#design
the border is there just to show the overall grid and layout. i decided to dead centre this to create the underlying space issue (at least one of them). i thought about absolutely evenly spacing the letters over the entire layout but i like the word search implication. i can’t help but try to string together different words by starting somewhere in any which direction. wasn’t that some alternate game to traditional word searches? i can’t quite remember. i have a terrible need to keep working on this to make it more interesting but i just want these to be very quick, ephemeral, and playful without too much going on.
i feel like i’ve been conjuring up some quite complicated concepts and the execution of these ideas hasn’t been very great. for my next design related things, i just want to come up with a simple idea, plan things out very minimally, and study the repercussions of the initial planning and the more spontaneous decisions that seem to always occur come development time (not to mention the more traditional aspects of space, form, etc.). hopefully the execution won’t suffer as much with less to work with.
i swear riding on the tube to and from work is slowly making me develop temporary fits of having space issues and i just thought it would be funny to take the idea further. i like the idea of a self referential design that still talks to the owner/viewer. i have a few ideas as to how to implement this concept in different ways so there will be a short series of posters by the end of this. perhaps three or four in total, they’ll all typographic in nature. lately i’m really struck by just how much we look at letters as accepted “shapes” without (having or) taking the time to appreciate the forms that compose the letters and gaps and spaces in between.
since this is the first of these posters, i’ve left it as basic as possible. no colour, no texture. i wanted to use letters large enough to not only overflow outside of the boundaries but also start to create an ambiguity between the positive and negative space. sans serifs like these tend to need a fair bit of white space to breath but i still think this is quite readable, given the anti-letter-spacing and size of the type. this size also helps to bring the negative space to the forefront, especially since the similarly shaped forms tend to lie in loose groups.
i might look into letterpressing these at some point as well, depending on how happy i am with the series. enjoy.
I decided to try my hand at a tshirt design for the threadless loves (red) contest. Some of the designs are pretty cool. If you like mine enough you can vote for it <a href=”http://www.threadless.com/submission/305154/catch_the_cure”>here</a>. thanks in advance.
here’s a longer post to hopefully try and make up for the lack of updates. i’ve been busy but i made time to quickly work on this.
i came across this poster competition on the swiss miss blog and i thought it would be fun to enter. positive posters is a non-profit poster competition founded by nick hallam and run by volunteers. they basically just try and spread a good message through the competition. it started last year with the theme of change and this year’s is “a glass half full” from a more positive viewpoint.
i spent a few days on my daily commutes brainstorming. i won’t detail the concepts i didn’t follow through on but i decided early on that i wanted to keep things as simple as possible. the concept of polarity immediately jumped in my mind (being the nerd that i am) and so plus and minus signs were the images i wanted to use to reflect the positive and negative outlooks people can take on this classic saying.
here are some of the initial sketches. hopefully you can see some of the thought processes i (might have) had.
the basis for the theme essentially is perspective. so my first thought was to make the poster work in any orientation, – landscape, portrait, upside-down, or right-side up. no matter the layout, i wanted a positive sign to always be recognisable. the simplest idea that i went further with came from the third image of sketches and is as below.
this is just a draft but the idea was to have the inked surface cover fifty percent of the poster but it’s probably not exact in the depiction above. the border wouldn’t have been there either, i just drew it on here to show the boundaries of the poster. rather than just plop a plus sign right in the middle or any other area, i thought about having it “float” in the liquid represented by the inked surface – ink…liquid…get it??? also, instead of the more obvious black and white, i went with magenta – slowly becoming a favourite colour for design. the brief reminded us about the fact that these posters should stand out in a cityscape because the winning poster will be printed 4000 times and plastered around australia. to keep things basic then, i wanted to stick with one of the CMYK colours since the nature of the poster is pretty basic. yellow and cyan don’t seem like they’d stand out so magenta it was.
sidenote: to try and validate the choice of colour, i looked up magenta and i found some interesting points. it’s an extra-spectral colour, meaning that it cannot be perceived with out two wavelengths of light. so it’s got that duality thing going on right? a bit of a stretch. more interesting though is the origin of it’s name. a conflict called – what else? – the battle of magenta in – where else? – magenta, italy occurred shortly before the discovery of the dye in that region. so that was kind of relevant to me – a negative conflict may have brought about something positive in the discovery of the dye and, you know, hopefully the conflict occurred to bring about positive consequences. validation? check.
anyway, the good thing about the plus sign is that no matter what orientation, it still looks like a plus sign. here’s the same version upside-down.
in the first version the plus sign is white and blends in with the background and in the flipped version, the liquid would be white and so it blends in with the liquid at that point. it’s pretty plain that the plus sign doesn’t seem so obvious. and in the inverted version, the liquid isn’t really filling half the glass. it gets worse in either landscape format.
the other idea i thought would’ve been interesting to pursue involved patterns of plus signs. i haven’t worked too much with patterns so i thought i’d try and take that a bit further. you can sort of see two attempts in the sketches but something jumped out at me for one of them. the plus signs in the positive space started to form minus signs in the negative signs in the negative space. this idea responded well with me for obvious reasons.
so for the second attempt, the abstraction of the half filled glass would be presented as a pattern of positive or plus signs that align to form negative signs in the negative space. rather than have the positive signs just cut exactly half the page, they’re staggered but the ratio of positive space to negative space is about equal. the staggering also helps lend to a layout where the positively spaced area is just slightly larger than the negative (i actually calculated it), which biases the outlook to the positive. also, the negative or minus signs are only really perceptible in landscape layout. either way, more plus signs are always visible than minus signs. so in those ways, the poster really is more positive than negative. the result is below.
and here’s the “inverse” version:
this version is kind of interesting because the plus signs seems to occupy the negative space and the opposite is true of the minus signs – so a bit of irony there. also, the minus signs seems to resemble drops falling into the magenta liquid – at least to me.
so why a tilted liquid level? well, here it is rotated. notice also that the minus signs are a bit more obvious.
the impression i wanted to finally leave things off with is that the poster that is the “cup” is being tilted but enough for the contents to come out yet. so is the liquid being enjoyed and sipped? or is it being poured out and wasted? that’s up to the viewer.
i was a bit bummed at the fact that it’s not a true pattern because if you try and tile this, you obviously won’t get the impression that it’s a never ending barrage of plus signs formed by a succession of posters aligned adjacent to other versions of the same poster. BUT, now that i look at it again, a similar effect can still be achieved:
and it’s still possible to have a level “liquid”
so that makes me happy.
even if i don’t win, this was tonnes of fun to do. the rest of the entries are
here.
i really love experimental jetset’s work. you need to go to their site now. i could spend days looking at their archives and i really appreciate that they actually took the time to explain their pieces. yeah, i know – sometimes if you have to explain the concept it may not be as good. i can appreciate that. i tend to disagree with that notion though. mostly because i’m probably too daft to fully understand things sometimes, ha ha. but hey, some took shannon’s channel coding theorem at face value and some wanted to see the proof behind it.
anyway, the idea for the poster is my little homage to these talented dutch folks. they conceived this
idea years ago and it’s been
redone several times over. i did a little bit of checking and didn’t see a radiohead version. i thought that that was blasphemy. so i made my own. rather than completely recycling the idea, i thought i’d add a little twist to signify the brotherly connection between members of the band. at the same, i thought i’d try and acknowledge a pair of swiss fellows who helped make jetset’s poster possible as well.
redesigned my website. give her a gander if you so please. and thanks.
i was just given this great book by bryony gomez-palacio and armin vit. among the great examples of design throughout history, i find a sample of this project. so i guess i got scooped on this concept and it probably wasn’t the first time.
now let’s get one thing straight. i’d never go on to assume that anything i’d ever come up with is even close to original or revolutionary. but it still feels funny when you come up with
something, no matter how good or bad it really is, only to see it done already. richard holley originally fueled this re-imagined
project by
daniel eatock.
having seen what i (presently) think is good graphic design and looking back at my poster, i can see the things that could really be improved in my first poster (sorry lpci folks!), especially the type. i still think the concept is ok though. and as i said, it’s been done. so humblepied i have been, albeit ignorantly at the time. and not for the last time i suspect, so this is round one.
exhibit a (the basis for my poster):
exhibit b (some of the holley portraits on eatock’s site):
i guess on one level it’s nice to know that i came up with my thing independently and in that sense it’s a bit validating. but i can also see how that could be seen as a defense mechanism or worse on some level. this, like everything, is part of the learning process and i like to think (hope?) that even the most experienced and professional designers go through the same thing. it probably isn’t accurate to label this round one, ha ha.
i’ve come to terms with the idea that there’s always someone better but there’s always some worse out there. i guess all one can do in the ensuing rounds is aim to land on the former side of that little credo.
so apparently i can’t ever think something is done but i’m definitely going to have to learn to do that. i’m happier with the above product. the concept is still there and is (i think) stronger…not to mention more aesthetically pleasing? i’ve actually been asked about prints here and there so i’ve had that at the back of my mind for a little while. i figured as an exercise, i’d show part of the process and meaning behind the logo in a print friendly layout. the two arrangements i’m liking are below.
if you’ve been following along at all (and for this i shall say very flatteringly say thanks), then you could probably have guessed that i have a slight fascination with ravens. i’m so very interested in graphic design and the question was actually raised to me that were i to have my own little illustrative design type of shop, what would my logo be? well, behold (or scoff at) the first iteration for that. i will probably tweak this some more but i can already see a host of ways to vary this, to which i’m nerding out at the mere possibility. i’m a loser. it’s true.
beautiful graphic design by build. michael place had a spot in helvetica and i believe he designed some posters for objectified as well.
