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/

Rules and Terms

-- Parts of the grid: what are the following: margin, column, alley, module, gutter, folio. Margins are the spaces surrounding the grid that are typically left blank. Columns are the areas in a grid that text is placed to give order. A module is a single organizational or divisional element element (a little box) in a modular grid. Gutters are the inner two margins of facing pages. Folios are page numbers and are usually placed on the outer edge of a page to aid navigation.

-- What are the advantages of a multiple column grid? Multiple column grids allow the designer more freedom and provide a more flexible format.

-- Why is there only one space after a period? The characters on a computer are proportional, not monospaced.

-- What is a character (in typography)? Characters are any letter, number, space, or punctuation mark.

-- How many characters is optimal for a line length? words per line?

-- Why is the baseline grid used in design? So all text, no matter what its size, lines up.

-- What is a typographic river?

-- What does clotheslining or flow line or hangline mean? These terms refer to an imaginary horizontal line running through the top of a page. Most of the top blocks of text, pictures, etc. should “hang” off of the line. This line helps lead the reader across the page and creates stronger designs.

-- How can you incorporate white space into your designs?

-- What is type color/texture mean?

-- What is x-height, how does it effect type color? The x-height is the height of the main part of a lowercase letter. When the x-heights of a font are smaller, they create the impression of a condensed black line crossing the page whereas fonts with larger x-heights tend to look greyer.

-- Define Tracking. Tracking is the process of adjusting the spacing between letters.

-- Define Kerning. Why doe characters need to be kerned? What are the most common characters that need to be kerned (kerning pairs)? Kerning is the process of removing small spaces between letters to create visually-consistent letterspacing. The most common kerning pairs are: H and L, H and O, O and C, O and T, and A and T.

-- In justification or H&J terms what do the numbers: minimum, optimum, maximum mean?

-- What is the optimum space between words?

-- What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph. Are there any rules? To indicate new paragraph you can either add a few points in a box usually called after or you can indent the paragraph. Don’t do both; it’s redundant.

-- What are the rules associated with hyphenation? Avoid more than two hyphenations in a row. Avoid too many hyphenations in a paragraph. Avoid stupid hyphenations. Never hyphenate in a heading. Break lines sensibly.

-- What is a ligurature? Liguratures are the combinations of two letters. A common one is the & symbol which is made of the letters E and T.

-- What does CMYK and RGB mean? They are different color systems. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black and is used when preparing for print. RGB stands for red, green, and blue and is for on-screen use.

-- What does hanging punctuation mean? Hanging punctuation is useful when there are quotes separated from the main body of text or other situations where punctuation can look a little “off.” The program adjusts the format slightly so the text beneath the first line is lined up with the text above and not the quotation mark.

-- What is the difference between a foot mark and an apostrophe? What is the difference betweenan inch mark and a quote mark (smart quote)? Foot marks and inch marks are straight up and down. Apostrophes and quote marks curve or angle slightly.

-- What is a hyphen, en dash and em dashes, what are the differences and when are they used. Hyphens are the shortest of the dashes (1/3 of an em) and are used for hyphenating words (duh) and for line breaks. En dashes are ½ an em and are used between words indicating a duration. They are used where the word “to” could go. They are also used in compound adjectives when one of the two elements is already made of two words or is already hyphenated. Em dashes are used in a similar manner as colons or parentheses or it indicates an abrupt change in thought. There should be no spacing around the em dash.

-- What is a widow and an orphan? A widow is a lone word at the end of a paragraph (or seven or fewer characters). An orphan is created when the last one or two lines of a paragraph are separated from the main body by the creation of a new column.