CD&F;

Working on color combinations through photography has proven to be a rather difficult task. even though I am doing book covers which pretty much gives me eery possibility in the world, it is still difficult to find what I need. Seeing as there are thousands of books at the library, I would think that finding the right color combinations would be an easy feat in itself, but it is not. Seeing as there are so many books to choose from, finding the best out of all of them is a hard task. It takes time, but after a while of searching the best can be found. Then once finding the book covers, being able to photograph them well enough is the next key. Lots of different steps to think about in all of these photographs.

VISCOM1; Icons

Here are four different variations of my final set of icons. The top two on the left are my favorite, I included the bottom two because they were the other combinations of the three icons just to give a feel for how all the possibilities look and interact together. I am hoping to get your opinion of these sets, Jamie, so I can move into the storyboards with a set final three icons. It will make my storyboarding easier to do.

This one(pictured above) is my favorite of all four of them. The overall weight, color, and tone are all, for the most part, very consistent with each other and give it a nice coherence. But some people felt that they looked too much alike. That the second and third ones were too similar. I can see where they were coming from. However, I feel that the overall shapes are different enough to not have them be too repetitive.

The second one(pictured above) is my next favorite. However, for the second icon, I substituted it with another option that I had for that line. With that icon in place it changes the feeling of the set, I feel. It is a break in tone of the other two for the most part. The circle of the middle one is echoed in the right shape but not shown directly the same way again. Also, the heaviness of the top part of the middle icon is also echoed in both the first and third icons by the weight and darkness of the icons. However, now both the second and third icons deal with circles, making the third one more repetitive and less interesting.

Below is also one other iteration of the second line's optional image. This iteration has the circle small enough to fit snugly into the crook of the folded piece. I quite like the interaction of the two pieces at that point, but it may be too tight.

My opinion is to go with the top left set, it feels the most coherent and the best all-around feeling set. Unless I hear word from you Jamie, I will move forward with that set and create my story boards.

VISCOM1; Vector/Bitmap + Motion

Vector/Bitmap

Vector;
Pros;  With vector it is very simple to resize the icon both up and down, smaller and larger, without worrying about losing any detail to the image.

Cons;  With vector you lose any hope of the amazing details that you get with bitmap. Vector can be looked at as a simplified bitmap. You can take the basic shapes from the bitmap and vector those, but you can never have the same amount of detail tat bitmap gives you. It makes it much cleaner looking, but that's not always what you want, which is the case for me. I do not want to lose the bitmap. I want all of those subtle(and not-so-subtle) details in my icons.

Bitmap;
Pros;  With bitmap you keep all of the quality of the image(the photo). Bitmap has all of the subtle detail and gradients that no matter how hard you try, they can never be reproduced vectorally(may not be a word but it works well here). Bitmap gives me all of the subtle vein-like details within my marks.

Cons;  With bitmap, resizing is much more difficult. It is very simple, and very successful, to size down a bitmap image, but sizing up is a whole different thing. When sizing an image up, you are requiring the computer to create more information that what it is given, and it is prettyyyyyyy bad at doing that. When you size up an image, it becomes blurry or pixelated, which is almost never wanted, and almost always very ugly.

Time + Motion

With motion graphics in the picture, it creates a whole new area to be able to explore and take your designs so much further. There are so many different ways to show motion and represent motion without actually ever having motion. There are ways to create motion through color alterations, and opacity adjustments. There are also ways to suggest motion without ever having the design be put to motion involving cropping and repetition.

VISCOM1; Taxonomy Proposal

For my taxonomy of marks I will make a 4x8 wire-o book. The book will have black covers and the front will either have my final three marks, or just the word "Taxonomy" on it. The table of contents will be clearly set up and there will be very clear section title pages at the beginning of each new section of marks. Each page of marks will house either 3 or 4 marks trying to keep down on the clutter and make it much more presentable and understandable to the reader. I will scan my marks at a very high resolution so when I print them off they will be very crisp. I will print on high-quality cardstock or nice matte photo paper.  To the right are a few examples as to what my cover might look like and how the section headers will echo the cover. The images will be printed black on white photo paper and the covers and section title pages will be printed white ink on black to give nice contrast to the title pages. Words will be written on opposing pages that corralate to the images on right, describing them. Put documentation of found objects into the book to further clarify the marks?

The pages would be separated by connotative and then within the pages and sections they would be organized denotatively. For example, the pages would be separated into what the marks look like, then they would be further separated down from lightest to darkest. This is only one example, it could be done in other similar ways.


Connotative;

1. cross/religious
2. butterfly
3. gong
4. wind
5. feathered
6. brain
7. pants
8. embryo
9. rorschach test
10. weave
11. vein

Denotative;

1. object it was made by
2. circular
3. horizontal
4. light
5. dark
6. medium
7. thin
8. thick
9. square
10. grunge

TYPE1; Bromine; Final Monogram

Click here for the original hand-drawings that inspired these three sets of digital drawings.

In the set above, I focused on three different pairings of the letters "b" and "r" picked out by my studiomates and teacher in class. These are three sets of iterations of the three different designs. The boxed monograms are the two chosen for me to elaborate on.

This stage I focused on the two ideas and created many an iteration. I leaned towards the bottom idea more than the top. I felt I had more room for creativeness in the bottom one. Yes the top one is more compact, but I preferred the bottom one. I felt the top one didn't give me as much room for creative freedom. The one highlighted one is the one I built upon even more.

Bromine is only one of two elements on the periodic table that is a liquid at room temperature. I wanted to play off of this fact as much as possible and even though the lowercase b has the stem, I wanted to play off of the bowl of the sans serif "b" (DIN Schriften Std) and the ear of the serif "r" (ITC New Baskerville Std) how both of those are very curvy, fluid forms. I also liked the juxtaposition of the sans serif "b" with the serif "r". It gave the "r" more of a importance against the "b". It gave more weight to the r that it didn't just look like an odd decorative element to the "b".

At the bottom of this post is the final monogram for my element, Bromine. This is the final of many different iterations of this form.

After finishing this monogram, it reminded me of a designer my friend showed me a longgggggg time ago. His name is Fabien Barral and he is a graphic designer in France. His work is veryyyyy organic with almost 100% all serif fonts in his work. There is a wonderful mix of clean typographic and logo-work paired with a very organic grunge/fluidity. The simplest way to put his work, is elegance at it's grungiest finest. I am in love his work, and in looking at my monogram, it reminded me of the work that he has done.