Journal 14

I think the most inspiring thing about this semester was the good work that everybody else in the class was doing. I thought we all really pushed each other to keep the intensity up all year. There was no point where you really had to to slack and keep up with everyone else. I'm looking forward to seeing how we all grow over the next couple years and the work we're doing by the time we're at this point senior year.

Journal 12: Hillman Curtis Artist Series

I like the ideas Paula Scher brings up about type as image. When we design with metaphors I generally think of metaphors within pictures or icons. However, Scher points out that metaphors can be used within type design too. For example, she points out that a lowercase "a" is a square and a circle, so you can use the metaphor of a square peg in a round hole. I would love to know where she gets all of her inspiration from.

David Carson talked about the importance of maintaining a design personality, even while using a computer. What's nice about the computer is that it makes it so easy to duplicate things, but that can be sort of a curse. It's more important now than ever to pay attention to type, and tweak it just a little it to set it apart from all of the other Helveticas and Univers' out there. I would like to know mare about Carson's process. His work seems very free-form and gestural and I'd love to know how he arrives at that.

Lawrence Weiner is an interesting person because he has such strong views and opinions about typography. He detest Helvetica because he thinks it forces its own views on everyone, Which in a way is pretty true. It seems that designs adapt to Helvetica. Helvetica doesn't adapt to designs.

Journal 11: Debbie Millman

Debbie Millman the President of the design division at Sterling Brands, an international design consultancy. She has been there for fourteen years and in that time she has worked on the redesign of global brands for Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Campbell’s, Colgate, Hershey and Hasbro. Debbie is President of the AIGA, the professional association for design.

Design Matters is a talk radio show on the internet focused on graphic designers. The show aims to delve into problems in design and the people that solve them.

I listened to the most recent interview with Stefan Sagmeister. It was interesting because I generally think of Sagmeister as being a print designer, but in this interview he was discussing a documentary film he was working on. This shows that creative people are often creative in many different ways.

Journal 10: GOOD

Good serves as a sort of social networking site for artists and designers. This offers a sort of a community for designers to get feedback or get their name out. Most of the infographics and videos are aimed to be educational, wether they be about medicine or crime. I think this is an interesting approach, because it gives designers interesting problems to deal with.

I liked the "State of the Planet" video. It had very dynamic imagery and really good pacing. The designer made good decisions in terms of what and what not to include. There weren't overly dramatic transitions and nothing seemed to be moving to fast.

Journal 9: Type in Motion

Some of these examples are really effective without sound and some aren't. Videos that have more sophisticated motion seem to illustrate the words better, and don't necessarily need sound. For example, the Pulp Fiction video. This one is effective because it has so many different speed changes and transitions that make the words reflect the sound bite.

Videos I didn't like usually had too much going on. For example, the V For Vendetta video. This one had way too many transitions and everything moved too fast. The viewer would need to hear the sound in order to understand what's going on.

I liked the title sequences from American Splendor, Se7en, and Thank You for Smoking. These all have smooth transitions and keep things on the screen for just the right amount of time.

Journal 8

Univers would be a better option than Futura because it has so many different forms.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface

This article pointed out that there are tons of fonts out there and there are a number of different reasons why you would choose a specific one. For example, it might be beautiful or versatile. This is why I've used Univers on practically every project. It's so easy to make Univers fit in with anything. I also liked where the author talked about custom fonts. It's always fun to work with something that is special or unique. Even if you don't have an entirely custom font, it's still fun to mess with existing fonts by outlining them by hand or changing certain letters.s

Journal 7

Good Package Design Should.....

Interpret

Identify

Brand

Protect

Final Vintage Posters

Type Speech: Lou Gehrig's Farewell

"The past two weeks, you've been reading about a bad rag. Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. When you look around, wouldn't you consider it a privilege to associate yourself with such fine looking men, as they're standing in uniform in this ballpark today? I might've been given a bad break but I've got an awful lot to live for. Thank you."

1. Who is speaking: Lou Gehrig
2. Why is it important: Gehrig's farewell to baseball after becoming sick
3. Why is it interesting: Happened on July 4th. All of Yankee Stadium was sad as the news was announced
4. Emotion/ Tone: Sad but strong. It is motivating to see how strong Gherig was throughout the whole thing.
5. Call to action: None
6. Feeling: Sad but motivating
7. Audience feeling: Sad, shocked
8. Other interpretations: None
9. Biography:

   Lou Gehrig was one of baseball's great players. His parents didn't want him to make a career of baseball. They thought it was a waste of time, but he loved the game. He was on his high school baseball team. A talent scout saw him and offered him a sports scholarship in college.
   
   The family didn't have much money because his father was ill. His mother was a cook at the college, and Lou waited on tables to help pay his way.
   
   He started playing for the New York Yankees in 1923. His parents scraped together $14 for him to make the trip to spring training camp in New Orleans. When he got there, he started looking for a job, but the team paid him some money in advance. (They usually paid the players at the end of the training camp.) He was able to concentrate on practicing and improving his skills.

"The past two weeks, | you've been reading about a bad rag. | Today, | I consider myself | the luckiest man | on the face of the Earth. | When you look around, | wouldn't you consider it a privilege | to associate yourself | with such fine looking men, | as they're standing in uniform | in this ballpark today? | I might've been given a bad break | but I've got an awful lot to live for. | Thank you."

Blue = Echo

| = Pause

What is Sequence?

There are a lot of things that can contribute to the rhythm of a book, especially in accordion form. As I was looking through all of my cut magazine pieces, I found myself mostly looking for consistencies in color and alignment. In an accordion book, it is important to have these things remain consistent so that the viewer can easily be guided from page to page. These ideas could also be applied to magazines or books, even though you're only looking at one spread at a time. A magazine will not be as interesting or rewarding to look at if it isn't coherent.

Journal 6

I appreciated the fact that all of these designers had trouble naming one thing that inspired them. It seems to be very important to pick ideas that inspire you, rather than one particular image or style. If you focus on one particular logo or image you will have trouble thinking outside the box. With that being said, I loved what Sean Adams said about the Declaration of Independence. That's obviously not an object that would pop into my mind if I was going to name a strongly designed piece, however it is the single most important piece of design our country possesses.

Jack White of the White Stripes said that creativity comes out of work ethic, and I guess that's what inspires me most. I have my best ideas when I'm in the zone working on something. It's impossible to just force yourself to be creative. You have to let your ideas work around in your head a little bit.

In terms of actual designed pieces, I've always loves the Yves Saint Laurent logo. There's something really timeless about a well-done monogram. I appreciate things that are so simple, yet so effective.

Journal 5

I like what Sagmeister said about the priorities of design. I like how he put "helps others" before don't hurt anybody. Personally, I know that I often worry that somebody out there in the world is going to think my design isn't good. However, I should be primarily concerned with the audience that I'm supposed to be designing for. It's probably going to be impossible to create something that everybody in the entire world is going to be in love with, so you have to focus on making your chosen audience happy.

Spring Break Inspiration...

Alexander McQueen's final collection

Timeline: Finished Product

Project Brief

CONTENT
_ timeline must have a range of dates
_ intro text
_ each point in time must have a date
_ and each point of time must have at least one sentance
_ images, icons, graphic elements are optional

Use the content from the website, you may use any additional resources for more information, images, etc. You may work in groups on collecting content.

CHALLENGE
How can you visualize the content? How can the audience get a quick understading about the topic? How are the pulled into the content to find out more?

TECHNICAL RESTRICTIONS
Format: poster or accordian folded book
Size: You determine the final size, poster min. size is 13 x 19 tall or wide
Color: Unlimited color palette
Typography: 2 typefaces, 3 type styles, and no more than 4 sizes of type.
Grid: proportional or ratio modular grid

Project Overview

For me, this project was for the most part an exercise in hierarchy. It was much different than designing a book jacket, because book jackets give you multiple surfaces to reveal various points of information. A poster, on the other hand only gives the designer one area to work with. The timeline required us to figure out how to fit quite a bit of information into this one are. I feel that I learned a lot in terms of deciding what is most important to the poster and how the reader's eye should move.

If I were to do this project over again, I might have made it feel a bit more like an infographic. I could have made the main image just a little bit smaller and still had room to fit extra statistics or images on the poster.

Timeline: Revised Sketches

Timeline: Preliminary Sketches

Mantra of the Week // GO DEEP

Bruce Mau mantra number 5:

Go Deep / / The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value

This mantra is especially true when we are in the process of starting a new project. In order to come up with an effective design and concept, it is important to think and sketch until you've exhausted all of your ideas. This will make it easier to move on in the design process because you will have a more definite direction.

Twenty Rules

These rules serve as a good guideline for when I'm not sure what direction to go in. I know I've neglected some of these rules in the past, so it will be nice to have a reference from now on.

The three that I think are most important are having a concept, being decisive, and doing it with less. All three of these can be the keys to good design. In class we always talk about how you should be able to clearly explain what you are trying to do, and if you can't than you don't have a good concept. Similar to that, if you are not decisive about what should be included in your concept, then you will end up with a product that isn't unified.

The three rules I need to work on are treating type as image, distributing light and dark, picking colors with purpose.

The three rules that I want to ignore are ignoring fashion, measuring with my eyes, and static is dull.

GD//01: Toolkit

Who is John Gall?

John Gall is another well-known book cover designer. Gall is known for his strong imagery as well as effective typography. He has done covers for Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, and Jim Shepard. Gall has also served as art director on several covers.

Gall is important to us because his covers are excellent examples of image and type balance. Rather than over-designing his covers, he chooses one strong image to build off of. His typography is often very subtlem but effective because he understands size and weight relationships.

Who is Chip Kidd?

Chip Kidd is a "rock star" graphic designer who is known for his book jackets. Author James Ellroy called Kidd "the world's greatest book jacket designer." Kidd's most well known work includes book covers for No Country For Old Men, Jurassic Park, and The New Testament.

Kid's work is so important because he was one of the first designers to turn the book cover into and artistic medium. His book covers have been described as creepy, striking and unpredictable. Even with his success, Kidd has a cynical attitude towards his own work. He wants the cover to serve the book, but not sell it. Publishers often expect a good book cover to just sell more books, but Kidd believes the cover should help sell the story.

William Eggleston

Eggleston's photos have a sense of color that almost seems staged, with a very clear color palette. In this photo of a dog, the viewer sees an orange subject set against a mostly blue and green background. This color palette almost seems calculated, the way it would be in a painting. This artistic sense gives color photography a chance to be more "legitimate" in the eyes of critics.

Book cover mood board...

Type Studies

Concept Board

Journal 1: Writing for Visual Thinkers

I thought this was a good article to read because it pointed out ways for a designers to organize their thoughts and ideas. When I am just starting out on a project, I have a lot of ideas going through my head, but I don't usually try to organize them in any particular way that will make them useful to me further on down the road. Rather than just giving the reader one way to organize their ideas, the author presents several different methods so that each individual can find one that fits the way they work. This will help me as a designer because it will keep me from going with my first thought and allow me to develop my ideas further.

Nice Book Cover

I thought this was a pretty sweet book cover for how simple it is. This shows how conceptual you can get without causing your image to be too busy. Kerouac wrote this whole novel on one continuous typewriter scroll, so the designer has the road spilling out of the typewriter. This designer did a really good job of taking a great idea and executing it well rather than having a boring idea and trying too hard to make it look interesting.

Brainstorming Reading

• I thought the best point this reading made was to not throw out any ideas while you're brainstorming. I generally just go with the first "good" idea I have, which isn't usually effective. I've found that I end up with a better finished product when I have a a whole list of ideas that I can refer to, and build one big solid idea.
• My favorite kind of brainstorming is clustering or mapping. The reading suggests that this is the best form of brainstorming for visual thinkers, and I totally agree with that. Clustering allows you to think and write freely and then pull everything together once you run out of ideas.

Concept Statement (Part Two)

Audience Persona:
Richard is a middle-aged Midwestern man who owns a farm. He lives in an old house with his wife and drives a rusty red pickup truck. His two kids have recently left for college and his house is much quieter now.

Richard is proud of his Midwestern roots and does not go to to big city very often. His father owned a farm as well, and Richard has been working outside with is hands for as long as he can remember. Richard would love to leave the farm to his son, but doubts he will be interested.

Richard does not watch much TV, but when he does, he watches old western movies. These movies remind him of a time when life was slower and quieter and information was not so readily available to all of us.


Concept Statement (1):
Most Americans believe that the days of the "Wild Wild West" are long gone, but author Cormac McCarthy breathes new life to these forgotten stories. In his novels, McCarthy tells tales about ruthless characters and the lawlessness of the American Southwest.

Death don't have no mercy in this land
Y' know death don't have no mercy in this land, in this land
Come to your house, you know he don't take long
You look in the bed, you find your mama is gone
Death don't have no mercy in this land

-Rev. Gary Davis, Death Don't Have No Mercy

Concept Statement (2):
Step into Cormac McCarthy's world of interesting characters in Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country For Old Men. Each story gives the reader an in-depth look into the minds of some of the most interesting figures in American fiction. The reader will be forced to challenge their own morals and the ideals of our society as a whole.

Concept Statement (3):
Follow a team of interesting characters across the expansive badlands of the American Southwest. McCarthy paints a detailed picture of landscapes and locations that mmost suburban Americans have never set their eyes on.

Concept Statement (Part One)

I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.

-Allen Ginsberg, "An Eastern Ballad"

I was sheriff of this county when I was

twenty-five. Hard to believe. Grandfather
was a lawman. Father too. Me and him was
sheriff at the same time, him in Plano
and me here. I think he was pretty proud
of that. I know I was.

-No Country For Old Men

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation

of men engaged in rash undertakings.

-Blood Meridian

It was a lone tree burning on the desert.

A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire.

-Blood Meridian

I always figured when I got older, God would sorta

come inta my life somehow. And he didn't. I don't blame him.

If I was him I would have the same opinion of me that he does.

-No Country For Old Men

If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

-The Road

People were always getting ready for tomorrow.
I didnt believe in that.
Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.

It didnt even know they were there.

-The Road

Why don't you come up here, pony, now come on, please let's us go
I said, "Come up, get up now, please pony, now let's us go"
Let's we saddle on down on the Gulf of, of Mexico

-Son House, Pony Blues

So I’m going back to the place where we met
I’m going to find the beer bottle we left
Wedged in the limbs of the tree that we sat in
Wedged in the magnolia tree

-The Avett Brothers, Left on Laura, Left on Lisa

Death don't have no mercy in this land
Y' know death don't have no mercy in this land, in this land
Come to your house, you know he don't take long
You look in the bed, you find your mama is gone
Death don't have no mercy in this land

-Rev. Gary Davis, Death Don't Have No Mercy

Book Cover Research (Phase 1)

Series: a group or a number of related or similar things, events, etc., arranged or occurring in temporal, spatial, or other order or succession.

Sequence: the following of one thing after another; succession.

Sign: Physically represents a certain obvious idea.

(a picture of you is a sign of you)

Index: "Points" to the object but doesn't show it.

(dark clouds are an index for rain)

Symbol: A less specific image for a general idea.

(a cat is a symbol for animal)

Sign for

"Woodpecker"

Index for "Woodpecker"

Symbol for "bird"

Successful Book Jackets.....

A successful book jacket should have some sort of balance between image and type. Many ineffective book jackets have too much bad type, or confusing images. A viewer should be able to judge this book by its cover. A reader might be disappointed if they find out that a book is completely different than what they expected.

My Three Books...

1. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (Western)
2. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Post-Apocalyptic)
3. No Country For Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy (Western)

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy; July 20, 1933) is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, ranging from the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He has also written plays and screenplays. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He received a National Book Award in 1992 for All the Pretty Horses.

His earlier Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 and he placed joint runner-up for a similar title in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, is a 1985 Western novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. It was McCarthy's fifth book and was published by Random House.

The narrative follows a teenage runaway referred to only as "the kid", with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Indians and others on the United States–Mexico borderlands in 1849 and 1850. The role ofantagonist is gradually filled by the demonic Judge Holden, an extremely large and intelligent man utterly devoted to violence and conflict. Much of the book is based on Glanton gang member Samuel Chamberlain's memoir My Confession, which has been criticized by historians as unreliable. Chamberlain is not a character in Blood Meridian. Critics considered Blood Meridian generally historically accurate, and it includes numerous references to contemporary occurrences.

Although the novel initially earned lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become widely recognized not only as McCarthy's masterpiece, but also as one of the acclaimed American novels of the 20th century.

The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed all civilization and, apparently, almost all life on earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006.

No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. Set along the United States–Mexico border in 1980, the story concerns an illicit drug deal gone wrong in a remote desert location. The title comes from the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats.^[1] The book was adapted into the 2007 film No Country for Old Men, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Associated Words

Fires, boat, houses, landscapes, apocalypse, alone, gray, delirious, father, son, angel, lost wife, others, cause, shopping cart, food, tarp, shoes, good guys, bad guys, cannibals, raiders, family, old man, clothes man, brutality, mexico, the kid, anti-heroic, gang, American Southwest, religious, warlike nature, lawless, bar fight, Judge Holden, Gnosticism, time passing, officers, retirement, Rio Grande, brief case, tracking chip, Mexicans, fate, water, trailer, wife, shoot out, desert, overexposed, coin, wit, Midwest pride, Bronco, symbol, Texas, Llewelyn, Chigurh, coin flip, fate, no motive, psychopathic, sunset, cow gun, black.

Apocalypse: a prophetic revelation, esp. concerning a cataclysm in which the forces of good permanently triumph over the forces of evil.

Dismal: causing gloom or dejection; gloomy; dreary; cheerless; melancholy: dismal weather.

Desensitize: to make indifferent, unaware, or the like, in feeling.

Fate: something that unavoidably befalls a person; fortune; lot: It is always his fate to be left behind.

Psychopathic: of, pertaining to, or affected with psychopathy

Unrelenting: not relenting; not yielding or swerving in determination or resolution, as of or from opinions, convictions, ambitions, ideals, etc.; inflexible: an unrelenting opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Haunting: remaining in the consciousness; not quickly forgotten

Tragedy: a dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction.

Lawless: being without law; uncontrolled by a law; unbridled; unruly; unrestrained

Gnosticism: a group of ancient heresies, stressing escape from this world through the acquisition of esoteric knowledge.

Tone/Model

east-----------------x---west

organic--x---------------high-tech

minimal--x--------------ornamental

retro---------x-----------contemporary

rough-x------------------clean

machine--------------x--handmade

trad-------x--------------non-trad

complex-------x---------easy

To Suggest...

• the American Southwest
• a Dismal landscape
• a slow pace of life
• a Ford Bronco
• the desert
• Midwest Pride