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.

Final Cobalt Pages

My final layouts for my element pages. The top image is my page spread and the bottom image is for the web.  Looking back on this project I believe I could have strengthened my spreads by causing the elements to interact more with each other.  I played with this in my web page and it could have helped my spreads become more engaging.  Working with the rag in the body text was absolutely frustrating as every change to fix one area would mess up another. I choose to approach this by balancing out the body text as much as I could while using minimum amounts of hyphens.

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.

Working Towards the Web

Choosing to work with the fifth iteration from the initial web studies, I have started working with the space arrangement around the monogram, illustration and title.  With all of the elements on my page being black and white the page became a jumbled mess. Trying to counteract this I changed the illustration and monogram to a dark gray to create a difference with the body text.

Blog Backgrounds

The past couple of work days have been spent working on backgrounds for my blog.  I have kept with my 3 tone color palette to keep things simple and orderly.  In the end I decided not use a tiled background because they can cause the page to become busy and complicated.  Also I found that if a user were to zoom out the tiling would increase and become hectic on the eyes.  I tried to work with this by creating tiles that were smaller and larger, but I was unable to find a happy medium since any zooming caused the tiles to change and once again become disorienting.  The background that has the multicolored vans became my favorite and if I could lock how big the tiles appeared I would use it.

Cobalt for the Web

My web pages for cobalt are built from three column grids with gutters on the sides so that the material won't appear to be squished.  I changed the leading to 14 px and size of my typeface to 12 px. While working on these the hardest part became working on the orphans, the rag, and the hyphens that show up.  As I fixed one problem the other ones would take its place and it became a balancing act between them.

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.

   

Final Monogram and Cobalt Spreads

Throughout this project we have been learning about monogram development and gridded page spread design.  While looking online for my find and share I stumbled across a website that ended up being a wonderful source for page spreads from the early days of swiss design to the modern day.  It has 711 different stories that tell the development of influential book design starting around the 1920's.  Each story has lots of pictures of spreads and the use of grids is shown in great detail.  The title of my project was causing me problems because the length was awkward for capitalization.  Capitalizing each word made the title appear blocky and clunky.  Not capitalizing any of the words made the title seem unimportant.  I also tried capitalizing only the first word and what I believed to be the most important words in the title. By doing this I was able to balance out the title's strength.

The website:

http://wiedler.ch/felix/books/index