Studio Journal: Public Service Announcement

My latest design project is to create a series of three PSAs that relate to our thesis focus. I immediately recalled PSAs that I thought were most effective and tried to determine in what ways they had made me remember their message. I concluded that many successful PSAs were very blunt in their language, using a dry humor to quickly and forcefully connect with their viewer. My series is titled, "Hire A Designer." I though of it as an ad campaign for AIGA in support of designers. The images I created for the 3 posters are all a "badly designed" object placed into a space that one might expect to see a "higher" level of design. The objects I chose are all real products that I found online. I included the tag line "Design surrounds us every minute of everyday. Let's make it good," because it is sort of a dry response to the classic what is "good" design argument. Also, the posters are meant to spark conversation between viewers as to whether the designs of the objects are in fact bad, and who can really make that call. After all, some one at some point thought they were good.

Studio Journal: A New Cliche

This next project for Design III was called "A New Cliche." My class was assigned to refine a cliche that exists in our world. We then also had to find some way to distribute our "new cliche" to the public. To quote the assignment sheet, "This project is about the possibilities that lie in referencing shared knowledge; in altering meaning through repetition; and in knowing and
involving your audience." I wanted to create a piece that was not distributed but rather a performance piece in which when others interacted with myself, I create my "new cliche." I finally arrived at a graphic that I believe has much more gravity than people realize these days, and a graphic that is actually quite beautiful in itself. In illustrator I recreated the infamous Macintosh "Pinwheel of Death." For non-mac users, this is a little colorful pinwheel that your mouse morphs into during periods of computer overload and/or processing. I rigged an arm attachment to my constructed pinwheel, in a shield like fashion and bolted the wheel onto another piece of cardboard. The nut and bolt attachment enabled the pinwheel to really spin, which in turn enabled me to mimic the motion and aesthetic of the "Pinwheel of Death" in a large public setting. My idea was to appear in situations like a city street corner during rush hour, a place filled with congested people who are barely moving anywhere. When they see my wheel in action it triggers many emotions, but most likely gives them flash backs of a time when their computer was in a slow process like they are currently in. I felt the project was a success and the feedback I have gotten on and off the street was overwhelmingly positive. I have included a picture that I have taken on George Street during rush hour.

Studio Journal: Information Graphic

My next project in Design III, was a data set. For this assignment, we had to create an info graphic that represented a set or sets of data that related to our personal life. Similar to our first assignment, the data set project required us to examine our personal lives and extract information that we normally may not ever analyze or quantify. After much thought, I decided to examine my cigarette smoking, confident that it would provide substantial and provocative data that I could use to create an info graphic. I began by counting the average cigarettes I have smoked per day starting in 2005. I surprisingly have a good memory for this kind of stuff, so my numbers turned out pretty accurate. My first set of graphs were divided up by year and represented the average number of cigarettes I smoked per day by monthly. The bar graphs were created by burning cigarettes, therefore giving varying heights to the "bars." I then put a color overlay over the cigarettes to color code them by brand. Next, I employed a line graph to show the steep hike in cigarette prices since I have been smoking over the last 5 years. I then tallied up all the cigarettes I had smoked and divided them by 20 to get the total amount of packs. This too was shown in bar graph format. Then using the data of the average pricing over the past five years I was able to calculate approximately how much money I had spent on cigarettes during my lifetime. The totals are 25,360 cigarettes smoked, 1,268 packs smoked, and 7,652.90 dollars spent. I titled the graphic The Tobacco Tally, and the included image is a detail from the title. For this part of the piece, I found about 10 photos of smoke. Like putting a puzzle together, I cut out pieces of the images that I could use to create a single smoke wisp that had the illusion of flowing through the letters and reacting to their structures. This technique was a part of the basis for my thesis proposal.

Studio Journal: 24-Hour Narrative

Our first project in Design III was a 24 hour narrative. The goal of the project was to represent some aspect of our life over a span of 24 hours. After much contemplation, I arrived at a solution that satisfied the criteria for the assignment. During a day of design work, I took screen shots of my computer window at specific times that I thought would give an honest representation of the different projects I was working on. I started at 9 in the morning and ended at 9 the next day. At first, I was not going to include breaks or nighttime, but then realized that these variables would actually provide for a much more interesting image. After I had all my screenshots in chronological order, I began to figure out a way to compile them together. There is nothing more linear in the world than time, so I figured a long piece that resembled a timeline seemed like the obvious direction to go. Then I realized I had to take the project a step further and decided not only to depict the projects I was working on during that time, but also to represent my creative flow as I was working on them. In Photoshop I compiled all the screenshots together then began to warp them in a way that I would describe as a heart monitor print-out of my creative flow. During times of high creativity the screenshots bulge out and during times of low creativity they implode. Also, during break time or sleep, my flow is represented by the black form as seen in the included image. The final piece was 200 inches long. For the included image, I chopped it up into 3 sections so that I could fit it onto the blog.

These images further support my thesis focus. The artists have employed different techniques to combine images in a way that seems natural and believable, even if impossible. For example, in the first work by Rambow, he has added the color of the environment to the floating structure he has created to make it appear to be in the environment. My focus also is bringing surrealist art like the painting from Dali into the conversation.

Annotated Images

The first image by Kennard, supports a part of my thesis focus because the artist has seamlessly incorporated foreign elements together to create an very provocative image. The next piece by Runge is one of my all time favorite works. Here he has painted different images together, however this still supports my thesis because I am interested in the way he smoothly and creatively transitions between elements. The work by the AES Group of a veiled Statue of Liberty add to my interest in the idea of image manipulation and the idea of illusion. With the miracle of Photoshop, I can create images like this that convey very bold ideas and would otherwise be impossible to create without the use of a computer program. The next image by Charles Wilson Peale is a groundbreaking painting he created that explores further the idea of illusion and how the viewer can be tricked by exploiting simple graphic techniques.