hi again!

Dear Jocelyn,

please please please please give me credit, if i do one more blog post I just might die. please please please.

love

Lacey

hi!

Here is a sexy picture of Derek Jeter for you. Merry Christmas.

Helvetica

I figured if there was a two hour long movie on the typeface Helvetica, I could right a two minute blog post on it. Helvetica. Is. Amazing. There's even tee shirts made about Helvetica. Like the ones that say "sex drugs helvetica bold" "use helvetica"and "you had me at helvetica". Its like the cure-all, you know from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but instead of Windex, its Helvetica.

Sneakers

These sneakers aesthetically remind me a little of your jewelry Jocelyn. They have the same kind of funky structures and actually look quite comfortable. Not only would they be light weight but they will keep your feet cool and actually look like they would be healthy for your feet.

Functionality in Design

An important factor in design is functionality. One of the best examples of this I can think of that would be well received by people my age is the Rain Vodka bottles. Not only is the vodka delicious, once you finish the bottle you fill it up with water and stick a light under it and it makes a beautiful light.

Roald Dahl

One of my favorite authors and illustrators when I was younger was Roald Dahl. I think the thing he has taught me the most is that your drawings do not have to be perfect nor do they need to look realistic. I like the sketched quality to his work and when I am having problems getting something to look right, I try to infuse a little Dahl in my work.

Duchamp

One idea that I always try to keep in my head is the idea of simplicity. Especially now while in school simplicity is key for me because of time restraints. An 'artist' who is great for simplicity is Marcel Duchamp. This is the man who bought a urinal, signed his name on it and named it "Fountain." The whole thing probably took him about 5 minutes and he made millions off of it. Remember its not how long it takes you to do something its just how well you do it and great success can come with little effort.

Truth to Materials

One idea found with in design that always intrigued me was the idea of "truth to materials" This idea came from Pugin and it means that nothing should be altered from its original state. Therefore concrete cant be painted, it must stay grey and rough. Wood should be also stay as it is in nature and not be shiny and used for a car such as it is on the picture in the left. I have actually used this concept this semester while doing the orange peel porsche tutorial. For this tutorial I made an old "Woody" station wagon to made out of "wood."

Cardboard Furniture

My next topic is the one of cardboard furniture. This idea was started by Leo Kampf and has taken off like crazy. It is an interesting concept to think that thin strips of cardboard could actually hold up a human. And because it is so flexible at first it is possible to make really cool designs like the curvy chairs. The texture would also have to be pretty interesting because you use corrugated cardboard.

Symmetry

I like symmetry, the problem with it is it can be very hard to pull off correctly. When done right though, the effect is quite epic. Take for example Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. This album somehow pulls off this excellent symmetrical appearance without being exactly symmetrical. The faces of course will all be slightly different because they are all faces of the band members. The black and white helps to combat this though. Their tongues are all the same graphic representation and snakes around each other into a pattern. The album title and the name of the band both happen to be four words set at the same location on each part of the page. The flowers are the same in the opposing corners and the one in the middle is a nice "mix" of the two types of flowers. the splash of red gives the piece the extra oomph it needs. Them vs. You vs. Me by Finger Eleven is something completely different. The color scheme for this was well planned and the textured background offsets with silhouettes of the band quite nicely. The most striking thing about this cover however is the different directions the band members are looking. It ties in nicely with the title of the album.

Album Covers

Music not only influences us through how it sounds, but also the art it produces, whether that art be music video, fan induced art or album covers. However an album cover does a great deal to sell a record. If the cover looks interesting and draws a person in, they will be more likely to purchase the album to listen to the music. The cover art tells just as much if not more of a story than the music contained on the cd. Here are two of my favorites. The typographical one is Riot! by Paramore. It gives off the impression that the words really are rioting on the page through their use of typography and color. The next cover, Spiritual Machines by Our Lady Peace tells the listener a story of the human as some machine assembled by a higher power. It is intense and fascinating.

Ed Hardy

Id like to donate this blog to how much I currently hate Ed Hardy. When his stuff first came out I thought it was awesome. I loved the vector graphics that composed the objects and I loved the sayings that were woven within the pictures. I loved the bright colors and the objects shown within .. the birds and skulls and hearts. And then it got pointed out to me by a friend of mine, that all he is doing is ripping off old school tattoo artists. This didnt bother me at first, because frankly I liked the images. But then something happened. I saw his stuff everywhere. On clothing. Steering wheel covers, folders, notebooks, even wine bottles. And I realized that it sucked. Not necessarily the images, even though the tattoo artists do them so much better, but the commercialization of the art. All of a sudden teeny boppers are coming out of the woodworks wearing all of this and not knowing where it came from or the meaning behind it. Now when theyre old enough (or maybe even before) theyll go get a tattoo like it and itll be the new thing. Almost like the new three stars on your foot and then the people to whom these images mean something wont get them as tattoos cause everyone else has them. These images just wont hold the same meaning anymore and its sad.

Blog Spoon Graphics

Another one of my favorite design blogs is BlogSpoonGraphics run by Chris Spooner. Though he doesnt have any of his portfolio pieces on his site, it is a great site to go to for design articles, tutorials and free stuff. There are a lot of nice brush sets and other fun vector packs to use in your designs on this website. It is also a good place just to go to find out what is going on in the design world because he talks about everything design. The tutorials he has on here are good and very helpful. They are easy to understand and follow and are also quite helpful for many projects.

Just Creative Design

I also follow many graphic design blogs in an attempt to use others as inspiration for my work and to get good tips from, because I feel that learning from others and their mistakes and successes in the business is the best way to learn. One of my favorite blogs to follow is the Just Creative Design blog run by Jacob Cass. Jacob is self-employed as a graphic designer, specializing in the fields of corporate identity (logo) design, web design, print design and branding with the majority of his time spent designing and implementing marketing promotions for small businesses such as logos, websites, letterhead, business cards, packaging and more. He is an inspiration for me because these are the kind of things that I would like to do. Not only that, he is the same age as I am but is already running his own design company. I truly look to him as a source of inspiration in my work. I have included some of my favorite pieces of his work. The one I like the best is the Drink Coaster that he made warning people of the dangers of spiked drinks.

Favorite Graphic Designer

My favorite graphic designer is Stefan Sagmeister. He designs everything from advertisements to album covers. Not only do I really like his work and try to use it for inspiration for my own work, but I also greatly identify with his motto. His motto is "Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution." I love that, because it truly exemplifies the amount of heart and soul that goes into creating design projects. I think one of my favorite pieces of work by Stefan is AIGA Detroit poster in which his intern actually cut the typography into Sagmeister's skin.

Monoface

Another one of my favorite flash websites is Monoface, http://www.mono-1.com/monoface/main.html, Monoface was a project in which you the visitor to the site can change a face around by clicking on the various features of the face. The facial parts available are from the different people who worked on the site. The site really has no purpose other than fun but it looks good within its space.

Tokyo Drum Machine

Since this is a Web Design class and I started looking at a bunch of my favorite websites. I at one point remembered one that I found freshman year, that still is number one in my list. This site is the Tokyo Drum Machine, http://www.tokyoplastic.com/dm.html, you have to go through the whole site (totally worth the time) to find the drum machine, but for all you impatient people, here's the drum machine itself, http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/drum. The color scheme works well (especially for a Japanese site) and the composition is set up nicely to to give the plain white background a sense of depth. The entire site in general is very in depth and interactive.

Third Eye Blind Don't Believe A Word

Advertisements Using Nature

Continuing in the long line of advertisements, I next looked at ones that used Nature to tell their story. The first is an advertisement by Stefen Sagmeister. It was a billboard that said Complaining is Silly. Either act or forget. He created this billboard by laying newsprint out in the sun and putting differnt plant life, such as ferns and flowers down to give it that texture. He also laid down the lettering. After a day or two he took the plant material off as well and left the project sit in the sun again. On the final day, he took the lettering off and pasted the billboard on. The lettering of course showed up nicely against the yellowed paper. However, within a week, the letters had faded completely thanks to the sun yellowing out the paper.

The next ad is for a hair salon. It uses the cut out of sillohuette of a girl and her lucious hair. The hair is cutout so that one can always look through the sky at the colors in the background and see how her hair would look in that color. For example during the day she is blonde, at night she black hair and in during a sunrise/sunset she seems to have a red hair color.

Advertising

As I discussed before, I thoroughly enjoy advertising and am always looking at it. I have over the years found some very interesting and creative ways of getting people to look at products, but these three are probably my top three favorites. The first shows a person in a very cramped space fulling their job obligations. Neither person looks very happy. The statement of these ads is "Life is too short for the wrong job!" How true! So if you are as unhappy as the people being portrayed, dont you think you should change your job? The next advertisement is probably my favorite because I love coffee so much. It can be found in New York City (the city that never sleeps) and it is a simple cover for a manhole cover. This cover is made to look like a cup of coffee, if you were standing over top of one looking down. When steam escapes from the manhole cover it gives off the illusion that the cup of coffee is steaming. The tagline on this ad: Hey city that never sleeps, wake up! The last advertisement is found on clear glass sliding doors at stores, so obviously the doors are going to open for you when you pass them. There are decalse of a group of people on these doors and as they slide open, it seems as though the people are parting to let you through but in doing so are moving exaggeratedly away from you as you pass. There is a sign just inside the door saying: People move away when you have body odour.

The reason I love these ads so much is they take their product and they present it in such a way that people cant help but remember the message that they are trying to send, which is of course hey buy our product because it can help you the most.

Wired Magazine Covers

Wired magazine is a technology based magazine which features articles on everything from cars to gadgets to movies to new technology to gaming. Since I am interested in magazines, especially layout, I decided to take a look at some of their covers, because I have always noticed that they grab you and pull you in.

First things first, their logo for the magazine, which often always serves as a header on the cover is a unique and in your face kind of logo. The word 'WIRED' spreads out across the top of the page, alternating back and for between each letter at being boxed in and not boxed in. I believe that this technique gives the letter the appearence that they are 'buzzing,' almost as if they have injested gratuitous amounts of caffiene or they buzzing with electricity. This relates to the articles because the population who would be interested in this magazine often is thought to be constantly injesting caffiene whether it be through coffee or Mountain Dew. They also are very technology driven, i.e. they use 'electronics.'

All of the compositions are very nicely laid out and almost all seem to feature a central image that deals with the main feature article. These images are laid out in a fashion that allows for the eye to roam around the page in an orderly fashion, seeing all the sights and coming back to the beginning again. The typography of course is always spectacular. On most of the magazine covers the font is either a simple serif or a sans serif font. There is always a very nice rag on the text and the text seems to be left justified most of the time. If it is not left justified it is a right justification, but you can see there are very specific reasons for it to happen, such as the magazine cover with the article "You call this the phone of the future?"

Layouts

I got really excited the other day when I was at work, because I was able to explain my hatred for the posters on the wall - and non -majors understood with what I was saying. We were all standing around inside Peg's Cafe (in the Shumo Center) and I commented on how crappy the posters were on the wall which were trying to sell Recovery Shakes. Let me describe them for you (since I have searched without avail to find pictures). They are an awkward size, I'm guessing about 15 by 15. Every single poster had a blurred edge to it. Every single poster had "RECOVERY SHAKE' written across the top, a picture of person after a workout directly underneath, and directly underneath that they had something to the effect of: Make your workout count. Drink Recovery Shakes." The font looked as if it was Times New Roman or in the same font family. Although I tried not to look at them, they kept bugging me and I finally voiced my dislike of them. My two co-workers immediately agreed. There was one poster that they didn't mind however. It was the same one that I could tolerate if need be. I asked them to explain to me why they liked it. Both of them could only answer "I dunno I just do."

Of course, since I am a digital media major I decided to test my knowledge and explain to them why they liked it. This poster, like all the others had the weird blurred edge, however it was not blurring out a crappy background it was framing the person with in it who took up almost the whole poster. It was a guy whose was leaning forward on a countertop or something of the like. He was leaning in from the left and he had his chin resting on his arm which was at about a 45 degree angle from the table. His head was not centered in the picture but slightly to left of the center. This made it so that the entire poster was not in one center line, but slightly skewed, making for a more interesting composition.

I pointed all this out to my friends and they sat there looking for a moment and went, "Wow. You're right. That's crazy." And I smiled, knowing that I had learned two important lessons: 1) my four years at Albright might not have been wasted afterall and 2) people know when something is wrong with a design, whether they "know" it or not. So when designing, keep that in mind. The details do matter and always check your work with non-design people.

Business Cards

Our final project is to build an identity/portfolio/website for ourselves and while trying to come up with a business card design for myself I decided to look into some graphic designers business cards in order to get some inspiration. There are many interesting designs out there but I chose the four that most appealed to me.

The first card, Estetic Kabinet, first caught my eye because of the color scheme. All the colors work well together and are not overpowering. I was then drawn to the use of the patterned background. The monotony is broken up by a lighter fragment in the upper left hand corner. This element is then transferred over to the back of the business card and that particular section is in the corner to add a little design element to the back. The logo also works well and they composition is very nicely done.

The second card, CDS also used a textured background. I like theirs even more because they mute it out so that it is not as prominent as Estetic Kabinet's. CDS's logo is also very nice; the colors are well thought out. There are two elements in this business card that usually does not work out well but I believe the company has pulled them off well. One is the curved text, which they do make work but I still do not like and feel that they could have done something else with. The second is centered type. They did however manage to make this look presentable and not very formal.

The third card, Hinge, I chose because of its funkiness. This business card is folded in half so that it "hinges." This is a really good example of showing and not telling. I'm not sure of who's card is the fourth one but I loved it so much that I had to include it here. If I was an employer I would not forget this card. It is very simplistic, yet is says so much. The logo which is a meteorite, has actually "burned" the card. There is also great use of negative space.