ceci n'est pas une blog.

Describe your ideation + brainstorming process on this project:

The display is all about the ideation. I knew the client wanted a large version of the poster and sketches, but I had to figure out the most effective arrangement. I taped out the shape of the display on my floor and moved the pieces around trying to find a workable overall composition.

What issues came up as you interviewed your client?

My original design had way too many pieces, and the client pointed out many of the posters had only vague differences. I also lacked a chronology, so the pieces were more thrown together than they needed to be. The choice to limit my roughs and place them from loosest to more refined served the concept well.

You were asked to generate two different approaches to the showcase design...what were they?

I had to choose between mounting everything onto one giant piece of foamcore, mounting every piece by itself, or by tacking everything up individually. I had wanted to mount everything onto foamcore but realized mounted roughs made little sense and would take forever.

What issues came up as you began to plan + work with materials?

The large format printer in the VDIL is not nearly as fancy as one would expect. Problems printing from Illustrator arose, which lead to the creation of a 300 megabye tiff for the final enlarged image. A previous failed print revealed my tiling background had seams, so I had to hand erase the lines in the giant tiff file.

Evaluate the success of the concept and the craft of your finished showcase:

The end product hangs together very well. I set the design brief in the same typeface as my final poster, and the ransom-esque title “IDEATION� uses wood type letters present in all of the designs. By working with the available pins and tacks I reinforced the idea of a “rough.� The giant mounted poster also provides an amazing contrast. By having a complete design process, someone can go from a mess of construction paper and white-out to a clean finished piece grounded in meaning. I think design choices done only for form are a cop-out, so I was glad to have a functional reason for my materials and layout.

Posted by Topher McCulloch at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our third major assignment for Graphic Design I was to create a magazine spread with bold use of image and playful typography. We chose articles from Voice: AIGA Journal of Design and researched appropriate ways to support the article content with layout.

I worked with an interview by Steven Heller discussing current issues with editorial cartoonist Signe Wilkinson who came under fire after drawing a cartoon depicting a KKK travel guide encouraging trips to Philadelphia to see young blacks killing blacks. Much of the article also focuses on the Danish cartoons depicting Mohamed, and I was struck by the decision of many large American newspapers not the republish the images out of concern for Muslim readers. The article warns against creating boundaries of free speech and pointed out most readers went online and found the images themselves.

I included some of the Danish cartoons to illustrate the article, as well as two of Wilkinson's works and a turn of the century anti-Catholic cartoon by Thomas Nast. I stuck with a simple color scheme of black and red to highlight the article's controversy and relate back to the editorial page. I also incorporated silhouettes of the cartoons to break up large blocks of text and echo the forms of the images. They play on the idea of censorship and question if the cartoons would still be offensive in reduced form.

View the spreads in pdf format or read the original article.

Posted by Topher McCulloch at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For our second main assignment in Graphic Design I, we were asked to design a poster for a play in the upcoming 2006-2007 UMD theatre season. I was assigned to The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, a play set in 1890s Dublin where a woman is secretly posing as a man working at a tavern/inn. She fears she will be revealed when a man comes and must share "Albert's" bed. The man turns out to be another woman forced by society to assume the role of a man to be successful.

In my preliminary sketches, I was quickly drawn to the idea of a corset as metaphor. Women during this time period were forced to physically contort themselves to be attractive to men; in the play, "Albert" is contorting him/herself in the extreme, she has become man. In the first versions, the play title itself is bound into the corset, shoved inside the silouhette of a corsetted man/woman. A moustache contrasts the feminine groin, figure, and lack of Adam's apple.

I was unhappy with the typography and my professor was not too keen on the crotch, which lead me to the cropped version. The cropped version ends ip more effective because it incorporates Rosewood and Zebrawood, two typefaces often used at the height of the woodblock type craze, the era the play is set in.

The over the top, crammed, sensationalist wood block type became the basis for my second design. The words overpower the image and jumble into nonsense, which I hope still catches attention. Passerbys will be forced to stop and decipher the poster's full message. The bold "UMD THEATRE PRESENTS" informs even a casual viewer that this is a theatre poster, and the performance dates are the most emphasized elements in the visual hierarchy after the title. The sensational "AUTOPSY REVEALS MAN TO BE WOMAN" hints at the play's storyline, though I fear it might be saying too much. I need to discuss the designs with the director before I can go any further.

Posted by Topher McCulloch at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For our first assignment in Graphic Design I, we were required to create several posters for the on campus film series "The Culinary and the Cultural." After refining my rough version, I ended up with this, based on J.D. Salinger's original bookcover design for Nine Stories. Both the original book cover and my poster design used a grid to further box the boxes. I removed my lines after critique, and I am starting to realize that most of the time, lines and boxes are a poor excuse for design. Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn Typography discusses how too many designers are worried text might fall off the page otherwise. It won't.

After our first poster, we chose an art director and created an overall series of posters with a unified theme. We chose a long strip of 35 mm film as our concept. I designed the template for the film and then began work on my individual poster for Eat Drink Man Woman.

I originally played with the idea of the obvious choice of having "EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN" in large letters and then added symbols for "eat", "drink", "man", and "woman" at the bottom. It was decided this was too obvious, so I opted to use the Mandarin symbols for eat, drink, man, and woman, which helps to emphasize the notion of the cultural aspect of the film series. I made the symbols on the bottom of the poster specific to the plot; the man became the father chef, the food became more Taiwainese inspired with added chopsticks, the drink became a teacup, and the woman became the three daughters. Working through the poster group as a series, we decided we would have more visual impact if every other poster was reversed, which is why I ended up with a back background and reversed text and image. I kept my typeface simple by sticking with Adobe Caslon, which was another unifying element of the poster series.

Here are some shots of our posters in action (click on the thumbail for a larger image):

    

Posted by Topher McCulloch at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I am feeling very Arial Bold, functional, yet bland.

Posted by Topher McCulloch at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)