keep reading!

the last blog's cliffhanger picks up here: after that first critique, i just set out to take lots of different staged idea photos. these include a few locations in my house including the stairs and an enthused & cooperative roommate's bedroom. (her room is much more fun than mine.) eventually i wound up again in the photo studio (now i am teased when i asked for the keys, i've been in and out so much) staging hand shadow puppets.

that! now. by that point i'd hit upon something that had some legitimate potential. marty did some neat folding and proposed i try to combine the pillows/bed idea and the wall/shadows idea, and incorporate the lamps on the wall (because nobody sleeps with taplights, not even children) and so then came another thousand or so photographs on that theme, resulting in the following, that i offered today.

the sad story about those are how grainy and unfortunate they are. actually, the sad story is me & photography... we've had our troubles this semester in every class. but i am buying my own camera this christmas and i am going to tame it and we are going to get along great.

so with a gentler photoshopping, i dove back in with some zooming and cropping and lightening and brightening and leveling et cetera.

which brings us to the present.

(ta-da!) here is what i'm finally working with. it all comes down to a few days worth of tweaks, and then my semester of type 1 will be at a close. so strange. anyway, color correction and general cleaning-up: onward!

the story thus far

when you last saw my reach-out-and-read project, it was in its infancy, barely beginning on its path toward identity.

in the time since then i have taken no fewer than 2000 photographs. maybe 3000. so many photographs. consequently, so many iterations. consequentlyconsequently, this will be an image heavy blog post to catch us up on all the stages that eventually led me to my final image, whose color i will be correcting manically until shortly before it is due.

firstly i built my real book-object, from a grimm book called "the fisherman's wife," chosen for its appearance in the public domain. the construction paper letters changed from "read out loud!" to a simpler "read to me," the text from the all-type poster that i didn't end up pursuing.

i opted for "read to me" as opposed to "read to your child" because it engages the viewer more directly and doesn't necessarily imply parenthood. the responsibility of reading to children need not fall only in the hands of parents, because anyone who themselves can read is capable of reading out loud to someone younger.

my original intention was to have hands holding the book, and i tried a variety of people to get some diversity. here are 3 willing or unwilling hand models.

i tried a few other totally different things, too.

it was determined that, despite its unfortunate coloring (i thought it vintage and indie; it came through as a terrible photograph... and as you & urban outfitters can tell, the two are not mutually exclusive) the last was the closest to the right idea, based on the presence of the shadows on the "wall" and the fun bedtime idea that warm lights and shadows might offer. i relinquished the "somebody holding it" idea, picked up some happy bedtime-story taplights, and went to staging.

i'm going to cut this blog post in two so that it does not become quite so unwieldy all in one go. next up: the next set of iterations up through today's process!

time & motion

graphic design: the new basics's chapter on time and motion highlights the theory behind the work we're doing currently with our haiku animation.

a critical thing to realize (that perhaps a lot of people, including newish designers, might not) is that any still image has an implied motion (or implied stasis) at the same time as motion graphics must share compositional principles with print. the two are not so separate and different as they might seem.

potential modes of visual change include literal movement, scale change, transparency/color change, & layer shift, among others, all while the background itself has the option of remaining a neutral stage or participating in the action around the figure. the eyes of painters, typographers, animators, and filmmakers must come together in the mind of the motion graphic designer in order to successfully create a work with motion.

in panning and presentation, styleframes and storyboards are critical. styleframes are composed of the contents of an animation, while adhering to the strategies of still, static design, formulated to explain the visual language of the motion graphic to come, to establish its color schemes, typographic elements, illustrations, etc. storyboards take the most important key moments from a temporal design to show its progression, movement, and changes across a visual timeline.

the basics of animation rest in the use of keyframes and tweening. keyframes refer to the critical starts and stops of particular actions, while tweens are the frames that occur in between to create a smooth transition from one keyframe to another. in animation production, often one designer or key animator will generate the keyframes and leave the "inbetweening" to assistants. in our case, (and many others, especially more recently, as it's become an easy & reliable solution) we are leaving the tweening to computer automation within adobe flash. we build the keyframes, and select the space between them, and the computer fills in the gaps with a much smoother, mathematically calculated transition than we could have created by hand. this is particularly good for type and abstract graphic elements, but for subtleties like the movement of a body or facial expressions, there's no beating a by-hand approach.

[the next step, slightly outside the scope of what we are doing currently, is interactive motion design. in this type of motion graphic, rather than building a narrative/timeline, a sequence of actions that flow from one to the next, the designer creates a system of behaviors controlled by a coded list of if,then: statements. for instance: if the cursor rolls over it, then: the logo will dance. the actions have no sequence, and the interaction may change with every user, all while being constructed from the same building blocks. (which sounds pretty exciting, but we're not quite there yet.)]

paul rand/stefan bucher (sorry, this is not in haiku)

stefan bucher makes monsters. he makes them 100% analog, and with no planning, choosing instead to see how they develop. he begins with an inkblot, blown with air (through a straw, perhaps?) into drips and points and strands, completely random. like a rorschach test, he then looks into the inkblot and figures out what it looks like, "trying to see the shape and be very much in the moment." he says that many or even most artwork is so overfinished by the time it is viewed that it's hard to see how it was made, to see the "human hand, the human element." in his work, he turns his illustration into a performance, drawing upside down for the camera and posting his videos online for anyone to watch and collecting the stories people write for the monster characters. his work is absolutely process based, given that none of the monsters would exist without the initial random inkblot and that he builds the characters in time rather than through planning ahead. 

it is this kind of haptic improvisation that makes him relevant to our project, given our working methods for our static shapes. by using the qualities of our medium, ink or paint or whatever else we might have used, we take the orchestration out of our hands. we don't get to plan ahead and sketch it out, instead, we see what the ink will do, and learn how to roll with it to get something that is useful to us.

paul rand, previously called peretz rosenbaum, is credited with turning commercial art into graphic design, making it an impressive field, one to be admired, and demonstrating to businesses that graphic design could take a product or service to the next level of both visibility and desirability. 

his passion was for "defamiliarizing the ordinary," as iconoclastic artists have been doing throughout history, taking common and even mundane objects and ideas and through design making them beautiful and dynamic.

his truism, "don't try to be original, just try to be good" is a motto by which it's not a bad idea to try to live as a designer. to seek originality runs the risk of making something tied to the era of its creation, something that may seem dated or like it is trying to hard if not presently then certainly in the future. excellent design has a level of timelessness in it, without looking desperate or self aware. 

his description of working with "utmost simplicity and restraint" is relevant to both our static shapes and also our upcoming animations, in which we eliminate extra data and noise until we're left with something clean and simple that communicates our ideas more effectively than a complicated, confusing image.

the animation we watched about him is extremely pertinent to the way in which we are learning about motion graphics. the simplest, most basic elements of motion and interaction are the most crucial and using only those can get results with much clarity. the animation demonstrated all the pans and wipes and other simple operations that we've been studying with perfectly smooth, exciting transitions that never go beyond the simplest answers.

final static imagery and type

choosing motifs and the adding of type

tough, tough decisions:
the best don't go together.
no reconciling.

the circle of gourds,
the handprint for a soul-print,
the subtle twig-vine.

jamie's favorites.
but alas: content is king.
and twig is no vine.

justifications!
now, let's have no more of them.
here's what i have done.

altered the gourd-wheel.
sprouted from the cradled soul.
used the curly vine.

read!

new type project is so fun! we're participating in an aiga poster contest for an organization called "reach out and read," who are working with pediatricians to hand out books at check-ups along with information about the importance of reading, even very young, from a trusted, medical source.

this is particularly meaningful to me because i know (or at least have been reminded on a good handful of occasions) how much my parents read to me when i was little, and i know how much i lived to read growing up. looks like a typo, right? loved to read? which is also true. but seriously. both loved and lived to read, all the time, glasses by the time i was 8 years old, that kind of little kid. and then the whole winning spelling bees and high standardized test scores for all the reading/comprehension/verbal things. babies don't just grow up and figure that stuff out. doing well in language comes from being read to and spoken to and encouraged and given lots of books! (thanks, mum and dad!)

so anyway. a cause dear to my heart.

our constraints: let the posters be typographically dominant, or strictly type. eaaasy-peasy wide-open assignment! we began with 16 sketches for posters (i probably am not going to post them on here, because they're not very impressive), at least 8 using only type and then the rest featuring some kind of imagery, if we wanted.

through chatting with a small group and eventually presenting our sketches to the class, we settled on 3 directions apiece, the starts of which being due today.

these were my three directions!

and a physical prototype that looks a little something like this: 

the eventual incarnation of which i will be photographing with two hands holding the pages open, in a full sized book, rather than a tiny dollar tree bible. sorry, bible. it's nothing personal or willfully sacrilegious.  it's just that you were so convenient and inexpensive. if for some reason you were unable to determine, the letters are construction paper on a piece of wire.

i think my text is going to be the "read to me!" tagline from the other poster, because that's so much more direct, and demands immediate action from parents rather than the waffle-y "you should read to your child this much because science" that, although factual and enlightening, is less likely to inspire a quick change. 

so now i have to build that book (i spent so long at half-price trying to find a hardback book with text in public domain that god-forbid had some nice illustrations. the one i got is brothers grimm! and the illustrations are great! and it was only a dollar fifty! well worth all the hunting.) and buckle back into photography.

i sure do miss reading sometimes.