communtication design lecture.

For my communication design lecture I attended an assistant professor in printmaking nominee’s lecture. Unfortunately, in my notes if didn’t write down the name of the lecturer, assuming it would be less difficult to find than it proved to be. The lecture actually turned out to be more of a job interview; but he still showed us some very creative and thought-provoking works.
His body of work was quite varied, and though i was expecting it to be focused on the the use of print-making in communication design (the only way i understood it to be used), but it actually revolved around optical phenomenon (something I’ve always been fascinated by). By optical phenomenon, I don’t mean optical illusions per say; instead I’m referring to our brain’s way of actually ‘seeing’ the eye work. I actually seemed to learn more about physiology in this lecture than I did art. But that’s the point of good art, right? Broadening horizons.
He began by talking about printmaking. He talked about things like proofing, make ready and tare factor—printmaking specific terms that often get overlooked when judging a piece of printmaking art. He also began his lecture by talking about working backwards through history and how it bridges the gap between communication design and art.
The majority of his work however revolved around “entropic phenomenon”, which refers not so much your eyes playing tricks on you, but the brain actually seeing the working of the eye. The artist would study these phenomenon and replicate them using printmaking means. The phenomenon he explored were things like mandalic work, retinal viens, shearer’s phenomenon, and color blindness. When it came down to it, most of the works were nothing more than circles arranged in mathematic array on a large canvas; but each work was different, and it was so because each work represented a different phenomenon. Shearers phenomenon, I remember discovering while I was flying back from Las Vegas three years ago and being quite startled by. It is the eye’s ability to see white blood cells floating directly on top of the lens. It is only possible when looking at a very specific colored sky on a clear day. It was a relief to know there was nothing wrong with my eyes.
But as I said, the lecture actually turned out to be more of a job interview so the visiting professor spent much of his time talking about student works his philosophy on teaching. One of the high points of the lecture was actually the works of a student who worked in wood block prints. She did an animation of commuters crossing a crosswalk. The aesthetic of the woodblock print animation made the piece feel very archaic, because of the jumpy framerate, as we watch 20 people cross an intersection. It felt not only timeless, but place-less as well, like the intersection could be any intersection in any city in the world.
The lecture not only made me understand printmaking as an artform, but allowed me to appreciated the craft behind it. It seems to be very time consuming and delicate work.

Artist Statement

my calendar is done in the style of Andy Bell meets Bauhaus (in the style of El Lissinki). The similarities it holds with my design inspiration is the use of an analogous palette of orange and golden yellow, the use of straight lines and geometric shapes, and the implementation of somewhat odd, oblique geometry. my favorite thing about the designs of the Bauhaus was that although all the lines seemed to follow a grid, the grids intersected at all sorts of different angles-- not just 90 and 45 degree angles.

when Lissinki was designing, masking tape was about as cutting edge as art technology got. Now thanks to art-making programs that utilize vectors, we are able to arrange geometric shapes at specific grids, using unlimited scale changes and opacity trickery. So to give Lissinki's approach a more modern feel (as well as incorporating my aesthetic) i pushed this idea as far as i could. I also put a lot of blind faith in the idea of Gestalt, meaning that rather than design the calendar page by page, i designed a large "background" knowing that if [i]that[/i] looked good, then any zoomed in piece of the design would look good too. Regrettably, some portions got a little too busy when zoomed in on, but considering the overall concept of the calendar, it's a necessary evil.

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artist lecture

For my firs artist lecture i attended Susan Porteous lecture about her sculptural work. She began, some years ago experimenting with book-binding in unique ways. Starting with thing like how to make a small book with a giant bridge and how to make a book with the most complicated binding imaginable. over the years this work has taken an even more conceptual turn by building bridges out of the book "bridges" and actually using books about the game of bridge-- about as silly a play on words as one could ever dream up. one of the more charming parts of the talk was when a attendee asked if she ever read the any of the books that she was was sculpting with and she admitted that she might actually learn how to play bridge because of it.

exercise 5

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Marketing Reading Response

I loved the article. I thought it was great that by the end of it, PBR's success really did come all down to luck. I mean, i took a marketing team that was smart enough to turn down any and every bid for sponsership. That took savvy, but in the end what ended up defining the brand wasn't so much its reputation for not marketing to people, but the consumers who were buying it for no reason other than the identity that went along with it. All PBR had to do was keep their mouth shut and count their money.

i also liked the part about the company shutting down its milluakee plant and having miller take charge of the brewing not being a big deal with its consumers because what did they care about some workers' pension plans? it's consumers were the ones living paycheck to paycheck cooking on a line and being bike messengers. They're the true working class, not some overweight mid-westerner with a dental plan and vacation time.

self portrait

since i already did an illustrator self-portrait:


i did a portrait of my wife and dog instead:

chapter 5 response

The reading for chapter 5 spoke of the seven design components. These components were Unity, Space, Gestalt, Dominance, Hierarchy, Balance and Color. A few things that I found interesting about the reading was that, under the balance section, the author states that balance does not necessarily mean symmetry. Both symmetrical and asymmetrical balances are acceptable tools, and dependant on what you want the design to communicate. The section also defined balance as the correct amount of information, meaning that if there is too much information, the design is unbalanced as well. Another thing I found was in the color section, even though my printout was done in color, I was thrown off by the sentence “you read this first didn’t you?” No I didn’t. I assume this is because when reading a page of a book, you assume the information is sequential, with each sentence placed in a precise order to increase one’s understanding of the subject, and though I probably noticed the red text when I turned the page, I didn’t bother reading it first because it was in a block of text and I guess my brain decided in a split second, that the information wouldn’t have as much meaning if read out of order. Perhaps my brain is too methodical to have fallen for this trick, but I’m still a little curious-- if not outright skeptical-- as to whether any other students actually did fall for it.