I spoke with Michael Braley the other day to ask him if he wanted to judge AIGA Nebraska’s awards show, which I am co-chairing this year with Donovan Beery from eleven19, but he couldn’t make it on the weekend in question. Darn. He gave an awesome presentation about his design process when I was going to Iowa State. That presentation had a strong influence on my design process, and I’d love for the design community in Nebraska to see it. Maybe I can get him to come for his very own event.
Here is an image of the type exercise I wrote about in my previous blog:
I used only proximity to establish hierarchy in the content (all of the type is the same size). One could also argue that I used different capitalization states. The relationship between space and form in this piece is also based on the Golden Section, but I can’t remember precisely how, nor would I like to reveal the “secret.” It’s still very arbitrary though, I assure you.
I have, for the time being, abolished ornament on my blog. Yes, there is nothing but type on it. For usability’s sake, hyperlinks are still underlined, and the fact that I use color to differentiate information is perhaps questionable in this minimalist approach, but I feel much more free now that I have broken the chains of ornament.
It’s not so much that I think that ornament is evil. I do this to make a statement. Graphic Design’s academic programs, from what I have seen, have chosen to concentrate on visuals, and the copying of “styles,” at the expense of their students’ sensitivity to form and space.
Something such as a blog is, in it’s sublime sense, purely information. Most blogs take advantage of the wonderful semantic markup of the web, which, when used wisely, enables search engines such as Google to find the most relevant information to what you are searching for. There’s increasingly more information out there (duh!) so relevancy is more important than ever. It seems that many college Graphic Design curriculums have forgotten that Graphic Design all starts with the transfer of information (this all feeds into my disdain for all-Flash websites and text in images, but that is for another post, and maybe not even then, because (futile) attempts to pound these concepts into the heads of members of the general Graphic Design community have been made) and I don’t mean “information” as in some esoteric, masturbatory, “concept” you are trying to support, I mean information…the useful kind.
So, rather than learning about typographic nuance, students must resort to rummaging through CA to decide what “look” to copy (many of these “looks” are simply rip-offs of the pop-culture graphics of yesteryear). So, I present to you an exercise in space and form. The form being the letters and word-images, and the space being the space between these forms. It’s like that exercise in school that was a great exercise when taught at the Basel School of Design, and was supposed to teach you that the only necessary factors for establishing hierarchy are: proximity, size, weight, color (I’ll omit “visual punctuation” for the sake of supporting this theory that I simply do not have time to assimilate irrefutable information on), but that somehow got bastardized by your reconstituted design school’s curriculum. In my case, we were assigned to typeset a recipe, which has a hierarchy depth of TWO (ingredients and steps). A couple years later, when I finally realized what the actual objective of that exercise was supposed to be, I had to resort to independently re-typesetting the information on a deodorant bar to truly understand the nuances that establish hierarchy (I’m dead serious…I still have the files if you want to see them).
P.S. I have had the honor of being invited to be an author at Be A Design Group and this post, as well as some other future posts, will appear there as well as here.
Since starting blogging, I have increasingly found myself referring people to my blog, rather than explaining things that already reside there. Though my blog isn’t particularly personal, it reminds me of those rather impolite mass-emails you may get from a friend on occasion saying “This is what is going on in my life: yadda yadda.” I say rather impolite because my natural reaction has always been “Who are you to think I care?” and “Am I not important enough for you to write an e-mail just for me?”
That’s what’s great about blogs:
You can tell a story, or get information out there and only have to tell it once
Others who spend a lot of time around you don’t to get sick of hearing it over and over
Others are less inclined to wonder why you think they care, because they have sought the information
Others can consult the information at their leisure
You don’t have to worry about omitting crucial information from one telling to another
Anyway, now I sometimes find myself explaining something that happens to already be on my blog, then I get fed up, stop explaining, and simply say “just read my blog.” How selfish of me to consider my time so precious that another moment of human interaction isn’t worth explaining something an extra time.
Some people get offended if you don’t read their blog. I had someone ask me, “Hey, David, how is the blog going?” I, of course, responded “Don’t you read it? If you read it you wouldn’t have to ask me that question.”
I think some day in the future a man will come home from work and say to his wife “Hi, honey, how was your day?” and her response will be a hurt “Don’t you read my blog!?” Or, he might even hear “Are you reading another woman’s blog!?”
I have for some time noticed it, but didn’t know what to call it until today. Affluenza: the disease of epidemic proportions that causes Americans to sacrifice their health, communities, and families, all for the senseless pursuit of owning stuff, or simply “wealth” to buy stuff. Apparently, there’s a TV show on it, a book, and seminars to help combat it (the friend who introduced me to Affluenza noted that perhaps to buy the book was to demonstrate that you have Affluenza). I love this quote from the Amazon.com book review:
“To live, we buy..all the while squelching our intrinsic curiosity, self-motivation, and creativity.”
Apparently this book won’t teach you anything you don’t already know, but it’s exciting to witness our society finally waking up.
Do I have affluenza? I score 15 points on the Affluenza Diagnosis Test, which puts me just below having mild Affluenza. Well, nobody is perfect, and it’s not like all posessions are bad. Some of the things that may or may not make me guilty of Affluenza:
I have a TV…and cable, even though I only watch one or two channels, an average of 1 hour a week.
My computer is always on.
I’m using my Air Conditioner today (we have over 100 degree heat index today!)
My car is a V6, and I drive to work about 4 miles every day at a speed of 30mph.
My personal belief is that if you truly have an intrinsic passion for something, owning a few things that help you exercise that passion is okay. That’s why I won’t count my two guitars, my CD’s, and my book collection. Perhaps I shouldn’t count my computer being on all of the time, because it enables me to exercise my passion for design and for the internet (I believe there is virtue, if used for certain things, in the information classification and transfer that the internet makes possible). Also, working alot of hours has been cited as a symptom of Affluenza, but I do that because I like what I do (not that I never work a few more hours than I’d actually like to).
Of course, the “passion” argument sucks, because someone could say “I have a passion for driving an obnoxious tank that gets 6 miles a gallon half an hour to and from work down the main arterial road of my city,” and that’s not cool. I guess if you’re concerned about it, ask me, and I will tell you whether you should make your purchase or not. I’ll get this all sorted out some day into a solid argument, but until then, just be careful.
A truly fascinating art project related to this from right here in Nebraska: Obsessive Consumption.
Sidethought: I wonder if our economy would just collapse if everyone were magically cured of Affluenza.
After reading it, the outlook for sustainable print design in America looks pretty bleak – not that personal experience has indicated otherwise. I asked my printer the other day if he takes special measures towards minimizing his company’s impact on the environment, and his response, with a confused look on his face, was “well, we recycle?” I’ll have to get him a copy of this manual – maybe to be responsible, I’ll just send him a PDF.
I’m also considering making the manual the subject of my book club one of these months. That, or/and Cradle to Cradle.
Today, good taste is often erroneously rejected as old fashioned because the ordinary man, seeking approval of his so-called personality, prefers to follow the dictates of his own peculiar style rather than submit to any objective criterion of taste.
Here’s another:
Since typography appertains to each and all, it leaves no room for revolutionary changes. We cannot alter the essential shape of a single letter without at the same time destroying the familiar printed face of our language, and thereby rendering it useless.
Reiterating the previous idea:
…the typographer is chained more than any other artist by the unalterable word…
I just completed my latest fun side-project: a poster for Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, and more importantly, for One Percent Productions, who organize the absolute best rock shows in Omaha (the music scene is the best thing about living in Omaha). So here is the poster that will decorate the streets of Omaha (and Lincoln…this happens to be for a Lincoln show).
Yes, it is a little Saul Bass inspired. It started out as a visual interpretation of the music. I had some blobby forms to represent the sounds of the horns, some dots for percussion, and the still surviving vertical bands are what the organ sounds like. I felt it should look a little political too, a fact you can’t ignore if you hear their music.
A little disclaimer: the political nature of this band has nothing to do with me doing for a poster for them. The opinions they express are not necessarily mine.
The other day I saw Michael Moore’sFarenheit 911. I was initially disturbed by the film, but, like in Bowling for Columbine, it was obvious that Moore was using dramatic devices to try to persuade the viewer, and I knew that the information presented couldn’t be as simple as he was making it out to be. I found myself wishing that someone would compile retorts to the movie’s issues. Then I came across Dave Kopel‘s Fifty-nine Deceits in Farenheit 911. I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing, but at first blush it looks like a promising resource for hearing the other side of the story, or to just get an understanding of how Moore manages to persuade the poor people who use his movies as their sole information source.
There are very few things in this world that I know enough about to express a strong opinion on, and politics is far from being one of them. I will spare you from hearing another uninformed opinion on politics, but present this resource for you to form your own opinions.
