What I've been up to:

So, it's been a hectic couple of weeks. I've had five projects to work on, and I thought I'd show y'all two of them.

The first is the most interesting. I was given a semi-well known WWII document to clean up, then reproduce. The document is a posting to the troops from their commander, General McAuliffe, during the Siege of Bastogne (part of the Battle of the Bulge - the capture of northern Europe from the German occupiers), as a way of telling them that he had stuck his tongue out at the German commander when asked to surrender, more or less. The document utters the famous declaration "NUTS" to said surrender.

Basically, the allied troops in the Belgian town of Bastogne were surrounded, and they managed to hold out, despite the rediculous odds, until relief troops arrived (of which my own grandfather was a participant).

The scan that I worked on was a copy of a copy, and thus was in rather poor condition. The original can be seen here.

This is what I was given:


I spent about three full days in Photoshop cleaning it up. Then end result was this:


Then, since even this cleaned up version has major legibility issues, I created a reproduction, as faithfully as I could, so that it could be framed for personal viewing of the client. I searched through tons of fonts for the right distressed typewriter font (none were perfect, but the one I chose, John Doe, does the job. The x-heights are different, but they have enough key elements to be similar. This was the result of the recreation:

And there we have it.

The second project I wanted to share was a design concept for a new line of essential oil infusions, for a client of mine. The first is a horizontal label for a ficticious oil:

And then this is a verticle idea, for a different ficticious oil:
Despite the various conversion and compressions I had to go through to get them into jpg's that would fit in this entry, I think they still look fairly good, although the color is kinda tweaked. Maggie Smith's stuff is very nice, and you can check out her website here.

Anywho, that's what I've been doing. Cheers!

Font Fight

Helvetica vs Arial. Comic Sans MS vs Known Universe. Papyrus is for Chumps, etc.

Truth is, I don't really care for or much about any of these much hated fonts. Helvetica and Arial work well for certain situations, just like all fonts do. Helvetica Neue looks fantastically elegant and sophisticated in its lighter weights, but the heavy weights have got to be one of the most oppressive and depressing font faces ever created! I'd never use them in a million years for ANYTHING. It's like sitting down to breakfast on a clear, warm spring morning only to find you're eating green-eggs and ham with Stalin as your guest.

I'd rather use Arial (or some other sibling) for heavy weight applications where a neutral typeface is needed. At least I wouldn't feel like trying to have sex on a piece of Panton furniture.

Indeed, the whole problem WITH Helvetica is that it comes with Swiss Modernist design already installed. I respect the work of these masters TREMENDOUSLY, but I wouldn't call their work enjoyable. In fact, what most modernist design says to me is "I hate you". It's done with a simple but ugly palate of colors. It's abstract to the point of being alien. It's graphed and gridded to the point of obsessiveness. And it is as lifeless as the moon.

Interesting? yes. Innovative. Absolutely. A delight for movie producers trying to portray the future. Definitely. But friendly, enjoyable, lovable, accessible, inviting? Never. Ever. And Helvetica was the Trojan horse that Swiss designers wheeled their bizarre art form in, to the design studios of the world.

In general, I don't like any of the Akzidenz-Grotesk progeny. Geometric sans serif faces, like Futura or Toronto Subway, seem much more elegant and respectable to me. They have personality, back-bone, and say to the world "life can be classy, elegant, and chic but also accessible". They give the viewer something to strive for, while at the same time saying "the subject matter will be issue-free" and "socially acceptable". They are optimistic fonts, and I like that quality.

Comic Sans is, to me, no different than any other comic book font, and should be used accordingly. As something that fits that genre, for a touch of whimsy, when children are involved, or to simply lighten the mood and seem nonchalant.

I really like Papyrus, actually. It's elegant and exotic, and although it is rather overused by the average person with a computer remember - most average computer users don't have a lot else on their computer that is available FOR use in situations that could use a touch of the Orient or mythology or mystery, which is what Papyrus adds. The same goes for Comic Sans.

In fact the real issue to bring up is - although the average computer has a lot of different fonts on it, certianly more than any average person fifty years ago would have access to, without investing in a font folio or spending money on MyFonts or FontShop, they wouldn't know or have access to better fonts anyways. It's really not their fault.

Anywho . . . I know it's fun to berate the unilluminated literati of the world, but I think most of them feel they do their best. Who are we to criticize?

I'm bored

Here's the result:


I guess it's "my style". Clean, stylish, elegant (at least I think so) and relatively simple. I don't know if that's because I'm not much of an artist, or because of a genuine aesthetic. Aviano Sans does a great job here. I think a better script font would improve the inner content, but this is the best one I have available to me.

cheers!

Helvetica

DON'T PANIC!

There is no Helvetica here. I promise. Nor any Arial.

Instead, I watched the movie Helvetica, and was inspired to make both a "modernist" inspired poster, and then a "grunge" poster - the antithesis of modernism.

Here is the first:




And second, the grunge:



I really liked the movie. Helvetica isn't my favorite font, in fact it isn't even a font I own, but it really works in some situations, just like every other font in existence.

One important thing is how different the two styles really are. One is light, clear, open. The other is murky, intense and secretive. I really think both are kinda cool

At any rate, hurray for creative diversity!!!!

Ciao!

The "Why" of it.

As a follow up to my two most recent blogs, I wanted to clarify why I'm into graphic design/typesetting/document creation. It isn't because I'm particularly artistic, nor is it because I believe it's my calling in life, nor is it just a whim.

There are two specific events that triggered my enthusiasm.

First, as I was sitting in front of my computer one day, I realized that I'd spent thousands of dollars over the years on my computer, and would have spent more had not my computer engineer friend David Wiley assembled them for me, and yet it had never earned me a penny in return. And, as I sat there, I got sorta mad. I thought "Why am I working for my computer instead of the other way around?"

A computer can, after all, do a lot more than run Diablo II or Warcraft III, if given a chance.

The second event happened at work. I was in "express", waiting to help customers make their copies (I work at a nationally known xeroxography franchise), and this little old woman came up to do some color copies. She seemed upset, but didn't strike me as an the intrinsically irascible or moody elderly-type. So, I casually asked what was the matter.

She said that she'd just asked about getting a simple invitation designed and was told she'd have to pay $60 an hour to either my employer or a nearby graphic designer for its creation, and she simply couldn't fathom why. In that moment I knew I agreed with her. It really wasn't fair that someone like her should have to pay a huge amount of money just to have simple typesetting done, and I knew that I could do at least a decent job for a lot less (since I was already employed).

So, I purchased the Adobe CS2 suite, and set about learning the ropes. Jim Mullen of the Type Factory help me tremendously in the beginning, as I learned the terms and concepts behind graphic design, and then it's been about three and half years of reading, studying and experimenting.

What's interesting to me is that no matter how much I learn, there's always more to uncover - mostly because everything in media nowadays is connecting to everything else. Print content can be repurposed for the web and vice versa, so you have to know something about both. You have to understand about file types - where they came from, why they were developed, and which you use for what purpose. You have to understand about vector vs raster images, drawing vs photography, color theory, design theory, xeroxography vs offsetting printing vs digital printing vs silk screening, freeform design vs rigid typesetting, psychology, and on and on.

I suppose a third reason to do it is that I love fonts, and if I were a mix between Peter Roget (of Roget's Thesaurus fame) and endlessly rich Bill Gates, I'd spend all my time collecting fonts and then organizing them into various categories. There's millions of them at this point, so it'd be a lifelong project.

Overall, I'm rather proud of myself for tackling a fairly specific, difficult and detail oriented hobby/profession, and for persevering at it for no reason other than I felt I should. No one made me or asked me to learn it, and no one else I know or have met, except Jim, has ever tried to learn it as thoroughly as I have. Lots of people at work can use one or more of the Adobe CS products, and in some cases quite expertly, but none of them could also tell you why things work the way they do, nor can they talk about design theory.

My conclusion has been that it's simply the nature of people in my family to completely understand things and not just make them work. After all, if you don't know the "why" of something, then if it goes wrong, the * hits the fan and there's *-all you can do about it.

till my next repurposeless post,

Cheerio!

Rules Rule!

Not really.

After four or five months of delving into the typesetting rules, I've come up with my own list (WE LOVE LISTS!!!) of them. They are done with the assumption that InDesign is the only publishing program that matters (sucks to you, QuarkExpress) and that you're doing it for non-web based design. Web typesetting gets into CSS stuff which I don't understand, and that which I don't understand . . . . I don't understand.

So, here's my list.The font is a Futura clone, and the document itself follows the typsetting rules. One interesting result of both aligning to the baseline grid AND a document grid is that the text in all boxes start and end in a variable position to all the other boxes and really all text should begin in the same place, for consistency. No doubt there's a mathmatical fix for that . . . .

Anywho, this is my small contribution to the field. One list among many.

The nature of inspiration

So . . . I've been spending a lot of time studying more and more detailed aspects of graphic design, especially grids and styles in InDesign. And, although the knowledge that they've imparted have been invaluable, I realized today that, as purely structural elements, they lack the ability to inspire me. Really inspire me. In any way. At all.

So, tonight, as I was perusing some fashion pictures whilst looking at the Pantone colors for Spring 2009 fashions, I can across this picture:


I mean, look at that outfit! Great colors, clean lines, sensual fabrics, that hint-of-the-Orient with the obi-like sash. It's fantastic!

And the photo immediately inspired me to create this fictitious event poster:



Something that my recent studies had no ability to do to me.

So, I guess the moral of the story is - inspiration comes from inspiration and not from organization.

Amen.

American Myopia

I was just watching a trailer/promo/interview segment on the upcoming movie The Watchmen, and I couldn't help think about something that's been bothering me about my country for a long, long, long, long time. We're completely out-of-touch with our fellow human beings, countries, and cultures.
While the world is trying to cope with OUR financial miscalculations, we spend our time making movies about anti-social and petulant white superheros, implying that Americans have evolved so far above daily concerns that super-powers are the only things left for us to achieve. It's beyond horrible.
Movies are LITERALLY our culture (along with TV and radio), and it is this culture which we export, more than anything else, to other countries. Our culture, then, is basically telling the rest of humanity "Sucks to your daily life, culture, points of view, etc, you should be identifying with the lives of OUR fictitious comic book-heros!"
Uhm. No. When America has crashed and burned, we'll have a country of infantile adults wondering why the rest of the world is pointing and laughing at us. Gee. I wonder why.

Peace out.

Op Ed B.O.

So, just as undoubtedly 1 million blogs are pasting up their 2cents on our new Prez, I figured i'm hop on the band wagon. I like band wagons. They're cool! And I want to ride one!

1) He's not a dead-white-man.
- Our civilization has been run by dead-white-men for longer than Oprah has been on TV, and I'm tired of it. The same people with the same ideas, asking the same questions and answering them the same way for 2000 years. It's horrible. Dead white philosophy, dead white morals, dead white culture, dead white lies. The United States of America is the worlds biggest melting pot of peoples of all walks of life, ways of life, and expressions of life, and we deserve to have someone who actually represents that diversity.

2) He's a constitutional scholar.
- Finally, we'll have someone who actually believes in the constitutional basis for our government, rather than the fictitious government of megalomania that the likes of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove seem to believe in. Yes, they'd love us to all be heartless missile worshipers who earnestly believe that the few thousand lives lost in NY are more than equal to the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people our troops have killed in the Middle East. Clearly, Americans are superior to everyone else, so what difference does it make if we kill them all. Thanx Bush, we needed that boost to our global image. Cold, cruel, evil white overlords protecting oil.

And that about sums it up. If he can help our economy, SWELL. But the economy is completely fucked up only because of deregulation and the usual greed of our wealthy plutocrats who toy with the stock market to swell their already bloated swiss bank accounts, and I doubt any one person/administration is going to do, or be able to do anything about it. Plus, even if the market becomes regulated again once someone else is in the White House, it will all disappear. Americans have a ridiculously short memory. When Karl Rove gets his next puppet into the Oval Office, we'll be right back to where we were.

Enjoy!

PS. I'm white.

Well, pink and orange, actually. But why quibble?