Tender Buttons: Initial Idea

After reading through the poems and researching Gertrude Stein and her methodology I decided to emphasize the sound over the sense. She wrote these poems with the sound having more importance than the meaning, but I found it hard to initially get past where I thought there should be meaning. My idea is to break down the words into their phonetically syllable spellings with the stresses being highlighted. This forces to reader to recognize only the sounds and rhythm. This rids the poems of the initial hurdle over the senselessness.

My first concept with this breakdown of syllables reminded me of dictionaries, where you would normally find this kind of breakdown treatment of words to learn how to say words correctly. Next I tried setting the text into rhythmic lines with the spaces matching the undulations of sound. After showing my rhythmic pages to my roommate he voiced a concern about readability. After this I created a page of normal spelling but I kept the emphasis on the different sounds through hierarchical means. A mixture of these two ways is my new design methodology. By using the busted up syllables to clue the reader into the correct way to read the poems while still allowing them to see the original spellings I hope to push the reader faster into understanding the beauty of the poems.

My choice of poems and the materials I’ll use are to give the intimate empirical experience of book reading, which include tactile sensations and other sensory perceptions.

  

Find+Share: Rhetoric in Historical Advertising

1957- Pun: Under the phone's cover to show the mechanics of the phone

1963- Hyperbole: The spark plug's speed is compared to the speed of a rocket

1966- Pun: Taking a saying about shyness and turning it visually literal 

1979- Pun: Using the word breed to create a tie
between the new line of cars and the animal

1979- Personification: The bottle has a quite impressive mustache 

Early 1900's- Hyperbole: The value and quality of the
cigarette is implied to be comparable to jewelry's 

Find and Share: Motion Graphics

Conan O'Brien Kinetic Typography from Jacob Gilbreath on Vimeo.

Vanguard Jazz Orchestra- The Sound

From the beginning the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra stressed the nurturing and encouragement of creativity and experimentation, both from the creators, performers and even the audience.  Thad Jones would pull from the orchestra to make it sound larger than it already was, even though there were already 16 members. He would shift the ensemble around. For example he would have the flute doubling a muted trumpet or sometimes have just one instrument playing over the bass line. It could be a piano trio or sometimes a great massed choirs of brass. His sound was fat and rich. 

The experimentation continues today with the new composer Jim McNeely. He describes one of the central themes in jazz composition as the tension and balance between the individual (the soloist) and the community (ensemble). His current area of interest is creating ensemble structures for groups of soloists, not individual soloists.