One of the most trying tasks as a young designer is to develop a look and name for your own design services. Do you use your own name or make up an identity? Do you spell it in all caps or lower case or some composite of each? Or do you just use a glyph like Prince or whatever-his-name-is-now? Then you have to consider; is the domain name available? That done – what about a trademark search? Who knew this would be so much work? And this is before you even sit down to do any design work.
This is your singular moment to express your design skills in just one simple business card. Not to put too sharp a point on it, but it IS the DNA of your entire design career. It speaks volumes about you and your work. If you cannot simply express what it is you do well, why would anyone else trust you can do it for their business? The key is learning to edit your own work. With experience comes more confidence to discard those ideas that aren't working. So you have to learn to discern the difference between the good and the great. Learn to abandon your better ideas in order to arrive at the very best solution. Design is work and requires perseverance and determination. And those that learn how to reject and revise early on, will likely excel. In the words of Don Draper on Mad Men, "I want you to show me more work I can reject!".
A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath.
GERTRUDE STEIN From Poetry and Grammer, 1935 viaBobulate
Even if it keeps you up all night, wash down the walls and scrub the floor of your study before composing a syllable.
Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way. Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.
The more you clean, the more brilliant your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take to the open fields to scour the undersides of rocks or swab in the dark forest upper branches, nests full of eggs.
When you find your way back home and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink, you will behold in the light of dawn the immaculate altar of your desk, a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.
From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet, and cover pages with tiny sentences like long rows of devoted ants that followed you in from the woods.
Time to get down to business this quarter and begin some letter writing of the other kind. From letterforms to form letters...and email ettiquette. L8R
The month of April marks the 2nd Annual Student xType Culture Show at the school's Hunter Art Gallery. This show features the work of 48 students and their experiments creating alphabets which are fantastical, found, illustrated, photographed, videoed, animated, 3D, baked, stamped, stenciled, sketched on pavement, burned in grass, and imagined. The rules of play were to construct an experimental display font of 26 letters out of any media (with the exception of flammable, toxic or xRated, but this edict was even ignored), and they were bound only by time, money, materials and their imagination. After enduring a previous quarter of intensive book design where micro-typography conventions were the order – this was a big paradigm shift. I confronted them with new objectives; be playful, be expressive and examine what it means to create a font without any fundamental notions of legibility, readability, function or aesthetics. By challenging them to avoid these traditional typographic principles – where the function of type and reading are impaired – it made for some very surprising and creative results. It allowed the students to view the alphabet (whether real or imagined) in an entirely new context and challenged some of their own preconceptions. They were compelled to often carefully examine each letterform and in some cases deconstruct them into vaguely pixelated shapes. These playful typographic experimentations take flight in all directions and their results continue to impress and amaze me. I am happy to provide a sneak preview of some of their alphabets here. The show opens on Thursday, April 8th at the Hunter Art Gallery in the school's atrium from 5 to 8pm. The gallery is open M-F, 9:30am–3:30pm and also T and W evenings from 5-7pm. 1701 Broadway on Capitol Hill in Seattle.
Sand Serif, the elaborate video above, created with sand on top of a light table in a darkened room, is the work of two multi-cultural and multi-talented students, Mykhaylo Sinenko, originally from the Ukraine and Priyanka Basu from India. It is beautifully choreographed, and with over 7 hours of video editing alone–is a marvel to watch.
The Leitura Paper Swashes film below, is a stunningly beautiful stop action video created by Chloe Scheffe. She brings Leitura Swashes to life with cut paper, fishing line and tape.
Populations, above, by Erin Kendig is an interactive demographic of the population of 26 letters on page 167 of The Great Gatsby. Erin presumes that letters are a metaphor for humans as they have feet, legs, arms and she goes on to illustrate how they each populate the randomly chosen page 167. Give it a whirl here.
The following works are Fleuras, by Donna Belnavis, a font produced with forsythia flowering branches; Enlightened Letters, by Jee Lee, a paper engineered pop-up book structure electrically lit by an LED bulb. I hope to get a video of this book up here soon; GemType, by Wyatt Carroll, a font designed with amethyst crystals in Photoshop; Boundaries, by Ross Coyne, a tunnel book structure of a stencil-cut alphabet; and Egg Fancy, by Chieu Van, a font with each letter illustrated on an egg in the tradition of Ukrainian egg dyeing, using wax resist and colorful dyes.
For someone who has serious contempt for firearms, I find it ironic that my last 3 posts all have a gun-related theme. This one comes from my student, Ryan Ogborn, who took to a shooting gallery to "design" his experimental font this quarter. He claims it is inspired by the font, Bernhardt Medium and Sarah Palin. I admit I was very reluctant to give him my blessing on this production, but I think it is quite mavericky–and in that case–experimental. I'm rather offended however when I see the bullet-riddled face of Bernhardt, (Cheney could have done better), but sometimes one has to take a hit for art's sake. Frankly, I think Ryan scored a big hit with his Palin-inspired tribute. However the winking emoticon on his poster (click to enlarge) got a big zero.
Ok, I don't mean to get all political, but this creepy infographic steps on the toes of free speech. It appeared recently on Sarah Palin's Facebook page and lists 20 Democrats who voted to approve the Health Care Reform Package, and who were elected in previously Republican districts. Their locations are identified on the map with crosshairs – a rather crass metaphor to take up arms to defeat these Democrats in the November elections. In recent days, a number of these targeted politicians have received death threats and even had bricks thrown in their office windows. After the health bill was signed on Tuesday, Sarah shouted a plea to her Palin posse on Twitter, "Dont retreat, RELOAD!". Palin's scare tactics and her inflammatory firearms rhetoric are a shout-out to her base to take aim at these politicians and target their election campaigns. I am all for dissent and free political speech, but I find this sort of discourse and infographic offensive and irresponsible. Sarah is not going rogue – she's going ballistic. And as designers, I think we all have a responsibility to be very careful about what messages and information we promote in the name of free speech. Our actions may come at a very high cost.
From information designer, Mark Goetz, comes this satirical take on firearms and Powerpoint. It's IRONY folks – not reality! No kittens were harmed in the making of this infographic.
Information is everywhere. We are all drowning in it. As part of an exercise this past week, my student's were tasked with collecting data and displaying it as a personal geography. Their objective was to display the information in a visually interesting and entertaining manner. It was also to be fact-based, include a title and display handlettered text. From some of their many fine results are Things People Leave on Trains, by Hiroko Ebizaki; An Apartment's Surface Area, by Marta Sivertsen; The Analysis of a Scarf Collection: Belonging to the Twins, by Chelsey Scheffe; and Some Stuff in My Body, by Dane Herforth. Click on images for larger views.
Of course you have to have the shoes to go with the dress! And you will always find your way home in these fashion footware from designer, Jennifer Collier of Stafford, England.
Working on maps and information graphics in class this week has taken me to many far off places exploring other people's wonderful maps. Is it me, or are there an explosion of new sites about maps and infographics these days? I never grow too tired of looking at new ways to display information. It has been fun seeing lots of new material from my students this week which I will display here in short order. Meanwhile, take a further look at Elizabeth LeCourt's lovely map wear here.
The work of Philadelphia UArts design student, Jim Tierney brings new meaning to the word adventuresome. This guy is charting new territory in book jacket design. Check out his video of the Jules Verne series he did for his senior thesis recently. And check out his blog entries about the entire Verne series here. There is also a great entree on his blog about his book jacket design process here.
Over at lettercult comes an opportunity to make some letters and have them posted on the Alphabattle 2.0 Flickr site. Between now and February 28th, submit the letter A to lettercult@gmail.com. They will publish all submissions. From March 1–15th, submit the letter B. This will continue with the entire alphabet over the next year. You can find out more information about submission requirements here.
Rob Ryan produced a limited edition of these lovely lasercut valentines. They were screenprinted in an edition of 250 and were available on Etsy for a mere nanosecond. After the first run sold out so quickly, he did a red edition and those flew out the door too. Gotta love it!
This is from a series of postcards entitled Typefaces You Won't Recognise, designed to promote The Type Museum in London. All of them using letters–and numbers, to create faces. This one does it elegantly with only 3.
These little gems are from my small, but growing collection of Czechoslovakian postage stamps. Stunning handmade letterforms. Another good reason to write more letters. The two lower stamps are by Czech designer Karel Svolinsky. :: From The Letterology Archives
