Pictograms Icons Signs and An Iconic Lion (Reading)

A functioning pictogram:
The first glance: The most important qualities of an object are perceived.
The second glance: The less important qualities of an object are perceived.
The third glance: Additional details are perceived.

A modern graphic designer should sacrifice their individuality in favor of the subject matter that they're trying to convey. The most important point of an icon is that it needs to immediately convey the idea, so most often it is better to use simplistic, primitive representations. Our icons need to be things that can be internationally understood, and understood by anyone without explanation.

Seeing the NYPL logo and it's evolution was very interesting, and it was lovely to see all of the other elements that the logo is meant to embody besides an icon of a lion. It's funny that they mention that it might look like Simba, because that's the first thing I thought of when I saw it. But associating any picture of a lion looking upward with the Disney movie Simba something that might only bother people of our generation, since older folks don't know what it is, and for young children it's a dated move they probably haven't seen. Anyway, it seems like a really successful icon that helps give the library a much-needed facelift. It uses bold outlines to define the face of a proud lion, and the whole thing is framed in a nice round circle. Seeing it small on the web banner and seeing it large on the totes, it also holds up well no matter what size it's placed at.

Steve Frykholm

A few notes on Steve Frykholm, from his lecture, his works, and his critique.
Attention to detail:
Do we take the time to pay attention to what we say and how it's represented? What's appropriate?





In regard to Change One Thing:

• Cliches are easily understood, but what other icons symbols can represent the idea?
• Don't use text like a "bandaid on an assignment."
• Don't say the same thing with both your image and your type--leave something for the viewer to explore.
• "Change One Thing"

-keeping the tagline could make it more personal that just having the topic as the tagline
-is it a command or a call to action? Does the image make you want to do something?

• Narrative is king. Messages are important, work harder on your words.
• Facts may be more important than headlines.
• "Shoulder climbing"

"You have to create a MAGNET."

Design Process

This article helps a lot with the designing process, really breaking it down piece by piece. While the importance of process is constantly emphasized in studio, Meggs articulates each part of the process really well, which only further helps understand the significance of it all.

In relation to the project we are currently working on, the step on information gathering seemed to really pop out at me. While working on our Change One Thing project, collecting information on the topic that we chose is imperative to the outcome of the poster. The article mentioned that as a designer works on an assignment, they made need to look up more information than what they gathered at the beginning. This is a big part of trial-and-error--if you continue in the same direction without the proper information, then you're going to get stuck in a rut as your idea hits a dead end and become stagnant. This kind of happened to me earlier, and looking up more stuff about my topic, urban gardening, really helped me gather more ideas. I'll continue to look back on this reading as a template for the creative process.

Objects, drawings, and soon-to-be icons

Here are some of the drawing that I produced from the images I collected for my story. Learning how to minimize the use of lines and emphasize the expressions has been an interesting project, so far. I seem to do better using the thick markers in comparison to pencils or pen, which make my drawings look squiggly and kind of weak. Something about shrimp is so cute, too. I think they're my favorite object in my story. As I translate the linear simplifications into the different icons, I will be interested in seeing how the objects hold up as they continue to have extraneous detail removed from them.

Image: Vladmire Nabokov

This is the person that I chose for the second image project. His name is Vladmire Nabokov (for fun, he's his name in russian: Владимир Владимирович Набоков!), and he's a pretty interesting fellow!

Vladmire Nabokov is a primarily recognized for is work as an author. His works include Pnin, Lolita, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Besides being a prolific writer, he had a lot of other interests and skills. He was an entomologist, and collected and identified butterflies. He was a skilled chess player, and also trilingual. He taught literature as well as languages, tennis, and boxing. What a well-rounded guy! Anyway, here are some of the items I was thinking about:

• Journals/notebooks
• glasses
• butterflies (maybe fake from a craft store, pinned to corkboard?)
• insect books
• net
• bug box
  
• chess set
• owl ( he used a pen name that mean owl for a while)
• teaching materials
• a book he's written
• Russian flag

And a few quotes!

• "The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."
• "Literature and butterflies are hte two sweetest passions known to man."
• "Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."
  

Change One Thing Posters

These are the three new posters that I made for the Change One Thing competition. To be honest, I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. I know what I want my subject to be, but my posters are obviously lacking. I tried working with the cut paper again, and I guess it looks ok, but it doesn't look super interesting in the end result. Adding the message is where I seem to get really stuck, which is er...bad, since it's the point of the poster. It's been a tricky week.

Today's Word is Metaphor (or symboooool!)

How relevant!
And silly!
Gotta love My First Dictionary.

Type Image Message

This was an interesting read, and helped me understand a process behind project 2. Creating an environment for the image you want is a good way to start your creative process, even if it's a very abstract creation. Keeping elements as hand-made as possible helps create cohesive pieces that you can have a lot of control over, as opposed to using the computer for everything. It also helps get other elements into perspective, such as color, lighting, and texture. It's important to make sure that every element in the piece allude to the theme that you're trying to convey.
Also the relationship between image and type is something that is mentioned, and something that I'm going to keep in mind as this project evolves. It's going to be a lot trickier to embed the text into the scene manually instead of adding it on top digitally. But this just adds to the amount of thought and care that will have to go into project 2, which is fine with me. After all, graphic design is a way to solve problems, not just using programs and tools!

Urban Gardening

While looking for more information on my topic fo the Change One Thing poster, I found this clever public art piece! So clever and effective, yes? Anyway, I wanted to make a post to share this and at the same time save it for myself for later!

How To Think

In response to the article How to Think by Ed Boyden:

Always be making notes and always be connecting thoughts and projects together. This is great, not just as a habit to have in design, but a habit to carry through everything. It's amazing how often independent subjects can relate to each other if you connect the dots between them. He talks about collaboration and documentation too, which are things that are already stressed over and over again in studio.
What interested me most in this article was the logarithmic time planning in which as goals become closer, you must map out you plans for them more specifically. Always evolving and becoming more exact, these schedules allow for maximum productivity. The only thing I'd question about planning out your day so obsessively is that it might not allow time for mistakes, which will always happen. Also, this is REALLY machine-like. While it's a great way to manage time, it seems like you're also trapping yourself into these schedules and routines; is it really necessary to make your whole life a micro-managed day planner to get everything done?
Mistakes are another How to Think problem. The key to mistakes is to document them, remember what you learned from them, but move on quickly. While there's a lot to learn from mistakes, there's probably more to learn about what is past them.
Overall this article has a lot of really great points to it, but it also seems awfully mechanical. I understand the point of record-keeping, skill development, and long-term planning are all important to both design and life in general. But in the context the author presents it in, his rules seem a little over the top. I'll keep the general idea of this article in mind as I continue to work, but don't want to become quite so involved as this author seems to be.

The Stories

Old Family Recipe

1. Bag of Groceries
2. Old Cookbook
3. Turkey Baster
   
4. Fresh Veggies
5. Set of Knives
6. Broken Eggs
7. Dirty Bowl and Spoon
8. Oven
9. Timer
10. Fire Alarm
11. Burned Meal
12. Pizza Box

Japanese Tea Ceremony

1. Lotus Flower
2. Tea Whisk
3. Tea Bowl
4. Kimono
5. Sashimi (it's a meal served on those little wooden plate/stands)
6. Flower Arrangements
7. Tea Cup with Tea Inside
8. Sake Bottle
9. Shoes (not on feet, removed)
10. Sitting Mat
11. "Dango" (a kind of treat served?)
12. Hair Pin

I'm more interested in the first story, so that's the one that I'm going to look up images for. I'm not sure it's a strong title though, so I'll continue thinking about that as I find the descriptive photos of the objects. :)

Change One Thing

The three themes I chose to pursue for the Change One Thing poster are:

• spending time with your children
• give yourself a personal project
• learn a new word everyday

I wanted to focus on topics that were less politically/socially charged, but still important to everyday life. Particularly though, I decided to focus mainly on the first one. Taking time out of one's day to spend with their kid is important, and I'm not just talking about the fun stuff. I mean to help with homework, to be present at their sport games and stuff like that too. It's a vague idea still, but I'll be spending today working thoughts out a bit more clearly and working on the poster sketches!

Relevant reference pics:

Photographic Semiotics

A study of the breakdown of semiotics as a personal description:


ICON:

I'm going to stick with the most literal photos for this section, as it is supposed to be a physical representation of myself. At first this was the category I was least comfortable with, but after spending a while in the photo booth, it seems that icons are the area of semiotics that are easiest, after overcoming the fear of having to photograph yourself. I feel like I've got some solid starts on icons, so I'm going to focus my time on the other two categories for the most part. But if time allows, I'd like to continue to explore more methods/styles for these too.

INDEX:
Index is easy enough to understand, but pretty hard to accurately execute. I don't have a lot of "signature" items, or better said, I haven't found them yet. So I'll be working harder on this, while trying to make sure that I've got a visually appealing image.

ICON:
I had fun with icons, but I'm going to keep working on this category as well. The pig is a successful example of a symbol, but not one I necessarily want to putout as a representation of myself (once it's printed it's permanent!). Also, I think the glasses would be better suited to go in my index section. And again, I need to make sure that these image both meet the rules of their label, and are visually compelling! No more boring photos!

Amercian Express Commercial

Bitmap

Frog fooooont!

Here are the final words for the bitmap font that I made out of plastic frogs. I went with the outlined font. It's pretty readable, yes?

Taxonomy

Final taxonomy! I made a little sleeve for it, and hopefully it will hold up. In the end, I didn't make any changes to the book other than making its title sleeve. If I were to re-do anything, I would reprint all of the pages, but I'm a little skeptical to pour more time and money into the konica when I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the reasons my images got more and more blue as I printed was because of the black ink levels. The images were not all so terrible that I needed to redo the three books, anyway.


Here are some examples of the pages inside. With the perfect binding method, I was able to place images across the spread, which is something I would not have been able to do if I had continued with the stab-binding.


I got a little silly with these pictures, but I'm pretty proud of my sleeve, so I wanted to show it off a bit! :)

Final Statement

Final Evaluation:

For the final assignment of the semester, it's hard for me to think of this as anything else besides an accumulative learning process, in which it was important to revisit the earlier lessons in order to aid in the production of this latest project. A lot of the time, in a fast-paced class such as visual communications, it's easy to get caught up in the rush to produce adequate amounts of work and focus on meeting deadlines. Sometimes while pushing to complete all these things, I forgot the basic concepts from the beginning of the year, and because of it my work suffered.

¡ BUT !

About halfway through, I realized what I was forgetting, and from then on attempted to be mindful of what I had learned in regards to the haiku project. And even before that, there were a few things I did right, even if I hadn't realized it! :)

• Mind Mapping : I begin this project by mind mapping each individual line of the poem. This is something that we learned in the dot project, to help us dig deeper into the topic, and also come up with more surprising ideas that we might not have thought of otherwise. When it came to mind mapping the haiku lines though, I realized there is a point where the ideas are too far reaching. I will keep this in mind from now on.

• Iterating iterations of iterated iterations : Thank goodness for never using the first ideas that pop into our heads. Or at least, thank goodness for giving yourself something to compare them to. With all of the project this semester, and not only in visual communications, iterations saved my projects from being shallow and poorly developed. It's good to have choices, and it's good to try and consider other versions of an idea. For the dot book, we did countless amounts of thumbnails to refine and clarify our compositions. And also with the line studies, using the initial pairings as stepping-stones, I was able to learn from their critiques and make better compositions as I better understood the assignment. Time allows for more understanding to sink in, and our iterations are like a physical indication of this.

• Being Selective : This kind of goes with iterations, but I feel like it makes a more direction connection between the animation and the line studies. I could have done iterations of my haiku symbols all day, but being selective about them was a process in which I had to consider all the elements of the project in relation to the image I was choosing. In the line studies, the objective was to make photo/line pairings that not only matched, but also added to each other--completing a conversation--and were still visually pleasing. In the same manner, choosing the final icons was something that wasn't just about what looked good. Each symbol was chosen out of a group of icons (see the project evolution for examples) because it best reflected the meaning behind the line of the haiku.

• Just letting things happen : This was the most fun part of these assignments, for sure. The serendipitous nature of the projects was something that I was new to, and learned a lot from. Having line studies magically line up with photographs, and having unorthodox tools accidentally make better marks than I ever could have thought out on my own was a big learning experience, and something I'm going to try to incorporate as often as I can in the future. In general, getting away from mechanical tools like computers and their programs was a breath of fresh air.
  

As to the principles and practices, I've learn how to communicate...visually? No no, just kidding. I feel as thought I made a lot of progress in learning how to:

• problem solve
• focus on process as much as the final artifact
• better articulate concepts and ideas using a formal vocabulary
  
• recognize individual elements combining to make a cohesive whole

Along with these I've also developed a pretty clear understanding of many of the more formal principles such as the elements of design (proximity, layering, continuation), spatial relationships, and the workings of various analog and digital tools. I don't think I'm anywhere near mastering any of these practices yet. In order to keep these fresh in my mind in the next semester, and for the rest of my life, I plan on CONSTANTLY rereading notes, and reevaluating myself and my work to make sure I'm keeping in touch with all of these important elements. :)



Critique of older piece:

This is one of the earlier pairings for the line book. The reason I chose this one is because, looking back at all the works, this is one of the pieces that gave me the biggest "what was I thinking!?" feeling. When we initially began pairing the photographs with the line studies we had done, I tried making rather bland match-ups like this one. This pairing, to begin with, is visually very ugly. On top of that, the photograph and the line study do not add anything to each other. Even if I had gone along and digitally edited the line study, smoothing out the curves, it would still be a visually boring image that lends nothing to its partner. There's no conversation between these halves aside from the fact that they are similar in shape. This was an unsucessful attempt at creating a link between two incompatible images.

Haiku : Project Evolution

Here is the linear evolution and the final artifact for the haiku project! Hopefully the transition from sketches to mark making, then from the marks to the final animation is pretty clear. And this time the animation exported with *almost* no snags! :)

Crossing it alone
in cold moonlight...the brittle bridge
echoes my footsteps

Final Haiku from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

Music credits: "The Windmill's Tale of the Music Box Floats Through the Air. Riding the Windmill" by Unwed Sailor

Final Photos

These are the final photos for the color book! I've printed and cut them all out except one, the contrast of saturation, which I'm have a bit of trouble printing. Tomorrow, I will begin construction of the actual accordion book.

Neutra Face