alternative to some amount of process, but by now, i've been exposed to and utilized so many different methods of communication, and witnessed so many different relationships between the writing process and the design process, that i feel empowered to intertwine them now, not because i can't work any other way but simply because i keep getting so excited about all the possible interactions and how both of my disciplines can strengthen one another

thanks!










the ensuing critique was really good and flattering, and gave me a few ways to keep pushing this writing/designing/communicating  dialogue with puns and specificity and lots of layers. also, i got a bonus compliment on craft, which was super exciting.


now i'm a junior! oh my goodness.