Han will have that shield down. We've got to give him more time! 

-Lando Calrissian

Here we go, round two for those playing along at home.

Design Problem 1

1. Use a digital camera to capture compelling textures from the environment.

2. Write a descriptive paragraph about each the texture, focusing on the images' formal characteristics.

3. Using descriptive texts as content, re-create the textures typogra-
phically in an illustration program such as Adobe llustrator, employing repetition, scale, layers, and color. Typeface selection is open, but scale distortion is not permitted.

There also a section of this chapter over on the Graphic Design: The New Basics site here. I've included a small bit below.

Designers generate textures by hand, camera, computer, and code. Tecures are abstrace and concrete, and they can be captured, sliced, built, and brushed. Texture has a genuine, visceral, wholly seductive capacity to reel us in. 

In my mind this one seems like it might take a bit longer than the last (hence the quote), so I'm going to say this one is due Monday by end of business (7pm PDT). 

Once again I'll post my results as an addendum to this post and any other submissions I get Ill add them in as well. 

Happy hunting.

-daniel out

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Alright ladies and gents. I'm not going to make my own deadline. This weekend turned out to be super busy and theres no free time at work for a bit. So I'll have to postpone posting my own findings. Thats the great thing about doing this on your own time. If you're finished with your own solution to this particualr problem, go ahead and post them in the comments or you can wait until I post my own. Either way. Talk at you soon. 

Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos

-Francis Ford Coppola

In the last post I mentioned this thread over at mograph.net where Dani-Sang suggested that I put out the design problem first in case people want to play along at home. I figure it can't hurt to give it a try.

Design Problem 2 

1. Collect objects that represent the world in miniature, such as figurines, toys, game pieces, or ornaments. 

2. Photograph the objects in a way that changes the viewer's sense of their scale. Try placing the objects in an unusual context or shifting the level of the camera. 

3. Crop the photographs to enhance the apparent ambiguity. 

So theres the thing. I'm also going to say that this is "due" by end of business Friday Sept 23. Which is to say around 6 o'clock Pacific time.

Scale is Relative A graphic element can appear larger or smaller depending on the size, placement, and color of the elements around it. When elements are all the same size, the design feels flat. Contrast in size can create a sense of tension as well as a feeling of depth and movement. Small shapes tend to recede; large ones move forward.

I wouldn't get caught up in trying to use the most killer camera or anything like that. I'm going to use my iPhone because A) it's fast B) it can actually focus closer than a normal camera (unless you have macro lenses or something) and C) because if you can make pictures from your phone look compelling, then when you get your hands on a real camera imagine what you can do.

I'll post my results as an addendum to this post. See you Friday!

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Here we are, on Friday and I have some pictures to post. I know I'm early, but things are starting to get hectic at work and I want to get this out before I'm burried in stuff to do.

I haven't had GI Joes or anything like that in a while, but I did have these keychaing my sister gave me of Admiral Ackbar and a Storm Trooper. At first I wanted to put them in little scenarios that might be fun but then forgot to bring the Storm Trooper to work (I dare anyone to type a more ridiculous sentence than that). So I set out around the Henson lot with Admiral Ackbar to take some pictures.

I feel like the 3rd photo and 5th are the most effective and hiding his actual size. To me this is interesting because I had imagined that to really pull this off it would be best to shoot from a low angle. Use the old film making trick of shooting your hero from below to make him seem larger than life. I did a few shots that way but it never seemed to work out how I planned.  

I go ahead and add any other photos people submit below.

Dani-Sang

Of course, DeMille never did anything on a small scale.

Clint Walker 
 

I don't know who Clint walker is and I assume he's talking about Cecile B. DeMille. It's a little bit of a shame they don't make movies like The 10 Commandments anymore. Heston and Brenner killed it.

Design Problem 1 

1. Create a list of words that have opposite meanings, such as inside/outside, come/go, empty/full, and more/less. 

2. Choose a pair of words from the list. Using the typeface Futura Bold, manipulate the scale and placement of the words in order to express their meaning. How does the meaning of one word depend on that of its opposite? Employ contrasts in scale to emphasize the conflict between the words. Compose your work in a 6-x-6-inch square. Consider the full space of the square in your composition. 

3. Discuss work and make refinements based on feedback. 

Sometimes it is necescary for a man to call bullshit on himself. This is one of those times and I am one of those men. After the break you'll see a crappy execution of an idea. The crappiness of it stuck in the back of my mind, haunting me. 

I failed to keep working until I made something I was proud of, I just wanted to get it done, and that betrays the main advantage I have with this whole blog. I have as much time as I want. 

So after some soul searching, some crying, and some cookies and creme ice cream, I set out to come up with a solution I liked. As I also mentioned earlier I want to dive into C4D so of course I started in on how to use that particular piece of software to make something cool.

Well, there it is. Some physics simulations and so on. The cool part for me was at first, all of the letters being thrown were same size. Until I saw this picture.

and it clicked. The more the scale varies the more interesting it can become. It was so simple I was mad I didn't get it before. This is, however, the reason I'm going through this book. To learn all this shit, even if subconciously I already knew some of it. So I threw a random effector on my text and launched it out into the howling night. I also made a short little animation from the set up as well.

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I chose the words "prolific" and "impotent". I thought it had a nice ring to it and it would also make me look smart. I think its clear that it worked.

Visually I'm less than pleased with this one, but I also feel like it communicates the idea well within the restrictions I was given. After an interesting converastion at mograph.net I wanted to try and stick to the basics. "Trust the process" came up a couple of times in the thread and at first I wanted to disregard it because I want everything to look amazing. Then I thought about the people giving the advice, and if you go look at the work they've done you can see they are actually quite good at what they do. Listening to their advice might not be crazy.

So did the assignment without adding any texture or vignettes or any other accoutrement. It didn't take me too long to finish this one which I thin also lends to me not liking it. I don't feel like I earned anything, but maybe thats ok.

I did a screen recording while I was working so you can see some of the iterations I went through to end up where I did. At the :10 I was going for a growing over time feeling. The longer you live the more stuff you make idea. Then around :17 I had the text all bulging out as if it we on a marquee all majestic and shit. While I liked this idea, thats a simple to make any word look heroic, so it wasnt specific to the idea of being prolific. Finally I ended up with the word prolific punching a whole through a field of the word prolific. I think it communicates the idea of making a lot of something. At least I hope it does. I also changed impotent to be all lower case and turned the word upside down. Makeing it small and difficult to read, thus making the word iself impotent in communication. That sounds like a load of shit but its what I was going for.

Scale is Relative A graphic element can appear larger or smaller depending on the size, placement, and color of the elements around it. When elements are all the same size, the design feels flat. Contrast in size can create a sense of tension as well as a feeling of depth and movement. Small shapes tend to recede; large ones move forward.

I finished this up and then went back and looked at a few of these examples and I think I did alright compared to some of the other work done. I might have tried taking the block of text and setting it at an angle just to add some more chutzpah to the final product but I'm not sure that would transform this from bland to bango the way I hope it would.

In that same thread I mentioned earlier Dani-Sang had an interesting idea. Put the exercise up first so that if people want to participate they can. Then after a day or 2 put up my result and let others share their results as well. This sounds like a cool idea so I'll give it a shot.

In closing, this.

-daniel out

Our greeting: a double thumbs-up. Our credo: "Be More Awesome." Our lifestyle: "Maximum Fun." Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity.

-Maximum Fun

I love ridiculous stuff like this. If you don't, we can't be friends. Sorry.

Design Problem 2

1. Cut a .5-inch square cleanly through a magazine, yielding dozens of unexpected compositions. Select ten of these small squares to use as imagery in an accordion book.

2. Scan the squares at 200% and place them into a page layout file (formatted in 5-inch-square pages). Pair the images with a text gathered from Wikipedia.

3. Create a visual "story" by considering the pacing and scale of the images and text within each spread and accross the entire sequence.

Once again, I cheated. I did cut a whole through a magazine but it was such a huge pain in the ass and took so long and was so sloppy that I just didn't want to use any of the squares. So instead I found some photos I had taken that I liked and then I croped 10 of them down to a small square and used that instead.

I also recorded my screen while I did these layouts so you can watch.

As you can see in the video, I started off down a very different path than I ended on. Reading the instructions I felt like I was supposed to cram all the pictures into one 5x5 square. You can see that I ran down that rabbit whole for a while. I was also trying to tell some kind of story about General Patton, but that ultimately failed. After really hating the way that looked, I went back to the website (www.gdbasics.com) to see some of the examples they used for this particular exercise.

I noticed that the examples weren't square and so I though maybe it was 2 5x5 square pages laid out next to each other. I started over with this new pallete and some new copy. I came up with this using A Manifesto for The New Sincerity.

As I got to the last 2 pages, I started to understand what the chapter talked about when it said:

Designers employ contrasting size, texture, value, color,
and shape to offset or emphasize the weight of an object
and achieve the acrobat's dynamic sense of balance.

Adding small bits of color to the layouts to balance out the colors in the photos. Once I got a handle on the whole layout debacle I had a lot of fun with this one.

As always, leave a comment or a question, I'd love to generate some discussion on this blog so that whoever comes across it in the future can benifit from many points of view and not just my own. 

boom. roasted.

-daniel out

Symmetry is what we see at a glance.

-Blaise Pascal

How badass would you be if your name was Blaise? I submit the answer is super badass.

Design Problem 1

1. Working in a 6 x 6 inch square, arrange three of four geometric elements (circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, etc) in a symme- trical way. Start with variations in which all the elements are the same size, then create symmetrical designs with elements of diffe- rent size. Experiment with scale and cropping.

2. Create asymmetrical designs using forms of different sizes. Experiment until you find visual balance in each composition. For example, use several small elements to offset one larger one.

3. Many variations are possible. Introduce contrasts of color or value. Create a simple animation of one or more designs; make a stable design become active, or bring order to a seemingly random arrangement.

Ok, so I cheated on this one. I didn't work in a 6x6 square. Being that I tend to design for broadcast, and it's not 1993,I wanted to work in the medium I'm acustomed to. Widescreen. I went with 1280x720 and started designing away.

This one was pretty straight forward, and I had acutally done this same problem a couple of months back when I was still trying to get this site up and running. In that iteration I stuck with the square pallete and used different colors. I remembered having a lot of fun with that one, but for some reason this time around it just didn't come as easy. I wound up searching the interwebs for inspiration on ways to add complexity to a seemingly simple concept. Then I remembered this video I'd seen a while back.

I think its pretty clear that I drew a lot of inspiration from this video. Jr Canest does some great stuff with simple shapes and forms that I never thought I'd be able to pull off. I like to think that on a small scale, I succeeded here.

 A symmetrical design is inherently stable. Yet balance need not be static. A tightrope walker achieves balance while traversing a precarious line in space, continually shifting her weight while staying in motion. Designers employ contrasting size, texture, value, color, and shape to offset or emphasize the weight of an object and achieve the acrobat's dynamic sense of balance.

I found that working in a wide screen format makes finding balance vertically a lot more difficult. As you can see all the designs are balanced horozontially or diagonnaly, I could never get a result I liked when trying to work vertically. I also found that for me personally I get bored just positioning the shapes. In the middle of the second frame I started adding texture to these. Once I had that in I felt like I was making some real progress. However I hadn't nailed down the colors yet. At first I had to colors shifting from frame to frame. 

Then I thought, my god, this is more 80's than Duran Duran riding Spuds MacKenzie while high fiving The Noid. That is to say, very 80's. Anyway, I went back to the color scheme of the first 2 frames and found I was pleased with that.

I thought the suggestion to animate one of the frames was a fine idea. I've been slowly learning Cinema 4D over the last few years and I feel like it's time to fully dive in. So I decided to animate between these frame using C4D and see what I could come up with.

hasta lasagna, don't get any on ya,

-daniel out

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure. 

  -Oscar Wilde

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but Oscar Wilde said it. When it comes to dropping quotes on the internet you'll be hard pressed to find a man with more street cred than Mr. Wilde. Maybe Hemmingway. Or Whitman. Back to Wilde, he even had a cool name. Wilde.

Design Problem 2

1. Create list of words that have no obvious visual reference, such as names for emotions (fear, anxiety, hope, tension).

2. Choose a word. Use points and lines to construct the word in an emphatic, expressive way. Use physical, digital, or gestural processes. If your process involves three-dimensional construction, photograph it to produce a two-dimensional image.

I'll be honest, I had a hell of a time with this one. I kept trying to think of a word that I wanted to design around. This alone took a while, and even then I changed my mind. At first I chose dissatisfaction/unsatisfied, because generally thats how I feel about my work. I think this is common for a lot of creative people, and its not meant to be some self depricating sort of thing. It's just a true fact.

That being said I came up with a few different concepts on the road to what you saw above. I'll show them to you now.

This was originally going to be a picture of one post it note with the word "satisfied" written on it with a strike through it. Below that would be the word "dissatisfied". The strike through obviously touching on the not being satisfied idea. Its also a line and thats kind of a key thing in this exercise. I thought I was clever. That is until I tried to do it. I was never happy with the way the words looked and ultimately I just didn't like the idea enough to accept it as the final for this exercise. Though I did like the idea of an eraser being a methaphor for dissatisfaction.

This was following the idea that to be unsatisfied is to be incomplete, hence the word wasn't finished being written. It get all squirelly at the end because sometimes pushing into the things that leave you feeling empty only ends up doing more of the same. Deep, I know. 

It was around this point in my Aristotelian like trance that I realized I needed a new word. This one wasn't doing me any favors and frankly, could get bent. I moved on to another word that haunts me at times. Ambition. This is something I battle with. Feeling down because  I haven't achieved goals that I feel I should have or envying people who have no ambition because they seem so free. On the flip side I wonder about achieving goals. What if you achieve all of them. There are no goals left to achieve. Like Rambo with killing people. 

So with my new word and some ideas about ambition, I went back to work in the sketch book to see what I could come up with.

At first I thougth about incorporating a hand reaching to the stars. Going for a kind More You Know kind of thing. Ultimately I decided this was a stupid idea. Then I went back to the basics of what a line does. It connects and divides. Ambition is an attempt to connect with your dreams but it can also divide you against yourself if you let it.

This is the basis for the final product. A small face with a strike through the eyes (speaking to the losing ones identity thing if you let yourself get too caught up in the pursuit of a goal) and a line connecting the face to the stars (reaching your goals/dreams/whatever). After messing around in photoshop for a while getting the form of the letters to look how I wanted, I started positioning the elemnts and such until it got to a place I was happy with. Added some color and some texture and viola. It was done.

The moral of the story is that anything can eat you alive if you let it. Like this. Unless you're all Nietzsche about it, in which case there is no moral.

An exerpt from chapter one of Graphic Design: The New Basics

Point, line, and plane are the building blocks of design. From these elements, designers create images, icons, textures, patterns, diagrams, animations, and typographic systems.

Here we are, track 1 side 1 of this little journey. I read through the chapter and it seemed straight forward enough. Points may have mass and size and they may not, lines can connect but they can also divide, and while a plane is two dimensional, if you get a few of them together all of a sudden you've got a third dimension.

Design Problem 01:

1. Divide class into three groups: point, line, and plane. Each group explores the environment with a camera, looking for surprising and intriguing visual examples. 

2. Choose your best examples, and crop them to a square.

3. Present work to the group and discuss what you see. Points and lines can be positive or negative, large or small, active or static, single or in groups.

Since I'm not in a class, per se, I decided to chose one of the three and just focus on getting shots of that. I also decided to limit my picture count to 10 so that I wouldn't wander around all day snapping pictures of everything that may or may not work. I find forcing yourself to be selective about what you are allowed to grab makes you think more about your work. 

I chose line and headed out into the world to grab some pictures. I used my phone becuase when I decided to do this excercise I was techinically at work, so I didn't want walk around the lot with my 7D while people wonder what the hell I'm doing. I attempted to stay away from things that screamed line, like parking space line or a line on a street sign. I tried to get a variety of different lines from organic vines growing to lines in the sidewalk. After I chose the subject of each photo, I tried to capture it in an interesting way, always thinking about trying to take a project to a new level with various levels of polish. I also used shake it photo on all the pictures because this is my damn website and sometimes you just feel like doing something. 

Here are the pictures I took, I hope you don't hate them.

(download)

Click here to download:

point-line-and-plane-observation-zAbzdEpmwrxsHbmrxJId.zip (7.6 MB)

The purpose is this blog is a place for me to post the work I do as I make my way though Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton. The book came out a few years ago and I picked it up and promptly never read it. This chewed at me for some time, like a critter or a wookie would on a ewok. Finally I decided I had to go though this book because I paid money for it and it would just be a waste to sit around and watch tutorials on the internet about how to use photoshop and never bother to try and learn the underlying ideas and principles behind design.

I graduated from film school in 2005 and began searching for a job in Texas. I wanted to be an editor. I've always loved computers, I'm technically minded, and I'd been editing since before school so it seemed like a good fit. I quickly learned that the market in Texas is quite small and the guys/gals who are editors have been doing it for a long time. I was 25 and didn't really like making 10 dollars an hour with a college degree so I started thinking about what new tricks I could add to my repetoir that would make me more desirable to employers. One day while searching for demo reels of editors I came across a message board dedicated to motion graphics. I was almost instantly hooked. I wanted to know how they did it, what programs, where, who, when, and why. My enthusiasm, while well placed, lead me to do some pretty aweful work and show it to some very patient people. They told me to learn design, pull back the curtain and get the theory down before I start sending out work to strangers saying "LOOK WHAT I MADE" because it will probably be shit and I will definitely be embarassed (I was).

Flash forward a few years (and few webseries) to 2011 and I live in Los Angeles and I'm trying to find some work. I did a lot of work in Houston, and I worked with some really great people but ultimately I wanted to give it a try out here and see where the chips fell. I found rather quickly that as much as I had learned on my own about design it still wasn't enough to land me a job anywhere out here. So here were are, watching me go through this book and do some exercises that are on the website and see if we can't learn something together. I look forward to going through this, seeing what people have to say, and hopefully the conversations started here will inform my work just as much as yours.

believe in magic.

-daniel