Venezky

Martin Venezky captures how the visual experience can be a fleeting moment. He tries to capture this moment in his collaging.  The items that he uses are supposed to be relative to the items next to them.  His work is not random as he spends time with each piece of the collage to make sure it is correctly placed.  After any period of time passes he will take down pieces if he finds that they no longer fit.

This changing of ideas occurs when you look at past projects. After looking at artwork I created in high school I can't help but asking myself what I was thinking.  This seems like an almost natural experience to lose interest while moving on to greater ideas.  Moving upwards on this design slope you can't help but look down on the things you created in the past.

Semester Reflection

As I round the corner to the end of my first semester of graphic design I find time for reflection.  From the beginning of the semester there has been an emphasis on engaging the viewer through visual means.  As designers we therefore have to put emphasis on creating dynamic work.  I have also gained an appreciation for clean craft.  Being able to hold and view objects that have perfect craft brings electricity through the fingertips and eyes.  Craft has become a form of beauty for my and in the future I will continue on my quest for perfect craft.

Dead-end Iteration Critique

The above image was supposed to be a dot composition showing anonymity.  I realize now that this sort of stacking doesn't show a lack of identity but instead has more congested connotation.  The image also appears very flat and uninteresting.  The negative space that has been left around the dots is awkward and gives a strong diagonal line from corner to corner almost making a 50/50 composition.

Final Thoughts

Working with Flash these past couple of weeks has reinforced my love of print media.  I have found that time based movies have very little interest for me.  Even though animations don't interest me I tried to conceptually link my haiku and the meaning I found in it to the marks, motifs, music, type, and the transitions that I used.  From my haiku I got the story of a personal journey.  Since the concept of isolation occurs in the haiku I chose to keep my motifs simple and isolated with a good amount of negative space.  I chose to use Coltrane's Monk's Blues for the music track because of its hollow simplicity and cool toning.


With the taxonomy books we decided to create field guides like those used by bird enthusiasts.  Atheistically the books were kept somber and natural.  The inside pages are filled out with notes like they were written on out in the field. Some pages are missing the images and notes. This makes it appears as if they are in the process of being completed. After the books were completed with careful craft they were aged.  This process of aging became very entertaining as it allowed us to get out our last week of finals stress through abusing our books.  The books were bent and thrown to loosen the stiffness, they were hit on the edges of desks to create slight indentions, the covers were also smudged.  To create a difference between our books the natural marks book was crushed by a large rock to create speckling indentions, while the man-made marks book had a tire dropped on it to create the track marks of a dusty tire.

Final Haiku Motifs and Movie

The lines left by the moving shapes were created when exporting as a .mov file.  They are not supposed to be there.  

Song: Monk's Blues by John Coltrane

Paul Rand and Stephan Bucher

Paul Rand believes everything graphic is art, but he also believes in form and concept. These two principles cannot be without each other and still exist. With the current project we are relying heavily on form and concept.  Without the concept behind our forms they wouldn't make sense or really be relevant to our haikus.

Stephan Bucher creates drawings and animations of monsters.  From his video I grasped onto the idea of the person behind the art.  The viewer should be able to look at anything and be able to see the creator behind it.  By doing this the artist has truly created something that is apart of himself.

Motifs with Typography

The final typeface I used was Avenir Lt Std in light oblique.  It is both light enough and simple enough not to take the viewers attention away from the motifs. The thin wispyness of the letters add to the images by showing and giving more reference to the meaning and experience of the haiku.

motifs

Now in sad autumn

as I take my darkening path

a solitary bird.

Different placements of type:

Taxonomy

Out taxonomy will be first split up between natural and man-made items.  These two groups will have four items each and there will be four marks per item.  The marks will be the item inked and dragged, inked and impressed, charcoal coated and dragged, and charcoal coated and impressed.

Each mark will be placed on its own page, which will be 5 in by 8.25 in and off-white.  The cover won't be very thick but will give a sturdy structure.

now in sad autumn

Now in sad autumn
As I take my darkening path
a solitary bird
-Basho

The first part of this project was to create thumbnails for each line of the haiku that would represent the entirety of the line with the emotional content.

Initial thumbnails (refined)

   Now in sad autumn

   As I take my darkening path

   A solitary bird

First set images created through mark making.

Now in sad autumn

As I take my darkening path

A solitary bird

Refined construction of images

   Now in sad Autumn

   As I take my darkening path

   A solitary bird

As I worked on the last set of images I started to use marks that related more in shape with the thumbnails than I had previously.  The initial set of images using marks were created using a linear tool so even if i wasn't drawing with it the images still appear to be drawn.  Switching to shape orientated marks gives each image more cohesion and takes the images to where they appear to be within themselves singular and whole.

leo lionni

I found similarities between leo lionni's writing and my own life.  I often find myself collecting objects not because I plan on using them but because I find them to be visually pleasing or interesting.  Ever since I was little I would work in the garage taking things apart, seeing how they work, and then I would either try to make them better or keep them apart so I could use the parts later.  Normally I would just keep the parts I thought were interesting and toss the rest.

We also share an innate urge to create.  During elementary school I would use Microsoft Paint to create things like business cards, id cards, and other miscellaneous things.  My mom started scrap booking around the time I was in middle school and this is when I started using paper to create analog compositions.  During this time I didn't realize that I was doing simple design work.  I just thought it was fun.

Paula Scher

Paula Scher is a graphic designer that moved to New York during the 1970's.  She believes that living in NYC has influenced her graphic design aesthetic. She makes posters that show the personality and distinctive qualities of the city.  With this project the concept was the same. We had to create posters for areas of Kansas City that would act not only as advertisements for the areas but they had to relate to the areas in context and have the essence it.

Posters Galore

This week saw the conclusion of the poster project for Visual Communication. These final posters saw me go full color bleed.  This choice was heavily influenced by the swiss material that I have been researching in typography.  I chose to use popping yellow and black for the Nelson-Atkins poster because I wanted to bring the modern vibe that is found inside the Bloch building into my poster.

Using such powerful colors for the Southmoreland Park posters wouldn't have been in the correct context but I still wanted them to go along with each other.  I did this by sticking with the two tone color palette with black but I used a creamier yellow to have a more naturalistic feel. Cream is also nice because it can go with a lot of other colors in cohesion.  I also changed the typeface on the Southmoreland Park poster to Futura Std like the Nelson poster because the serif typefaces weren't catching the essence of the park.  Futura Std ended up working for the poster because the typeface is round enough that it can still appear to be playful and airy.

I created depth in my Nelson poster with the angle that comes towards the corner.  It causes the poster to recede into space.  The poster for Southmoreland has the pile of dirt and line manipulations in the foreground of the poster. As you get closer there is depth to be found in the pile created by the overlapping in the collage phase.  This poster connects to the general upkeep of the park.  The pile of dirt relates to the piles of trash that can be found in the park after a freshman party. The Nelson poster is representative of the modern art period through its simplicity, composition, and colors.  Throughout the project I worked on each poster idea as a collage first and then edited them after scanning them at high resolution. I found it easier to get my thoughts out with the paper cutouts then I did on the computer.

   

This is Your Nelson-Atkins on Color.

 

      

As I have started to add color to my posters I have been messing around with the idea of 3D glasses like coloring or at least the effect of offset coloring.  This is working for the Nelson–Atkins poster set but the Southmoreland Park posters have larger amounts of small information and color soon becomes overwhelming.  Creating unison through the poster series with a cohesive color palette has become a priority of mine.