Taken by Storm

So a while ago, back in the days of the dots, I was lookin for books at Half Price Books. This was of course a hunt for imagery for the dot books. Anyway, during one of my trips into the store I stumbled upon this book titled Taken by Storm. The cover of the book is what caught my eye. It was the album cover of Audioslave's self-titled debut album. I am not a fan of Audioslave. I am a fan of the pieces of Audioslave (Tom Morello, Brad Wilk, Tim Commerford, and Chris Cornell), but that's beside the point. I noticed an album cover and immediately knew it was an album artwork book. Before I knew it, I had looked through the whole book and had spent half an hour doing so. Of course, I was brief with each page. I planned on buying the book anyway so I skimmed through, snatched it up and now have it to refer to for inspiration. I've always been interested in album artwork and came to the decision of wanting to design album artwork a few years ago. So it was natural for me to pick this book up. I did not expect the epicness that this book possessed. I knew it would be good but I didn't know that this book was just one artist's work, and I never would have guessed that this guy has done some of the best and well known album covers from the past 45 years. The designer is Storm Thorgerson, and his job is to create truly epic moments and use them as album covers. Basically. Just witness a few of my favorites and see what I mean. Really. Epic.

 Butterflies and Hurricanes single-Muse

 Try Anything Once-Alan Parson's Project

 On Air-Alan Parson's Project

 Secret Society-Europe

 Deloused In the Comatorium (alt. cover)-The Mars Volta

 Houses of the Holy-Led Zeppelin

 The Widow single-The Mars Volta

 Tree of Half Life t-shirt design-Pink Floyd

 Bottom Half-Umphrey's McGee

 Wish You Were Here-Pink Floyd

Stomp 442-Anthrax

Refined Webpage Design

I chose this layout from my critique with Marty. She pointed out that the image and the text have a "push-pull" effect on the layout. I maintained this effect and tried to rearrange the rest of the page to compliment it.

These next five images are basically the process in my rearrangement of the layout. The last image is the final outcome and my final refined layout.

Accordion Album Art

My color theory accordion book was done using album art work for the color harmonies. There are many colors present in the album artwork world, something I'm sure most people have noticed. Definitely something I've noticed, considering album artwork is my primary aim with what I plan to do as a designer. My main challenge in composing the photos was dealing with text and imagery in the artwork. For the most part I tried to find solid colors in the artwork, but I also wanted to maintain a variety in the albums the artwork was pulled from which made it a little harder to avoid all text and imagery. Also if the text and imagery was totally abandoned then the color fields become ambiguous and may not be seen as album art work at all. In fact, using just the solid color fields wouldn't be using album artwork. Album artwork is the text and imagery too. So what to do about the text and imagery to avoid distracting from the color harmonies? I tried to eliminate commonly known covers and imagery. Any imagery that would be recognizable (like Jimi Hendrix in the monochromatic purple composition) was covered up partially; just enough to remove the immediate recognition and distraction of the familiar, but still leave the color of the imagery present. As for the text, the best thing to do was to present it at angles and upside and sideways to make it harder to read. I also refrained from using whole words in any composition other than the warm, cool, and monochromatic pictures. Again looking at the purple composition, the text is arranged at angles, is for the most part on the two CDs (so the text curves) and is upside down. 

The cropping was focused on close and angled compositions. The angles made the compositions dynamic, as opposed to boring simple layouts of album covers, and helped bring the feel of album artwork into the pictures. When the entire accordion book is unfolded the compositions look like a pile of CDs and cases laying on the table. The angles also allow a sense of dimensionality whereas (and it can be seen in the cool and warm compositions) the straight up and down layouts are more two dimensional.

Possibly my favorite part of the book is the Table of Contents. I have a decent mental repository of album names and their artists, and in many cases I know albums down to the songs on it and in some cases the sequence of the songs. Musical information (not so much the actual making of music, and musical knowledge) interests me a lot. I actually considered being a music historian for awhile and it's still a consideration even now. So to get back to my book, I included the names of the albums and their artists that were used in each composition. It almost makes each composition like an I-Spy book. This also allows viewers to connect to the compositions on a more personal level through the familiarization of musical artists and albums. So, I took the familiarization out of the compositions to avoid distraction, and I put it in the Table of Contents to create an interest. Now does it create a distraction because the compositions come after the Table of Contents? I don't think so, but that's a little tough to determine.

Web Pages for Iron

From a two page layout to the internet. Well not on the internet yet, but some web page designs that might get used.

Poster Series Reflection

The space in each poster was arranged at angles to create dynamic diagonals that made the posters kinetic as opposed to static. For the poster on the left the movement was needed to continue the flow of the curves. These curves needed to move to carry a relaxing feel in the imagery. Furthermore, the poster spans the poster from corner to corner and creates a nice hourglass-like shape that keeps the whole composition balanced and and somewhat elegant to stress the smooth relaxing curves. The poster on the right uses this diagonal composition to create movement, but for a quite different reason. The poster is very busy and dense. It's gridded and structured, to appear very rigid and demanding almost. The composition is layered over the top of the photograph of a map of Westport to increase the density of the poster.

The conceptual juxtaposition to my series is the dualism of business and leisure in society and urban areas through the visual elements of Westport. Westport was used because it is a place of leisure (for patrons and the common public) and a place of business (for business owners and employees). Also, Westport sits askew to the rest of the gridded Kansas City roads. This, in a way sets the leisure aspect of Westport aside from the busy bustling business of Kansas City.

The relaxed aspect of the left poster represents the relaxed leisure of Westport while the right poster represents the rigid and structured business aspect of Westport. The right poster also sets a grid that is interrupted by the large black area with the text. This formal concept stresses the idea that Westport is set apart from the Kansas City road system. It's a place to escape to and relax.

The poster on the left started as just the bench and line study as it is now in the corner with nothing else. It was rather empty and the bench lost is contextualization as a bench. So, I set out to fill some of the white space and contextualize the image as a bench. These two goals went hand in hand and solving one certainly meant solving the other. Another image of the bench was added to contextualize the bench. When this image was added it just sat in the corner where it sits now with nothing between it and the main part of the composition. Next I needed to find a way to integrate the two into each. Eventually I was able to decide on a transition into the upper bench's shadows using fragments from the main image. This created an hourglass shape that was visually pleasing.

The poster on the right was ran through a few cropping iterations to see which made the image of the map easier to see. Once a close cropping was chosen for the composition something had to be done about the photo. The map that I took the picture of was pixelated. Badly. The close cropping helped this issue by no means. To solve the pixelation I live traced different tolerances and shades of gray of the map. These were then layered to create a pixelated like gradient. Then a halftone bitmap was added on top to help the pixelation.

Paula Scher

Paula is an American artist and graphic designer. She studied at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia where she received her BFA, and later finished her schooling with a Doctor of Fine Arts degree at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C. Early in her art career, she designed album covers for Atlantic and CBS Records and followed that up with art direction for some magazines, specifically magazines through Time Inc. She is now a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and has been the principal at the Pentagram design consultancy office in New York since 1991. She has received a few awards and recognitions including: induction into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame (1998), the Chrysler Design Award for Innovation in Design (2000), a gold medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (2001), four Grammy Award nominations for album cover designs, and a few pieces that have become permanent parts of art collections at the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in Manhattan. She has held a few exhibitions at the Stendhal Gallery, the most recent of which was in January earlier this year.

The most noticeable correlation between Paula's perspective and work and our line study work would be how her work (the acrylic paintings of maps) took on the forms of overlapping and intertwining lines. In the interview on the blog, she talks about how New York City is always growing. I relate this concept directly to the practice of art. Artists are always growing and always developing their ideas. An artist could probably almost always improve a piece of work at any time. Deciding when a piece is done is really just deciding when it works. A piece could convey a message a million different ways using a million different details, so there isn't ever only one answer to the project. An artist just needs to find one that works. Then this idea can be expanded on as many times as it needs to be to make it the most practical, the most interesting, or the most meaningful. Artists should always look back at their work and wonder how it can be improved.

In terms of this current line study project, Paula and her work relate because of the interaction of city scape and the artwork that we do (us students and Paula). The designing she did in New York City was often integrated with the architecture of the city. She painted and applied graphics to many buildings. In the second part of the interview, Paula talks about how she would be commissioned to do the large map paintings she's known for. She points out that most of her clients had expectations for the commissioned work, so she was never really able to expand on the concept and production of her maps, until she started to apply them to three dimensional space. When she began to do this she was interested in her work again. It was new. It was developing. It was changing. This translation to the three dimensional space is exactly what we did in class with the manipulated line studies. We projected the work we had (the processes and techniques we were familiar with) onto different planes and surfaces. This changed our work in concept and direction and we were able to expand on the line studies and expand our abilities as artists.

Find and Share (Grids)

  A pretty simple gridded layout. Something I need to approach more concerning my own layout.  I just simply have too much information so I just simply need to make the layout more... simple really. The layouts are really dense and a lot to take in so some readjustment will be essential. There are five columns used in this layout. Each set of small text is in its own column. Ghostly Essentials and Avant-Pop One align with the third and fourth columns respectively. Ghostly Essentials aligns its left side with the column and Avant-Pop One aligns its right side with the column

 This layout looks kinda some of mine. Super dense except right around the title. This layout is divided by four columns on each page and are all pretty easy to see.

This is a layout of a typeface. The grid is used a little more creatively and isn't always easy to see. It appears that it is a three column grid spread (so three columns on one half and three more on the other). The "X" in the bottom left corner is what indicated this layout for me. I can easily imagine three fitting right next to each other on the page.  Most of the rest of the text is all three column width except the "Ai",the text on top of it, the hand with the text arm, the "LE" it's pointing to, and the the row of numbers and symbols.

 This one is easy to see. The right triangles act as guides in a way. There are four columns in each of the four sections of this spread. All text boxes are two columns wide and sit on the right side of each section aligned with the center of each section. Two titles used are one column wide and align with the right side of their respective text boxes while the other two titles are centered in their sections.

 This layout might be the most intricate of these examples. It has two five column pages that each have lists of information. Horizontally, this list is aligned with each point in its own column (most are one wide but some extend into another column. Vertically, each of these points aligns with the five images on the far right. Each point aligns with the bottom or top of an image where achievable.

This one is pretty tough to see. I think there are seven columns used here but there isn't as much alignment present as there should be.  The text may not fit into a grid but it seems like it might. Maybe in a grid with more than seven columns even. Not too sure, any reader should let me know what they think. Maybe I just want there to be some grids in this poster...

vectors, bitmaps, what's the deal

First off, right off the bat, I have to say I'm happy we had to read up on this stuff. I never even knew. I mean I knew some of the differences and that there was a difference between the two, but I had no idea how to use them differently really. At all.

Bitmaps
Basically bitmaps are images that consist of bits, or pixels, that are different colors to create gradations and such in images. Bitmaps are good for photographs and realistic looking images.  Bitmap images cannot be scaled like vector images however. If a bitmap image is scaled up or down too much it will lose its realistic quality. Too  big and it looks blocky and the pixels can eventually be seen and if it's too small it starts to look fuzzy. Bitmaps are also larger files than vectors.

Vectors
Vectors are lines and fields of colors created using mathematical definitions. Each line is composed of equations that define the curves of the line and are controlled through and anchor point and other points that move the curve. These are called Bezier curves. These lines and drawings can then be filled with color fields and some gradients. Although some artists can draw life like images using vectors, most vector files are used for illustrations and simple images like logos. Vectors are also ideal for these because they infinitely scalable and can be used at any size when wanted. Since vector files are composed of only equations guiding these Bezier curves, they are rather small compared to bitmap files.

One can switch back and forth between vectors and bitmaps fairly easily. Photoshop is more ideal for bitmaps and can open any file as a bitmap. Illustrator on the other hand is good for vectors and can easily turn a bitmap into a vector with the live trace feature. It smooths out pixelated images and changes them into a black and white image. Yes the image may lose its realism, but that's the sacrifice that needs to be made when one chooses to use vectors.

Overall, there are good uses for both, and ideally it seems like working back and forth between the two might be the best idea to accomplish certain tasks. Our task at hand now with these posters is one such example. Photos and vectors combined to form one nice smooth and clean poster.


Here's a link to the website i found my information.  I found it all pretty useful.
http://www.prepressure.com/library/file-formats/bitmap-versus-vector

Some Info on Iron

Here's a little background info on iron, its uses, some history, etc.

Throughout history, iron has undergone several processes of harvesting and manipulation (of chemical and physical structure).  It has been used for different things, from jewelry and eating utensils to weapons and architecture.  As time has progressed a better understanding of metals and their relations with each other has increased.  Working with iron has changed from just heating the hell out of a strange metal to blasting the metal in a furnace with other molecules (and also heating the hell out of it). Iron use first began around 1500 BCE, and is suspected to have began in the Near East around Mesopotamia. Current understanding indicates the Hittites from the fertile crescent area had the best grasp of iron working for their time. The period following the fall of the Hittites is known as the Iron Age. Within two hundred years, iron working had reached Europe. As iron use spread, so did the knowledge of iron working methods. Casting iron was soon developed in China and eventually steel was being made from iron. Iron’s use really took off in the 18th century though with the Industrial Revolution and the discovery of blast furnacing. Blast furnaces allowed steel to be mass produced.  WIth the mass production of steel, bigger and much taller buildings were able to be built. The spread of urbanization wasn’t just on the ground anymore. Buildings could now reach to the sky. In this urban world, iron had found its place

Iron has maintained several uses since its durability was discovered thousands of years ago. It replaced the use of bronze for tools and weapons in Asia and in Europe during the Iron Age. It was also used for jewelry around the same time and wrought iron, specifically, has been used for decoration ever since then. Cast iron is now frequently used for pots and pans because it has a unique chemical property allowing it to heat evenly across its surface. Steel is (as of now) the furthest advancement of iron use. Steel has been used for a few centuries but its accessibility really advanced with the use of blast furnaces. Early on it was created through the process of smelting pig iron. These four forms of iron(wrought iron, cast iron, steel, and pig iron) are all allows made with different concentrations of carbon. The carbon amount has different effects on each form of iron. Wrought iron has a low concentration so its probably the easiest to mold and bend. Steel has the second lowest but is quite a bit more than wrought iron. Steel is arguably the strongest form of iron as well. When too much carbon is in an iron alloy it begins to get too hard and brittle. This is what occurs with pig iron, making its uses limited and mostly for short periods of time. Cast iron has a carbon content between steel and pig iron, so it’s more durable than pig iron but doesn’t possess the strength of steel. Overall, iron has many uses. If one is to look at the chemical substances used on a daily basis they will probably find that many have at least a small portion of iron in them. Most products that are used in society are combinations of chemicals and these combinations of chemicals tend to use the same thirty or so elements. Iron happens to be one of these elements. Iron is also one of three pure elements (iron, nickel, and cobalt) that is ferromagnetic (or ferrimagnetic) meaning it can be magnetized and permanently retain a magnetic field. All other metals and alloys may possess a magnetism but are much weaker and won’t retain magnetic fields. Due to iron’s abundance and magnetic capabilities it is very commonly used for magnets. Basically, iron’s use boils down to tools, structures, and magnets.

properties

• atomic number is 26
• atomic weight is 55.845 amu
• transition metal
• belongs to group 8, period 4, and block d
• electron configuration: [Ar]3d64s2
• electrons per shell: 2, 8, 14, 2
• density: 7.874 g x cm-3
• rarely found by itself in nature/mostly as oxides(rust)
• sixth most abundant element in the universe, most abundant on Earth, and fourth most abundant in the crust
• iron alloys are the most common and practical metals
• it is a solid at room temperature
• melts at 1538 degrees Celsius
• boils at 2862 degrees Celsius
• combined with other metals to strengthen and reduce oxidation
• always heated to react with other metals
• close to neutral pH level

I will definitely have to limit the amount of text I'm using right now. Iron is very useful, abundant and has had a long history so there's a lot to go into. I'll just have to limit it to what's important and what I'm focusing on.

West Port

So, evidently I decided to go with a poster series representing West Port. It's an area I really like in Kansas City and I felt like the most interesting photos i got were from that area.

Some words to describe the West Port area:

Relaxed
Antique
Busy
Genuine
Inviting
Askew (to the rest of Kansas City streets)

Particularly in my posters I will focus on the relaxed, antique, and askew aspects.

IRON... nuff said

The element: iron. The Periodic Table of Elements symbol: Fe. The reason for the "f" and "e": the abbreviation is  derived from the latin word for iron, ferrum. The idea behind the monogram: strong, sturdy, and the main idea that steel, which is made from iron, is one of the sturdiest and practical metal allows there is.

This set of iterations was based on iron and its natural state of existence. It's really never found alone in nature. It's almost always connected to some other element, in many cases oxygen through the process of oxidation (or rusting, in simpler terms). 

 This set was based on the allows of iron. Two substances come together to make a better stronger one. Carbon and iron are combined to make steel which is much stronger than either by themselves. These iterations were a little off though. The ones with the lowercase "e's" on top look a little floaty and don't have the sturdiness I wanted.

 These iterations are also based on the two elements combined to make a better one.  One difference from the above set though is that they work way better. The continuation of the leg of the "E" off of the serif of the "F" makes a good, sturdy, structured appearance, that was also combined by two things to make something better.

More iterations based on a few of the above.

This idea was eventually decided as the chosen direction. Refinement was needed though and a different font was eventually chosen.

THE FINAL MONOGRAM! After discussing the above iterations with Marty, I decided to change the typeface to Serifa. This is the result and that is what I'm talkin about. The one on the left had a space between the serif of the F and the leg of the E that was the same as the width of the serif on the lower arm of the F. The one on the right has had this changed. The openness of the one on the left was a little too big and slightly distracting. The image on the right is the final monogram.