Better late than never.... so they say

I've been spending too much time trying to find an aesthetic value I like enough to pursue, which means I'm so far behind I wont be sleeping for weeks. It's not even funny. Now that I have a generalized look to it I'm going to run in that direction. Unfortunately for that direction, I can't do what I'd really like to do... which is draw everything. Instead I'm replacing drawings with vectors.. a very digital feel. Time makes enemies of us all. I'll post the drawings I have already completed for the final outcome.
That being said, the content of my site also needs work. What a way to start out the semester.


Here are my three sorting methods. The reason the middle image is a different color for the nav bar is because that is the color it turns for a roll over option. The other two indicate what sort method you're currently looking at.



The next seven are my infographics. I'll start off with what I think are the worst and go from there. I need a new image method or angle to denote the parts of the car I'm calling out. It looks bland in comparrison to the others.


Seems to also be bland. Also very light on the information... I wonder what other facts I can add to this bundle of fun.


I'm not sure the drawing style matches the rest of the site.

I dislike how everything looks so much better as a sketch on paper. On top of all this, I need to create two new infographics along with fixing these... and generating code.

Second Songs

I have decided to spoil everyone's fun and show the lyrics of the entire album in one image. Luckily for you you can't read type that's tracked between -300 and -490. What I did was took each line of the song and condensed it down to as close of a pixel as i could. Then I stacked them all into the grid structure made by Jash Lambert (formally pronounced Josh) to spell out the album name the song pertains to. This means the entire album name is created out of each line of each song from the band. The results are quite interesting when I use a serif type (new caledonia) for a heavy metal band (TOOL) and a sans serif (helvetica neue extra light) for a frilly frolly singer named lykke li. The caledonia I used for Tool was thick and alluded to a lot of the deep meanings in their music. Tyler G says it eludes to the idea of metal having black sensor bars. I really enjoy the macro level heaviness I get while looking at the tool album name. While it might look heavy and blocky, the micro level has a touch of grace and elegance with the descenders and ascenders. As for lykke li's, she didn't sing enough lines in her album to fill up the name! what does that tell you about her as an artist! I haven't figured out how to finish the name of her album yet, so I just filled it in with the typeface i was using to condense her songs. She often repeats herself in her songs and when they are condensed down results in patterns being dispersed throughout the letters. There is quite a shift from the two contrasting faces. the one that seemed more elegant at first becomes robotic and geometric, while the other becomes very elegant through the pairing of descenders. Here are the images of the two albums. I find it interesting trying to find ways to incorporate time based events into a single image. Now that i've done this, how can i apply my previous experiments to this one? Perhaps my next step is to incorporate image with this type.
Can you read what the album names are? The answer to this question is at the bottom of this post. This will be a test to see if Jash's type and my applying pixels is legible. Don't cheat or I'll send my team of killer whales to come find you in your home. They told me to tell you if you cheat they will "vouuuwwwwwummpp vouuuwwwwwummpp you oooooooooorrrrrrrrreeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyooo". And they mean business.













the answer for the first one is tool's Aenima and the second is Youth Novels. Here is the sweet type that Jash is credited for.

Back on track with with Red and Black

This link is a collaboration project on how to change a byke tyre with team ΩTRON (better than feltron). The team consists of of type expert Shmurglund (Laura Berglund), and illustration experts Big Boy Tirone (Ian Tirone) and Gerg Werk (myself). Together we figured out ways to pop a tyre, take the tyre off and whip at nearest wildlife, and replace with new tyre to begin racing traffic. Things went smoother than my roommate Pooty Waltman's face. The color is red because this aint your grandma's byke. This is for confident people who know what they want when they want by confident designers. I stole this image from Big Boy Tirone without his permission, but we all made it so I thought it was okay. There will be a better detailed version when we get the project back from Sir Kidwell bikes-a-lot.

Just Kidding

I decided to ditch everything I was doing and just have fun.

process..

drawing drawing drawing...

type findings (more)

How can I capture the dialogue of a film in a single frame? the first set is the movie City of Lost Children I photographed 1/3 of the movie's subtitles. I fidgeted with the opacity and layer property options to try and find the best combination of viewing all the type at once. They are in the order which I did them, so you can see the progression from first to last experiment.


On the second set of experiments, I thought why not get rid of the noise in the picture and deal with type alone? What can I do to compare america english with other languages? I took two songs, one from Tool, and the other from Nancy Ajram. Again I messed around with layer properties and opacity to get different results. The cool thing about Nancy's song is it's in Arabic, so you can compare Arabic type with English. I had to put color behind the top sets, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see any type at all. I was going to do this to a whale song, but it was just the same thing over and over again, "vouwomp, vouwomp. ooooooooorrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeee".

type findings

Known for their packaging, Non Format combines simplified shapes with texture and color as typography. Jon and Kjell started making record sleeve covers for independent musicians which was great for them because they had as much freedom as they wanted. For specific projects they create their own fonts. Jon's favorite typeface is avant garde and Kjell's is hermes.
After reading a quick bio about them, they like simple but effective design. The most important thing to them is Heirarchy, and after that they use as few layers as possible especially when the layers are really detailed. "It’s really important to decide on the most important thing you want to communicate first and then make it work really hard." If your design is too jumbled with details of type and image, it will distract you from the message. "Also, it’s really important to remember that almost all design projects result in a finished object – whether that’s music packaging, a book, a magazine, a packet of crisps or a box of tissues. These objects are made up of a number of surfaces that should all work together to tell a story. The hands and the eyes work together over these surfaces, so the paper quality and texture is just as important as any print or production techniques employed, or choice of imagery, graphic elements or typography." I think the work they produce pushes type legebility, as well as has a nice aesthetically pleasing look to the geometric type.
Although I am not working with packaging, I enjoy the way their simplified type looks next to the images they produce. I am currently working on creating my own, geometric type but instead of having it a solid field of color I am working on packing texture, pattern and imagery into the shapes. I started creating type for the book 'the old man and the sea' and the images and textures i drew for the letters had to do with the content of the book (rope, wood, water, fish scales etc). I'm also working with how to show time within one frame. This really doesn't have anything to do with what non format is doing or even how it looks aesthetically, but i'm hoping somehow to combine the two. I'm photographing the subtitles of movies and stacking each line on top of each other to see how it looks. and voila, we have the whole movie condensed down into one image. I've learned through research that grids are still 'in', big flat color geometric type is cool overseas, and creating a legibal typeface is difficult when I apply my own restricitons for making it. I started with squares and the only thing i'm allowed to add to it are two size circles around the edges. This makes the letters 'g' and 'q' very tough to produce. I really need to sit down and think about these things more thoroughly.

Here are some type experiments i have been playing with:

I started looking at how to capture film into a single frame. this seems to be far off from typography.. but my original thought was to mask the 'movie' with the simple type I created for the movie poster/dvd/cover.the three frames are a forth of the movie The Professional and the bottom image is a frame stretch for some of the episode of south park. it might look nice, but i realized it really didn't have any application with typography...back to the drawing boards.

more iterations...

I wasn't really feeling the dungeon master theme.. it didn't turn out the way i imagined, so i began something more simple. by doing this hopefully i could focus more on the information graphics that will be in the website. i tired a more ornamental approach approach, but i soon noticed it was looking too digital. after discussing this with a few of my classmates, they suggested i incorporate my illustration skills into the layout.



the shapes of the keys now influenced my drawing style. out of the three things i drew on this example, only one works. but the point is i know that it should work if i apply the right shapes to the right places. the main bar i show in the images below doesn't fit with the other drawings on the page. the way the keys are orientated on the page need to be changed, as well as work on the background image. the digital infographic also looks strange aesthetically, so i am spending the rest of the night illustrating a couple for class tomorrow morning.

just got lockedddd

three iterations for the look and feel of my key site. also shows process that i build my own boxes digitally through photographing the boxes that lead type sits in. the photographs are the rendering style because you miss fine aesthetic details, texture and color if i were to draw them by hand. there are also so many interesting shapes i couldn't produce easily with drawings than I could with photography. by using the wood separators i am able to create a housing for my keys to be grouped in any organization that i choose. i realize the website navigation wouldn't say 'home/one/two/three' these are just place holders for other key terms and sorting methods. so far i'm not liking the feel. reminds me of a dungeon masters room.

process of photographing technique

index page 1:
index page 2:
index page 3:
these three are macro views of my potential website. the bottom image is the micro view and infographic about history of they key. cropped. these will be incorporated in the micro stages to call out what the infographic is referring to.