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.

thoughts on the whole wide semester.

how much i've changed in one semester! i'm inclined to say "we," for all of my classmates too, but i'm hardly qualified to speak for all of them. but. how different my working methods are, my work ethic, my drive, my fear of failure. which is to say, i have those, in spades, in a way i have never experienced quite so potently before. i suppose it comes down to this: all throughout education until this year, the year i have begun my major, it has been possible (inadvisable, but possible) to be somewhat dismissive. "this doesn't have anything to do with the rest of my life." "this doesn't even matter." "i'm never going to have to deal with this stuff again." all that dried up this august.

finally? this is it. this really is. what i've been waiting for. no more waiting around for things to be important and pertinent. i have done some amazing learning throughout my life, and i am very thankful for it, but no matter how passionate i thought i was about it, i see now that there was always a level of removal, a skepticism about what difference it all makes. the bridge from my day-to-day to the real world was simply too long and too misty to conceive.

but now? now i can see. exactly what it's going to look like, to navigate through kcai and merge onto the motorway of the rest of my life. graphic design is important not simply because it is teaching me life lessons about listening to authority, and critical thinking skills to analyze literature, which are significant lessons and important skills, but because i will be applying the knowledge i'm gathering right this instant to a job within the next few years, and quite possibly from here on out. no lag, no delay, no removal. this equals that.

the blindfolded, trust-based processes were unfamiliar, but they have been sinking in, proving how much better a final product can be if each step is treated as its own final project, and absolutely no corners are cut. the emphasis on perfection of craft, hitherto unfamiliar, has turned me rapidly into a perfectionist, let loose the meticulous tendencies i must've always had tucked away somewhere.

i've really experienced the importance of analog methods, both as initial jump-starting techniques and also as very intentional aesthetic decisions, achieving imagery that would otherwise be totally unattainable or otherwise laughably false.

the work ethic that says to my body, "it's okay, we'll sleep later, i promise," and then gets me out of warm bed to go to studio because that is where i need to be to get my work done as i would like it to be done.

these things are simple and early and basic, but i am certain that they are pouring the graphic design concrete underneath the designer that i will be striving over the next few years to graduate as, and that, then, will be the foundation for the designer i will be spending the rest of my life striving to become.

looking back into history with a more critical eye

this plaza poster. i feel like i got pretty close, and then swung, and then missed. volleying back and forth on how specific and obvious to make the "spotlighting ornamentation" concept, i struggled to spotlight the plaza the same way i did the valentine. eventually i chose to bring the twin halves of the spotlight between the posters, where they already were utilizing alignment and continuation from the straight lines of the plaza into the zebracurves of the valentine. unfortunately, they were not quite related enough to be a successful diptych, and in demanding that they operate like one, i tied them together too much to be separated or reordered. i remain fond of the typography of this poster, and even the black and white composition, particularly on its own and not compared to my other, but the use of color in this piece was not a very successful experimentation, despite very much iterating and very much colortesting. i would not try to sell this to the plaza. but now i know more! and i'm in the process of knowing more all the time! so everything's just gonna get better and better from here on out.

project three. a final string of haiku.

review objectives,
did i meet them for each step?
i certainly hope.

markmaking goalsets:
•use nontraditional tools.
•make expressive marks.

binder full of marks!
you can't split concept from form
when media links.

generate motifs:
•both beauty and clarity
•don't lose the handmade.

the generation
of motifs from thematic
connections i made.

vectorization
careful not to lose the splats.
real live digital.

taxonomy book!
matthew and i rock partners.
bound simplicity.

•categorize marks.
•figure out how to bind it.
•one for each of us.

our categories
more than organized: told tales
about a garden.

took a risk: whitespace.
very open and quiet.
gentle little books.

bound with modest string,
printed on creamy paper,
pretty artifacts.

animation time:
•explore time based transitions,
•precisely planning.

transitions for me
follow the haiku story,
grow and then repeat.

guitars encourage
vines to sprout and fruit to grow
and seeds to start new.

each motif dances,
conceptually willful,
relationships shown.

it is gone, and then beautiful

martin venezky is a designer who immerses himself in a carefully considered and arranged world of visual noise. by collecting found materials, postcards, advertisements, and "ephemera," he generates a collaged stillshot of a moment in the form of an abstract visual field, often too complicated to pull particulars from, that keeps the eye roving without settling. venezky connects items and imagery by color, and by form, and by emotion, and by any number of things, consistent only in its inconsistency but never, ever random. it is this methodology that relates most directly to our recent work.

in our taxonomy book, we were asked to look at a vast collection of structurally related marks. the only thing that they all absolutely had in common was that they were the evidence of a nontraditional drawing material. it was then up to us, in our partner-groups, to look at the sea of data and let organizational systems swim upwards to us. the idea is not so much to split and organize as it was to look at our data as many ways as possible, and come up with divisions and associations that might not necessarily be apparent at first, but prove, in the long run, to be more meaningful.

i personally identified very strongly with the concept of detaining things with an extremely short lifespan, extending the life of an object once its usefulness has worn away, leaving only its beauty. he rescues the things he puts on his walls, keeps them from being thrown away and forgotten about, keeps them in a big visual time capsule, lets them become important in a way they were never necessarily intended to become important, until suddenly their time is up, whether only to make room for another artifact or because the entire wall must be eradicated for a move of studios. i find within myself a responsibility to the things around me to try to keep them, and let them live out in meaning and aesthetic, even once their original purpose has dried up, and in this way, i am incessantly collecting things that, unless i can display them in some fashion, i have this instinct that they resent me, that they're heartbroken and longing for respect. presumably venezky is not so much an anthropomorphizing crazy person, but he, too, compulsively displays things that would by many others be easily discarded, even though his collages are still only temporary pushpins in a wall.

yaiy emotional magpie behavior!

taxonomy book: the artifact.

taxonomy book:

earthy covers cultivate

haiku markmaking.

documentation

of marks, labeled by either

method or image.

imagery growing,

less and more information,

building clarity.

with blooming of plants,

the amounts of marks increase

by categories.

from the human touch,

through the spade of gardening,

through the plant structures...

ending in fruit,

almost quite a hundred gourds:

autumn growth on vines.

haikunimation, featuring josé gonzales's "heartbeats"

alas for quicktime,
its digital artifacts,
and lack of looping.

i must recommend
replaying once it is done
immediately...

conceptual loops,
and lifecycles repeating
season by season.

sprouting from the fertile soul

beginning with stuff:
a spade, and some plant matter.
i made lots of marks.

meanwhile: some thumbnails.
separate but equal process.
but now to combine!

analog collage
piece by piece into motifs,
cutting and pasting.

need to cradle sprout.
turn the spade mark 180?
now gently holding.

final vector marks,
and bernhard modern typeface:
the ending product.

final storyboards, final static images and type

i revised these a tiny bit in the course of my animating, so i'm posting them again. 

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.

motifs, and refined motifs

as promised: motifs!
first drafts, and then some refined,
as well as thumbnails.

(thank you studio
for getting a new scanner
we quite needed it!)

after class critique,
thoughts from classmates and jamie,
a few revisions:

to cradle the sprout,
flip the spade print on its end.
safe and less lonely.

same delicate sprig:
sprouting from the soul of earth?
earth is too weighty.

small to big and dense,
swirling, but not too heavy.
infinity gourds!

many hundred gourds,
connected, not math'matic.
much more organic.

oh the single vine
it needs love and character
curly and not sparse.

jamie liked them all!
today's one-on-one, she 'yay'ed!
now, split directions.

arrange six motifs,
permutations, sets of three...
we'll see which one works.

taxonomy ideaing

taxonomy plans:

mudstained paper to garden

books of markmaking.

wire-o, or stab bound?

probably a serif font.

seven by four inch.

hold it vertically,

to give the idea of growth,

along with content.

so very simple,

one mark per page is enough

progression is slow.

from the human hand,

to the spade of gardening,

through the plant structures.

ending in the fruit,

many gourds and many grapes,

autumn growth on vines.

moving from simple

into the complexity

that shows progression.

markmaking will grow

right alongside the concept

step by step by step.

from not very much

visual information

will grow until clear.

over and over,

for each step of the process

of autumn gardens.

the daily desk of yore

ah, a daily desk,
digital work excludes you.
but now: analog.

objects we had found:
thematically linked, hand-held,
to make black marks with.

now with these black marks,
cut and paste to build thumbnails
previously sketched.

clever exacto,
rubber cement and xerox,
collaged imagery.

hanging on the wall,
fifteen pages to critique,
later to be blogged.

on making.

leo lionni (what a lion-tastic name) worked as an art director for a series of advertising agencies and fortune magazine until he was fifty, at which point he moved to italy and wrote & illustrated children's books for his remaining forty years.

he writes of the urge to make things, citing jacob bronowski in thinking that our precursors first became human "when pithecanthropus erectus picked up a stone and kept it for future use," suddenly filled with the "imagination and will to make things" that will define humanity from roughly that point onward.

the idea of making, whether an art object or any other object, just the using of the hands for some otherwise-unattainable end, certainly characterizes being human. animals will construct things, out of natural materials and largely built in natural methods, such that it is theoretically possible (if unlikely) that you might find them naturally occurring without intervention. humans on the other hand insist on harnessing their surroundings to such a degree that either through physical manipulation or chemical recomposition and combination, we make things that could never have occurred without our help. it is a  uniquely human drive, uniting our species through the millennia.

as for the chinese painter, painting a tree, becoming a tree? any time you are sufficiently absorbed in some task (absorbed! not absently working while doing something else) it is impossible not to become what you're doing. This is true in a deep metaphysical sense as well as a simple semantic one. if the "first person" in your head, the i or the me, is quiet, blocked out, and all that fills you is the painting of a tree, then as much as you are anything in that moment, you are the tree. you are certainly not yourself unless you're present inside your thinking, giving first-person commentary to your actions and experience. if inside you is only tree, you are thinking tree, and feeling tree, and you are painting tree, you, likewise, are tree.

i am absolutely the kind of thing-oriented person about whom he speaks but not in any materialistically ambitious sense. i am thing-oriented in that i anthropomorphize and consequently empathize with any object i come across with enough attention to spare. i am also thing-oriented in that i, like lionni, would collect things, warehouses full of things, things that are beautiful or exciting or fascinating or useful or important. i am thing-oriented like a magpie is thing oriented, fixated on the collecting, the keeping, the saving.

when it comes to my drive to make things, it has less to do with the urge to create a novel object and more to do with the utilization of some aspect of collection. i don't feel any pull to spontaneously generate (as i feel very few people can, in the first place, if any) so much as react to the things that i want to keep, to try to possess them and make them my own, to turn them into something that i can call mine.

haiku: new beginnings.

a new project starts,
matthew jacobs as partner.
"choose your two haiku."

after reading lots,
we narrowed, narrowed, narrowed
ending up with these:

"night is bright with stars
...silly woman, whimpering:
shall i light the lamp?" (etsujin)

(&)

"quite a hundred gourds
sprouting from the fertile soul...
of a single vine" (chiyo-ni)

expanding the words,
we brainstormed new images.
here are some mindmaps.

"you've gotta get off the train now," or: THE END OF THE LINE

final posters! they're on the wall, looking just like this! i even plotted them. i hope critique gues well.

firstly, on employing tools and incremental process.

starting at the very beginning, we've used adobe illustrator, the various printers, the konica copier and the scanner to distort our line studies, the projector to reconfigure our line studies, our feet, bikes, cars, skateboards and cameras to attain imagery from around town, exactos & cut paper to collage our first posters, back into illustrator and then into photoshop to continue pursuing the paths we first discovered through collage all the way until our final prints for critique. as always the incremental process was invaluable, given that we could never have reached anything like our final pieces without having had to go through as many small steps as we did. as a rule, to have done something very unheard of, particularly in a long, complicated sequence, is to have the opportunity to create something nobody had ever thought of before.

and now, final reflections, on some pertinent questions, the three remaining (after that one up there) are as follows: 

activating and arranging the graphic space.

formal & conceptual juxtaposition.

communicating visual identity of a location

beginning with valentine:

i wanted my pairing of image and line composition in this poster to be basically seamless and full bleed, to be the poster itself, the ground, rather than be the figure on the poster. this transition allows the figures of the lightbulbs and particularly the text to step forward in importance, as everything, the color, the arrow shapes, and the density of lightbulbs, leads the eye to the left edge, at a height that (if i'm not mistaken) should reference the golden phi ratio. this composition contains loud, high contrast stripes, juxtaposed against a deep, low saturation glow of color. i wanted to evoke feelings of vaudeville, the performative aspect of these lights from the uptown theater. they are obviously not lights for utility, but for ornament, and to imply entertainment. formally, the juxtaposition of these two elements should result in smooth, clean continuity, with no cracks in which unwanted meanings might try to hide. i desaturated the current red & yellow of this light display to hint at the theater's age and history, a microcosm for the age and history of the entire valentine area, now filled with colleges and shopping in addition to housing and entertainment. 

my arrangement of the space for the plaza was rather more restrained, not only because it looks nicer but because that imagery & handling thereof is the most appropriate to the look and feel of the plaza itself. i let the interplay between the  placement of the text and warmer, lighted area towards opposite edges pull your eyes back and forth. together these posters should play a game of catch with your eyes, with the plaza taking you from its name and out through the warm spotlight into the curves of the valentine, which slings all the way up and out before the arrows drag you back in, passing you back off into the plaza. formally, this study was rather more of a comparison than an extension or a continuation because the shapes are very similar, and they are related in both the horizontal and vertical handling of the images. the plaza is a very, very heavily ornamented area of kansas city, and so, by keeping my composition relatively simple, i run less of a risk of completely overrunning my work with flourishes and architecture. 

i liked the idea of having both of my posters related in their treatment, their aesthetic, and also their content. the uptown theatre and the plaza were both built in the 1920s so their visual relationship is even stronger than i had originally presumed when i started. learning this helped cement my decision to tie them together, and let them each in their own way evoke a certain antiqueness while still playing with the idea of their modern incarnations, stylized and simplified into something clean and vectored. by letting the two posters, each with a very different syntax, even if they use the same visual language, "talk," so to speak, i feel as though the viewer has almost learned more about kansas city (not just the popular districts) and its architectural and cultural history. 

paula scher's geography

this video. it is exceedingly apropos. i kind of wish we had watched it at the start of the project rather than at the end, not because it's any less valuable at this juncture, but because it might have been a kind of inspirational jumpstart when we were first brainstorming.

paula scher lives new york city. that might look like a typo, but it isn't, i promise. she lives it and loves it and designs it, saying she gets the most satisfaction from designing things to exist "on the street," where you can walk by and experience her work within the context of the rest of the city.

she speaks of the character of nyc, the "layering of opinion," the neighborhoods "colliding, influencing the city," as well as the visual structure: the complicated grids, the tall, narrowness of the clutter of buildings, the locked up traffic jams, the chaos united by location.

she uses the visual language of the city itself to influence the visual language of the work she does for the city. some examples she gives: using all caps, condensed typefaces, tall and thin, close together, parallels and perpendiculars, filling all the space with a chaotic sense of order, the layering of ideas and imagery like the layering of ideas and opinions and lifestyles in the different neighborhoods.

this. being. exactly. what. we're. doing. it's like our professors have this stuff all worked out in their heads, all along!

we are looking at the character and the visual structure of a city-- our city, kc. we are taking this visual structure, this identity, and through the use of graphic elements and a splash of text, we are shining the character of the city back onto itself by taking what we see and remixing it into something less 1:1 and more complicated. we have been inspired by the language of the neighborhoods we're examining, and we have worked to create a flat graphic, 18x24, that can act as a catalyst in the brain to evoke the same feelings as being in the neighborhood.