Nnenna Freelon Folly Jazz Poster (FINAL)

This was the poster I put on display for the showing of our classes posters to the Folly musical directors. My concept employed two icons as allegories for two of the strongest characteristics for Nnenna. The spotlights act as an allegory for Nnenna's "showwomanship". Nnenna, being the center of attention in her performances demands a lot of attention through the vocals. The mic stands in as an allegory for Nnenna's vocals. Nnenna Freelon is a singer and is the attraction when she takes the stage. I use these two allegories to stress this nature of Nnenna's music. I want it to be obvious that she is a vocalist and that that is what the audience is going to be there for. 

The typefaces I chose represent Nnenna's elegance and pop jazz vocals. The typefaces have a modern aesthetic that not only references the pop music but also draws in a more modern and younger crowd.

The colors chosen I use to illustrate the mood of her music. The backing instrumentation that accompanies Nnenna is generally laid back smooth and very comforting and cool. The poster smoothly ranges from these cool colors to a burst of warm yellow. When listening to her music I picked up on the smooth cool music, but when she started singing I could sense this burst of warmth and love coming from her vocals. She is a very loving person and I see this frequently in her vocals so I chose to express this burst of a warm and loving vocal harmony.

Gertrude Stein Kinetic Poetry (FINAL)

Asparagus

Orange In

Type 3 in class exercise

These were two exercises I did for my Typography 3 class. This was an in-class assignment in which each student was being limited in their design choices in laying out the lines of a certain poem. We were given coins and were instructed to flip them. A heads or tails denoted what weight of font we used, the size and leading and the placement of the type on the page. Part of the point of the assignment was to embrace serendipitous moments in design and to understand what is readable as type overlaps and such. Just a short exercise, but plenty to consider as a designer. 

Concept and First Layouts of Gertrude Anthology

Like in my video, I wish to express the cubist influences of Gertrude Stein. More important for the anthology, I wish to express the intended neutrality of Stein's poetry. It is abstract poetry and she writes it to avoid any preconceived concepts to be interjected into the reading of the words. This neutrality will show in my anthology by framing each passage of poetry on a square surface. The square is a shape that has always denoted neutrality and regularity while a rectangular page would typically denote a narrative of sorts. Furthermore, the type will be arranged on the page in a way that does not depict the top of the page. The "page" can be held and read anyway it's orientated. The type itself will more than likely conform to a geometric typeface to further reference cubism and the sounds created by the words and letters of the poetry.

These first two compositions explore what direction to go with orientation of words and type use. The upper composition was the chosen general direction with a more expressive composition and geometric sans serif typeface. 

For this set of three compositions, I was running with the idea of layering my compositions. I have decided to create the anthology as unbound separate pieces of poetry. This allows for the viewer to look at each poem from any perspective and to not be bound by the orientation of the book when viewing the page of poetry. To enrich this unbound and individual viewing of the poetry by each viewer, I chose to cut out a hole in the compositions (the large black space) and orientate the type around this "cubist hole". These layered holes were then going to create different viewpoints of the poetry lying underneath each layer, like so:

Moving Poem: First Few Seconds and Concepts

When researching to generate concepts for the representation of Gertrude Steins poetry, I realized I needed to find out what category her poetry fell under. I soon found that her "Tender Buttons" series was one of hermetic works. I also found that her most popular works fell under the hermetic category. Now I needed to know what hermeticism is. The first definition I came across claimed that hermetic poetry was austere and difficult poetry. This didn't help, seeing that I had already realized the poetry was austere, so I read on and found that in a broad sense the term is defined as poetry in which the sounds and suggestive powers of words are more important than or equally important to the meaning of the words.

Next I came across the so-called creator of hermetic poetry, Giuseppe Ungaretti. Ungaretti was a fan of the symbolist and futurist movement and greatly believed in the simplifying of things and the abstraction of things to a core essence. I believe this core essence of an idea is what helped Ungaretti develop hermetic poetry. He looked at the words he used in his poetry as sounds. It did not matter what the poems meant but how they sound.

Considering the auditory form of the poetry over the meaning is precisely what I need to express in my rendering of Gertrude's poems into moving typography. In these videos I would like to focus on the formal aspects of her poetry. Repetition, the flow of the words, syllables and similar sounds will all be exemplified to stress the sound of the poetry over the meaning of the words. I will also reference ideas of cubism in the video to express Gertrude's interest and influence of Cubist painting.

So far this video is only an introduction of the title of one of my poems, "Asparagus". The animating of the word onto the screen is done to stress each syllable of the word. This draws more attention to the way the word sounds. Also, the syllable by syllable appearances of the letters suggest a defragmentation of the word. This defragmentation and seeing the word on multiple levels creates the suggestion of a cubist nature in the video

Jazz Poster Rendering Tests

These were ten final sketches I curated based on the greatest successes from the matrix concepting session. I felt like these ten ideas illustrated her music in the best way. I have now narrowed down the concepts I would like to express in her music to: vocally based, voice is reminiscent of the elegance and flow of water, Nnenna possesses a great stage presence, and her music is largely about the loves in life. These sketches will soon be adapted to fit a poster composition that will include Nnenna Freelon's name, the time of the show and the date of the show as well as the imagery I choose to represent Nnenna's performance.

The following images are rending tests for Nnenna's poster. The purpose of these is to see what method of creating my desired aesthetic is the most appropriate for representing Nnenna Freelon and her music.

Digital drawing

Colored craft paper was glued to a record-sized illustration board. This board was then placed on a record player and spun to get a blurring of the colors.

Colored Craft paper underneath rippling water to distort the pattern of the paper.

Water color paints

Sharpie markers

Matrix Info Dump (Folly Jazz Poster)

My ten symbols chosen to represent Nnenna Freelon are: a microphone, mouth, water, love, show(wo)manship, dress, soul, stage, voice, and education. The task was to generate ways to incorporate these symbols into rhetorical tropes to create a clearer picture of who Nnenna is and what her music is like.

Rhetoric in Design Find + Share

metonymy

Alexey Brodovitch designed this cover for Harper's Bazaar in 1940. He uses the butterfly itself as a symbol to stand in for the summertime while the overlapping of the butterfly and woman suggests summer fashion.

allegory

Peter Behrens created this poster in 1914 to suggest that design is a "humanizing social force" (Meggs, History of Graphic Design). The torch bearer stands in for Behrens, a designer, as a leader.

 hyperbole

Herbert Bayer created this poster in 1943 to convince farmers of the need of their eggs during World War II

antithesis

Saul Bass created this logo for the film Man with the Golden Arm in 1955. The film is about a man recovering from a heroin addiction. The term "golden arm" intensifies the damage his arm has suffered from the addiction.

Rhetoric and Poetry reading response

We're all poets and didn't know it? How cliché but true. When one stops to think about this it turns out to be plenty true. What I found remarkable is how these metaphors enter our everyday dialogue and we tend to be entirely unaware of our rhetorical speaking. The Poetry For Everyday Life reading points out several examples of words used to figuratively describe everyday activities or thoughts. The stock market climbs and falls, marriages can be healthy and we devour and digest the information in books. Each of these examples provides a visual idea of how we communicate these ideas. The visual representation is used to create a better and more interesting idea of what is actually occurring. These rhetorical phrases can be considered examples of deconstructive language. The descriptive words (like climb, fall, and healthy) are not used in a literal sense but in a figurative one.

Figures of speech occur in our daily lives on a level of subconsciousness most people will never be aware of. As designers part of our job is to consider the subconscious workings of our audience and to tap into the subconscious mind when possible to create messages that are understood immediately without any consideration or questions asked. Using some figures of speech and applying them to graphic design, some designers can get ideas across quicker and clearer than if they were to explain the message in words.

Amsterdam Type exercises

First set of exercises for typography 3 class. The type setting of our names was done so that our teacher could see how we set our names and see how the typeface, point size, position of name on page, etc. reflected us students as designers. 

The type compostions were created after reading a passage of text describing the city Amsterdam. Our task was to create an expressive composition using type to convey messages in the text and make the text digestible for readers. In my first composition I call out parts of the text to emphasize ideas using the letters in an illustrative manner. In the second composition, I follow a system of setting nouns, adverbs, verbs, adjectives, etc. in a certain typeface and carry that trend through the composition. The final composition is more an exploration of type and drifts away from actually expressing the message of the text (a mistake on my part I must say). My goal in the composition was to create a field of text with varying weights and qualities. 

Narrative Type Find + Share

 A narrative on the development of the Trixie typewriter typeface. The video explains some of the technical tactics employed in creating the ever changing Trixie typeface. It also gives some of the statistics and traits incorporated in the typefaces construction. The moving type is implemented to reference the letter by letter typing of a typewriter while a typewriter in action acts as the backdrop for the text throughout the video.

 
Sleepyhead from melissa gorman on Vimeo.

This is a motion graphic final for Gail Anderson's Just Type class at the School of Visual Arts. It's the narrative of a solitary "z" emitted from a sleepyhead. Apparently our "z's" get down when we're asleep.

Nnenna Freelon Research and Mood Board

Patrick, Mckenzie, and I received the jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon as the subject of our Folly poster designs. Our first step in the curating of this poster was to create a mood board. This mood board compiled colors, textures, words, typography, and a few objects that expressed the music and persona of Nnenna Freelon. 

Biography

Nnenna Chinyere Pierce was born in Cambridge, MA in 1954. She first dabbled with 

her  vocal talents in a church gospel choir as a child. She did not, however, even begin thinking of a music career until her later 30’s after she had already married and had children. She studied at Simmons College in Boston and received a degree in health care administration. With her freshly acquired degree she joined the social services work force for the Durham, North Carolina hospital corporation.

In 1979, Nnenna married the architect Phillip Freelon, thus changing her name. 

A few years, and three children later, she finally began considering a music career. 

She trained under Yusef Lateef and harnessed her vocal splendor by listening 

and singing to jazz horn players. After learning and singing jazz independently for seven years, she came to a massive turning point in her career when she met Ellis Marsalis. 

In 1990, the two found each other at the Southern Arts Federation’s jazz meeting where Marsalis was doing A&R work for Dr. George Butler of Columbia Records. Butler was on the search for a female singer at the time and was delighted to come across such a 

vocal splendor like Nnenna. Two years later she was signed to Columbia Records and made her musical debut with a self-titled album. This album was absorbed by the masses with mixed feelings. Critics and jazz fans alike commended and condemned 

her imitation of Sarah Vaughn’s vocalistic style. Nnenna recorded two more albums 

with Columbia Records before parting ways with the  label to more openly explore her own style.

Nnenna signed with Concord Records in 1996 and earned her first of five Grammy nominations with her album Shaking Free. She further expanded her horizons in 2000 with the self-produced album Soulcall. The album earned her two more Grammy nominations for her résumé. Over the next ten years she recorded a hand full of 

albums two of them being cover albums for Stevie Wonder and Billie Holiday the latter of which tallied her another Grammy nomination. Her latest album Homefree was released in 2010. 

Nnenna’s influences include Sarah Vaughn, Nina Simone, Betty Carter, Billie Holiday Stevie Wonder and several other vocal performers. Her vocal style takes on a contemporary and pop flavored vibe that soothes the ear with a smooth and elegant vocal range. Her roots in gospel and soul music remained evident throughout her career. The musical counterpoint to her vocals ranges from slow tempo and drone of the blues to the upbeat tempo of swing.

In addition to her career as a performance artist, Nnenna has also done extensive 

work with her Babysong workshop project. Launched at Duke University Medical Center, this program stresses the importance of parents singing to their children to promote brain development. 

In addition to five Grammy nominations, Nnenna has received the Eubie Blake Award, the Billie Holiday Award and performed live at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards.

Mood Board

Cool colors dominate the board with interruptions of warm bursts of color. The smooth cool colors suggest the steady flow of jazz and blues in the music that accompanies Nnenna's vocals. The bursts of warm color reflect the beauty, grace, and power of Nnenna's vocals. In a way her voice is a burst of light and energy amongst the slow steady and calm jazz she sings to.

The photos chosen for the mood board reflect Nnenna's vocals and her stature as a glamorous soul/R&B singer. Shiny and dominantly golden objects suggest the glamour, while the microphones stress the dominance of her vocals in her music.

The typography chosen expresses the elegance of her stage presence. The type also suggests the sophistication of her voice and vocal control.