...huh?

We have been studying the design of book covers in typography 2. Some are clever. Some are interesting. Some are thought provoking. And some are just plain confusing:

There is a picture of a baby. On this so called Book of Tea. So it is a book about tea with a picture of a random (cute) baby on it. Does this make sense to anybody - 'cause I'd really like someone to explain it to me. Is this child particularly fond of tea? Maybe the baby is some world-famous tea brewer. Or maybe the author of this book is especially fond of tea with just the slightest bit of extract of baby in it. I just don't know. Please, feel free to leave your own explanation. I would love to hear (read?) it.

When You are Engulfed in Flames

For anyone interested, this is Chip Kidd's final design for When You are Engulfed in Flames (the book that he was still in the process of designing when the interview was filmed). I had actually picked this book up to look at in a Borders a few days before we watched the interview. Weird. I think the final solution works pretty well. I liked his idea of putting the title in a fake warning label, but it didn't really fit with the rest of the design.

Bruce Mau

Bruce Mau is a contemporary designer from Sudbury, Canada. When he first became interested in design he thought of himself mainly as a graphic designer, but he has branched out since then. He has worked to design a museum and installation art as well as authoring his own books. The books S, M, L, XL and Life Style cemented his fame in the design world. However, the work that launched his career and led to the founding of his business, appropriately named Bruce Mau Design, was the book series Zone. The designs for Zone Books are unique in their flexibility. The series contains over one hundred titles that work together but still maintain their independance. For a short video about him and his work check out this. He seems to like Slinkys and the word "capacity."

reading two

We've heard it once, we'll hear it again: working with clients can suck. Keeping your cool is key; apparently chair throwing is not an option. It will be tough to toe the line between ignoring the client to the point that they fire you or just going along with ideas that you know aren't the best you can do. I can always hope for clients that grant a lot of freedom or ones that give useful/good input. For a fun video of a client that does neither go here. Yes, I have posted this before, but it fits the situation...

I thought the part of the reading where it described how to come up with visual metaphors was pretty interesting as well. The ones we see and the ones mentioned in the reading seem so obvious but still clever, but when I try and make one of my own it's a lot harder. The steps that it gave will probably be useful later in this project.

Everything you always wanted to know, but were too afraid to ask...
YouTube was launched in 2005

Niffty Website

While I was doing the research for graphic design, I stumbled across the website for the School of Architecture at Urbana-Champain. It's pretty cool for a school website. I really liked how they designed the photo montage - most school websites have a space where one photo blips to the next and this was different and more interactive. It was interesting to see how some of the outlines were around negative space and others were around positive. You can also see bigger versions of most of the pictures on the next pages.

Type 2 (due Jan 20)

Chip Kidd is a designer, editor, and writer. For this particular project he is important because he has designed over 1000 book covers but still manages to keep each one unique. When I looked at his work I was surprised (and pleased) to note that he doesn’t seem to have a defining style. By keeping each cover true to the book it represents but still interesting in its own right he avoids repetitive or tedious work.

John Gall is the Vice President and Art Director for Vintage and Anchor Books. The reason he is important to us is because with his designs he is able to “convey the essence of the book in a unique and surprising way that maybe pushes the design envelope a bit.” Both John Gall and Chip Kidd are very good at mixing an interesting amount of unexpectedness in their designs. The content is recognizable enough for the viewer to understand it, but there is something there that captures the attention after the first glance and keeps it from being boring.

Definitions: I couldn’t find where the first two were in the readings, but I gave them a good old college try...

series – several books that are all connected, but don’t necessarily depend on the others; deal with the same world, time period, characters, similar themes, etc.

sequence – several books that have an obvious order for reading them, usually chronological

sign – things that have some sort of pattern and meaning; something that represents something else; there are many types of signs: they can be visual, verbal, literal, non-literal, etc.; a picture of a person represents them, a map represents a particular area, an apple can represent temptation…

index – there is a physical or cause and effect relationship between the sign and what it represents, viewer/reader can understand what caused something by seeing the result or can anticipate the result by seeing/reading a particular event; the timer on the microwave going off means the popcorn is done

symbol – non-literal relationship to what is being symbolized, entirely based on conventions; a set of scales represents justice

Interesting book covers:

John Gall

Chip Kidd

Henry Sene Yee

David Drummond

Chip Kidd

Indexing:

Bodies: the drawing of the person was half erassed as can be seen by the left over erasser crumbs

A Perfect Mess: the crooked lampshade means that someone must have bumped it (well, the would have if it were real…)

Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance: someone diliberately cutout/digitally removed the seccond “l” in the word “small”

Everything you always wanted to know, but were too afraid to ask...

I am allergic to Vicodin and this man.

reading one

Who knew there could be so many different kinds of signs? There were a few things in the reading that I had thought about before (like the arbitrary assignment of words to signify an object - why does the word "dog" mean dog, etc.) but a lot of the other stuff was new to me. I hadn't even thought that a cause/effect relationship could be reduced to a signifier and a signified. And I've never even heard of the word "synechdoche" before...

I also thought the section about the effect a viewer's past relationships has on him/her pretty interesting. A cultures conventions can work for or against the designer. I guess it is up to the decisions of the designer to make sure that it is difficult for a person to take a message out of context. It's important to know the ins and outs of your audience.

Everything you always wanted to know, but were too afraid to ask...

Nickelodeon was originally known as Pinwheel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Nickelodeon

Logos

Anyone who is having a tough time finding logos for graphic design 1 might want to check out this blog. They have some pretty awesome ones listed. I wish the author had listed the designer on all of them, but I guess you can't have everything.

Everything you always wanted to know, but were too afraid to ask...
Laurel Hill School of Florida has perhaps the oddest mascot I have ever heard of: the Hoboes. Seriously - http://www.okaloosa.k12.fl.us/laurel/