VISCOM1; Scher Video

Scher lives in New York City, and the style of design that she does is very crowded, squished, very thin and vertical. Her design style is influenced by the city she lives in, by what surrounds her. It is interesting to see how the city that she has lived in for so long has affected the art she makes. I never fully thought about that aspect of design. Design affects its surrounds but the surroundings also affect the art that you put into it. 

The city I live in right now is Kansas City. The project I am working on right now is based on and influenced by Kansas City. Kansas City is a rather big city, but the nice part about it is that it may be big, but it's had the opportunity to grow outward instead of upward, like most big cities. This city isn't in as big of a metropolitan area as say New York or other big cities. My book showcases the many different aspects of Kansas City. Some pages house tall buildings, some pages house smaller objects like stuff on the street. It has to big city aspects, as well as the smaller aspects that this city has to offer that other big cities do not. My cover also reflects this. Kansas City has its fair share of sky-rise buildings, but it also has many gorgeous very old buildings. my cover is in the shape of a rather tall building, but not as thin or as tall as the usual sky-scrapers, but it shorter, and wider.

VISCOM1; F+S; update

Sooooooooooooo, I went to my apartment after class today to grab a shower(i woke up at 9 o'clock for my 8 o'clock class...) and make some lunch(at 3.30...) and in the process I pulled up fox.com to watch Glee. When I pulled up the website, I saw this amazingly gorgeous juxtaposition:

At first I thought it was done on purpose, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that it was probably completely by accident, pure serendipity. The images they put up there are the one image from each episode that best describes the episode or what best describes the caption, and these two work amaaaaaaaazingly well! This made me oh so very excited to see it. Obviously, the guy in the right picture is holding up a gun almost perfectly inline with the guy on the left in the bed. It also helps that the guy on the left in the bed is in a hospital bed and obviously hurt, this plays up the fact of getting hurt(by the gun, even though there is no gun wound to the head, obviously). Also, House's eyes are inline with the guy on the right giving him a look while the guy on the right yells back. I thought of Jamie the moment I saw this, oddly enough, i had to post this to my blog asap for her to see.

Design is taking over my life! LOVEIT.

VISCOM1; Cover Title Options

These are my first stabs at covers for my line book, named "Streetviews". We had to come up with six different ideas and these three are my favorite of the six+ that I had for class. I wanted something simple, small, and understated for my book, no overly huge text or put in any weird sort of way. I ended up going with the first of my ideas. The final cover is at the end of this blog. Below is the title and the text that lie on my cover.

Streetviews

Kansas City is full of bustling streets and busy offices, it never slows down. I have come to enjoy taking walks around the city taking time to slow down, take a breath, and escape from my everyday tasks. In doing this, I have come to find there are innumerable parts of this city that are stunningly gorgeous. Everything from the office buildings in the business district, the apartment buildings on the plaza, art pieces strewn throughout the city, sewer covers on the streets, and metal workings showing through the concrete on the sidewalks. All of these pieces share one thing in common, the lines within them. They are all made up them, all in different ways, and all have different tasks. Everything is comprised of lines, it just takes a keen eye, relaxed mood, and time to be able to find all of these treasures.

TYPE1; Elements; Bromine

These drawings above are my 30+ sketches of Bromine. Bromine's symbol is Br. These are the first 30+ rough sketches. We were required to work with combining the letters to make logo-type graphic drawings. The above images are of the original sketches of my element.

These, above, are my enlarged, refined sketches of Bromine's symbol. I picked out ten different drawings with Michael's help to blow up and refine. Then at the end of class the ones starred, along with the bottom left drawing are the three that I will reiterate five times each. I was working with combining the two letters to become one solid symbol. I focused on on the basic structure and connection of the letters and in my reiterations I will start working with different weights of the two letters trying to find the nice balance between the two. I will update this blog post sunday with my fifteen different iterations of BR.

About Bromine

Bromine was found by two separate chemists; Antuine Balard in 1825, and Carl Jacob Lowig in 1826. Balard accidentally discovered bromine while trying to create iodine. It was discovered in the ash of sea weed from Montpellier in the salts of the sea weed.  Lowig found bromine in mineral water from his hometown Bad Kreuznach. He used a solution of mineral salt saturated with chlorine to extract the bromine.

The main characteristics of bromine are dense, mobile, volatile, reddish-brown liquid. It evaporates easily to form a toxic, corrosive red vapor with a strong odor. It is slightly soluble in water and highly soluble in carbon disulfide, aliphatic alcohols, and acetic acid. The three main uses of bromine is used a bleaching agent, maintaining swimming pools, and as a fire retardant. It is only one of two elements liquid at room temperature. It is harmful for the ozone so it is slowly being phased out from most production processes.

CD&F; October 11-17

This week has been a week about wrapping up the extruded letterforms. We had photographs of our letters(or numbers) due wednesday trying to show four of the six contrasting elements in our forms. It was much harder than it sounded. Even after our second wave of critiques, I still have to go back a third time to reshoot photos to properly finish this assignment. My form, while being very dimensional and having manyyy possibilities, is still rather limited. The way I constructed this was a horrendous idea and it does not have the full range of motion that it has the capabilities to. Even after that fact, though yes it makes my job harder, it makes me become more creative and figure out ways to fulfill the assignment. It makes me have to work through situations differently than how I could if my project was up to my usual standards in craft. I have a busy weekend ahead of me, but this only makes em want to be even more creative in how I finish everything.