28 February 2011
27 February 2011
25 February 2011
Day #13: Lloyd (my father-in-law)
This is Gotham Book and it is a beautiful typeface. I chose to set this name in all uppercase because the two Ls make for a somewhat strange, but pleasing combination.
24 February 2011
Day #12: Willow (my niece)
I've decided to go with whatever typeface seems to serves the form of the letters best – or rather, a typeface that yields interesting or pleasing results. Having typeset Helvetica a lot I find that I can better challenge myself by setting a variety of typefaces, which confronts me with different shapes and therefore different shape relationships. For example: Gill Sans (below) requires more breathing room than Helvetica (though, upon inspection, I probably should set Helvetica a little bit further apart).
Gills Sans is the (un)official typeface of Great Britain, designed by Eric Gill in the early 20th century. See the BBC logo and London Underground signage.
Gills Sans is the (un)official typeface of Great Britain, designed by Eric Gill in the early 20th century. See the BBC logo and London Underground signage.
23 February 2011
22 February 2011
Day #10: Harley
OK, so I decided to change things up a little bit now that it's been 10 days. While limits can be challenging and can produce interesting results if adhered to too strictly they can also become a straight-jacket.
21 February 2011
20 February 2011
19 February 2011
Day #7: Steph
My thinking on this project is shifting after a week. I think that I came at it too strongly from the conceptual side of things when, in practice, it's a formal exercise. Ross's comment certainly called attention to this, and also my professor made a comment about the content being "esoteric." He's right, but I don't think that that has to be a bad thing. True, those people who know the names being represented can think about it in terms of the people themselves, but there's something to be said for just appreciating the formal beauty of the letters in relation to each other, their colour and their background.
· How does white on pink look different from white on green?
· How does the relationship between the "t" and the "e" change when the "e" is in front of or behind the "t"?
· Is there an optical difference in the letterspacing of light-coloured letters as opposed to dark-coloured letters? Is the difference real or imagined?
And other such questions.
What the names do for me, I think, is force me to problem-solve letter relationships that I would normall avoid when typesetting. While the names are chosen rather methodically they do, in a way, give me a random configuration of letters to relate to each other, which is interesting. For example, with "Steph" the relationship between the uppercase S and the lowercase t was a bit of a toughy which I hadn't encountered much as yet. The names become less important than their constituent parts in an exercise like this, and I think that if you went and looked at the pieces from the past week that will come through.
18 February 2011
17 February 2011
16 February 2011
Resisting Sleep
I am, for some reason, resisting sleep.
Like so many Tuesday nights I ended up staying late at work, then, when I got home, I ended up on the computer – a stupid move, I know.
Only three days in, though, and this 100 Days project is consuming my thoughts, or at least making me think a bit differently. I've heard it said that everyone an artist knows becomes fodder for his or her work, and I've always kind of resisted that attitude. Something about it seemed kind of opportunistic, or maybe reductionistic. When I saw the movie "Capote" a few years ago it affirmed my resistance. The way that Truman Capote interacted with the prisoner in that film was so, I don't know, not exactly cold, but he obviously was after something, right? In art the risk of alienation is very real, and it goes both ways.
I'm not trying to elevate my little project here to the level of "art," exactly, but over the last couple of days it has caused me to think about people from my past and present in terms of how to portray them in a very specific context in a perhaps similar, though less intense, way as a novelist or painter. And all I'm giving myself is one colour. I have to reduce that person down to one colour.
In considering these people that I know, family and otherwise, I am after something, right? I'm trying to complete a project. It's my hope that this project may also be a tribute to these people, but I am "using" them, in a way. I haven't asked anyone's permission. If you're reading this chances are you know me in some way, which means that YOUR name might be put up here in a few days or weeks. Would you feel used? Maybe not if you liked my portrayal of you – but what if it was a colour that you didn't like or felt lacked personality? It's funny that I've never asked these questions in the context of photography. I've taken plenty of pictures of people, and sometimes people haven't liked those pictures – or liked that I took a picture of them – but they haven't felt judged by me if the picture doesn't turn out well. By taking an image of them I haven't abstracted them to a very great degree. A goofy picture is like me writing:
Andrew spilled his beer.
That's true, and maybe slightly embarrassing in a way, but so factual that there'd be no reason to get upset about that particular sentence. It's just something that happened; I made no abstract judgement like "Andrew is clumsy." But if I took my friend Andrew, abstracted him even further and then portrayed him as his first name in medium grey he might wonder, "why grey? Does Scott think I'm just bland and innocuous?" Tricky.
What I mean to say is that to make an broad abstraction of a tree is easy, because the tree cannot respond or feel judged, but to take someone you know and care about and assign a colour to represent that person is proving (unsurprisingly) to be a difficult thing. It involves finding some meaningfulness of that person and making some very strange associations. Day #3 was my old friend Adam, who is red. Why red?
Coca Cola.
He and I shared a love of Coca Cola and much of our shared experience involved that drink. I experimented for a little while with other colours that perhaps described in some way who he was when we were friends, but red made the most sense for the simple reason that he and I both liked Coke. It was a good way to make a sort of summary of that relationship.
Doing this project is actually kind of like writing a little haiku about someone, come to think of it.
Perhaps more on that later. I've become tired.
Like so many Tuesday nights I ended up staying late at work, then, when I got home, I ended up on the computer – a stupid move, I know.
Only three days in, though, and this 100 Days project is consuming my thoughts, or at least making me think a bit differently. I've heard it said that everyone an artist knows becomes fodder for his or her work, and I've always kind of resisted that attitude. Something about it seemed kind of opportunistic, or maybe reductionistic. When I saw the movie "Capote" a few years ago it affirmed my resistance. The way that Truman Capote interacted with the prisoner in that film was so, I don't know, not exactly cold, but he obviously was after something, right? In art the risk of alienation is very real, and it goes both ways.
I'm not trying to elevate my little project here to the level of "art," exactly, but over the last couple of days it has caused me to think about people from my past and present in terms of how to portray them in a very specific context in a perhaps similar, though less intense, way as a novelist or painter. And all I'm giving myself is one colour. I have to reduce that person down to one colour.
In considering these people that I know, family and otherwise, I am after something, right? I'm trying to complete a project. It's my hope that this project may also be a tribute to these people, but I am "using" them, in a way. I haven't asked anyone's permission. If you're reading this chances are you know me in some way, which means that YOUR name might be put up here in a few days or weeks. Would you feel used? Maybe not if you liked my portrayal of you – but what if it was a colour that you didn't like or felt lacked personality? It's funny that I've never asked these questions in the context of photography. I've taken plenty of pictures of people, and sometimes people haven't liked those pictures – or liked that I took a picture of them – but they haven't felt judged by me if the picture doesn't turn out well. By taking an image of them I haven't abstracted them to a very great degree. A goofy picture is like me writing:
Andrew spilled his beer.
That's true, and maybe slightly embarrassing in a way, but so factual that there'd be no reason to get upset about that particular sentence. It's just something that happened; I made no abstract judgement like "Andrew is clumsy." But if I took my friend Andrew, abstracted him even further and then portrayed him as his first name in medium grey he might wonder, "why grey? Does Scott think I'm just bland and innocuous?" Tricky.
What I mean to say is that to make an broad abstraction of a tree is easy, because the tree cannot respond or feel judged, but to take someone you know and care about and assign a colour to represent that person is proving (unsurprisingly) to be a difficult thing. It involves finding some meaningfulness of that person and making some very strange associations. Day #3 was my old friend Adam, who is red. Why red?
Coca Cola.
He and I shared a love of Coca Cola and much of our shared experience involved that drink. I experimented for a little while with other colours that perhaps described in some way who he was when we were friends, but red made the most sense for the simple reason that he and I both liked Coke. It was a good way to make a sort of summary of that relationship.
Doing this project is actually kind of like writing a little haiku about someone, come to think of it.
Perhaps more on that later. I've become tired.
15 February 2011
Day #3: Adam
Yesterday I was thinking about this project and it occurred to me that one of the most difficult things about the project will be the choosing of the names. I'm of the opinion that good design is, in a big way, all about good content, and so being a good curator of the material at hand becomes a valuable skill to be pursued. Therefore the choosing of the names presents a series of dilemmas: who? in what order? system? no system? based on relationship? based on who I was thinking of when I sat down to do it?
The last option seemed the most exciting to me, but then I remembered that I have a real tendency toward meta-cognition and so I'd sit down and try to think of a name, second guess myself over and over and then in the end have a whole cornucopia of names sprawled out in front of me – so:
I'm starting with close relations and working my way out from there. That being said, if a name presents itself to me in some clear way, then I will use that one. I won't be making it clear, however, who these people are. Maybe comments on the blog will make it clear who they are, and that's fine, but all I'm putting up are names and colors.
The last option seemed the most exciting to me, but then I remembered that I have a real tendency toward meta-cognition and so I'd sit down and try to think of a name, second guess myself over and over and then in the end have a whole cornucopia of names sprawled out in front of me – so:
I'm starting with close relations and working my way out from there. That being said, if a name presents itself to me in some clear way, then I will use that one. I won't be making it clear, however, who these people are. Maybe comments on the blog will make it clear who they are, and that's fine, but all I'm putting up are names and colors.
14 February 2011
Day #2: Carol
I'm already formulating quite a few thoughts on this project which I will post as they develop, but for now:
13 February 2011
100 DAYS – Day #1
I guess I've been on a Michael Bierut kick lately – but that's probably because he's awesome.
Here's a post by Michael Bierut about a design project that he does with his students at Yale in which he asks each of them to do the same design operation every day for 100 days. The results are interesting, so I've decided to try it.
My project?
Manually* typeset, in 72 pt. Helvetica Medium, the first name of someone I know and choose a colour according to what I know of that person's personality. The format for every entry will be 4 × 5.
I may not post every entry on here, but I'll at least post one periodically.
Day #1: Hank
*By "manually" I mean letterspace and kern the letters point-by-point as vector shapes in Illustrator as opposed to just simply typing them.
Here's a post by Michael Bierut about a design project that he does with his students at Yale in which he asks each of them to do the same design operation every day for 100 days. The results are interesting, so I've decided to try it.
My project?
Manually* typeset, in 72 pt. Helvetica Medium, the first name of someone I know and choose a colour according to what I know of that person's personality. The format for every entry will be 4 × 5.
I may not post every entry on here, but I'll at least post one periodically.
Day #1: Hank
*By "manually" I mean letterspace and kern the letters point-by-point as vector shapes in Illustrator as opposed to just simply typing them.
11 February 2011
SENIOR SHOW POSTER
Here is a poster idea I've been developing for my upcoming Senior Show.
There are five of us in my particular grouping and so the idea is to get each of my fellow students to send me a favourite quote of theirs about art/by and artist and a photo of one of their own works which will appear in the show. The poster below is a quote I chose by Andy Warhol and a photograph of mine that will appear in the Senior Show.
Addendum: The Scott Vande Kraats, 2011 is a watermark not on the poster itself. Sorry for the confusion.
There are five of us in my particular grouping and so the idea is to get each of my fellow students to send me a favourite quote of theirs about art/by and artist and a photo of one of their own works which will appear in the show. The poster below is a quote I chose by Andy Warhol and a photograph of mine that will appear in the Senior Show.
Addendum: The Scott Vande Kraats, 2011 is a watermark not on the poster itself. Sorry for the confusion.
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